By Michael Springmann, former
diplomat in the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service, with postings
to Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, and the Bureau of Intelligence and
Research in Washington, D.C. Springmann was the head of the U.S.
consular official in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia . The published author of
several articles on national security themes, Mr. Springmann is now an
attorney in private practice in the Washington, D.C. area.
The following is an excerpt from Springmann’s book, Visas for Al Qaeda, sent to us by the author.
Having
just joined the “real” Foreign Service (after stints in the
State-Commerce Exchange Program and the Foreign Commercial Service), I
was assigned to Jeddah, the “Grandmother of Cities.” (Eve, the
grandmother of us all, is reputedly buried in it.) There, I learned that
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a mysterious and exotic place, but it
was nowhere near as exotic and mysterious as the American consulate
general on Palestine Road.
Upon arrival, I found, as a new visa
officer, I was expected to winnow more than one hundred applications a
day, separating them into “issuances,” “refusals,” and what turned out
to be “free passes for CIA agents.” However, none of the clean-cut young
fellows at the consulate (or even any of the pudgy, “been around too
many blocks” types) bothered to clue me in on this special class of
applicants.
However.
One
day, Eric Qualkenbush, the CIA Base Chief, stopped me while I was
walking on the consulate’s huge compound (which included a nine-hole
golf course). He had a request. Could I issue a visa to one of his
agents, an Iranian whose family owned an Oriental rug store? Eric said,
“Mike, make it look good (wink, wink). We want him in Washington for
consultations.”
Flabbergasted, I said, “Sure.” Up to that point, I
had had almost a daily battle with Jay Freres, the Consul General,
along with other CIA officials, who demanded visas for peculiar people,
that is, people whom law and regulation required me to refuse. I also
had running fights with visa applicants who told me to approve their
paperwork or they would complain to Freres and have him overrule me.
Why,
I wondered, did Qualkenbush clearly explain what was coming? And why
didn’t he tip me the wink about the others, instead of leaving me to
fight continued violations of rule and directive all by myself?
I
was even more flummoxed when Eric’s agent appeared in line before me
while I was on my stool behind the visa section’s armored window. Secure
in my industrial-strength cinderblock office, I went through the
interview: Memo on company letterhead explaining trip and customers to
be visited?
Check. Properly filled out visa application form DS-156?
Check. Clean passport with no hidden notations of previous travel refusals?
Check. Coherent, comprehensive, clear account of travel purpose?
Check. Previous US visa stamps?
Check. Appropriate responses to my questions about proposed journey?
Check.
I issued the visa and wished I had more applicants like him.
And yet…
I
had heard in Washington about all sorts of abnormal problems tied to
visas in Jeddah. None of it made sense at the time, but the office
atmosphere after my arrival was increasingly poisonous as I invoked the
Immigration and Nationality Act and the Foreign Affairs Manual in
preventing scruffy types from apparently trying to emigrate to the
United States. Despite my questioning people in the office, I began to
suspect that something wasn’t quite right. I knew it wasn’t right when
the State Department later fired me without explanation and then
stonewalled my efforts to learn why.
The following story is what I
learned about what was really happening in Jeddah, how I got there,
and the dreadful consequences of what I learned to be American policy.
Here Are Two Key Points
First,
the Consular Section’s job was to secure visas for CIA agents, i.e.,
foreigners recruited by American case officers. The Department of State
and the Central Intelligence Agency collaborated on sending ignorant
pawns to Jeddah, a place that was handling about forty-five thousand
visa applications annually. If they processed the paperwork like
automatons and didn’t ask awkward questions about the applicants, they
kept their jobs. If they followed law and regulation and resisted
illegal pressure to overlook the people who had no real reason for
traveling to the United States, they “weren’t with the program” and
could easily be dismissed as incompetent.
Second, the
Department of State already had a watchdog in place to prevent this type
of problem: the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. According to its
website:
D[iplomatic]S[ecurity] works with the Bureau of Consular
Affairs on cases involving allegations of corrupt American Embassy
employees, fraudulent document vendors, and the use of visas by
terrorists, and those smuggling and trafficking drugs and human beings.
