Free The Scorpion's Gate by Richard A. Clarke Page A

feel like—what did they say in the Star Wars movie?—‘there’s a disturbance in the Force.’ ” MacIntyre waved the fingers on both hands as if conjuring up the Force.
    “Well, Obi-Wan, what are you going to do about it?” the Senator said, rising and going for a refill.
    “For starters I’m flying over to London tonight to see what I can stir up. They always tell us more in person, stuff they are hearing but can’t put into a liaison report to us for whatever reason,” MacIntyre said, waving off more bourbon. “And they just seem to have better analysts than we do. I’m trying to find out what that ingredient is that they have so I can inject it into our new little Intelligence Analysis Center.”
    “Good idea to go to London about now, but why not keep going and drop in on some of our friends in the Gulf ? They always know more than they put in writing, too,” Senator Robinson said, moving behind his desk. “Besides, there’s a guy out there I want you to get to know. Brad Adams, runs the Fifth Fleet out of Bahrain. Did a year with me up here on some sort of officer development program when he was a captain. We stay in touch. He has, well, some of the same concerns we do about the civilian leadership in the Pentagon. I’ll tell him you’re coming.”
    “Okay.” Rusty accepted that his trip to London just became much, much more.
    “But tell me, Rusty, do you believe this Islamyah Shura Council will really give up power to freely elected officials? Hell, these are the guys who killed some of the Saudi royal family in their coup. Some of their supporters were al Qaeda, fought us in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
    “Senator, we have lots of reporting that there is a rift in the Shura Council between the jihadists, who want to export the revolution, and those who want to modernize and democratize Islamyah. It’s always that way with a revolution. After a while there is a struggle among the revolutionaries, just like in the French Revolution, the Russian...”
    Senator Robinson looked at the map of the Middle East on his wall and thought out loud, “Well, you’re right, Rusty, it was a relatively bloodless coup, all in all. There’s no line of royals at a guillotine. Most of the Sauds escaped to the U.S. on their private planes. The whole thing was over in three days because so much of the Saudi military was in on the coup, the revolution. And so far, all they have really done to piss us off is to eject our defense contractors.”
    “Senator, it was us, the United States, that froze their bank accounts here after the coup and then stopped shipping military spare parts for the weapons we had sold the Sauds.” MacIntyre felt he could be frank with his old boss, and so continued on. “By placing a unilateral economic embargo on them, we made it illegal for U.S. companies to buy Saudi oil. It was only then that they nationalized one hundred percent of Aramco and broke the contracts to sell oil to America. We did it to ourselves.
    “Besides, sir, the Saudi government was no barrel of laughs either. They beheaded people, they denied women rights, they funded all sorts of terrorist-related Wahhabi schools and charities before 9/11 and even after. There were literally several thousand royal princelings, and corruption was rampant.”
    “Look, I know all of that, Rusty,” Paul Robinson sighed. “Now the royal Saudis have taken up residence in the finer parts of Los Angeles and Houston. They’re throwing their money around, getting involved in American politics. Or should I say more involved? The Bushies were always in bed with the Sauds.
    “You can’t report this, Rusty,” the Senator said, leaning forward and tapping with his finger like a woodpecker on MacIntyre’s knee, “but I had one of those exiled royal sons of bitches in this room, this very room, two months ago saying he had twenty-five million dollars in an offshore account that he would transfer control of to me if I would back an