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Chapter 12 Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

THEY ADJOURNED TO THE REAR terrace and settled into a pair of wrought-iron chairs along the balustrade. Carter balanced a coffee cup on his knee and gazed toward the gray spires rising gracefully above Georgetown University. Paradoxically, he was speaking of a shabby district of San Diego, where, on a summer day in 1999, there arrived a young Yemeni cleric named Rashid al-Husseini. With money provided by a Saudi-based Islamic charity, the Yemeni purchased a run-down commercial property, established a mosque, and went in search of a congregation. He did most of his hunting on the campus of San Diego State University, where he acquired a devoted following among Arab students who had come to America to escape the stifling social oppression of their homelands, only to find themselves lost and adrift in the ghurba, the land of strangers. Rashid was uniquely qualified to serve as their guide. The only son of a former Yemeni government minister, he had been born in America, spoke colloquial American English, and was the not-so-proud owner of an American passport.

“All sorts of strays and lost souls began stumbling into Rashid’s mosque, including a pair of Saudis named Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.” Carter glanced at Gabriel and added, “I trust you’re familiar with the names.”

“They were two of the muscle hijackers from American Flight 77, personally selected by none other than Osama Bin Laden himself. In January 2000, they were present at the planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, after which the Bin Laden Unit of the CIA managed to lose track of them. Later, it was discovered that both had flown to Los Angeles and were probably still in the United States—a fact you neglected to tell the FBI.”

“Much to my everlasting shame,” said Carter. “But this isn’t a story about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.”

It was a story, Carter resumed, about Rashid al-Husseini, who soon developed a reputation in the Islamic world as a magnetic preacher, a man to whom Allah had granted a beautiful and seductive tongue. His sermons became required listening, not only in San Diego but also in the Middle East, where they were distributed by audiotape. In the spring of 2001, he was offered a clerical position at an influential Islamic center outside Washington, in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. Before long, Nawaf al-Hazmi was praying there, along with a young Saudi from Taif named Hani Hanjour.

“Coincidentally,” said Carter, “the mosque is located on Leesburg Pike. If you hang a left onto Columbia Pike and go a couple of miles, you run smack into the western façade of the Pentagon, which is exactly what Hani Hanjour did on the morning of 9/11. Rashid was in his office at the time. He actually heard the plane pass overhead a few seconds before impact.”

It did not take long for the FBI to connect al-Hazmi and Hanjour to the Falls Church mosque, said Carter, or for the news media to beat a path to Rashid’s door. What they discovered was an eloquent and enlightened young cleric, a man of moderation who condemned the attacks of 9/11 without equivocation and urged his Muslim brethren to forsake violence and terrorism in all its forms. The White House was so impressed with the charismatic imam that he was invited to join several other Muslim scholars and clerics for a private meeting with the president. The State Department thought Rashid might be the perfect sort of figure to help build a bridge between America and one and a half billion skeptical Muslims. The Agency, however, had another idea.

“We thought Rashid could help us to penetrate the camp of our new enemy,” said Carter. “But before we made our approach, we had to answer a few questions. Namely, was he somehow involved in the 9/11 plot, or were his contacts with the three hijackers purely coincidental? We looked at him from every conceivable angle, starting from the assumption that he had a great deal of American blood on his hands. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where and when. And at the end of the process, we concluded that Imam Rashid al-Husseini was clean.”

“And then?”

“We dispatched an emissary to Falls Church to see whether Rashid might be willing to put his words into action. His response was positive. We picked him up the next day and took him to a secure location near the Pennsylvania border. And then the real fun began.”

“You started the assessment process all over again.”

Carter nodded. “But this time, we had the subject seated before us, strapped to a polygraph. We questioned him for three days, pulling apart his past and his associations, piece by piece.”

“And his story held up.”

“He passed with flying colors. So we placed our proposition on the table, accompanied by a great deal of money. It was a simple operation. Rashid would tour the Islamic world, preaching tolerance and moderation while at the same time supplying us with the names of other potential recruits to our cause. In addition, he was to be on the lookout for angry young men who appeared vulnerable to the siren song of the jihadis. We took him on a domestic test drive, working closely with the FBI. And then we went international.”

Operating from a base in a predominately Muslim neighborhood in East London, Rashid spent the next three years crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East. He spoke at conferences, preached in mosques, and sat for interviews with fawning journalists. He denounced Bin Laden as a murderer who had violated the laws of Allah and the teachings of the Prophet. He recognized the right of Israel to exist and called for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. He condemned Saddam Hussein as thoroughly un-Islamic, though, on the advice of his CIA handlers, he stopped short of endorsing the American invasion. His message did not always go over well with his audiences, nor were his activities confined to the physical world. With CIA assistance, Rashid built a presence on the Internet, where he attempted to compete with the jihadist propaganda of al-Qaeda. Visitors to the site were identified and tracked as they moved through cyberspace.

“The operation was regarded as one of our most successful efforts to penetrate a world that, for the most part, we had found almost entirely opaque. Rashid fed his handlers a steady stream of names, good guys and potential bad guys, and even tipped them off about some plots that were brewing. At Langley, we spent a great deal of time marveling at our cleverness. We thought it would go on forever. But it all ended rather suddenly.”

The setting, fittingly enough, was Mecca. Rashid had been invited to speak at the university, a high honor for a cleric who had been cursed with an American passport. Given the fact that Mecca is closed to infidels, the CIA had no choice but to allow him to go alone. He flew from Amman to Riyadh, where he met a final time with one of his CIA handlers, then boarded an internal Saudia Airlines flight to Mecca. His speech was scheduled for eight that evening. Rashid never showed up. He had vanished without a trace.

“At first, we feared he’d been kidnapped and killed by a local branch of al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, that turned out not to be the case. Our prized possession resurfaced on the Internet a few weeks later. The eloquent, enlightened young man of moderation was gone. He’d been replaced by a raving fanatic who preached that the only way to deal with the West was to destroy it.”

“He deceived you.”

“Obviously.”

“For how long?”

“That remains an open question,” said Carter. “There are some at Langley who believe Rashid was bad from the beginning, others who theorize he was driven over the edge by the guilt of working as a spy for the infidels. Whatever the case, one thing is beyond dispute. During the time he was traveling the Islamic world on my dime, he recruited an impressive network of operatives, right under our noses. He’s the ultimate talent spotter and skilled in the art of deception and misdirection. We hoped he would stick to preaching and recruiting, but that hope turned out to be misplaced. The attacks in Europe were Rashid’s coming-out party. He wants to replace Osama Bin Laden as leader of the global jihadist movement. He also wants to do something Bin Laden was never able to accomplish after 9/11.”

“Strike the Far Enemy in his homeland,” said Gabriel. “Shed American blood on American soil.”

“With a network bought and paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency,” Carter added soberly. “How would you like that chiseled on your headstone? If it were ever made public that Rashid al-Husseini was once on our payroll . . .” Carter’s voice trailed off. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.”

“What do you want from me, Adrian?”

“I want you to make the bombing in Covent Garden the last attack Rashid al-Husseini ever carries out. I want you to smash his network before anyone else dies because of my folly.”

“Is that all?”

“No,” said Carter. “I want you to keep the entire operation secret from the president, James McKenna, and the rest of the American intelligence community.”