Passport
and visa crimes are federal offenses punishable by up to 10 years in
prison and a fine of $250,000. The maximum prison sentence is increased
to 15 years if the offense is connected to drug trafficking, and to 20
years if connected to terrorism.
So who was committing these
violations, and what were they doing? And why wasn’t the watchdog
watching? As I later learned to my dismay, the visa applicants were
recruits for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union’s armed
forces. Further, as time went by, the fighters, trained in the United
States, went on to other battlefields: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, and
Syria. They worked with the American intelligence services and the State
Department to destabilize governments the United States opposed. While
it’s no secret, most knowledgeable people still refuse to talk about
this agenda.
The Magic Kingdom: Confusion to the Americans
Prelude
Surprisingly,
I got a call one day from a desk officer (essentially, those in
Washington who follow political, economic, and social affairs in a
country) for Saudi Arabia. Ambassador Cutler was in town for
consultations about the kingdom with State Department officials, and he
invited me to meet with him. I expected it to be a five-minute “hello
and good-bye” session. Instead, Cutler kept me for about forty-five
minutes, telling me the problems my predecessor as vice consul in
Jeddah, Greta Holtz, had created for our embassy in Riyadh. Visas were
being denied to servants of rich Saudi women who, after all, couldn’t
travel to the United States without their entourage of hairdressers,
seamstresses, and other factotums. I sat there and listened and wondered
at this report. Clearly, Cutler was conveying some message, but for the
life of me, I could not puzzle it out. Afterward, I spoke to the desk
officer, who had been there with me during the talk, asking what that
meeting was really all about. His response was that he didn’t know,
saying that Cutler (who had previously been ambassador to Zaire and
Tunisia) was “ just a queer duck.”
Years later, Cutler, then head
of Meridian House, a nonprofit that promotes international
understanding, flatly refused to talk to me about Jeddah. Despite his
silence, he knew full well what had been going on. In a discussion about
recruits for the Afghan war in Robert Dreyfuss’s
Devil’s Game,
Cutler is quoted as saying, “Where I was, nobody was looking ahead at
what would happen to those unemployed freedom fighters.” (Contrary to
what Cutler told me and, as I learned later, many of Jeddah’s visa
applicants were mujahideen recruits, alleged “freedom fighters”, and not
servants of rich Saudi women.)
Then, being “satiably curious,”
like Rudyard Kipling’s Elephant Child, I began asking around about
Cutler’s odd remarks on visas in Jeddah. Heeding the advice of a
consular officer that anything out of the ordinary should be questioned
as a source of potential trouble, I contacted Ellen Goff in the
Executive Office for the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs (NEA/EX),
essentially a position handling administrative matters. She told me
that, yes, she had heard stories about visa problems in Jeddah, but she
had no details on the subject.
Still puzzled and confused, I went
off to Jeddah in September 1987. I later learned that I had been
assigned to a CIA post, another unpleasant surprise. [Most of the
American officers and staff did not work for the State Department, but
instead for the Agency (the CIA, or “Langley” for the location of the
CIA in Virginia), or the National Security Agency (NSA).]
Arrival and Puzzlement
Welcomed
with open arms by Jay Freres, the Consul General (identified by the
German journalist Julius Mader as a CIA official), and Henry Ensher,
the political officer, I was told I was an improvement over Greta Holtz,
whom they alleged had had terrible problems at the consulate. [Years
later, I began to realize that this was more a cover story than anything
else, especially since my visa refusal rate was within five percentage
points of hers. According to one biography, Holtz had had strong ties to
the intelligence services, having previously worked at the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA), later receiving the Christopher Award from
the CIA (according to another biography)] For someone who created such
problems for our embassy in Riyadh, Greta Holtz has done extremely well
for herself, moving steadily up the promotion ladder. Once
Minister-Counselor for Provincial Affairs in Iraq, she became a Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State. Then President Barack Obama named her
Ambassador to Oman in September 2012. Her new official biography
strangely omits her DIA service, saying just that she worked in the NATO
policy office at the Defense Department. When in Washington, DC, she
lives in a $2.4 million house in nearby Potomac, Maryland.)
