Bliss Broyard: 'One Drop' and What It Means

DATE September 27, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Bliss Broyard, daughter of writer Anatole Broyard and
author of the family memoir "One Drop," on her father's hidden
racial heritage
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

In the literary world, it was somewhere between a rumor and an open secret
that the writer Anatole Broyard was a light-skinned black man passing for
white. Broyard wrote a couple of terrific memoirs. "Kafka Was the Rage" was
about living the bohemian life as a young man in Greenwich Village after World
War II. "Intoxicated by My Illness" was about the end of his life when he was
dying of prostate cancer. Broyard was also a long-time book critic and
columnist for The New York Times. He kept his racial identity a secret from
his two children. When he was dying, they knew he had a secret but they
didn't find out what it was until very close to the end when their mother told
them.

Anatole Broyard's daughter, Bliss Broyard, is my guest. She's just written a
memoir called "One Drop" about learning his secret when she was 24 and how
that secret changed her life. Her book also investigates his father's life
and Creole heritage and reconstructs his family tree. In today's New York
Times Review, Janet Maslin wrote, `This fascinating, insightful book makes
clear that Mr. Broyard left a legacy of racial confusion and great
autobiographical material.'

Let's start with a reading from "One Drop" describing how Bliss Broyard's
mother revealed the secret.

Ms. BLISS BROYARD: (Reading) "`I think I'd better tell you what the secret
is,' my mother said. She was sitting between my brother, Todd, and me. We
caught eyes behind her back, and, explicably, we both began to grin.

`Well,' she took a breath and let it out. `Your father's part black.'

I burst out with a laugh. `That's the secret? Daddy's part black?'

`That's all?' Todd asked.

`That's it,' my mother said, allowing herself a smile. We asked a few
questions. How black was he? After all, he didn't look black. Neither did
his sister Lorraine or his mother, whom we'd seen once or twice when we were
little.

"My mother explained that my father had `mixed' blood and his parents were
both light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, where race mixing had been
common. She said that his parents had to pass for white in order to get work
in 1930s New York, which confused my father about what their family was or was
supposed to be. He was the lightest child out of the three siblings, and the
fact that his two sisters lived as black was one of the reasons that we never
saw them.

"My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his
family had moved when he was six, he'd been ostracized by both white and black
kids alike. The black kids picked on him because he looked white, and the
white kids rejected him because they knew his family was black. He'd come
home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn't ask what
happened. My mother said that he didn't tell us about his racial background
because he wanted to spare his own children from going through what he did.

"`So this means that we're part black, too,' I said, taking in the news. I'd
always bought into the idea of the American melting pot and now I was an
example of it. The idea thrilled me, as though I'd been reading a fascinating
history book and then discovered my own name in the index. I felt like I
mattered in a way that I hadn't before.

"Todd was pleased, too. `What a great pickup line,' he said. `I may look
white but, I'm really Afro-American where it counts. The guys in my office
are always giving me a hard time about being so white-bread.'

"`Todd,' my mother said alarmed. `This isn't something you should be telling
everyone. Anyway, you kids aren't black. You're white.'"

GROSS: And that's Bliss Broyard reading from her new memoir "One Drop."

What a confusing message to give you, you know? Like your father has kept
this secret all these years, that he's really black. But you're really white.
Could it be more confusing?

Ms. BROYARD: No. I think it was equally confusing for my dad because he'd
grown up around people like himself who were Creoles from New Orleans,
light-skinned blacks, and then when his family moved to New York, apparently
his father had sat the kids down in the living room and said that from now on
they had to be white in order for them to work in New York, where it was very
hard to get a job if you were black in the 1930s.

GROSS: You knew that your father had a secret, but you didn't know what it
was until your mother broke the news a couple of months before he died. He
was in the hospital, he knew he was dying, and he didn't want to talk with you
about it. He didn't want to reveal the secret himself. Why not?

Ms. BROYARD: Well, I think he always intended, at some point during his
illness, to tell us, but I think it was very hard for him to figure out what
the right words would be. And I think after keeping a secret from your
children for, you know, all of our life, in a way it was more the fact of
having a secret than the news itself that was going to be hard to explain. So
he said my mom had kind of sprung it on him a couple of months before that,
you know, we're gathered here together, you're going to tell the kids the
news. And he had said that he needed to think about how to present things.
And I remember his phrasing because it was so typical and kind of surprising.
And he said he wanted to order his vulnerabilities so they didn't get
magnified during the discussion.

