Sleeping With The Devil (24 page)

    WALKING DOWN THE GANGPLANK and stepping onto the tarmac at Osh, I
wondered if my grand-tour idea had been all that smart. It was difficult to decide what was
thicker: the putrid cloud of haze, dust, and smog that blocked any view of the Tian Shan, or
the utter depression that wafted off the industrial wasteland and the shriveled vegetation that
stretched as far as I could see. I now understood how Osh - which means “soup” in Persian - got
its name. Any romantic notions I had about the Silk Route instantly evaporated.

    Fortunately, my guide was waiting at the airport. A six-foot-six giant,
he was standing next to an ancient Zhiguli. On the other side of the Zhiguli was a tiny old man
bent at the waist like a broke-open shotgun. It took me a minute to figure out that the old man
was the driver. How would he see over the steering wheel?

    Ibramov, as I will call the guide, turned out to be a great traveling
companion. Although he knew only about six words of English - enough to teach English
literature at the local technical college - we got along fine using my Tajik, Russian, and
German. More important, he was willing to take me anywhere in the Fergana.

    The next morning we set out on an hour’s drive to Namangan, supposedly
the crucible of Islamic fundamentalism in the region. We motored from mosque to mosque, but no
one suspicious was hanging around. Incendiary posters weren’t pasted on the walls. There wasn’t
any graffiti. Even though it wasn’t Friday, the Muslim holy day, there should have been some
outward sign of fundamentalism. Instead, the place looked like Osh - listless. I decided to
poke around one of the mosques. Before I could get out of the car, though, Ibramov grabbed my
arm and pointed at a Lada parked by the sidewalk in front of the mosque. Three men were sitting
in the car, looking straight ahead. They weren’t talking. The engine was off.

    “Let’s go,” Ibramov said. I didn’t object. I’d obtained permission to
travel around Kyrgyzstan’s part of the Fergana, but we were in Uzbekistan now. The Kyrgyz had
no jurisdiction here. “I suggest we go to Kokand,” Ibramov said. “There are not so many
problems there.”

    As we drove away, I could see one of the men in the Lada copying down
our plate numbers.

    Two hours later, Ibramov accompanied me into the only hotel in Kokand
with reliably running water. The place was empty except for an Uzbek man dressed in a
grease-stained wool suit who occupied one of the two chairs in the lobby. Without standing, he
asked what we wanted. When Ibramov pointed at me and said I needed a room, the Uzbek got up and
walked over to me. “Passport, please.” I noticed his two incisors were gold.

    “You don’t have permission to visit Kokand,” he said, fanning the pages
of my passport without bothering to look at them. Obviously, someone had informed him that I
was on my way and lacked the proper papers. Technically, I’d broken the law. Although
Uzbekistan won its independence in 1991, it never discarded the old Soviet system of requiring
passes to visit cities and regions it deemed sensitive. Uzbekistan didn’t trust foreigners any
more than the Soviet Union had.

    The man walked around the reception desk and made a call. Not more than
two minutes later, two uniformed militiamen showed up with Kalashnikovs slung over their
shoulders. The Uzbek got into an animated conversation with Ibramov. It was all in Uzbek, and I
didn’t understand a word. The upshot was that Ibramov smiled wanly, shook my hand, and left. I
never saw him again.

    When I went up to my room, the two militiamen followed me and posted
themselves outside my door.
This is silly
, I thought. After all, I was traveling on a
diplomatic passport. I wasn’t indigent, and I certainly didn’t look like a
basmachi
. I
headed back downstairs to find out what the story was. One of the militiamen followed me.

    My Uzbek minder was still there. I asked if I was under arrest.

    “No, we are here to protect you. It is very dangerous in the Fergana.
The
basmachi
, you know.”

    “May I take a walk around Kokand this evening?” I asked.

    “No. There are too many
basmachi
at night.”

    Dinner - a bowl of leek soup, a piece of stale bread, and one
pockmarked apple - was brought to my room. Somewhere out in the night, presumably,
basmachi
were swarming thick as deer flies. Whether they were plain old brigands or the
heirs of the proud Muslim revolutionaries who’d taken on the Bolsheviks, I had no idea.

    THE NEXT MORNING my Uzbek minder knocked on my door. “We can visit
Kokand this morning,” he said.

    A Russian-looking man stood behind him, dressed in a suit nearly
identical to the Uzbek’s. He didn’t introduce himself, and I couldn’t figure out who he was.

    I passed on the Uzbek’s offer to tour Kokand’s main textile factory and
instead asked to visit the main mosque. Ibramov had told me it ran a popular
madrasah
.
The Uzbek and the Russian looked at each other and shrugged.

    The mosque was built along traditional Central Asian lines, with a
tiled cupola. I wandered through it for a while, peering into the empty classrooms, before I
found a man of about sixty-five, dressed in flannel robes and the ornate half-round cap that
Central Asian clerics wear. He was sitting on the floor, listening to a boy recite a sura from
the Qur’an. The boy’s Arabic was nearly perfect, but I doubted he understood a word. My two
escorts stood in the door, while I sat on the floor and talked to the cleric, or tried to.