My New Job as Consular Officer—Issuing Visas
Later
on, during my service in Jeddah, I began getting referrals from Freres
and Ensher (and others, such as Paul Arvid Tveit, a commercial officer
listed in
namebase.org
as a CIA official). Initially, I was approached diffidently with the
caveat that, while according to law and regulation, I had the final
decision, they really wanted visas for their contacts. While no example
springs to mind, the referrals, for the most part, were unremarkable.
Later, after I had begun questioning the credentials of many applicants
because they lacked ties to Saudi Arabia or their own country, the
requests became demands. Then, they became threats.
Ghost Busters
While
the Foreign Service is filled with people who do not work for the
Department of State, Jeddah was my first experience with a
majority-spook post. (Intelligence officers, in State Department slang,
are spooks because they’re invisible beings from another world.)
According to both a former CIA station chief (head of undercover
operations in a country) who asked not to be named, and Jay Hawley, now a
retired FSO, the average percentage of intelligence officers to real
diplomats at a given Foreign Service post is about one in three. My
experience in Jeddah, Stuttgart, and New Delhi might place it higher— at
least 50 percent, if not more. According to the
Anti-CIA Club of Diplomats: Spooks in U.S. Foreign Service [sic], a twelve-page, 1983 Canadian publication (see
namebase.org),
the percentage is 60 percent. At Jeddah, to the best of my knowledge,
out of some twenty US citizens assigned to the consulate, only three
people, including myself, worked for the Department of State. The rest
were CIA or NSA officials or their spouses. (NSA creates and breaks
ciphers, listens to telephone calls, and reads e-mails. This allegedly
makes US government communications more secure and those of American
citizens and other nations less so. One of the languages it teaches its
analysts is “Special Arabic”—that is, Hebrew, helping conceal Israel as
being a target of NSA activity.)
Things rapidly went from bad to worse.
My
name was on the visa plate that stamped applications to enter the
United States, making me personally responsible for my actions. After
opposing questionable demands for visas, I began to inquire about what
was really going on. First, I asked Jean Bradford, the head of the
Citizens’ Services branch of the consular section. She told me that “Jay
Freres (the source for most of the illegal visa pressure) just likes
giving candy to babies.” I then tried Justice (given name) Stevens, head
of the consular section. He told me to keep quiet and do what Freres
wanted. I later discussed the matter with Stephanie A. Smith (a former
French citizen) who was Counselor for Consular Affairs in Riyadh, the
capital. Another one of those listed as a CIA official in
Anti-CIA Club of Diplomats. Spooks in US Foreign Service,
she told me that Freres’ and others’ demands for illegal visas were
“very bad.” She later advised me to raise the issue with the Bureau of
Consular Affairs on my next trip to Washington.
Eric Qualkenbush,
the CIA base chief at Jeddah, whose cover was head of the
Political/Economic Section, came up with a new demand: he or his staff
had to examine and approve all visas that my staff and I had issued
before the stamped passports were returned to the applicants. I had to
wonder if this practice originated from his experience as a Clandestine
Service officer at the CIA station in New Delhi or as station chief in
Sofia, Bulgaria, prior to Jeddah, where one European diplomat told me he
served? (Eric’s assignment after Jeddah was Bonn.) According to retired
consular officers, this requirement was highly unusual. Another, who
asked that I withhold his name, informed me that the CIA often trolled
visa application files or sought specific information about
visa-seekers.)
Exorcists Needed
In our spook
–ridden
Jeddah consulate, I sometimes found it was a daily battle to do my job.
Here are just a few examples of what I discovered and how the laws of
the United States were routinely ignored. Little did I know that I was
dealing with recruits for the Arab
–Afghan Legion.
Two Pakistanis came to me for a visa. According to their story, they were traveling on a Commerce Department
–organized
trade mission to an automotive parts exhibition in the United States.
