Almost as a sideline, he began to ask for supplementary reports from his stations; not about what the local prime minister was doing, but about the mood in the street, in the souks, in the medinas, in the mosques and in the teaching schools, the madrasas, that churn out the next generation of locally educated Muslim youths. The more he watched and listened, the more the alarm bells rang.
‘They hate our guts,’ his voice told him. ‘They just need a talented coordinator.’ Researching on his own time, he picked up the trail once again of the Saudi fanatic UBL. He learned the man had been expelled from Saudi Arabia for his impertinence in denouncing the monarch for permitting infidels onto the sacred sand.
He learned he was based in Sudan, another pure Islamist state where fundamentalist fanaticism was in power. Khartoum offered to hand the Saudi zealot over to the USA, but no one was interested. Then he was gone, back to the hills of Afghanistan where the civil war had ended in favour of the most fanatical faction, the ultra-religious Taliban party.
Devereaux noted that the Saudi arrived with huge largesse, endowing Taliban with millions of dollars in personal gifts and rapidly becoming a major figure in the land. He arrived with almost fifty personal bodyguards and found several hundred of his foreign (non-Afghan) Mujahedin still in place. Word spread in the bazaars of the Pakistani border towns of Quetta and Peshawar that the returnee had begun two frantic programmes: building elaborate cave complexes in a dozen places and constructing training camps. The camps were not for the Afghan military; they were for volunteer terrorists. The word came back to Paul Devereaux. Islamist hatred of his country had found its coordinator.
The misery of the Somali slaughter of the US Rangers came and went, caused by rotten intelligence. But there was more. Not only was the opposition of the warlord, Aideed, underestimated, but there were others fighting there; not Somalis but more skilled Saudis. In 1996 a huge bomb destroyed the Al Khobar towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen US servicemen and injuring many others.
Paul Devereaux went to see Director George Tenet.
‘Let me go over to Counter-Terrorism,’ he begged.
‘CT is full and it’s doing a good job,’ said the DCI.
‘Six dead in Manhattan, nineteen in Dhahran. It’s Al Qaeda. It’s UBL and his team who are behind it, even if they don’t actually plant the bombs.’
‘We know that, Paul. We’re working on it. So is the bureau. This is not being allowed to lie fallow.’
‘George, the bureau knows diddly about Al Qaeda. They don’t have the Arabic, they don’t know the psychology, they’re good on gangsters but east of Suez might as well be the dark side of the moon. I could bring a new mind to this business.’
‘Paul, I want you in the Middle East. I need you there more. The King of Jordan is dying. We don’t know who his successor will be. His son Abdullah or his brother Hassan? The dictator in Syria is failing; who takes over? Saddam is making life more and more intolerable for the weapons inspectors. What if he throws them out? The whole Israel–Palestine thing is going south in a big way. I need you in the Middle East.’
It was 1998 that secured Devereaux his transfer. On 7 August two huge bombs were detonated outside two US embassies in Africa: at Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
Two hundred and thirteen people died in Nairobi, with four thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two injured. Of the dead, twelve were Americans. The explosion in Tanzania was not as bad: eleven were killed, seventy-two injured. No Americans died, but two were crippled.
The organizing force behind both bombs was quickly identified as the A1 Qaeda network. Paul Devereaux handed his Middle East duties to a rising young Arabist he had taken under his wing and moved to Counter-Terrorism.
He carried the rank of Assistant Director, but did not displace the existing incumbent. It was not an elegant arrangement. He hovered on the fringe of Analysis as a kind of consultant but quickly became convinced that the Clintonian rule of only employing sources of upright character as informants was complete madness.
It was the sort of madness that had led to the fiasco of the response to Africa. Cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory on the outskirts of Khartoum, capital of Sudan, because it was thought the long departed UBL was manufacturing chemical weapons there. It turned out to be a genuine aspirin factory.
Seventy more Tomahawk Cruises were poured into Afghanistan to kill UBL. They turned a lot of big rocks into little rocks at several million dollars a pop, but UBL was at the other end of the country. It was out of this failure and the advocacy of Devereaux himself that Peregrine was created.
It was generally agreed around Langley that he must have called in a few markers to get his terms accepted. Project Peregrine was so secret that only Director Tenet knew what Devereaux intended. Outside the building the Jesuit had to confide in one other: White House Anti-Terrorist Chief Richard Clarke, who had started under George Bush Senior and continued under Clinton.
Clarke was loathed at Langley for his blunt and abrasive criticisms, but Devereaux wanted and needed Clarke for several reasons. The White House man would agree with the sheer ruthlessness of what Devereaux had in mind; he could keep his mouth shut when he wanted; more, he could secure Devereaux the tools he needed when he needed them.
But first, Devereaux was given permission to throw in the trash can all talk of not being allowed to kill the target, or use to that end ‘assets’ who might be utterly loathsome, if that is what it took. These permissions did not come from the Oval Office. From that moment Paul Devereaux was performing his own very private high-wire act, and no one was talking safety nets.
He secured his own office and picked his own team. He headhunted the best he could get and the DCI overruled the howls of protest. Having never been an empire-builder, he wanted a small, tight unit, and every one a specialist. He secured a suite of three offices on the sixth floor of the main building, facing over the birch and osier towards the Potomac, just out
of sight save in winter when the trees were bare.
He needed a good, reliable, right-hand man: solid, trustworthy, loyal; one who would do as asked and not second-guess. He chose Kevin McBride.
Save in that both men were career ‘lifers’ who had joined the company in their mid-twenties and served thirty years, they were like chalk and cheese.
The Jesuit was lean and spare, working out daily in his private gym at home; McBride had thickened with the passing years, fond of his six-pack of beer on a weekend, most of the hair gone from the top and crown.
His annual ‘vetting’ records showed he had a rock-stable marriage to Molly, two youngsters who had just left home and a modest house in a residential development out beyond the Beltway. He had no private fortune and lived frugally off his salary.
Much of his career had been in foreign embassies, but never rising to chief of station. He was no threat, but a first-class Number Two. If you wanted something done, it would be done. You could rely. There would be no pseudo-intellectual philosophizing. McBride’s values were traditional, down-home, American.
On 12 October 2000, twelve months into Project Peregrine, Al Qaeda struck again. This time the perpetrators were two Yemenis and they committed suicide to achieve their goal. It was the first time the concept of suicide bomber had been evoked since 1983 in Beirut against US armed forces. At the Trade Towers, Mogadishu, Dhahran, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, UBL had not demanded the supreme sacrifices. At Aden, he did. He was upping the stakes.
The USS Cole, a Burke-class destroyer, was moored in harbour at the old British coaling station and one-time garrison at the tip of the Saudi peninsula. Yemen was the birthplace of UBL’s father. The US presence must have rankled.