So I think that he had a lot to fear during this conversation, what we would
think of him, whether it would change the way that we thought of ourselves
and, you know, that we'd be angry that we'd been kept from his family and his
history for so long.

GROSS: Were you angry?

Ms. BROYARD: I was angry. I mean, when I found out the actual news, I had
just witnessed my father suffering terrible pain in the hospital. He'd been
crying out, you know, `Help,' like he was drowning. It was unbearable to
listen to someone that you love suffer like that. So in that moment, I felt
relief that the secret wasn't something more disturbing, like we'd thought
perhaps he'd been the victim of some crime, or there had been incest or
something terrible. And so this seemed pretty light-hearted.

By the time of his memorial service a month later--that's where I met my
father's sister Shirley and my cousin Frank and saw his other sister Lorraine
for the first time in 17 years, it started to dawn on me that this was more
than just kind of an interesting note in his biography, and I did feel angry
because, as much as I wanted to reclaim that family and this history that I
never knew, it was hard to start all of that at age 24.

GROSS: Even though your father kept his racial identity a secret, a lot of
his friends knew about it, even though his children didn't. And for years
there was speculation in the literary community about, was he really black
passing for white? And your father was so well known, not only because of his
books but because for years he was a literary critic for The New York Times,
and so there was a lot of speculation, you know, was he passing because he was
ashamed to be black, was he passing because it would improve his life and the
lives of his family members if he passed? Was he secretly racist? There was
just all this speculation. So looking back now on your father's life, knowing
what you know as a result of all the family history and genealogy that you
did, what ideas do you have about how he felt about his racial identity as a
black man, which he kept hidden?

Ms. BROYARD: My thoughts about why my father, or his feelings about his own
racial identity, I think, were very confusing for him. One of the indications
I have of that is he filled out his Social Security application for a Social
Security number when he was 17. It's the first record and one of the only
records I have of him marking down his own race. And there's a check next to
Negro and then when that's crossed out, and then another check next to White
and then in the space "Other," there's a C, which could have stood for Colored
or Creole. So I think for him it was an ongoing question about his own racial
identity.

I think that, you know, there's a fine line between kind of self-preservation.
I think for him to live the life that he wanted, he didn't feel that he could
do that as a black person, but then also selfishness, that he wanted to make
up the rules, you know, as he went along and not have to live by these
accepted society rules, the one drop rule, which said that he was a black
person. So I think he did it for a lot of reasons, some to kind of protect
himself and some to have the life that he wanted.

GROSS: Your father in the 1940s was a bohemian, and he has a great memoir
about his life in Greenwich Village in the '40s called "Kafka Was the Rage."
And, you know, it's all about, you know, like re-inventing himself, as his
friends did too, and all of the kind of sexual adventures that he had and how
important sex was to his life then. And, you know, even though he didn't
reveal that was, you know, black or Creole in the memoir, he revealed so many
things about himself. And because, you know, like re-invention is so central
to the whole idea of bohemian life then, where is that line, do you think, in
his life between the re-invention that he thought everybody, a
self-reinvention that he thought everybody should have a right to go through
and this kind of denial of who you really are?

Ms. BROYARD: I think that he probably fell more on the side of--he thought
everybody, like you say, had the right to self-invention. I mean, he wrote in
"Kafka Was the Rage" that all of his friends fled to Greenwich Village, where,
you know, nobody had a family. They were all sprung from their own brows, and
people's backgrounds--they were all trying to escape their backgrounds. And
that was very much, you know, the moment in Greenwich Village after World War
II when people were doing that. So I think for him, you know, he really
didn't feel like he had a responsibility again living in the way that sort of
society had dictated to him, that he could live by his own rules.

GROSS: One of his friends, Chandler Broussard, who had also been living the
bohemian life in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, later wrote a novel about
that period, and one of the characters in the novel was based on your father,
Anatole Broyard, and, you know, that character was a black man passing for
white. The publisher sent your father a release form getting his permission
for the character to be based on him and your father was outraged. He refused
to sign the form, so the character had to be changed as a result. And you
said that your father felt betrayed and that by singling out his racial
identity, Chandler Broussard had made him an exception to the prevailing credo
that they were all free to discover themselves without being encumbered by
family or ancestral histories. And that in Chandler Broussard's formulation,
your father wasn't inventing himself like every one else. He was just
pretending to be something that he wasn't.