However, they couldn’t name the trade show or identify the city in which
it would be held. I denied their visa request. Within sixty minutes,
Paul Arvid Tveit (now retired and living in Virginia) called and
demanded visas for these same Pakistanis. I explained the reasons for my
refusal, citing § 214(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (a visa
applicant is an intending immigrant unless and until he can prove
otherwise) and the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM, State’s holy book that
carries instructions for everything, including the requirement to refuse
visas if there is any doubt as to the applicant’s bona fides). Ignoring
the law and regulation, Tveit went to Justice Stevens and the visas
were issued.
Then, Karen Sasahara, the political officer and Henry
Ensher’s successor, demanded a visa for a Sudanese who was a refugee
from his own country and unemployed in Saudi Arabia. Following the
letter and the spirit of the law, I refused. Sasahara immediately went
to Justice, and a visa was issued. When I later asked Justice why he
authorized a visa to someone with no ties to the Sudan or the kingdom,
he replied simply “national security,” a phrase without legal
definition.
Besides staff going to Stevens (now retired and living
in Switzerland), people from outside the consulate frequently went to
Jay Freres to reverse my decisions. One individual, an expatriate
company messenger with a stack of passports, appeared at the visa window
one day, telling me I could issue the visas then and there, or I could
do it after he went to Freres. Per regulation, the only way a refusal
could be overridden was by a senior FSO with a consular commission,
which Freres lacked. Additionally, the senior officer had to have more
information unavailable to the denying officer. Therefore, Freres acted
without authority, also failing to make a required written report. (Cf. 9
FAM 41.121).
A Questionable Question
One
question that I never addressed was, if a junior consular officer, such
as myself, questioned the credentials of all the peculiar visa
applicants, what were the far more experienced Immigration and
Naturalization Service (INS) inspectors doing at the port of entry when
these lowlifes entered the country? How is it that none of them were
turned back? I well remember being told a story by Mike Carpenter, head
of the consular section in Stuttgart in the 1970s. One of the applicants
to whom he had given a visa had been sent home from New York. Although
she had declared to the inspector that her US visit would be short, INS
found a two
–year supply of birth control pills in her handbag, thus indicating her fraudulent plans for a much longer stay.
Jay the Jailer
Jay
Freres did more than help questionable people get visas. He helped the
Saudi government put expatriates in jail. This seemed to be in keeping
with his questionable past, such as his assignment to Kabul in 1979 when
the American Ambassador, “Spike” Dubs, was kidnapped and killed. As the
Afghan security forces blazed away at the people holding Dubs within
Room 117 in the Kabul Hotel, somehow Freres, head of the
Economic/Commercial Section, was situated outside the space. Dean
Henderson, a writer, columnist, and blogger, asserts that Dubs was also
CIA chief of station, unlikely in knowledgeable people’s opinions.
However, a European diplomat opined that Dubs, and likely Freres, were
State Department officials co-opted by the Agency. Freres later became
Political Counselor in Ankara in 1982. (Other than his service as consul
general in Jeddah, these were his only assignments that I could find in
the State Department’s
Key Officers of Foreign Service Posts booklet.)
Not
long after I arrived and began making contacts around town, consular
officers from two European consulates took me to lunch. Over good food
and “Saudi champagne” (sparkling water, apple juice, and citrus slices),
they asked my help in identifying and publicizing the actions of a
fellow of indeterminate nationality having multiple passports. They said
this man possessed an arrangement with the Saudi government to import
and sell liquor and drugs. According to my interlocutors, he would hold
parties in alcohol-free Jeddah, generously supplying intoxicants, liquid
and otherwise. As I understood it, he would then provide the names of
his guests to the Saudi authorities who, on occasion, would raid the
events, arresting as many attendees as they could catch. In return, he
got to keep his profits (and stay out of jail). Subsequently, at one of
the consulate’s “pool parties,” I happened to meet a man, an American
citizen, who had been to one of the raided functions. Appearing to be in
his fifties and far out of shape, he told me he ran out the back door
as the police came in the front. Despite his age and physical condition,
he said, he was up and over the wall at the rear of the house faster
than a teenage athlete.
