Paul Devereaux, for all that he was confident the FBI would not be allowed to dismantle his Project Peregrine, was perturbed by the acrimonious meeting with Colin Fleming. He underestimated neither the other man’s intelligence, influence nor passion. What worried him was the threat of delay.
After two years at the helm of a project so secret that it was known only to CIA Director George Tenet and White House anti-terrorist expert Richard Clarke, he was close, enticingly close, to springing the trap he had moved heaven and earth to create.
The target was simply called UBL. This was because the whole intelligence community in Washington spelled the man’s first name, Usama, using the letter ‘U’ rather than the ‘O’ favoured by the media.
By the summer of 2001 that entire community was obsessed by and convinced of a forthcoming act of war by UBL against the USA. Ninety per cent thought the onslaught would come against a major US interest outside America; only ten per cent could envisage a successful attack inside territorial USA.
The obsession ran through all the agencies, but mostly through the anti-terrorist departments of the CIA and the FBI. Here the intention was to discover what UBL had in mind and then prevent it.
Regardless of presidential edict 12333 forbidding ‘wet jobs’, Paul Devereaux was not trying to prevent UBL; he was trying to kill him.
Early on in his career the scholar from Boston College had realized that advancement inside the Company would depend on some form of specialization. In his younger days, in the blaze of Vietnam and the Cold War, most debutantes had chosen the Soviet Division. The enemy was clearly the USSR; the language to be learned was Russian. The corridors became crowded. Devereaux chose the Arab world and the wider study of Islam. He was regarded as crazy.
He turned his formidable intellect to mastering Arabic until he could virtually pass for an Arab, and studied Islam to the level of a Koranic scholar. His vindication came on Christmas Day 1979; the USSR invaded a place called Afghanistan and most of the agents inside CIA headquarters at Langley were reaching for their maps.
Devereaux revealed that, apart from Arabic, he spoke reasonable Urdu, the language of Pakistan, and had a knowledge of Pashto, spoken by the tribesmen right through Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier and into Afghanistan.
His career really took off. He was one of the first to argue that the USSR had bitten off far more than it knew; that Afghan tribes would not concede any foreign occupation; that Soviet atheism offended their fanatical Islam; that with US material help a fierce mountain-based resistance could be fomented which would eventually bleed white General Boris Gromov’s Fortieth Army.
Before it was over, quite a bit had changed. The Mujahedin had indeed sent fifteen thousand Russian recruits back home in caskets; the occupation army, despite the infliction of hideous atrocities on the Afghans, had seen their grip prised loose and their morale gutted.
It was a combination of Afghanistan and the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev that between them put the USSR on the final skidpan to dissolution and ended the Cold War. Paul Devereaux had switched from Analysis to Ops and with Milt Bearden had helped distribute one billion dollars a year of US guerrilla hardware to the ‘mountain fighters’.
While living rough, running, fighting through the Afghan mountains, he had observed the arrival of hundreds of young, idealistic, anti-Soviet volunteers from the Middle East, speaking neither Pashto nor Dari, yet prepared to fight and die far from home if need be.
Devereaux knew what he was doing there: he was fighting a superpower that threatened his own. But what were the young Saudis, Egyptians and Yemenis doing there? Washington ignored them and Devereaux’s reports. But they fascinated him. Listening for hours to their conversations in Arabic, pretending he had no more than a dozen words of a language he spoke fluently, the CIA man came to appreciate that they were fighting not communism but atheism.
More, they also entertained an equally passionate hatred and contempt for Christianity, the West and most specifically the USA. Among them was the febrile, temperamental, spoilt offspring of a hugely rich Saudi family, who distributed millions running training camps in the safety of Pakistan, funding refugee hostels, buying and distributing food, blankets and medicines to the other Mujahedin. His name was Usama.