Ms. BROYARD: Well, exactly. There was a kind of special situation for
blacks that everyone else was invited in Greenwich Village certainly to take
as much of their history and have that be a part of their lives as they wanted
to, you know. I know people who were Jewish from that era, but that wasn't
particularly important about them and it wasn't made to be important about
them by their friends. And in my father's case however, Broussard, in writing
"Who Walk in Darkness," seemed to suggest that no, if you're black you have a
responsibility to be out, and my father greatly resented it and refused to
sign the release. And as a result Broussard had to change it. He changed it
to the main character was illegitimate, which of course didn't carry the same
kind of social stigma in the 1940s as being black did.

GROSS: You write that your father truly believed that there wasn't any
essential difference between blacks and whites and that the only person
responsible for determining who he was supposed to be was himself.

Ms. BROYARD: Yes, that's right. I mean, it was very kind of easy for my
father to feel that way because the world didn't see a black man when they
looked at him. He wasn't reminded of it constantly, you know, in stores or in
restaurants being refused service, which happened to a lot of his friends in
the neighborhood who were darker skinned. So I think it was naive on his part
to think that he could just--a black person could just reject all the kind of
assumptions and stereotypes that white people often thought when seeing a
black person. Broussard's kind of assumption that my father had to be black.

GROSS: My guest is Bliss Broyard. Her new memoir is called "One Drop." We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Bliss Broyard, and her new
memoir, "One Drop," is about her father, the literary critic and memoirist
Anatole Broyard. And she found out when she was 24 that her father was really
black passing for white. And that's at the heart of this memoir.

There were things that your father said that really, that you quote in your
memoir that make the reader wonder, you know, was your father perhaps racist?
I mean, you describe how he was worried when black people started moving onto
your block that they were going to bring down the price of your home. He
sometimes used the word "jigaboo." There were other instances like that that
you saw. Do you think that there was a racist aspect to your father, or a
self-hating aspect to your father?

Ms. BROYARD: Well, I think it was probably a little bit of both. I think
that he felt angry at the existence of blacks. He sort of blamed them for the
existence of racism, rather than white people. And he, for example--the
example that you cite about worrying about our house in Connecticut, you know,
what he had seen happen in Bedford-Stuyvesant is when, during the Depression
when a lot of blacks started moving into the neighborhood, the housing
properties dropped, and so rather than seeing that as a really kind of a
complicated societal problem, he just blamed blacks for bringing down the
neighborhood. So I think it was both racism and self-hatred.

GROSS: When you found out that your father was really a very light-skinned
African-American, it meant that you not only had to revise your sense of your
father's identity and his life, but of your own. And when your mother told
you and your brother your father's secret, she said, `This isn't something you
should be telling everyone anyway. You kids aren't black. You're white.' So
what do you think? Like, how do you define your racial identity when anybody
asks you, whether it's a form or a conversation. How have you come to think
of yourself racially?

Ms. BROYARD: Well, it sort of depends on the circumstance. Usually for a
form, I would say black, white, check all that apply, which we are now able to
do since 2000. So in my case it would be black, white and Native American.
In conversation, I used to really struggle over how to answer the question
because I felt that if I said biracial or black/white that there might be some
expectation that I would seem more black in some way. I felt, in the
beginning, that there was some kind of right answer out there. That I could
put the circumstances of my life--you know, raised as a WASP for 23 years,
learned this information at 24, met this many family members and knew this
much about history and come up with a succinct answer of my own identity, and
it's a lot more complicated. You know, there isn't one right answer. So I
think I'm sort of more interested in--I think that now that I've learned a lot
about my history and I met my family, I feel more comfortable with who I am
and less concerned about how I represent myself. But the short answer would
be, I say, `I have mixed race ancestry.'

GROSS: As you say, it was an open secret among people who knew your father
well outside of his children that he was black, but he was officially outed in
a New Yorker article by Henry Louis Gates a few years ago, and Gates had
actually had several long conversations with you, although you didn't know
that he was writing, or that he would eventually write a piece about your
father when you talked with him about your father. What impact did Henry
Louis Gates' article about your father have on you and your family?

Ms. BROYARD: Well, at first I was really upset about it, as he knows. I
think I really had this idea that because I didn't have control of this
information as a child, I wanted to take control over it by being the one who
outed my father. Now I'm really grateful that I didn't have to take on that
responsibility. I think that, again, I had this idea that I could, you know,
write a 1,000-word essay or I somehow could come up with a statement that
would encapsulate the struggle that he had over his racial identity and
explain it, and I think--it was very hard for me to do that. So I think that
Gates kind of forced me to--gave me something to respond to and got the
information out there. I mean, I had always like told friends ever since I'd
known, but the act of kind of a public outing, I think, required, you know, a
sort of drama that I'm glad I didn't end up getting engaged in.