Learning about this scam, I felt I should
post details of this mysterious dealer to warn American citizens in our
consular district, the Hejaz. A simple notice, mailed to those
registered with the consulate, would be the easiest way to protect our
citizens. When I suggested this to Freres, as head of the consulate, he
refused. He said it would offend the Saudis, and he ordered me to keep
silent.
While I didn’t work in Citizens Services at the consulate,
which deals with the welfare of US nationals and handles any
imprisonments, I still thought it only prudent (and my duty) to quietly
pass the word to people I knew about this subject, Freres be damned.
Pool Parties, the Marine House, and the Brass Eagle
Alcohol
was a big deal in Saudi Arabia where, if you drank and were caught, you
were (1) arrested, (2) flogged, (3) deported. Yet, despite our efforts
to “conceal” alcohol use at the consulate (by crushing bottles and beer
cans, for example), the Saudis knew all about what the Americans were
doing. Saudi citizens and government officials attended receptions at
my house where I served forbidden drinks. They also attended pool
parties and functions at the Marine House where alcohol was provided.
Saudi citizens and government officials attended events at the Brass
Eagle, several rooms that served as the consulate’s private bar. And, if
they didn’t spill the beans about alcohol consumption, a movable Saudi
“traffic” camera overlooked the compound with its parties, and provided
a bird’s-eye view of what went on there, including drinking and
mixed-sex dancing.
Shortly after Lonnie Washington, the only State
Department Communicator (who sent and received official messages) and I
arrived, we learned about the Brass Eagle. Begun by former consular
officer Brad Braford’s wife, it was a remarkably dreary and sparsely
attended place used mostly by CIA officials. We two, with our household
effects still in transit, decided to invite official and unofficial
contacts to this bar. Selling tickets for the local equivalent of ten
dollars for five drinks, we filled the Brass Eagle to overflowing in no
time and made a pretty good profit for the American Employees Family
Support Association (AEFSA) (which may have been a CIA front). The
Agency really didn’t like that we brought non
–Americans to the consulate. So, in retaliation, they put roadblocks into the otherwise smooth operation of our parties.
Later,
after the CIA grasped what a good idea it was to ply expatriates with
alcohol, it began organizing parties around the consulate swimming
pool. The parties, with two hundred or more guests, generated about one
million dollars per annum for said AEFSA, an alleged nonprofit
organization.
The Marine House was another watering hole.
Invitations were highly prized, and guests tried to compensate for a
booze-free week by drinking as much as they could in a few hours. Many
departing guests staggered out onto Palestine Road, fronting the
consulate, in various stages of drunkenness. (I had arrived in Jeddah
too late to enjoy the Marine House’s “Tarts and Vicars” party, where the
female guests displayed abundant intoxicated skin as they left the
grounds—a blatant violation of Saudi mores.) Sometime later in my tour, a
Marine Corps inspection team arrived to question such consumption of
alcohol and earnings from its sale.
Keep the Saudis Happy, Part One
Consul
General Jay Freres’s watchword at the consulate was, “Don’t offend the
Saudis.” At the same time, he refused to hire a capable,
American-educated Saudi female for a US Information Service position
advising on academic study in the United States. (I learned the previous
employee had been fired earlier because she had allegedly identified a
CIA official at one of the pool parties.) Also, he allowed illuminated
Christmas trees (regarded as religious symbols in Jeddah) to be
displayed at the consulate and Christmas carols to be played over
loudspeakers. (This might seem inoffensive, but the only religion
permitted in the kingdom is Islam. Anyone caught openly practicing
another faith suffers disproportionate consequences.)
Were Freres
genuinely interested in not alienating the Saudis, he could have done
more to keep liquor out of nondiplomatic hands on consular premises.
Official receptions could have served fruit juice and soft drinks, and
he could have stopped supplying liquor to the Mobil Oil Corporation’s
boat.
