The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  After a few years working as an interrogator, an even more interesting opportunity with DIA presented itself to me: to become a defense attaché. Despite the fact that attachés are almost always normal commissioned officers rather than warrant officers, a good friend of mine, Ahmed Habib, who had worked for DIA for a long time, recommended me.

  Military attachés work out of US embassies around the world. In addition to being the ambassador’s local military experts, these personnel conduct intense liaison with host-nation military personnel and with the attachés of other nations, who, like them, are stationed in the host country’s capital. Additionally attachés run programs facilitating the transfer of US-manufactured arms and military technology to other countries, while monitoring those sales to ensure compliance with terms, conditions, and humanitarian restrictions. Stateside, military attachés can be found in a number of billets too, helping provide cultural context to planning and strategy discussions at the senior staff level.

  Because of the nuanced, often sensitive nature of this work, the attaché training program usually includes intensive language training at the Defense Language Institute (DLI), a stint in the Advanced Civil Schooling program to pick up a relevant graduate-level degree in international relations, and in-country time polishing language and diplomatic skills. It’s an intense but rewarding training program and an even more rewarding career path.

  Because of my language and cultural aptitude, the Marines did not need to send me to the Defense Language Institute; nor did they need to give me extra schooling or a year of in-country immersion. So I was a bargain for them, ready to go directly to the final stop in the military attaché training program: Joint Military Attaché School at Bolling Air Force Base, across the Anacostia River from the Capitol in DC.

  Colonel Dan Cronin was in charge of the Middle East program for attachés at this time. He called me up after I interviewed and said, “Sam, since you’re doing a real good job, I am going to recommend you for the attaché course. You know we’ve never had warrant officers in this course, so from what I know you’ll be the first.”

  A month later the course started at Bolling. I still had my credentials and entrance badge from my work as an interrogator, so unlike the other officers, at least some of whom were coming into the building for the first time and walking around in a bit of a daze, I strode right into the class where I belonged, wearing my Marine uniform with my warrant officer rank clear on my collar.

  The lead instructor for our course, a lieutenant colonel who had just come back from Israel, where he worked as the Army attaché, said, “Chief, I think you’re in the wrong classroom. The operations coordinator course is in the room next door.” This course is for enlisted personnel who run the attaché office but not for the attachés themselves.

  I said, “Thank you sir, but two things.” Everyone in the class had turned to look at me, on this first day, the lowest rank among them being a major. I needed to be careful but also firm so that I set the tone that I wasn’t going to be pushed around. “First, don’t ever call me ‘chief.’ Second, is this the attaché course?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then I’m in the right place.”

  I sat down and started out that day not only as an attaché in training but also as somewhat more of an equal despite the rank difference. Of course I had to explain to the Army and Air Force officers in the room that in the Marine Corps, warrant officers are called gunners, not chiefs. In the Navy, chiefs are senior enlisted personnel. So I told them to call me gunner or, more formally, warrant officer, but not chief.

  We hit it off after that, especially once they learned that my language skills weren’t a product of the Defense Language Institute but instead reflected a native fluency. The instructor went so far as to recommend that I didn’t need country orientation but could go straight into the field, a situation that worked out extremely well because Morocco had an open position for an attaché at that time, and Morocco, if you don’t know, like Lebanon, is a jewel of a country, green and cultured and easygoing.

  My gig there for the next few years was still a Reserve job. I stacked drills so that instead of flying all that way for one weekend a month, just to be jet-lagged and ineffective while there, I consolidated those weekends into a larger block of time. I also still belonged to a Marine Corps unit too, so I had to do some drills at Marine Corps HQ C4I, right there in DC. Mostly these were administrative requirements to keep me current and approved for overseas duty. Technically I still belonged to C4I and just did my DIA work on loan. In any given year I’d end up spending two to three months in Morocco, much more time than typical reservists spend on their weekends and summer training, but funds were available, and there was certainly plenty of mission to accomplish, especially after the king of Morocco died in 1999 and everyone, from the president on down, came to visit for the funeral and to reaffirm with the new king our existing long-term relationship. (Morocco was the very first country to recognize the fledgling United States, and so our embassy there was the oldest as well.)

  I liked attaché work so much that I considered going back to full-time active duty, but I had my businesses and my job with the state, and—truthfully—this level of involvement suited me just fine. It allowed me to do something productive and interesting as a break from job and family and business stress, a getaway to live in another world and another time.

  While most of my attaché work supported the US Embassy in Morocco, I occasionally also supported the US embassies in Algeria and a few other places like Bahrain and Qatar, countries very different from Morocco. The work in Algeria, for example, was much more locked down, much more confined to just our embassy. And Bahrain and Qatar had much larger Navy missions. In Morocco, on the other hand, things were very free, and we could play fast and loose a bit. One of my main responsibilities, because all the other full-time attachés in the US Embassy at Rabat were either Army or Air Force, was to provide the liaison for US Navy ships calling at Moroccan ports. Some of this involved helping orient the sailors and crews to the country, briefing them on dos and don’ts. But it also entailed facilitating training and events, as was the case with the very first ship I helped host in Morocco, a US Coast Guard cutter coming in to conduct law enforcement training at the port in Casablanca.