GROSS: Would you say that he got the story right?

Ms. BROYARD: I think that the Gates article was very perceptive about the
notion of passing in general and kind of questioning, you know, what is an
authentic identity and framing my dad's struggle in a lot of the modernist
themes of re-invention. But I think that I would have liked to see more about
my father's background as a Creole, because I think that that's the thing, for
me, that was the missing piece that explained his separation, for example, in
Bedford-Stuyvesant from the kind of the larger black kids that were there.
And they had always--his family even within the black community had kind of
kept themselves separate. And I would have like to have seen that in the
piece as well.

GROSS: Your memoir opens when your father is dying of prostate cancer that
had metastasized. He wrote a great book about his final illness called
"Intoxicated by My Illness." He writes: "All my friends are wits, but now
that I'm sick, I'm treated to the spectacle of watching them wear different
faces. They come to see me and instead of being ironical and making jokes,
they're terribly serious. They look at me with a kind of grotesque lovingness
in their faces. They touch me, they feel my pulse--almost. They're trying to
give me strength and I'm trying to shove it off. The dying man has to decide
how tactful he wants to be. What a critically ill person needs above all is
to be understood."

Were you self-conscious around him when he was dying? Because he had this
sense of what dying meant and how a dying person should behave and how his
friends and family should behave. I'm not sure how much he actually
communicated that, and I'm also not sure how self-conscious that would make
you that you had to behave according to his code. Do you know what I mean?

Ms. BROYARD: Well, it's--yeah. I think that--the moment that comes to mind
is right before my father had this emergency surgery, and my mother had called
my brother and me and told us to come to the hospital. And she had to go off
with some doctors to sign some forms and she wanted me to stay in the room
with him, and he was in a terrible crisis. He was in a lot of pain. He
looked like he was in shock. And I thought that I was probably never going to
see him again. That's what the doctors had kind of led us to expect after the
surgery, he wouldn't necessarily make it. And so I tried to say goodbye, and
he kind of kept looking at me and I pulled my chair closer and was whispering,
you know, the things that you say to someone if you think they're dying, that
I loved him, that I was proud of him, that he had lived a good life. And he
told me to stop with my bromides, that this was incredibly difficult and that
he needed to concentrate.

And it's funny to me because he wrote a wonderful story about his own father's
death, "What the Cystoscope Said," where, you know, he sat at his father's
bedside and said a lot of those same things, and it's a very beautiful and
moving scene. So I think that my father did welcome those sentiments, but the
articulation of them, perhaps because, you know, they do come out in kind of
cliched language, you know, embarrassed him or troubled him.

GROSS: Well, Bliss Broyard, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. BROYARD: It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Bliss Broyard's new memoir is called "One Drop." I'm Terry Gross, and
this is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, author of "The Siege of
Mecca," on a forgotten battle in 1979 that he claims is the
catalyst for the modern global jihadi movement
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. We're going to hear the story of a
forgotten crisis in the early days of the modern global jihadi movement. On
November 20, 1979, which was the first day of the new century on this Islamic
calendar, Islamic extremists took over the Grand Mosque of Mecca in the hopes
of starting a global war that would lead to Islam's total victory. My guest,
journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, has written a new book about the crisis called
"The Siege of Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the
Birth of al-Qaeda."

He says the story isn't well known for a couple of reasons. The House of Saud
did its best to prevent news of the siege from getting out and the Carter
administration didn't realize the significance of the siege, in part because
it was so focused on the Iranian hostage crisis.

Trofimov has been a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal since
1999, and has reported extensively from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim
countries.

Yaroslav Trofimov, welcome to FRESH AIR. Before we really get into the story,
where do you see the story fitting in the rise of radical Islam?

Mr. YAROSLAV TROFIMOV: I think this was really the beginning of the modern
jihadi radical violent movement that led to al-Qaeda. If you look at the
history of this radical movement, the very first operation that was
transnational--it involved terrorists from several countries., Saudi Arabia,
the United States, Egypt--was really this one, the 1979 takeover of the Grand
Mosque in Mecca. This is really where it all began.

