While living rough, running, fighting through the Afghan mountains, he had observed the arrival of hundreds of young, idealistic, anti-Soviet volunteers from the Middle East, speaking neither Pashto nor Dan, yet prepared to fight and die far from home if need be.
Devereaux knew what he was doing there; he was fighting a superpower that threatened his own. But what were the young Saudis, Egyptians, and Yemenis doing there? Washington ignored them, and Devereaux's reports.
But they fascinated him. Listening for hours to their conversations in Arabic, pretending he had no more than a dozen words of a language he spoke fluently, the CIA man came to appreciate that they were fighting, not communism, but atheism.
More, they also entertained an equally passionate hatred and contempt for Christianity, the West, and most specifically the United States. Among them was a febrile, temperamental, spoiled, offspring of a hugely rich Saudi family, who distributed millions running training camps in the safety of Pakistan; funding refugee hostels; buying and distributing food, blankets, and medicines to the other Mujehadin. His name was Usama.
He wanted to be taken as a great warrior, like Ahmad Shah Massoud, but in fact he was only in one scrap, in late spring 1987, and that was it. Milt Bearden called him a spoiled brat, but Devereaux watched him carefully. Behind the younger man's endless references to Allah, there was a seething hatred that would one day find a target other than the Russians.
Paul Devereaux returned home to Langley and a cascade of laurels. He had chosen not to marry, preferring scholarship and his job to the distractions of wife and children. His deceased father had left him wealthy; his elegant town house in Old Town Alexandria boasted a much-admired collection of Islamic art and Persian carpets.
He tried to warn against the foolishness of abandoning Afghanistan to its civil war after the defeat of Gromov, but the euphoria as the Berlin Wall came down led to a conviction that with the USSR collapsing into chaos, the Soviet satellites breaking westward for freedom and world communism dead in the water, the last and final threats to the world's only remaining superpower were evaporating as mist before the rising sun.
Devereaux was hardly home and settled in when, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. At Aspen, President Bush and Margaret Thatcher, victors of the Cold War, agreed they could not tolerate such impudence. Within forty-eight hours, the first F15 Eagles were airborne for Thumrait in Oman, and Paul Devereaux was heading for the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The pace was furious and the schedule gruelling, or he might have noticed something. A young Saudi, also back from Afghanistan, claiming to be the leader of a group of guerrilla fighters and an organisation called simply "The Base," offered his services to King Fahd in the defence of Saudi Arabia from the belligerent neighbour to the north.
The Saudi monarch probably also did not notice the military mosquito or his offer; instead, he permitted the arrival in his country of half a million foreign soldiers and airmen from a coalition of fifty nations to roll the Iraqi army out of Kuwait and protect the Saudi oil fields. *Ninety percent of those soldiers and airmen were infidels*, meaning Christians, and their combat boots marched upon the same soil as contained the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina. Almost 400,000 were Americans.
For the zealot, this was an insult to Allah and His prophet Muhammad that simply could not be tolerated. He declared his own private war, first against the ruling house that could do such a thing. More important, the seething rage that Devereaux had noticed in the mountains of the Hindu Kush had finally found its target. UBL declared war on America and began to plan.
If Paul Devereaux had been transferred to Counterterrorism the moment the Gulf War was over and won, the course of history might have been changed. But CT was a too-low priority in 1992; and both the CIA and the FBI entered the worst decade of their twin existences. In the CIA's case, that meant the shattering news that Aldrich Ames had been betraying his country for over eight years. Later it would be learned that the FBI's Robert Hanssen was still doing it. At what ought to have been the hour of victory after four decades of struggle against the USSR, both agencies suffered crises of leadership, morale, and incompetence.
The lingering scandals of Irangate and the illicit aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, caused the new masters a crisis of nerves. Good men left in droves; bureaucrats and bean counters were elevated to chiefs of departments. Men with decades of front-line experience were disregarded.
At eclectic dinner parties, Paul Devereaux smiled politely as congressmen and senators preened themselves to announce that at least the Arab world loved the United States. They meant the ten princes they had just visited. The Jesuit had moved for years like a shadow through the Muslim streets. Inside him a small voice whispered, "No, they hate our guts."
On February 26, 1993, four Arab terrorists drove a rented van into the second level of the basement garage below the World Trade Centre. It contained between twelve and fifteen hundred pounds of a homemade, fertilizerbased explosive called urea nitrate. Fortunately for New York, it is far from the most powerful explosive known.
For all that, it made a big bang. What no one knew for certain, and no more than a dozen even suspected, was that the blast constituted the salvo at Fort Sumter in a new war.
Devereaux was by then the deputy chief for the entire Middle East Division, based at Langley but travelling constantly. It was partly what he saw in his travels and partly what came to him in the torrent of reports from the CIA stations throughout the world of Islam that caused his attention to wander away from the chancelleries and palaces of the Arab world, which were his proper concern, into another direction.
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 *madrassahs* 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 that the man had been expelled from Saudi Arabia for his impertinence in denouncing the monarch for permitting infidels onto the sacred sand.
He learned that UBL was based in the Sudan, another pure Islamist state where fundamentalist fanaticism was in power. Khartoum offered to hand the Saudi zealot over to the United States, 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.
Devereaux noted that the Saudi arrived with huge largesse, endowing the Taliban with millions of dollars in personal gifts, and rapidly became a major figure in the land. He arrived with almost fifty personal bodyguards and found several hundred of his foreign (non-Afghan) Mujehadin still in place. Word spread in the bazaars of the Pakistani border towns of Quetta and Peshawar that the returnee had begun two frantic programs: 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 U.S. Army 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 Kobar towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen U.S. servicemen and injuring many others.