Keep the Saudis Happy, Part Two
Jay
Freres and his “Don’t Offend the Saudis” program had as many holes as a
piece of Swiss cheese hit by a shotgun blast. Again, in Saudi Arabia,
Islam is the only religion permitted. People of other faiths get their
prayer books, hymnals, and other religious articles seized at the
border, and if they act blatantly enough, can get themselves deported.
Yet Freres, a Roman Catholic, had an undercover priest say Mass at his
official residence on Sundays for coreligionists from inside and outside
the consulate. Protestant expatriates were allowed to hold services in
the auditorium in the consulate’s main building, something FSOs, such as
myself, were ignorant of. After Freres retired, Tim Hunter, a devout
Catholic, told me that he (Hunter) had been ordered to discourage
attendance at the Holy Church of the Consulate. When he objected, he was
savaged by US government officials.
They’re Like Termites…But Do More Damage
Besides
direct confrontation and dubious “referrals,” the spooks, the
“Invisible Ones” were also assigned to the consular section for
“diplomatic cover.” Philip Agee, a former case officer, said to me that,
in Mexico City, where he had been assigned, the CIA always had one of
its Clandestine Service people occupying a consular position. From what I
was told by people in Jeddah, Brad Braford, Andrew C. Weber’s
predecessor, had been assigned to the visa section as a
“part
–time”
consular officer. (He went on to Dhahran as political/military
officer.) Supposedly, he and Andy Weber had complained about Jay
Freres’s questionable visa issuances. (Without a consular commission,
Freres had had a visa signature slug made, and presumably, used.) Weber
would occasionally sit at the visa window and say to me, “Mike, let me
take this next guy in line, he’s one of mine.”
CIA involvement in
hanky-panky with visas, such as that in Jeddah, is common in almost
every Foreign Service Post. If this behavior leaks out, it’s quickly
hushed up. Remember, it was a CIA “consular officer” at Khartoum in the
Sudan who issued a tourist visa to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, later
linked to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The “blind” Sheikh had
been on a State Department terrorist watch list when he was issued the
visa, entering the United States by way of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and
the Sudan in 1990. [I later wondered if this was the same fellow who had
once sent an emissary to me in Jeddah with his passport and
application. Since we required personal appearances for every
nationality except Saudi (and sometimes even for them), I told the
representative I needed to see the applicant, but I was told the man was
“handicapped.” Still, I thought, why could he not get on a bus in Mecca
to travel to our consulate?]
Keep That Lid On (So the Whole Mess Doesn’t Boil Over and Dirty the Stove)
I
began to see Jeddah as a very strange place filled with people I really
knew nothing about who conducted themselves in a remarkably odd
fashion. Questions got me nowhere. A plethora of contacts couldn’t
explain to me what really went on inside the consulate. European
diplomats regularly asked about the number of spooks on Uncle Sam’s
payroll there, possibly because Agency staff didn’t seem to care about
their “cover.” Unlike other American officers, they all drove identical,
olive-drab Toyota Land Cruisers with orange-and-red lightning bolts
painted on their sides—with buff Saudi, instead of green Consular Corps
license plates that real diplomats had on their cars.
As
previously mentioned, before I left Washington for Jeddah, I wrote to
Greta Holtz several times, asking about my job and what she wished she
had known before she took up her post there. I never received a
response. When I met her in person, during one of her visits to Jeddah
from Yemen where she was next assigned, she told me she’d been “too
upset” to give me a clear picture. Holtz called me in Washington, DC
after I’d left the service and questioned me about the progress of my
complaints about Jeddah, even though I’d never mentioned a word to her
about the subject.
Then, the Inspectors came.
Periodically,
Foreign Service Posts are examined for compliance with law and
regulation, and a report is prepared. Nestor Martin, one of my close,
well-connected contacts, a Cuban American with intimate ties to
intelligence officials, had warned me to say nothing to the inspectors
about problem areas. These included suspect visas, extremely profitable
and voluminous liquor sales to expatriates, Muslim and otherwise, as
well as the harassment of the Arab American language teacher, Salma
Webber. If you do, he cautioned, you will be fired.