GROSS: Well, let's get to the story. Why did this group of radical Islamists
take over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979? What were their grievances?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, they really believed that, first of all, Saudia Arabia
has strayed from the path of true Islam. They objected to things like the
presence of Western embassies, the presence of Westerners, as such, in the
kingdom, the alliance with the United States. And even trivial things like
the fact that pictures were being used on currency and portraits were hanging
on the walls of offices, even though, in their view of Islam, Islamic
scriptures prohibits any graven images. So going from that, they hoped and
they believed that, by taking over the Grand Mosque, they would start a
worldwide movement to purify Islam and to eventually triumph over the entire
world. The ideology was quite messianic. They believed that one of them was
going to be the mahdi, the new redeemer.

And the date was not accidental. This was the very first dawn of the 14th
century of the Islamic calendar, in which, according to some prophecies, is
the time when the redeemer would come.

GROSS: So did the people who took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca believe that
the end of the world was imminent?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Some of them did. The Saudis definitely believed that. Many
of the Egyptians and other foreign radicals who joined them were more
opportunistic. They didn't necessarily share the messianic beliefs, but they
thought that this would be the spark that would start the worldwide uprising
because of the huge symbolism of the place. This is the holiest place in
Islam. Every Muslim every day five times a day must pray facing towards the
Grand Mosque. Even in death Muslims are buried with their faces towards the
Grand Mosque, and that very morning there were 100,000 pilgrims from the world
over in that mosque.

GROSS: Tell us about the leader of the siege, Juhaiman al Utaibi. Who was
he?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, Juhaiman Utaibi's history is very interesting. His
father was very active in the uprising by the radical Islamist Bedouin tribes
against the House of Saud in the 1920s. There was an uprising against the
government's decision to open up to the West, to establish relations with
Western countries and to bring in such devilish innovations as cars and radio
and telegraphs. So he had this history of family resentment against the
monarchy. He joined the Saudi National Guard. He was a corporal there.

But then he started studying the Islam religion in the university in Medina,
which was one of the new universities established by King Faisal in the 1960s
and 70s, where many of the teachers and the professors were Islamic radicals
from Egypt and Syria and other places, who brought the ideology that had been
developed by the Muslim Brotherhood and by other outfits to Saudi Arabia. So
this blend of the traditional Bedouin zeal and the ideology of the Muslim
Brotherhood was what really fueled him and he became--he was a very
charismatic figure and so instantly he gained following from many, many,
younger students who saw him as sort of a guru.

GROSS: So he was radicalized at the university?

Mr. TROFIMOV: He was opposed to the regime since his childhood, but he
really got into the Islamic theology and became involved with the Islamic
movement at the university in Medina. And the head of the university at the
time was Sheik Bin Baz, who would in future become the supreme religious
authority of Saudi Arabia, grand mufti, and who was very sympathetic initially
to this movement.

GROSS: Now, the people who took over the mosque smuggled their guns in in
coffins. Coffins? Wouldn't coffins look suspicious in the mosque?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Coffins are not suspicious at all because, by Muslim
tradition, if you want to bestow the blessings on your departed relatives and
to assure that they are well off in paradise, you have to bring the body to
the Grand Mosque and have the imam bless it.

GROSS: Oh.

Mr. TROFIMOV: So, always, especially at the end of
the...(unintelligible)...season you could see at the time hundreds of people
bringing their relatives, sometimes all the way from India or from Iraq, to
the holiest shrine that a Muslim can ever visit.

GROSS: Since this is the holiest shrine in Islam, isn't it disrespectful to
bring in guns and use them?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, certainly it's disrespectful and very unusual. It's
really the very first time that guns were used inside the mosque. Under the
Muslim tradition you can't even hurt a bird in this sacred precinct, let alone
discharge a gun, so this was why there was really no defense organized against
such an intrusion. The guards in the mosque were only armed with sticks to
beat up some of these misbehaving pilgrims. They didn't have any guns or
ammunition themselves.

GROSS: So paint a picture for us of how the siege started, how they got in
and what they did once they got into the holy mosque.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, once they'd smuggled in the weapons--and they didn't
just smuggle them in coffins but they also had bribed some guards of the bin
Laden company that was doing construction work in the mosque and had driven
three truckloads of ammunition into the basement. So once they'd done that,
Juhaiman Utaibi and his gunmen marched to the very center of the enclosure
during the morning prayers. He pushed away the imam of the mosque, who had
been his teacher before, and announced that the mosque was being taken over.
His gunmen fired in the air. The plan was very well organized.

