Sleeping With The Devil (32 page)

    The black prince was the former minister of economy and the chief of
police. He had tried to overthrow the Amir in February 1996, with the backing of the Amir’s
father, Khalifah, who himself had been overthrown by his son in 1995. If it sounds confusing,
it is. But the point is that Qatar is the center of intrigue in the Gulf. Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
and Syria all backed the February 1996 coup attempt and were continuing to undermine the Qatari
government. Qatar was not only wobbly and a source of fascination to anyone who cared about
Gulf politics; it was also a big prize for the world’s oil companies. In addition to its oil
reserves, Qatar owned one of the biggest gas fields in the world. It was also flirting with the
Israelis, and that meant the black prince was a figure of importance to a lot of people in
Washington.

    To even find out where the black prince lived wouldn’t be easy. I
started by looking up my old friends in Beirut. After something like fifty meetings in Hamra’s
smoky coffeehouses, I found someone who knew the prince was living in Damascus, in a compound
reserved for senior military and intelligence officers. That put him out of reach. It wasn’t
like I could go and knock on his door. I wouldn’t have made it past the gate guards. I pulled
out my Rolodex and got back on the phone.

    Eventually, I got to one of the black prince’s “business” associates,
who agreed to set up a meeting in Lebanon. The one condition was that it take place in the Park
Hotel, in the Biqa’ Valley. The Park Hotel, outside Shtawrah, was run by Syrian intelligence.
The black prince must have figured that I would never dare grab him there, if that was my
intention. After all, Qatar and the United States were close friends, and in the black prince’s
view of the world, it would be logical for his cousin the Amir to send an American to do his
dirty work.

    A mystery writer could not have picked a better night. Sheets of
freezing rain swept across the Biqa’, knocking branches off trees. Shtawrah was deserted, black
as a grave. Even the Syrian checkpoints along the main Damascus-Beirut highway were abandoned.

    The lights were out at the Park Hotel. I wouldn’t have been able to
find it if not for the driver. When we pulled up, half a dozen gaunt, bearded men stood under
the hotel’s portico, cradling AK-47s. They didn’t say a word when I got out. Not even a nod of
welcome. They followed me into the hotel.

    Inside, the lone concierge was waiting for me. He motioned me to follow
him up to the second story. We walked down a long, pitch-black corridor, the gunmen still
behind. The concierge knocked on a door that looked like the rest. The black prince opened it.
A bit heavy, dressed in fatigues and combat boots, with a black-and-white kaffiyeh around his
neck, he looked like a Palestinian fighter, not a Gulf prince. The room was dark except for a
gas-burning stove in the corner. As the black prince made tea, he said, “You know, I was with
Arafat in the early days, at the beginning of the civil war. I trained in his camps. I fought
alongside him.”

    I already knew that, but it was important to hear it from him. He was
trying to tell me that I shouldn’t take him for one of his soft Al Thani cousins or Saudi
royalty. He was a fighter. A revolutionary. Someone I shouldn’t mess with.

    It didn’t take long for him to come to the reason he’d agreed to see
me. He wanted to know about the relationship between Washington and his country’s foreign
minister, Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir Al Thani, or “good Hamad,” as he was known to Qatar’s
Washington lobbyist. The foreign minister was a Washington darling, having hosted several Arab
economic summits to which Israel was invited. He’d also allowed Israel to open an economic
mission in Doha, one step toward diplomatic recognition. He had promised democratic elections,
women were now allowed to drive, and Enron had recently been let into a multibillion-dollar
natural-gas deal. On top of it, the foreign minister was almost as socially acceptable as
Bandar - he owned a tasteful estate on Foxhall Road, maybe D.C.’s most expensive neighborhood.
With those kinds of credentials, he could wander in and out of the White House anytime he
wanted, just like Bandar had. The black prince, though, wanted to know if the foreign minister
had the White House in his pocket.

    “So has my cousin bought a seat on your National Security Council?” the
black prince asked.

    “No one buys and sells Washington,” I shot back. “He’s the goddamn
foreign minister, and he’s rich. Sure he can pretend he owns the place, but he can’t buy it.”

    “Hmm… you have a lot to learn, my friend. We need to talk.”

    THE BLACK PRINCE and I kept in touch. As things warmed up in the spring
and he trusted me more, we met in restaurants in the mountains above Beirut. We usually sat
outside and smoked water pipes until late in the night.

    We talked about Qatar, mostly. It was clear right away that the black
prince wanted to make another stab at overthrowing his cousin and his nemesis, the Amir and the
foreign minister. At one point he asked me if I could help him find landing craft. Going along
with the ploy, I called an arms dealer in Paris who sent me some data on military landing craft
for sale in the Ukraine. It worked like a charm. The black prince invited me to his home in
Damascus. He had built himself a two-story house in a military compound northwest of Damascus.
It had a pool and a football-field-size lawn. It wasn’t exactly a palace, but then again, we
were in socialist Syria.

    The first part of the afternoon, we sat around the pool drinking
lemonade. His new Egyptian wife joined us for a while. I noticed a man barbecuing next door. He
was wearing an apron and a baseball cap. He could have been one of my uncles.

    “Who’s that?” I asked.

    “General Khuli,” the black prince said, waving across the fence to him.