While serving
in Jeddah, I was quizzed by Joseph P. O’Neill, one of the State
Department’s Inspection Team members. O’Neill interviewed me and pressed
me to confirm what he’d heard about visa problems and alcohol deals. He
shared details new to me and repeatedly said anything I told him was
and would remain confidential. When I repeated what Nestor had stated
to me, O’Neill reassured me that nothing would happen to my career.
After about an hour, I relented and, trusting my government, confirmed
O’Neill’s suspicions. Just a few days later, Jay Freres wrote a vicious
efficiency report on me that would virtually guarantee my dismissal from
the Foreign Service.
During my conversation with O’Neill, I told
him about the file of shady visas I had been keeping. Neglecting to make
a copy or take the file with me, I later learned it had been
mysteriously shredded (by a person or persons unknown), and O’Neill, I
suspect, was the instigator of that. (He was the only American officer
who knew about this file.) Subsequently, I wrote O’Neill a letter when
he was consul general in Bermuda (and before he traveled to Afghanistan,
the Ukraine, and Uzbekistan on several Foreign Service assignments as a
retiree), asking about what really went on at Jeddah. No response.
Perhaps this was a result of O’Neill’s becoming an
“off
the-books” liaison with the Arab Afghans he seemed to be protecting. Or,
possibly, it was his ties to the CIA, going back to 1979 when he was
assigned to the American embassy in Tehran when irate students captured
it. (O’Neill wasn’t listed in the 1979 Key Officers Booklet, and he
wasn’t listed as a hostage by the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and
Museum).
Revelations on the Road to Unemployment
Like
Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, I was blinded by the “light of
truth.” In a chance meeting, Joe Trento, a journalist at the Public
Education Center in Washington, DC, put all the hostility toward me into
perspective. Joe revealed to me what had been really going on with the
CIA in Jeddah and what had been concealed from me. It wasn’t garden
variety visa fraud as I had once thought, but something much more
serious: it was the Visas for Terrorists Program, set up to recruit and
train (in the United States) murderers, war criminals, and human rights
violators for combat in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. These men
became the founding members of al-Qaeda, the Arab
–Afghan
Legion. President Jimmy Carter (D-GA) and his National Security
Advisor, Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski, began the campaign to assemble
these goons to engage in blowing things up and shooting things down,
preferably with Soviet soldiers inside. To help them do that, Trento
said, the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency sent
patsies as visa officers to the Jeddah consulate, then handling about
forty-five thousand visa applications annually. If they weren’t bright
enough to question what was going on, Trento noted, things would be
fine. If they protested the spurious visa requests, as I would, and
resisted illegal pressure to overlook them, they could easily be fired
because, as he added, “they wouldn’t get with the program” and there was
“obviously” something wrong with them.
Supplementing Trento’s
remarks were similar statements made by a former US government employee
at the Voice of America and another man connected with George Washington
University in DC. I reached both by chance in the course of researching
an article on the Middle East, and they told me that the CIA, ably
assisted by asset Osama bin Laden and Saudi connections, had three
recruiting offices in the kingdom: one was in Jeddah, one was in Riyadh,
and one was somewhere in the eastern province of al-Sharqiah. However,
the Saudis, once the Soviets had withdrawn from Afghanistan, they said,
were not pleased with the saddle tramps that they had helped recruit. In
fact, the Saudis prevented those who’d been enlisted within the
kingdom, particularly the Palestinians, from returning. They feared they
would use their newly acquired skills to promote “regime change” at
home. Other nations in the region rejected these recruits as well, my
contacts told me.
Many recruiting offices were located in the
United States, too. According to background on Abdullah Azzam, one of
the cofounders of the Services Office (an organization inter alia
placing Arab volunteers with Afghan factions fighting the Soviets),
The main aim of Sheikh Abdullah in creating the
Jihad
magazine (an Arabic publication providing information about the Afghan
war, focusing on Arab efforts to help that struggle) was to inform the
Arab world what is happening in Afghanistan; informing them, help
funding, recruit people. [Eventually we printed] seventy thousand copies
[an issue].
