“Saudi Arabia is more and more an irrational state—a place that
spawns global terrorism even as it succumbs to an ancient and
deeply seated isolationism, a kingdom led by a royal family that
can’t get out of the way of its own greed. Is this the fulcrum we
want the global economy to balance on?”
In his explosive New York Times bestseller, See No Evil,
former CIA operative Robert Baer exposed how Washington politics
drastically compromised the CIA’s efforts to fight global
terrorism. Now in his powerful new book, Sleeping with the Devil,
Baer turns his attention to Saudi Arabia, revealing how our
government’s cynical relationship with our Middle Eastern ally and
America’ s dependence on Saudi oil make us increasingly vulnerable
to economic disaster and put us at risk for further acts of
terrorism.
For decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been locked in
a “harmony of interests.” America counted on the Saudis for cheap
oil, political stability in the Middle East, and lucrative business
relationships for the United States, while providing a voracious
market for the kingdom’ s vast oil reserves. With money and oil
flowing freely between Washington and Riyadh, the United States has
felt secure in its relationship with the Saudis and the ruling Al
Sa’ud family. But the rot at the core of our “friendship” with the
Saudis was dramatically revealed when it became apparent that
fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers proved to be Saudi
citizens.
In Sleeping with the Devil, Baer documents with chilling
clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars
caused us to turn a blind eye to the Al Sa’ud’s culture of bribery,
its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of
fundamentalist Islamic groups that have been directly linked to
international acts of terror, including those against the United
States. Drawing on his experience as a field operative who was on
the ground in the Middle East for much of his twenty years with the
agency, as well as the large network of sources he has cultivated
in the region and in the U.S. intelligence community, Baer vividly
portrays our decades-old relationship with the increasingly
dysfunctional and corrupt Al Sa’ud family, the fierce anti-Western
sentiment that is sweeping the kingdom, and the desperate link
between the two. In hopes of saving its own neck, the royal family
has been shoveling money as fast as it can to mosque schools that
preach hatred of America and to militant fundamentalist groups—an
end game just waiting to play out.
Baer not only reveals the outrageous excesses of a Saudi royal
family completely out of touch with the people of its kingdom, he
also takes readers on a highly personal search for the deeper roots
of modern terrorism, a journey that returns time again and again to
Saudi Arabia: to the Wahhabis, the powerful Islamic sect that rules
the Saudi street; to the Taliban and al Qaeda, both of which Saudi
Arabia helped to underwrite; and to the Muslim Brotherhood, one of
the most active and effective terrorist groups in existence, which
the Al Sa’ud have sheltered and funded. The money and arms that we
send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own
throat, Baer writes, but America might have only itself to blame.
So long as we continue to encourage the highly volatile Saudi state
to bank our oil under its sand—and so long as we continue to grab
at the Al Sa’ud’s money—we are laying the groundwork for a
potential global economic catastrophe.
From the Hardcover edition.
關於作者：
ROBERT BAER was a case officer in the Directorate of
Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1976 to 1997.
His overseas assignments included stints in locations such as
Northern Iraq, Dushanbe, Rabat, Paris, Beirut, Khartoum, New Delhi,
and elsewhere, handling agents that infiltrated Hizballah, PFLP-GC,
PSF, Libyan intelligence, Fatah-Hawari, and al Qaeda. Fluent in
Arabic, Farsi, French, and German, he divides his time between
Washington, D.C., and France.
From the Hardcover edition.
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