He wanted to be taken as a great warrior, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, but in fact he was only in one scrap, in late spring 1987, and that was it. Milt Bearden called him a spoilt brat but Devereaux watched him carefully. Behind the younger man’s endless references to Allah, there was a seething hatred that would one day find a target other than the Russians.
Paul Devereaux returned home to Langley and a cascade of laurels. He had chosen not to marry, preferring scholarship and his job to the distractions of wife and children. His deceased father had left him wealthy; his elegant town house in old Alexandria boasted a much-admired collection of Islamic art and Persian carpets.
He tried to warn against the foolishness of abandoning Afghanistan to its civil war after the defeat of Gromov, but the euphoria as the Berlin Wall came down led to a conviction that, with the USSR collapsing into chaos, the Soviet satellites breaking westwards for freedom and world communism dead in the water, the last and final threats to the world’s only remaining superpower were evaporating like mist before the rising sun.
Devereaux was hardly home and settled in when in August 1990 Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At Aspen President Bush and Margaret Thatcher, victors of the Cold War, agreed they could not tolerate such impudence. Within forty-eight hours the first F-15 Eagles were airborne for Thumrait in Oman, and Paul Devereaux was heading for the US embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The pace was furious and the schedule gruelling, or he might have noticed something. A young Saudi, also back from Afghanistan, claiming to be the leader of a group of guerrilla fighters and an organization called simply ‘The Base’, offered his services to King Fahd in the defence of Saudi Arabia from the belligerent neighbour to the north.
The Saudi monarch probably also did not notice the military mosquito or his offer; instead he permitted the arrival in his country of half a million foreign soldiers and airmen from a coalition of fifty nations to roll the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and protect the Saudi oilfields. Ninety per cent of those soldiers and airmen were infidels, meaning Christians, and their combat boots marched upon the same soil as contained the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Almost four hundred thousand were Americans.
For the zealot this was an insult to Allah and His prophet Muhammad that simply could not be tolerated. He declared his own private war, firstly against the ruling house that could do such a thing. More importantly, the seething rage that Devereaux had noticed in the mountains of the Hindu Kush had finally found its target. UBL declared war on America and began to plan.
If Paul Devereaux had been seconded to Counter-Terrorism the moment the Gulf War was over and wo
n, the course of history might have been changed. But CT was a too-low priority in 1992; power caused to William Clinton; and both the CIA and the FBI entered the worst decade of their twin existences. In the CIA’s case, that meant the shattering news that Aldrich Ames had been betraying his country for over eight years. Later it would be learned that the FBI’s Robert Hanssen was still doing it.
At what ought to have been the hour of victory after four decades of struggle against the USSR, both agencies suffered crises of leadership, morale and incompetence.
The new masters worshipped a new god: political correctness. The lingering scandals of Irangate and the illicit aid to the Nicaraguan Contras caused the new masters a crisis of nerve. Good men left in droves; bureaucrats and bean-counters were elevated to chiefs of departments. Men with decades of frontline experience were disregarded.
At eclectic dinner parties Paul Devereaux smiled politely as congressmen and senators preened themselves to announce that at least the Arab world loved the USA. They meant the ten princes they had just visited. The Jesuit had moved for years like a shadow through the Muslim street. Inside him a small voice whispered: ‘No, they hate our guts.’
On 26 February 1993, four Arab terrorists drove a rented van into the second level of the basement vehicle park below the World Trade Center. It contained between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds of home-made, fertilizer-based explosive called urea nitrate. Fortunately for New York, it is far from the most powerful explosive known.
For all that, it made a big bang. What no one knew for certain and no more than a dozen even suspected was that the blast constituted the salvo at Fort Sumter in a new war.
Devereaux was by then the deputy chief for the entire Middle East division, based at Langley but travelling constantly. It was partly what he saw in his travels and partly what came to him in the torrent of reports from the CIA stations throughout the world of Islam that caused his attention to wander away from the chancelleries and palaces of the Arab world that were his proper concern into another direction.