    Muhammad Khuli had been the chief of Syrian air force intelligence. He
was removed in the mid-1980s when he was implicated in trying to blow up an El Al flight
departing London at Heathrow. A bomb had been planted in the suitcase of an unwitting pregnant
Irish girl. I wouldn’t say it was an intelligence coup to watch Khuli cook a hamburger, but I
couldn’t help remarking on the irony that I’d had to leave the CIA before I could get this sort
of access to the bad guys.

    Before I could think about it too much, the black prince said, “Let’s
take a drive.”

    We piled into his new American SUV and headed for the Israeli border,
to the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. We pulled off the main road and headed up the side of
a hill. It was now dark, and every once in a while the bodyguard got out to remove boulders
that had tumbled into the road. Finally, we pulled off onto a piece of ground that had been
leveled by bulldozers. “This beautiful plot is mine,” the black prince said. “I just bought it.
One day I will build a house here that will look onto liberated Palestine.” He was referring to
Israel.

    While we walked around, the driver and the bodyguard made a fire from
wood we’d brought along. They set up two camp chairs and put a pot of water on the fire for
tea. Although it was late spring, it was cold, and the wind had started to pick up. Sparks from
the fire blew across the mountain in a long arc. When we were comfortably seated in the camp
chairs and under thick blankets, the black prince launched into what he’d brought me here to
tell me.

    “Do you know anything about my cousin Hamad bin Jasim bin Jabir?” He
was talking about the foreign minister with the estate on Foxhall.

    By now I felt I could level with the black prince and he would
understand what I was saying. I told him about running into the foreign minister in the office
of Leon Feurth, Al Gore’s national security adviser. I mentioned how I’d been asked to leave so
Gore could have a one-on-one with the foreign minister.

    The black prince turned his head to get a better look at me. I think he
wanted to see if I was telling him the truth. Was that all I knew about the foreign minister?

    “Look, my friend, I don’t know whether you will be honest with me or
not. But your government is playing a very dangerous game.”

    I asked him what he meant.

    “Let’s start with bin Laden. The foreign minister is one of his main
backers and hates the Saudis. He would make a bargain with the devil to fuck the Al Sa’ud.”

    I knew that much. When I was still in the CIA, I’d heard Sultan and the
other senior princes refer to the foreign minister as “the dog.” I also ran across some
information that Sultan had indeed backed the black prince and the former Amir in the February
1996 coup attempt. But since the Saudis had refused to talk to us about it, we could not be
absolutely sure.

    “What do you mean, back bin Laden?”

    I knew that the interior minister, ‘Abdallah bin Khalid, had met Osama
bin Laden on August 10, 1996, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. A lot of Arabs were making the
pilgrimage to Khartoum to see bin Laden. Iraqi intelligence had met with bin Laden on several
occasions. Although we couldn’t be positive, we assumed the emissaries were only taking bin
Laden’s measure, making sure he wasn’t about to turn on them.

    “I mean back him. Do you know who Khalid Sheikh Hamad is?” In Qatari
Arabic, the “mu” is dropped on the word “Muhammad.” The black prince was referring to Khalid
Sheikh Muhammad.

    “No,” I said. I wanted him to tell me the story from beginning to end.

    “He is bin Laden’s chief of terrorist operations. His target of choice
is airplanes. In 1995 I was chief of police when he landed in Qatar. He’d come from the
Philippines after a couple of his henchmen were arrested. He was immediately taken under the
wing of the interior minister, ‘Abdallah bin Khalid, who is a fanatic Wahhabi. The Amir then
ordered me to help ‘Abdallah. The first things he asked for were twenty blank Qatari passports.
I know he gave them to Khalid Sheikh, who filled in the names.”

    “Do you have proof of this?”

    “Yes. I still have the numbers in my safe back in Damascus, and a lot
of other stuff.”

    It was becoming clear to me that the black prince wanted me to do
something with this information. By now he had checked me out and found that I was a former CIA
officer. I’m certain he thought - most Arabs do - that I was still working for the place. I
wasn’t about to disabuse him of his belief. I wanted to hear the rest of the story.

    “Where is Khalid Sheikh now?” I asked. (KSM was still at large then,
with a starting price tag on his head of $2 million.)

    “Flew the coop. Gone. Sayonara. You know as well as I, so don’t play
stupid.”

    “I want to hear what you heard.” When Khalid Sheikh Muhammad left Qatar
in 1996, I wasn’t sure of the circumstances.

    “As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha, the Amir and the foreign
minister ordered ‘Abdallah bin Khalid to move KSM out of his apartment to ‘Abdallah’s beach
estate. In the meantime, agents of the Ministry of Interior cleared out Khalid Sheikh’s offices
- the former police academy, a farm, and a place called the north depot.”

    The black prince could see I was incredulous. He called the bodyguard
over to bring me a pen and paper. “You write all this down and check with Washington.”

    “Where did they go?” I asked.

    “Maybe Prague. I know at least Muhammad Shawqi Islambuli went there.”
Islambuli was the brother of Khalid Shawqi Islambuli, the Muslim Brother who’d emptied an AK-47
magazine into Anwar Sadat’s chest in 1981. Muhammad himself was wanted in Egypt for murder.

    I didn’t say anything while I made a few notes. When I finished, I
asked, “And you have proof of all this?”

    “And a lot more. Remember, I was the minister of economy. Whenever it
came time to put money into U.S. elections, I did it.”