The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti

Author:Mark Mazzetti [Mazzetti, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12: THE SCALPEL’S EDGE

“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”

—President Ali Abdullah Saleh

The meeting was set up for a surrender, a symbolic gesture of peace timed to the holy month of Ramadan. The Saudi minister had even sent his personal jet to pick up the frail young man and deliver him to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city built along the shores of the Red Sea. There, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef was conducting the Ramadan custom of greeting well-wishers at his home, and he gave an order to his coterie of aides that Abdullah al-Asiri be allowed to bypass normal security procedures and not be searched as he entered the palace.

Al-Asiri had contacted Prince bin Nayef, the assistant interior minister and a member of the Saudi ruling family, days earlier, announcing his intention to surrender to the Saudi spy service and provide information about the group he had joined two years earlier, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s terror network that had recently rebranded itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The group considered Prince bin Nayef its bête noire, a man committed to crushing Sunni extremism in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the country’s impoverished neighbor to the south. In 2003, when militants in Yemen launched a twenty-month campaign of violence inside Saudi Arabia—blowing up Saudi government buildings and oil facilities, bombing residential compounds used by foreigners, and beheading Westerners—bin Nayef ordered a bloody crackdown involving arresting and torturing thousands of suspects rounded up inside the country. He posted informants inside mosques he believed had been infiltrated by extremists.

Bin Nayef’s aggression against al Qaeda had made him a friend of the Bush administration, and by the summer of 2009 a new American president and his aides already considered the prince an indispensable ally. He regularly received dignitaries from Washington, including a visit in May 2009 from a veteran diplomat whom President Obama had just charged with trying to manage an acceptable end to the war in Afghanistan. But when Richard Holbrooke met the prince in Riyadh to solicit the kingdom’s help with a war America was losing, the prince warned that the United States might have a far greater worry than the spiraling violence in Afghanistan. “We have a problem called Yemen,” bin Nayef told Holbrooke.

The prince ticked off a list of worries to the American envoy. Yemen’s tribes were more sympathetic to al Qaeda than were Afghans, and Yemen was closer to al Qaeda’s targets in Saudi Arabia than was Afghanistan. Yemen was a failed state, he said, with a weak and corrupt leader in President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose vision for the country had “shrunk to Sana’a”—keeping the capital, and his base, secure. Saleh had always managed to keep Yemen’s tribes in check, he said, but the president was losing control and passing more power over to his son, who didn’t have close ties to the tribes. Cash payments to Saleh’s government were useless, the Saudi said, because the president and those around him move the money out of the country as soon as it arrives.

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