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Caught napping
Why America Slept, by Gerald Posner

Reviewed by Seema Sirohi

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is struggling to contain and subdue Iraq, a country it said was a haven for al-Qaeda terrorists and a clandestine laboratory for weapons of mass destruction. As it spin-doctors its way out of old rationales and creates new ones, its leading lights may find better clues to international terrorism and how it germinates and operates in Gerald Posner's latest book Why America Slept. And many clues incidentally are buried comfortably in US policy and right here in the capital. There is more credible information in these 196 pages than the tons of "evidence" thrown at the world by the administration prior to the war. The book is a painstaking, piece-by-piece assemblage of an enormously complex puzzle, with players scattered around many countries, which begins to look complete by the end.

Why America Slept raises many questions about the current US policy on terrorism, just as it exposes the shockingly apathetic stance of past administrations as radical groups set up shop under the very noses of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), raised funds and traveled openly around the world. Posner has done a service by exposing the uncomfortable underpinnings that always formed the background of news analysis, but never came front and center. The author is a master at revisiting controversial topics - he has written books on the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr assassinations, Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, and the international Chinese mafia (triads) to list just a few. He describes himself as an investigative journalist with no agenda but to "go where the story" leads him.

His unique ability is in knitting together known facts and new information that he gets from his considerable sources in the US intelligence community into an organic whole. It is easy to forget a news report here, a statement there, because the "official" drizzle can go on without creating a flood or any impact. But when that information is condensed and organized, it begins to tell the larger story. And it is not a palatable story for the US government, which has taken on itself the task of fighting the "war on terrorism".

The timing of the book - the second anniversary of September 11 - is obviously aimed at getting maximum exposure, but somehow mainstream US media haven't jumped on Posner's expose as one might expect. The book is all about how two key partners in this war against terrorism - Pakistan and Saudi Arabia - were financing and arming Osama bin Laden, the former in the hope of keeping the Taliban on its side, and the latter to keep the jihad away from the precious royal kingdom.

Posner's bombshell revelations in the book are about this secret "terrorism triangle" which formed and gained in strength throughout the 1990s while American intelligence was either preoccupied with domestic events or fighting childish turf wars. The book says a key al-Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, who was captured last year in Pakistan, has confessed that key members of the Saudi and Pakistani establishments knew beforehand about the September 11 attacks, but failed to alert the Americans.

They didn't know where the attacks would be, according to Zubaydah, an insurance bin Laden was clever enough to buy. For the first time, names are named and telephone numbers revealed of bin Laden's protectors. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), chastened and clamoring to restore its image, has checked out Zubaydah's claims and found no reason to think that he is lying. They have corroborating evidence of the meetings he mentioned. And the phone numbers checked out as well.

If this doesn't make people jump out of their seats, the fact that whoever Zubaydah named as a key intermediary between bin Laden and the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies happened to die shortly after the Americans shared the information with those agencies, will make people start. The sudden deaths were all explained away as accidents and crashes, raising further doubts as to who knew what and when about September 11. Since the dead tell no tales, the Bush administration apparently decided not to further press the Saudis and Pakistanis, who have been cooperating since to produce terrorism suspects.

The book's final chapter contains the details of Zubaydah's confessions, which are chilling not just in the way in which they describe the cozy relationship between al-Qaeda and Pakistan's Inter-Intelligence Service (ISI), and long-time Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki-al Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, but the manner in which they were obtained.

He was given pain killers and sodium pentothal in the old game of "reward and punishment" in a cell made to look like a Saudi jail, while being questioned by two Arab-American interrogators. Instead of being alarmed at finding himself in "Saudi" hands, he was relieved and started reeling off names and numbers of Saudi princes who could vouch for him. The main contact for bin Laden, according to Zubaydah, was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a publisher and race horse enthusiast. He was a nephew of the king, but most Americans know him because one of his horses won the Kentucky Derby last year. The two other Saudis named were Prince Sultan bin Faisal and Prince Fahd bin Turki. The Pakistani named by Zubaydah was Mushaf Ali Mir, the air force chief, who met bin Laden along with other ISI operatives in Kandahar and other places.

Once the contents of the confessions were passed on to the Saudis and Pakistanis last year, first the two governments came back with nearly identical responses, saying that the allegations were false and malicious. Then the men named by Zubaydah started dying one by one. Prince Ahmed died on July 22, 2002, of a heart attack at the age of 43, and a day later Prince Sultan was killed in a car accident while driving to Ahmed's funeral. No other car was involved in the crash. Prince Fahd "died of thirst" a week later, according to an announcement from the royal palace. It doesn't get much stranger than that. Then in February this year, Mir was killed along with his wife and 15 other officers and aides in a plane crash near Kohut. The weather was clear, but reports at the time said that the pilot had been changed just minutes before take off.

Posner doesn't say the obvious - the four men died because the dead don't talk. But one must ask questions about this epidemic of death that suddenly struck the upper crust in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The sequence of events is a little difficult to swallow as natural, which the governments insist it was.

Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki, who was fired from his job after September 11 (presumably under US pressure) was quickly named as the Saudi ambassador to Great Britain, where he serves now. He has admitted meeting the Taliban in the past and his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan were too frequent to go unnoticed. According to Zubaydah, he assured the Taliban repeatedly that he would not seek bin Laden's extradition (the Bill Clinton administration was demanding it) as long as al-Qaeda kept its promise of not launching any attacks inside Saudi Arabia. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were two countries that continued to extend "diplomatic recognition" and privileges to the Taliban when most others had denounced the primitive regime. The Saudis may have given upwards of US$10 million to bin Laden over the years, apart from paying the ISI to keep the Taliban and al-Qaeda well supplied.

Posner's sources for the Zubaydah confessions are two senior Bush administration officials who wanted the truth out. They were obviously not team players because the majority view in Washington is that what happened cannot be undone and the war must go on in earnest from now on. That the ISI itself got infected with radicalism while exploiting religious fundamentalists in Afghanistan and promoting Islamic militancy in India is common knowledge. And that the Saudis financed stern Wahhabism throughout Asia and Africa in the 1990s to channel repressed energies of their own citizens is also well documented. But what is surprising is the inability or unwillingness of American intelligence to connect the dots.

Posner documents incident by incident 10 years of failure to look hard at what was happening inside the US even after the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The greatest myth he shatters is about the omniscience of the gargantuan US intelligence apparatus assembled and sustained with hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. The Congressional investigation into September 11 has delved into the intelligence culture, which seems to function like any other bureaucracy, fighting and carping constantly and missing out on the real deal.

So will the book make a difference in how US policies are made and executed? Given the inertia and attachment to old ways of thinking, it doesn't appear so. But Posner's book is a crucial addition to the body of literature on both intelligence gathering and analyzing terrorism. He accomplishes his task without bathing the whole awful scenario in the knee-jerk "us and them" rhetoric or painting all Islam in dark hues. He is distant where needed and surprised when necessary by unbelievable policy errors. One example might do - Sudan repeatedly offered to hand over bin Laden to the US before the man took shelter in Afghanistan and offered to let US agents read files on the conferences bin Laden organized in Sudan. Washington's response. Not interested.

This makes one wonder even more about what goes on in the "war on terrorism" even to this day.

Why America Slept, by Gerald Posner, Random House, September 2003, $24.95, 196 pages.

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Sep 17, 2003

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