Sleeping With The Devil

    

    
See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on
Terrorism

    

    
CIA’s Publications
Review Board has reviewed the manuscript for this book to assist the author in eliminating
classified information and poses no security objection to its publication. This review,
however, should not be construed as an official release of information, confirmation of its
accuracy, or an endorsement of the author’s views.

    

    Grateful acknowledgment is made to
Commentary
for permission to
reprint an excerpt from “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention” by Robert W. Tucker that
appeared in
Commentary
(January 1975). All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of
Commentary.

    

    Robert Baer

    

    Crown Publishers

    New York

    

    

    
T
O DANNY PEARL, in
recognition of his courage and relentless search for the truth.

    

    

    

    I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the Saudi experts, petroleum specialists, and
Islamic scholars for keeping me on the right track. Thanks to their true expertise, I hope I
managed to get the story right. I would also like to thank the numerous talented journalists -
all newfound friends since leaving the CIA - whose interests in the Middle East coincide with
mine. Our interminable discussions helped me immeasurably to understand the subject.
Unfortunately, there are too many to mention by name. Finally, I would like to thank my many
Arab friends who patiently tried to explain Saudi Arabia to me. The book could not have been
written without them. I hope I got it right and they do not look at this as an anti-Arab or
anti-Saudi book. As harsh as some of my views may appear, my sole intention is to attempt to
explain why relations between Saudi Arabia and the United States have reached such a low point
- and threaten to get worse. Again, as in
See No Evil,
this book would not have been
possible without the research and editorial dictums of Rafe Sagalyn, Howard Means, Kristin
Kiser, and Steve Ross, and support from Claudia Gabel, Amy Boorstein, Derek McNally, and Lauren
Dong. But, of course, at the end of the day any errors, faulty judgments, and oversights that
often pop up in a book like this are all my own.

    

    

    

    

    KING IBN SA’UD (also known as ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz) united Saudi Arabia into a
single kingdom in 1932 and ruled it until his death in 1953. He had at least forty-three sons,
eight of whom died before the age of twenty. Among the most prominent of the survivors:

    SA’UD. Succeeded his father as king November 1953. Deposed November
1964.

    FAYSAL. Proclaimed king November 1964. Assassinated March 1975.

    KHALID. Named crown prince March 1975. Died of natural causes June,
1982.

    FAHD. Named crown prince March 1975. Proclaimed king June 1982.
Incapacitated by a stroke November 1995. King Fahd has seven sons, including his youngest,
‘Abd-al-‘Aziz (or “Azouzi”), by his favorite wife, Jawhara Al Ibrahim.

    SULTAN. Minister of Defense and Aviation and chairman of Saudi Arabian
Airlines, among other titles. Father of Prince Bandar, long-time Saudi ambassador to the United
States.

    TURKI. Resigned as head of Saudi intelligence just days before the
September 11 terrorist attacks. The closest of the princes to the Taliban. Attended Georgetown
University with Bill Clinton.

    SALMAN. Governor of Riyadh for more than forty years and

    de facto head of the Saudi charities some of whose money found its way
into al Qaeda.

    ‘ABDALLAH. Named crown prince June 1982. Commander of the National
Guard since 1963.

    NAIF. Current Minister of Interior.

    

    

    THE WHITE FORD PICKUP rolled quietly to a stop below Tower Number
Seven, one of ten large cylindrical structures at Abqaiq that are used to remove sulfur from
petroleum, or turn it from “sour” to “sweet,” in oil-patch jargon. A dirty tarp covered the
cargo bed; extra-heavy shocks kept the bed from sagging onto the axle. To the east, across the
Saudi desert, a hint of the morning sun peeked over the horizon. The truck driver, one of
thousands of Shi’a Muslims who work the Saudi oil fields, cut the engine, checked his watch one
last time, and began reciting verses from the Qur’an, memorized long ago. The lights of the
world’s largest oil-processing facility twinkled all around him.

    Three hours earlier, a fishing boat equipped with twin
two-hundred-fifty-horsepower Evinrude engines had set out from Deyyer, on the southern coast of
Iran. By dark, the boat had sprinted across the Persian Gulf to the Saudi port at al Jubayl.
From there, the Iranian pilot had crept south, hugging the coastline, until he came in sight of
the Sea Island oil-loading platform at Ras Tanura, forty-five miles to the northeast of Abqaiq.
Now, with the water beginning to glow pink, he pointed the bow at Platform Four and slammed the
throttle to full.

    Just inland from Ras Tanura, at Qatif Junction, an Egyptian engineer -
a Muslim Brother who had made the grand tour of militant Islam, from Cairo to Tehran - flicked
on his flashlight and admired his handiwork. The Semtex was expertly crammed into and around
every manifold, every valve, every last pipe junction. It was art, really, lacing it all
together in a single charge: a work of beauty, of Allah’s great creation.

    West of Abqaiq, in the foothills of the al Aramah Mountains at a small
Bedouin encampment, a Saudi in his mid-twenties bent over a 120-mm Russian-made mortar for what
seemed the hundredth time. A Wahhabi, descended from the religious zealots who brought the
House of Sa’ud to power, he had been trained in munitions in Afghanistan by a man who was
taught by the Central Intelligence Agency. Below him, at the base of the foothills, sat Pump
Station One, the first stop on the oil pipeline that carried nearly a million barrels of
extra-light crude daily from Abqaiq across the peninsula to the Red Sea port at Yanbu.

    A pager vibrated lightly against his chest and went dead. It was time.
The Al Sa’ud were coming down. The oil that fed their whoring and corruption would flow no
more. Islam would be purified; the American devils, crippled; and their Israeli protectorate,
cut free to die on its own. The world would have to take notice, and for the simplest of
reasons: The global economy was fucked.

    I’VE DOLLED UP the details and updated them, but I didn’t invent them.
They come courtesy of people who studied the Saudi oil industry from the ground up. From the
mid-1930s until well into the 1960s, Saudi Arabia was a branch office of America’s oil giants -
a Republican internationalist’s fantasy. The United States remained secure in the knowledge
that Saudi oil would always be there for us, under the sand, cheap, and as safe as if it were
locked up in Fort Knox. We built Saudi Arabia’s oil business and, for our efforts, got full and
easy access to its crude.

    The first OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil
embargo in 1973 took the bloom off that rose, but anxiety turned into full panic in the early
1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, especially when it looked as if Iran might take the war to the
Arab side of the Gulf, including Saudi Arabia. With the nightmare of an Islamic prairie fire
taking down the world’s economy, disaster planners in and out of government began to ask
uncomfortable questions. What points of the Saudi oil infrastructure were most vulnerable to
terrorist attack? And by what means? What sorts of disruptions to the flow of oil, short-term
and long-term, could be expected? And with what economic consequences?

    Almost to a person, the disaster planners concluded that the Abqaiq
extralight crude complex was both the most vulnerable point of the Saudi oil system and its
most spectacular target. With a capacity of seven million barrels, Abqaiq is the Godzilla of
oil-processing facilities. Generally, the study groups posited a multiprong attack on Abqaiq,
with severe damage to storage tanks and the large spheroids used to reduce pressure on oil
during the refining process, and moderate damage to the stabilizing towers where petroleum is
purged of sulfur.