Most of them go to the United States because we had
fifty-two centers in the United States. The main office was in
Brooklyn, [also] Phoenix, Boston, Chicago, Tucson, Minnesota, Washington
DC, and Washington State. [Emphasis added.] Every year
[Abdullah Azzam] used to go to United States. The wealthy of the United
States can help much more than Muslims who are living in poor countries
or under dictatorship.
When I contacted him by email and telephone
in 2013, Sheikh Abdullah Anas, Azzam’s son-in-law, somehow couldn’t
remember any of this. All he said was that there were only a handful of
non
–Afghan fighters and that the CIA had no role in
dealing with them. One cause of his faulty memory might be his gaining
asylum in the United Kingdom. (The UK’s Secret Intelligence Service was a
participant in the Afghan war.) Another might be his rumored interest
in moving to the United States and not wanting to offend the people who
can make that happen.
Perhaps secret travel to the United States
by members of the Services Office was another source of friction in
Jeddah. While I was at the consulate, I proposed meeting with various
Muslim organizations who had been sending me unqualified visa
applicants. These interviewees were clerics ostensibly going to the
United States to preach to congregations but couldn’t explain why there
were no qualified Muslim evangelists in America. I had wanted to
describe to the groups what was needed for visa applications to reduce
the time I spent with unfit candidates. Jay P. Freres forbade this.
In
a subsequent conversation with Celerino Castillo, a former Drug
Enforcement Agency official, I learned that the CIA’s involvement in
the visa process was a successful program of long-standing in Latin
America and, I presume, a model for Saudi Arabia. South of the border,
he said, the Agency would slip passports and applications from its
contacts into packages sent to the local US consulate or embassy by
travel agents. Sandwiched between legitimate applications, “Agency
assets” would not be carefully examined by consular officers and would
thus get a free ride to the United States.
The question, of
course, is: Were these recruits selected in Washington, DC by CIA
headquarters or locally by the base or station? (A “base” is a CIA
office concealed in a consulate, while a “station” is a CIA office at
an embassy and controlling all the intelligence activities in a
country.) Former Agency official Marc Sageman, (one of only three people
who managed the entire anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan), maintains that
the stations and bases never dealt with Washington. They didn’t
communicate with headquarters on enlisting fighters abroad, he
asserted. The three people “managing” the Afghan war were Sageman, Milt
Bearden, and Gus Avrakotos (“Dr. Dirty,” as he was called, the man in
charge of arming the Afghans. He’s now dead). In 2008, Sageman played up
the threat of Muslims as dangerous because they were
“self- recruited,
without leadership, and globally connected through the Internet” and
who “lack[ed] structure and organizing principles…” These were
characteristics usually put forward to denigrate a risk. Sageman ran
“unilateral programs with the Afghan Mujahedin [sic] between 1987 and
1989 from Islamabad, and also was an advisor to the New York City Police
for years. In 2008, he became its “scholar in residence.”
How Stupid Could They Be?
Very stupid.
If
I had been informed of what the CIA, the State Department, and Osama
bin Laden were doing in Jeddah, I may have been dumb enough at the time
to have gone along with this policy. After all, I trusted my government.
The CIA and the State Department would have saved themselves negative
publicity, law suits, and twenty years of painful truth-telling from me.
I
managed to do my job despite wrangling daily with the intelligence
officers who staffed and ran the consulate. These were the people who
arranged for recruiting and training what were then the mujahideen, who
later became al-Qaeda, who then transformed themselves into ISIS. I saw,
but didn’t recognize, their start at Jeddah. We’ve all seen their later
development and what happens when the intelligence services control
foreign policy and diplomacy: the people they assembled aided the
breakup of Yugoslavia, the destruction of Iraq, the collapse of Libya,
and the savaging of Syria.
“I repeat: We knew those fuel trucks were moving back and forth, we saw them … and the decision was not made in the White House to attack them or not. You can’t tell me they were moving all that stuff back and forth for over a year, and we didn’t know about it. I mean, it’s just not possible given our [technological] capabilities — but I’ll be glad to hear 