    The cleric looked at me uncomprehendingly when I greeted him in Tajik.
Either he didn’t speak Tajik or didn’t want to speak it in front of my minders. “I don’t
understand,” he said in Russian.

    When I tried Arabic, the cleric’s face brightened. In stilted but
grammatically flawless Arabic, he asked if I was an Arab. I decided to sidestep that one. If I
told him the truth, he would clam up. Even in remote Kokand, they’ve heard of Langley,
Virginia. Besides, I figured my cleric friend would be more willing to confide in me if he
thought I was a believer. I told him a parallel truth: that I was from California. He smiled;
maybe he thought I was in the movies.

    I noticed that my minders were nervous. They were whispering to each
other, no doubt because the cleric and I were speaking in a language they couldn’t understand.
Pick up the pace,
I told myself.

    “Who’s paying for these?” I asked, pointing to a stack of new Qur’ans
sitting on a table in the corner.

    By way of an answer, the cleric got up and brought me one. He opened it
and pointed to the stamp on the inside cover, which said it had been donated by the
International Islamic Relief Organization, the richest and most active Islamic charity in the
world, the same one that was raided after September 11. Now we were getting somewhere. Founded
in 1978, the IIRO is a private, independent charity, at least on paper. In fact, it is a Saudi
government institution, fully under the control of the royal family. King Fahd’s full brother
Salman personally approved all important appointments and spending. But it’s more than a matter
of control: The creation of the IIRO was an important milestone in Saudi Arabia’s veer to
militant Islam.

    Like other charities sponsored by the House of Sa’ud - indeed, like so
much of the history of the modern Middle East - the IIRO roots lie deep in the Arabs’
humiliating defeat in the June 1967 war with Israel. Although Saudi Arabia hadn’t fought in the
war, the royal family was soon caught up in the backwash of recriminations. Why hadn’t its oil
revenues gone to building an army that might have turned the tide of victory against the
Israelis? Why had the Al Sa’ud princes been gambling in Monte Carlo when they should have been
on the front with other believers? Saudi Arabia was the keeper of the holy shrines of Islam,
yet it had sat on the sidelines as Islam was crushed. Sensing this post-1967 resurgence of
faith and eager to cover their rear ends, the royal family started flooding charities with
money, the IIRO among them.

    When Saudi Arabia decided to fund the Afghan
moujahidin
in the
early 1980s, the IIRO proved a perfect fit, a money conduit and plausible denial rolled into
one. If the IIRO was caught breaking some country’s law, or one of its employees strayed and
joined a terrorist group, Saudi Arabia could simply disclaim responsibility, a sleight of hand
that has spared the royal family a lot of embarrassment over the years.

    The IIRO was a backer of Abdul Rasool Sayyaf, the Afghan Muslim Brother
it favored in 1980 when it and the United States decided to fund a holy war in Afghanistan.
Sayyaf, in turn, had taken under his wing bin Laden and the other young Saudi and Muslim
firebrands who came to help drive out the heathen Russians.

    Knowing the IIRO was proselytizing in Central Asia was a small but
important piece of the puzzle, but what message was it pushing? Was it backing a Central Asian
Sayyaf? A new jihad? Or was it only handing out Qur’ans, simply trying to recall Central Asian
Muslims back to the faith? My two minders decided it was time to go and motioned me to follow
them. I had time to ask my cleric one last question. It had to be a good one.

    “Did Saudi Arabia ever send you any of Ibn Taymiyah’s works?”

    If the Saudis were handing out his works, that meant they were doing
more than proselytizing.

    “Who?” the cleric asked.

    
Damn
, I thought. I’d fired my best shot and missed. Before I
could ask another question, my minders came to drag me away.

    On the way to the airport, seated in the backseat of the Uzbek’s Lada,
I got around to talking with my Uzbek escort and his Russian friend. They were from “the
security services,” they told me. The Uzbek worked for Uzbekistan’s KNB, the successor
organization to the old KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. The Russian was “from Moscow,” which I
took to mean he was some sort of Russian intelligence adviser to the Uzbek KNB.

    In a weird way, that was the last piece of the puzzle. If I was reading
the signs correctly, this time the big battle would be between Russia’s ex-Central Asian
regimes and Wahhabi Islam. The Qur’ans donated by the IIRO were only a start, a foothold for a
full-fledged jihad. The cleric may not have known about Ibn Taymiyah, but as my plane lifted
off from Kokand, I was convinced that one day he would. Where the IIRO was, and Ibn Taymiyah
was coming, the Saudis were sure to be lurking behind the curtain.

    How about the United States? Was it prepared for what was coming? Well,
I was one of a handful of CIA officers to ever visit the Fergana. That ought to tell you
something.

    WHEN I CHECKED INTO Tashkent the next morning, I told the chief about
my visit to the mosque and asked him what he thought the Saudis were up to in the Fergana. He’d
been in the country only six months, but he had good Russian and had gotten around a lot.