  Sometimes I handled ship visits. Sometimes I helped man and staff embassy parties, for which I’d get the call back in Michigan and jump on a plane with my dress uniform, arriving to organize and chat up other attachés from other foreign embassies, do the liaison thing with the security and the gendarmerie in charge of the ports, secure everything, and help with etiquette for receptions onboard ship or on the embassy grounds or in the ambassador’s house. At one such event down at our consulate in Casablanca (the embassy is, of course, in the capital, Rabat), two of our consular officers saw how I was chatting up people from different countries, especially the Arabic countries, speaking fluent Arabic. They asked if I’d been to DLI. I told them I was a native speaker, from Lebanon. They looked at each other knowingly and said, “Uh oh, sounds like a conspiracy.”

  “What do you mean a conspiracy?”

  “You Lebanese are all over the place.”

  I smiled, knowing this was true after watching my parents start businesses in Libya and Dearborn and knowing Lebanese the world over were doing just the same. We’d formed quite a diaspora.

  I started to say something about that, but one of the officers interrupted me.

  “No, no,” she said, “of course your people are taking over the world one restaurant and delicious bowl of tabbouleh at a time.” Then she went on to explain. Little did I know, but the new US ambassador in Morocco, Gabriel Edwards, was himself of Lebanese descent, as was the consul general, Nabil Khouri. Both were in Casablanca and rose to ambassador status and even higher positions in the State Department.

  While most of the time my interactions with staff at the embassies was of this sort—humorous, good-natured, and accepting—all kinds of
folks came through with different viewpoints and backgrounds. A lot of congressional delegations (CODELs) made it a point to visit Marrakech, Agadier, and Fez. So I escorted them, often giving them their first taste of Arab culture in the process.

  Most of these interactions were good, but every once in a while I’d get a more difficult one. In particular I remember hosting two desk analysts from DIA who scheduled their “country-orientation trip” to Morocco at the worst possible time, right when King Hassan’s funeral was going on, with two presidential escort missions (both Bushes and Clinton) and a large number of CODELs sapping the manpower of the attaché office and the embassy as a whole.

  My boss, the chief of attaché operations at the embassy, tried to reschedule the visiting analysts for a later date, but for whatever reason headquarters overrode him.

  “Sam,” he said, “I need you to take one for the team. I want these analysts out of my hair. They wanna come do country orientation. You get them way out in the sticks, okay?”

  So I took them all around, a really fantastic trip up into the mountains, to little villages, waterfalls, and hidden spots and even out to the magnificent village of Ouarzazate, the door to the desert, the Sahara, a place not many Americans got to see back then.

  After ten days of this, we made our way back to Casablanca and were having dinner when one of the two, a woman named Deborah, posed what seemed like a hypothetical question: “What country do you think has the highest standard of living?”

  I said, “Based on my travel and experience, with the Marine Corps having sent me to live and work all over the Far East, Okinawa, the Philippines, Korea, the Near East, and all the European countries, living in Lebanon, Libya, I think the best country and best standard of living is the United States.”

  Leon, the senior analyst, nodded his head in agreement but gave me a strange look. I wasn’t sure why. His eyes flicked toward Deborah.

  On her face I saw a surprising look of scorn. “I beg to differ,” she said.

  “Beg all you want. Which do you think has the best?”

  “Israel.”

  Then she turned around and said, “Even here they have a good standard of living. Even Morocco is better than America.”

  That’s when I lost it. “Excuse me. You think they have a good standard? What are you basing that on, one week of travel? Do you not remember the kid Mohammed who came to shine my shoes in Ouarzazate for one dirham? A single dirham! That’s like a dime. And that was his summer job. He told us if he doesn’t collect enough money to buy his books for school next year, he won’t be able to go. You felt so bad you gave him ten dirhams, a whole dollar! My son Mohammad, sitting back home, playing Atari, has not a worry in the world that the bus will come, pick him up, take him to school, and that his books, pencils, papers, lunch, all the things he needs will be provided for him. My Mohammad doesn’t have a worry in the world. You said the standard is here, Morocco, or Israel. Here they have to travel twenty to thirty kilometers to the nearest hospital. If something happens to my son in Detroit, it’s an ambulance in two to three minutes, a hospital in two miles. What do you have that tops that?”

  “How about all the people sitting out here at this beautiful café?” she answered.

  “Debbie,” I said, “look at these people. There are seven or eight people sitting at a table, and they take turns buying a single drink each night so they can sit here. Just because what you earn in per diem for one day is a month’s salary here. Don’t confuse your well-being with theirs.”

  I finished by reiterating that the United States had the best standard of living and that I loved it. Everything else might look good from afar, but her romanticism, or her lack of experience, prevented her from seeing what America stood for or wouldn’t allow her to see the truth. Despite our differences, Debbie and I became good friends.