So they raced towards the almost-50 gates of this enormous stadium-sized
enclosure and locked these 100,000 pilgrims inside. Then they went up the
minarets--there were seven minarets in the Grand Mosque at the time, and they
were the tallest structure in the city of Mecca--and they established sniper
nests at the very top of these minarets, and from there they could keep the
entire city in the field of fire and very effectively repel future attacks by
the Saudi forces.

GROSS: What about the thousands and thousands of people who come to pray at
the Holy Mosque? What happened to them?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Initially Juhaiman Utaibi and his followers read out their
manifesto explaining what they wanted to do, and the Grand Mosque at the time,
and still today, has a very powerful radio system that would broadcast the
five daily prayers throughout the entire city, so the entire city could hear
what they wanted to do. So once they've done that, he presented his
brother-in-law, who he believed was the messiah, and made everybody in the
mosque pledge alliance to him.

Once that happened, the Saudis, especially the Saudis among the
pilgrims...(unintelligible)...more religious, who had long bushy beards, were
told to stay and help defend the mosque against the infidel plot of the
regime. The foreigners were allowed to escape through a few windows in the
basement, and slowly, slowly, over the next few days they trickled out,
because obviously Juhaiman didn't have water or food to keep such a large
number of hostage inside.

GROSS: My guest is journalist Yaroslav Trofimov. His new book is called "The
Siege of Mecca." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Yaroslav Trofimov.
He's a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He covers Saudi
Arabia and other Muslim countries. His new book is called "The Siege of
Mecca: The Forgotten Uprising in Islam's Holiest Shrine and the Birth of
Al-Qaeda."

After the siege, you know, the king wanted to end the siege as quickly as
possible, which was going to prove very difficult to do. One of the things
the king did was meet with the highest clergy, the...(unintelligible)...and
try to work out a fatwa with them. Why did he need a fatwa from them, and
what kind of compromise did he have to work out?

Mr. TROFIMOV: He needed a fatwa from the senior clergy because many soldiers
refused to fight, again because of this Islamic prohibition on using weapons
in the shrine. They just wouldn't point their guns towards the Grand Mosque
in the very first days of this tragedy. And also, many of them believed what
they had heard. They believed that the messiah had come. This was as
foretold in prophecy, the very first day of the new century. And so they
really needed convincing by the religious authorities that following the
orders was something legitimate, that they, you know, they would not then go
to hell, literally, if they executed the commands of the military.

So once the king realized that he had such a problem, he summoned the top
leaders of the clergy to his palace in Riyadh, and had a very long discussion
there because, first of all, the clerics had to look at the facts and figure
out whether, indeed, the messiah had arrived. Many of them knew Juhaiman
Utaibi and they knew his followers, if only because just a year earlier, many
of them had been arrested on sedition charges, and the top clerics had
personally intervened with the Saudi government asking for their release. So
they knew who they were dealing with.

And a big compromise was struck at the time. The top clerics said, `Yes, we
will let you go and re-capture the mosque, but in exchange you must stop this
slide toward secularism and modernization that was occurring in Saudi Arabia
at the time. Back then, women could be seen narrating the news on television,
and in some places they were even driving, so that grand bargain was struck
and, in exchange for the religious endorsement of the storming of the Grand
Mosque, the Saudi government did roll back many of the religious freedoms the
following years, and also they channeled billions and billions of dollars in
their oil revenues towards the clerical establishment so they could spread
their ideology all over the Muslim world. And the direct result of this is
the emergence of al-Qaeda later, because many of al-Qaeda recruits--in places
like Pakistan, like the Balkans, like Indonesia, or like Bangledesh--did go to
the Saudi-funded academies that sprang up as a direct result of the siege of
Mecca.

GROSS: How did the rules of engagement change once the Saudi king got the
fatwa from the top clerics of Saudi Arabia?

Mr. TROFIMOV: The Saudi government is pretty much reckless as far as human
casualties go, you know. When the commanders were complaining about almost
suicidal missions on which they were being sent, Prince Naif, the interior
minister, would say, you know, `They would become martyrs and go to paradise
and everybody will envy them, so let them die.' So the biggest care that they
took in the first days was not to damage the actual shrine--because the
government knew that if the shrine is damaged, securing clerical approval for
the operation would be much more difficult--but once they had this fatwa in
hand, once it was broadcast, then they started using heavy force. They used
artillery, they used army personnel carriers, they used aviation. And a large
part of the structure was destroyed.-

GROSS: A large part of the mosque?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, the mosque itself is very big. In the center of it
stands the Kaaba, which is really the holy site, the building that supposedly
was built by the biblical Abraham, Ibrahim, many millennia ago. But after
that, around it there is a courtyard, and encircling the courtyard is the
actual mosque. So that mosque was built fairly recently, and most of the
structures that were erected in the 20th century and built by the bin Laden
family.

