Sometime in 1993 the Sudanese leader Hassan Al-Turabi sent secret messages to Washington proposing a diabolical deal. Turabi would make sure that radical Islamist groups throughout the world would reshape their policies to suit American interests. In exchange, the US would support Turabi to establish himself not only as the strongman in Khartoum but also as a kind of Islamist supremo on a global scale. In other words he was asking the Americans: Please hire me!
The Clinton administration, however, rejected the offer.
This story first came out in this newspaper almost five years ago. At the time the author of the story, and this newspaper, were savagely attacked by the official media in Khartoum. Now, however, two men directly involved in the aborted deal have confirmed it. One is Timothy Carney, a former US ambassador to Khartoum. The other is Mansur Ijaz, a naturalized American banker and oil company consultant.
In their article, the translation of which appeared in Asharq Alawsat last week, they see the refusal of the Turabi deal as one of the worst intelligence mistakes made by the US in recent years.
At the time that Turabi made the offer to Washington he was riding high in Khartoum. He had just organized the so-called General Congress of Muslim Peoples as a kind of headquarters for the Islamist radicals throughout the world. The congress’s meetings in Khartoum had drawn an impressive number of fundamentalist leaders: Ayatollah Mahdi Karrubi, head of the Society of Combatant Clergy, had come from Tehran along with the leader of the Lebanese branch of the Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar had represented Afghan radicals. Tunisian fundamentalist leader Rached Al-Ghannouchi, his Algerian counterpart Abdallah Jaballah, and Rabeh Kabir of the Algerian Front for Islamic Salvation (FIS) had attended the conferences, along with the Egyptian blind militant Omar Abdul-Rahman (now in jail in New York). Lesser-known radicals had come from other countries including such figures as Yasser Al-Masri and Abu Qatadah, now facing terrorism charges in Britain. Turabi had even arranged for the election of an international council of shuyukh of which Osama Ben Laden, an active figure in the gatherings, had been elected a member.
From the account given by Ijaz and Carney, Turabi’s attitude emerges as utterly cynical. He told Ijaz that he regarded the conferences as occasions “to let off steam” by radical groups. His ambition was to act as a kind of American Trojan horse within the global fundamentalist movement.
To hammer in his message Turabi dispatched two successive intelligence chiefs to Washington for secret talks with the Americans. One, Gen. Elafatih Erwa brought an elaborate plan for kidnapping Osama Ben Laden and taking him to another county, in the same way that the Venezuelan terrorist Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez (alias Carlos the Jackal) had been handed over to the French. Later, another emissary, Gutbi Al-Mahdi, gave Ijaz sensitive intelligence on fundamentalist groups to pass on to Washington. Finally, Khartoum threw in another attractive offer: to let the FBI and the CIA set up offices in Sudan.
In other words, the sheikh-doctor was prepared to stab his friends in the back to win American support.
The Americans, however, were not tempted. Ijaz and Carney claim that Washington’s refusal was prompted by pressure from other countries that saw Sudan as a potential rival to themselves as America’s regional allies. That claim, however, runs counter to what we had found in 1996 when we first investigated the secret maneuvers.
According to our information, the Americans refused Turabi’s offer because they believed he suffered from “a credibility gap.” Sandy Berger, then President Bill Clinton’s National security advisor had told us that Turabi’s scheme of betraying the Islamic fundamentalists in secret was “too clever by half.” In other words, a man who could stab his friends so easily might well end up betraying a partner who was not even a friend. Turabi had told Ijaz that Islamism was mere hot air that needed to be ventilated through conferences. But the Sept. 11 events showed that something more than hot air was involved.
That Islamism was a mere political plaything for Turabi is clear from the various names he has used for his group. In every case other words such as “national” or “ popular” were used to somehow hide or modify the pretended “Islamic” identity of the group. The latest of these names, The Popular National Congress, drops the word Islamic altogether. There were others, however, who took Islamism seriously enough to kill thousands of innocent people and to die in the process.
This strange tale of ambition and treason reminds the world of one unalterable fact: whoever seeks a secret deal with the Americans should know that Americans couldn’t keep a secret! Ayatollah Khomeini learned this in 1986 when the Irangate scandal exposed his secret deals with the US and Israel. Today it is Turabi’ turn to learn that lesson.
