The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon #7)(33)
“Shimon always gave me the money first.”
“I’m not Shimon.”
The Egyptian swallowed the rest of his whisky. Gabriel refilled his glass and told him to start talking.
The beginning, the Egyptian said, was the day in September 1970 when Nasser died and his vice president, Anwar Sadat, came to power in Egypt. Nasser had regarded Egypt’s Islamic radicals, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, as a grave threat to his regime and had used mass arrests, executions, and torture to keep them in their place. Sadat had tried a different approach.
“Sadat had none of Nasser’s charisma and no popular base of support,” al-Zayyat said. “He was also a rather religious man. He was more afraid of the Communists and the Nasserites than the Brothers, and so he made what would turn out to be a fatal reversal of Egypt’s approach to Islamic extremism. He branded the Communists and the Nasserites as enemies of his new regime and let the Brothers out of jail.”
And then he compounded the mistake, al-Zayyat explained. He allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to operate openly and encouraged them to spread their fiery brand of Islam abroad, especially into the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. He also encouraged and funded the creation of groups that were even more radical than the Brotherhood. One was al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group. Another was al-Jihad. In October 1981, al-Jihad turned on the man who had helped bring it into existence, assassinating Sadat as he stood on a military reviewing stand outside Cairo. In the eyes of the Islamists, Sadat’s sins were many, but none so egregious as his peace treaty with Israel. Before opening fire, Sadat’s assassin, Lieutenant Khaled Islambouli, screamed: “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death.”
“The Gama’a and al-Jihad, of course, are with us still,” al-Zayyat said. “Their goal is to destroy the Mubarak regime, replace it with an Islamic republic, and then use Egypt as a base of operations to wage a global jihad against the West and Israel. Both groups are signatories of al-Qaeda’s declaration of war against the Crusaders and the Jews, and both are formally under the umbrella of Osama bin Laden’s command structure. Egyptians make up more than half of al-Qaeda’s core personnel, and they hold five of the nine positions in the ruling Shura Council. And, of course, Osama’s right-hand man is Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Jihad.”
“So Egypt is no different than the Saudis,” Gabriel said. “You thought you could reach accommodation with the Islamic terrorists by giving them money and encouragement and deflecting their rage outward. And now they’re threatening to destroy you.”
“You did the same thing, my friend. Don’t forget that the Office and Shabak gave money and support to Hamas in the early days because you thought the Islamists were a good counterweight to the secular leftists of the PLO.”
“Point taken,” Gabriel said. “But please don’t tell me I’m supposed to pay you fifty thousand dollars to tell me that al-Qaeda is responsible for kidnapping the daughter of the American ambassador to London. I could have saved my money and just turned on CNN instead. They have lots of experts saying the same thing.”
“It’s not just al-Qaeda,” al-Zayyat said. “It’s a joint operation, a merging of assets, if you will.”
“Who’s the other partner?”
The Egyptian walked over to the drinks cabinet and refilled his glass. “There were other groups besides the Gama’a and al-Jihad that formed in the seventies. More than fifty in all. Some were just cells of university students that couldn’t organize a bucket brigade. Others were good. Very good.” He took a drink of the whisky. “Unfortunately, a group that sprang up at the University of Minya was one of the good ones. They called themselves the Sword of Allah.”
The Sword of Allah… Gabriel knew the name, of course. Anyone who worked in the field of Islamic terrorism did. In the late 1970s, after Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem, a group of university students, professors, and civil servants from the Upper Egyptian town of Minya had coalesced around a fiery Islamist cleric named Sheikh Tayyib Abdul-Razzaq. Sheikh Tayyib adopted a simple program for seizing power in Egypt: inflict as much terror and bloodshed on Egyptian society as possible and the regime would collapse under its own weight. In the early 1990s, he nearly succeeded. Flushed with the prospects of success, the sheikh decided to take his campaign global, long before there was such a thing known as al-Qaeda. He sent emissaries to Europe to open branch offices of the Sword among the burgeoning Muslim communities there and dispatched his older brother and closest advisor, Sheikh Abdullah Abdul-Razzaq, to suburban Washington to wage jihad against the most important patron of the Egyptian regime: the government of the United States. In 1998, Sheikh Abdullah was found guilty on charges of conspiring to bomb the State Department, the Capitol, and the headquarters of the FBI and was sentenced to life in prison. He had recently been diagnosed with cancer. Freeing the sheikh before his death was now one of the Sword’s top priorities.
“Al-Qaeda has been itching to hit London again for a long time,” al-Zayyat said. “And, of course, Sheikh Tayyib wants to get his brother back from the Americans. They decided to merge the two priorities into a single terror spectacular. Al-Qaeda handled the bombings, while the Sword and its European networks saw to the hostage-taking side of the operation.”
“What evidence do you have of Sword involvement?”