  And perhaps that same feeling underpinned the experiences of a lot of the delegations I took around Morocco. They were enchanted by the beauty, even by the rundown corners, the aged and cracked facades from better days, the mystery and the waft of danger. It all perhaps seemed magical to these congressmen and staffers and analysts. But it wasn’t real. Real was that kid, Mohammed, fighting to pull himself up by his bootstraps. Real was being born in a tobacco-farming village and never having the permission, let alone the freedom, to dream of having or of being something more, something better.

  Perhaps a few of the wiser visitors understood this and went back to America more grateful for our society, more accepting that they might have to pay a few dollars in taxes or sacrifice with a bit of service to the country to keep things running, to oil the machine of liberty. But I think most just came to Morocco and were dazzled, unable to see themselves and their position of privilege through the eyes of the kids who watched them from the alleys and would have switched places with any of them in half a heartbeat.

  I could tell stories about Morocco forever.

  And I could have kept working there forever too. I loved it. I loved how it refreshed me and offered the perfect balance between participating in that world and coming home to Zainab and our growing children.

  But things were about to change, less so in Morocco than in America and the rest of the Middle East. A change for the worse, for sure.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED and Ramzi Yousef’s attempt to blow up the North Tower of the World Trade Center with a truck bomb had been the first indication.

  The second happened in Yemen, on October 12, 2000, when the USS Cole pulled into Aden for a port visit just like those I had helped organize time and again in Casablanca and Rabat. Al-Qaeda struck, with two suicide bombers ramming the side of the destroyer with a smaller vessel packed with C4 explosive and blowing a forty-by-sixty-foot hole in the Cole’s side. Seventeen sailors died.

  I happened to be in Lebanon visiting my mother, who had taken to spending part of each year in her home country, at the time when I saw it on the news. I called DIA right away and said, “Hey, if you guys need me, I’m here in Beirut, ready to jump in.”

  Colonel Dan Cronin told me to stand by and be ready.

  I stood by, and I stood by.

  Two weeks later, I headed back to the United States. I could sense Yemen calling. It felt almost fated at that moment. I didn’t feel frustrated. I totally understood when Colonel Cronin explained that the Yemeni government was throwing up roadblocks to any request to bring more people, more investigators or linguists or bomb experts, into the country. I had a little taste of Yemen then, reading about how the country’s ungoverned and ungovernable interior had become an al-Qaeda sanctuary and hotbed. Something in me knew that my path would take me there, but apparently not right then.

  Before I’d get that call, another thing happened, a much bigger milestone in the fight against radical Islam. It took all our attention for the next few years, so that Yemen’s connection to al-Qaeda receded. Even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s connection faded as another name rose: Osama bin Laden.

  In truth, we were witnessing one and the same issue: Ramzi Yousef and the Cole bombers. This was Ramzi Yousef’s threat being played out in real time, just as he wrote in his letter to the New York Times, promising to “continue to execute… missions against the military and civilian targets in and outside of the United States.”

  Yemen and the Cole bombing. Exporting terror and pursuing the masterminds of that terror deep into Yemen’s tribal heartlands.

  All that would happen.

  And so, too, 9/11—that world-changing day, like John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Members of my generation, perhaps especially those of us who are Arab Americans, know exactly where we were, what we were doing, and how we experienced the horror of those two smoking towers collapsing in New York.

  I was in Lansing, Michigan, taking a course in quality control for investigative training so that I could assume a new role as an auditor for the state’s Social Services Department. Perhaps twenty-five to thirty people from all around Michigan had come f
or this training conference. We were staying together in a hotel, and the seminar was being held in the hotel’s conference room. We’d taken a break, just like a hundred other coffee breaks, with a smattering of attendees gathered together in the breakroom, watching the news and chatting, when the first images of the burning tower came in. We didn’t go back to the conference. Everyone just stood together in shock.

  At that time I didn’t analyze it; I could only form the thought What the hell is going on? Even for me, with my training and background, trying to make sense of it proved too much. At the beginning I had a notion that an airline pilot had made a mistake, a simple but horrible mistake, and accidentally crashed into the building. But as we stood there, we watched in real time on the monitor of the breakroom TV as the second plane flew into the second tower. The lights went on for me. I knew I was watching an attack on America. We all did. My colleagues knew who I worked for and what I did in the military, so they looked to me for answers. I just shook my head and said, “This is hell.”

  The phone rang less than an hour later. Wearing the same clothes I had put on that morning for the conference and unable to fly with all planes grounded, I got into my car and drove to DC. The world had changed, and I knew, deep down, that I had a part to play.

  CHAPTER 5

  YEMEN, DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  THE DAYS RIGHTS after 9/11 were filled with frantic activity. America had just been attacked on its own soil for the first time since Pearl Harbor. This shocked all our systems, on an individual and personal level, so that we were all walking or running around somewhat dazed and grief-stricken. Personally we were all wrecked. But the same thing also happened on an institutional level. The blame game hadn’t yet started. Within the walls of Marine Corps Headquarters, the Pentagon, the CIA and FBI, and all the other agencies, we were still reassessing vulnerabilities, trying to figure out if another attack was planned, and if so, where it might come, when, and how. The system had been shocked. It was now starting to recover, but that recovery wasn’t smooth, not by any means.