Robert Baer - Blow the house down

I was thinking that maybe I had found that miracle land after all; thinking that I would sit with these two on the way to New York, that we could talk, swap life stories; that for once I might really tell the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth, and that maybe the old woman would tell me a truth in return-tell me how we had all come to live in a world as fucked up as this one, tell me how I had fallen into a life that piled betrayal on betrayal on betrayal-when I heard a rumbling and a rush of air behind me and turned around to find the bus, door open, ready for us to board. The Chinatown express was a luxury liner.

"Grandma," I said in Baluch, hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. "It's here. Time to get on board. I'll help you."

"No," she answered, unsurprised to find someone speaking her tongue in Washington, D.C. "No. We're waiting."

The little girl's eyes were open wide now, too. Waiting for what?

IF anything can go WRONG, it will. Murphy's Law. It's the first thing they teach you at the Farm, maybe the one eternal truth down there. Fifteen miles south of Wilmington, Delaware, a fuel tanker a few hundred yards in front of us swerved to avoid a pair of deer that must have been standing stock-still in its lane, jackknifed, caught a van broadside traveling two lanes over, and exploded into flames. We got a front-row seat to the aftermath from behind a barricade of Delaware state-police cars.

The two deer on the right seemed to have been dismembered. On the far left, someone-man or woman, it was impossible to tell-had somehow survived. He or she or God knows what was collapsed in the arms of an EMT. In between were the twisted hulk of the van and the still-burning fuel tanker.

I sat there thinking of the fragility of it all-of the tanker driver, of whoever might be ashes in the embers of the van, of the one thing I knew I

couldn't stand to lose myself: my daughter, Rikki. Maybe it had taken me this whole winding route to understand that. Now I did.

By the time a Medivac helicopter had lifted off with the sole survivor and tow trucks had cleared the highway, our four-hour trip had turned into a five-hour one. At 8:15 when I was supposed to be meeting O'Neill, we were still working our way crosstown from the Holland Tunnel. When the doors finally opened at 88 East Broadway, it was 8:32. I took off running. O'Neill said he'd light the fire at 9 A.M. I knew he meant it.

I was in full stride thirteen minutes later, dead in the center of Foley Square, when a shadow descended like some Biblical judgment, followed by the roar of engines.

What in the name of hell, I remember thinking, is an American Airlines passenger jet doing a few hundred feet over Lower Manhattan? I heard the explosion and looked up. The first thing I noticed were the flames shooting out of the North Tower: a bright ocher. That's not the color of burning jet fuel. And that's when I knew: I was too late.

I turned and raced north for blocks looking for a taxi. Traffic was at a standstill. I stopped at a phone booth. The line was busy. I moved to the next one. Broken. Another block north some woman was just hanging up a pay phone as I ran by. I grabbed it, punched in a call-card number, and dialed England. I was waiting for a rock anthem to finish so I could leave a message when the second plane hit.

"Rikki!" I shouted into the receiver. "Rikki! I promise. I'll be there. I'll

be there."

In August 1996, in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden came to his door to greet a man with a close-cropped beard and dressed in a starched white shirt with a straight collar and a lightweight synthetic suit. Bin Laden led the man into his sparse living room, where they sat on either end of a couch. The two were alone. What they had to say they wanted to remain between them, but bin Laden was delighted by the visit.

Recently expelled by the Sudanese, who had seized all his property, Osama bin Laden had arrived in Jalalabad basically broke. Rumors about his having a huge inheritance and trafficking in narcotics and "blood diamonds" were simply not true. He had been reduced to living off the Taliban's meager hospitality, but bin Laden had another problem: The Sudanese also had betrayed most of his networks to Western intelligence. By August 1996, bin Laden needed all the friends he could get. Now, an unlikely one had come to his door.

The visitor's Arabic wasn't fluent, but it was good enough for bin

Laden to understand the proposition the man had crossed Afghanistan in the midst of a civil war to deliver: Al-Qaeda and Iran, he said, should conduct joint terrorist attacks against the United States.

A month earlier, bin Laden had sent a feeler to Tehran, suggesting Iran turn its attention from fighting the Taliban and destabilizing Central Asia to attacking the United States. Still, the idea of a cooperative effort must have startled him. Bin Laden was a Wahhabi Muslim, a sect despised by all Shia, but especially by the Iranians.

Rather than respond right away, bin Laden changed the subject. Afghanistan, he told his visitor, was pitting Shia Muslims against Sunni Muslims, and Israel and the United States were using the divide to destroy

Islam.

The hour was late by now, and the visitor said he would have to go. As they rose, bin Laden put his hand on the man's shoulder and told him he would accept Iran's offer but only on the condition that their cooperation remain a secret, kept even from his own Qaeda inner circle. The visitor shook bin Laden's hand to close the deal, telling him they would be in touch.

When news of the meeting hit the CIA, alarm bells went off, at least with the Iran watchers. Bin Laden's visitor was an Iranian intelligence operative with American blood on his hands. Less than two months before, he'd been involved in the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen U.S. servicemen. Surely, this new partnership promised a new, even more lethal strike against the United States. The only questions were where and when. Those were answered on August 5, 1998, when truck bombs took down our embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, killing more than 250 people.

After the embassy attacks, the Justice Department indicted senior Qaeda members on charges of conspiring with Iran to commit terrorism against the United States. But there was one thing hauntingly odd about the indictments. While bin Laden and other members of Al-Qaeda were named, including some known only by alias, no Iranian was. Not even the one bin Laden had made his original bargain with in Jalalabad. The same thing would occur three years later when indictments came down for the Khobar attack. Iran was named, but no Iranian.

By then, I admit, I was beyond dismay. When I served in Lebanon in the eighties, there seemed to be, in effect, a blanket immunity for Iran. We knew which Iranians bombed our embassy and the Marine barracks. We knew the names of Iranians kidnapping Americans. And it wasn't as if the Iranians were trying very hard to cover their tracks. The first American hostage kidnapped by the Pasdaran was moved out of Lebanon and held in Evin prison in Tehran. When Bill Buckley was held in Balabakk at the Sheikh Abdallah barracks, he and the other hostages could see their Pasdaran guards from their cells. We knew the names of the local Pasdaran commanders. But they were never named, let alone indicted.

I remember thinking that the odd relationship had reached some kind of crescendo when the Reagan administration clandestinely sent missiles to Iran-through Israel no less-that ended up in the hands of the Pasdaran, the same crew killing and kidnapping Americans in Lebanon. But things got even stranger when Oliver North, Reagan's point man on the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages deal, gave a Pasdaran officer a tour of the White House late one night and later met in Europe with another Pasdaran officer who had been involved in Buckley's kidnapping. This was truly crazy, insane. Then along came the meeting in Jalalabad, and Khobar Towers, and the embassy bombings, and 9/11, and the bizarre grew commonplace.