GROSS: Yeah. Talk about paradoxes there. Like, the bin Laden family builds
the mosque. Part of the mosque is destroyed during the siege, and the siege
kind of, the way you describe it, leads in part to the start of al-Qaeda and
to the radicalization of young bin Laden, of Osama bin Laden.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, Osama bin Laden was very impressed and very deeply
troubled by what he saw happening in Mecca, you know. He was living at the
time in Jeddah, just one hour's driving away, and his brother, who at the time
ran the company, was involved in the effort. He was close to the senior
princes, helping them storm the mosque because he was the only one who had the
blueprints of the basement and of the structure, because his company had built
much of it. And Osama bin Laden in following years repeatedly said that this
was a moment of truth for him. And he empathized more with Juhaiman and
rebels than with the Saudi government, whom he accused of desecrating the
mosque by sending threaded vehicles and using artillery in such a holy site.

GROSS: But why--it's just so confusing to me why he would identify with the
radicals who brought guns into the holy site in the first place. I mean, that
seems like a desecration.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, he viewed them as idealists who only brought guns to
defend themselves and when Juhaiman was explaining the operation to his
co-conspirators, that was what he was saying. `We only need guns if we are
attacked. We are in the right. God is with us.' And many Islamists who were
upset by what had happened there would have preferred for the government just
to wait it out and wait until the water and the food had finished in the
mosque instead of storming it so violently.

GROSS: What kind of help did the Saudis ask the United States for during the
siege of Mecca?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, the Americans were involved on many levels in the
tragedy in Mecca. First of all, a few of the co-conspirators of the members
of Juhaiman's terrorist group were African-American converts to Islam who had
been brainwashed while studying in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the Saudi
Arabian government did not have enough pilots of its own, so it had to use
Americans who were working in the kingdom to fly a combat mission in
helicopters above the mosque.

More formally, the government had asked for some advice from the CIA, which
had long-standing program to train and equip Saudi internal security forces.
But one must remember, this was a time when the CIA's reputation was at a
pretty low level in the world. It was just a few years after the
congressional hearings. And so Prince Turki, who was at the time at the head
of the Saudi intelligence didn't put much stock in what the CIA could do for
him. So instead, he ended up turning to the French intelligence, and
interestingly, at the time, the French, unlike now, were the interventionist
hard-core power that believed in using military force to oust unfriendly
regimes, whereas the Carter administration was seen as sort of in retreat and
abhorring any use of force anywhere in the world. Sort of an interesting
reversal of their roles today.

GROSS: So it was French commandos who helped the Saudis end the siege of
Mecca?

Mr. TROFIMOV: The French role was very important. The French government had
dispatched its elite team, called GIGN, which was probably at the time the
best commando force in Europe, if not in the world. They had trained Delta
Forces later on. And this small unit had brought with them large amount of
poison gas and training materials, and they set up shop not far from Mecca in
the city of...(unintelligible)...and they trained and planned the operation to
flush out the rebels from the basement of the mosque once the surface had been
recaptured.

Because the basement really was the most difficult part. It's a network of
about 1,000 rooms, all different levels with narrow corridors, where tanks or
threaded vehicles could not be used. And so they devised a plan to perforate
the ceiling of the basement and to fire down large amounts of poison gas that
killed or knocked out most of the rebels and allowed the storm troopers to
tromp down and to re-occupy the basement.

GROSS: And then, after the siege was ended, all the radicals who were
captured ended up being beheaded?

Mr. TROFIMOV: All the adult rebels who were captured in the mosque in
December of 1979 were either beheaded in public in several Saudi cities in
January 1980 or were killed in secret in custody the following month. So the
only survivors who know what actually went on during the siege from within are
people who were 15, 16, 14 years at the time. They were given long prison
sentences, but they're still alive today. And part of the book is based on my
interviews with them on their testimonies of what they had witnessed at the
time.

GROSS: Now, in your book, you make it seem like the siege of Mecca was really
a turning point in radical Islam and the start of--you know, like the
prequel--to al-Qaeda.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Exactly.

GROSS: The Carter administration was in power in 1979 during the siege and,
the siege happened at the start of the third week of the Iranian hostage
crisis, which was capturing the attention of the Carter administration and of
a lot of America at the time. Did the Carter administration see the siege of
Mecca as being significant and as having large implications for the future of
the United States?

Mr. TROFIMOV: If one reads American documents from the time, the documents
from the State Department, from the CIA or from within the White House, it
almost looks like a comedy of errors, because initially once the siege
started, the working assumption in Washington was that the Iranians had done
it. And once the news broke and the news broke in Washington for the first
time, this was the message given out by the administration. The Iranians had
occupied the Grand Mosque. The Iranians want to overthrow out Saud. And
obviously the Iranians are very unhappy to hear that, so the next day they
turned around and accused Americans as Zionists, and this led to terrible
violence in the following days and burning of the American embassy in
Pakistan.

But later on, once the siege ended, I looked at the CIA reporting, and their
conclusion was, `Oh, this is a one-off event. This is just a throwback to the
distant past. Radical Islam is not at all a danger in the future.' So,
really, the administration blinked on this one and missed the significance of
it. And one must remember also that this wasn't just happening as the Iranian
hostage crisis was unfolding. This was happening a few weeks, two or three
weeks, before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And once that invasion
happened, all of a sudden all the radical Islamists were seen as a useful
resource that could be thrown against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which is
what happened in following years.

GROSS: My guest is journalist Yaroslav Trofimov. His new book is called "The
Siege of Mecca." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: My guest is journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, a foreign correspondent for
The Wall Street Journal. His new book, "The Siege of Mecca," is about the
crisis in 1979 when Islamic extremists took over the Grand Mosque of Mecca.
Trofimov describes it as the start of the modern global jihadi movement.

Your book is filled with a lot of historically interesting information. Part
of that interesting history had to do with how the Saudis, you know, earlier,
the Saudis, like before this 1979 siege, had welcomed a lot of jihadis and
Islamists to Saudia Arabia because they felt they had something in common.
These Islamists opposed the secular governments of Egypt and other countries.
Saudi Arabia had a religious government, so it was different. Egypt and other
countries earlier in the century had advocated pan-Arabism, this kind of like,
you know, one state kind of a thing based on Arab identity. The Saudis didn't
want that. They wanted a religious state, so they felt this connection to the
Islamic radicals, but that connection ended up backfiring on them.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, absolutely. They were blindsided by what had happened,
because traditionally Saudi Arabia saw itself as the guardian of Islam, and
its prestige and its security was laid on the fact that they could claim `we
are the most Islamist country in the world, therefore we can lead the Muslim
world. It doesn't matter that we are a relatively small country in terms of
population, that our culture doesn't go as deep as the culture in Egypt or in
Syria and other traditional centers of the Arab world.' But by the virtue of
being the most Islamic state in the world at the time, they felt pretty safe.

And suddenly, somebody from within challenges that and says, `Well, you're not
Islamic enough for us we want to go further and you really are infidels.' So
that was a big shock to House of Saud and they tried to cope with this in the
following years by buying off that more radical movement and by channeling its
energies outside of Saudi Arabia through this network of missionary activities
and schools and charities.

GROSS: So they bought off the radicals by funding their schools and other
activities, which, would you say that continued to backfire against the powers
that be in Saudi Arabia?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, it certainly took the attention of the radical movement
away from Saudia Arabia for a decade or two, but it did backfire in recent
years, because that is one of the factors that led to the creation of
al-Qaeda, which has been attacking in Saudia Arabia again in the last few
years, bombing hotels and bombing housing complexes and military
installations. So that is a threat that in a way was bred by the government
itself.

GROSS: So you've told this story of a not-a-very-well-known chapter in the
history of radical Islam. How would you like this story to change the way we
see that history?

Mr. TROFIMOV: Well, first of all, this really shows the power of this
radical ideology and how a fairly small group of people but powered by the
zeal and the beliefs could stave off the entire Saudi army for two weeks in
the most sensitive place in the world. And the other lesson is just how badly
misjudged it was by the West. The West blinked at the time. They didn't
realize what was going on and didn't realize the consequences of what had
happened for another 20-plus years.

GROSS: OK. Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. TROFIMOV: Thank you so much.

GROSS: Yaroslav Trofimov is the author of the new book "The Siege of Mecca."
He's a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

You can download podcasts of our show by going to our Web site,
freshair.npr.org.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.