The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  Dissecting the why and how of this first attack was best left to the pundits on the news. For us at Marine Corps HQ, the mission was clear: make sure another attack would be anticipated and prevented. As an organization, even while we mourned individually, we set about to do our part to prevent what many feared would be a follow-up attack in this emerging war of terror.

  To this end I began my call-up in those first days after 9/11 as one of the personnel manning what the Marine Corps calls the “critical desk” at its headquarters’ C4I cell, its command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence node—much like mission control at NASA but with more of a warfighting flavor: maps and graphics, live streams, generals coming and going, lots of coffee, underlings scurrying around preparing reports and briefings, chasing down inane details or responding to the latest crises. I performed this duty for about two weeks, necessary duty, an integral cog in the machine, but—strangely enough—history almost repeated itself at this time, at least for me and for my linguistic and cultural usefulness.

  The officer stationed next to me, manning another of the “critical desk” stations, got tasked to call around throughout the Marine Corps to find Arabic speakers and get them enrolled in Marine units that anticipated having need of such skills. I suppose I had gained some wisdom over the decade or two since first trying to raise my hand as an Arabic speaker for the Marine Corps and didn’t try to do so this time. Still, I was flabbergasted that this man could sit next to me every day, even complaining to me about how hard it was to find Arabic speakers, without thinking at all about my accent, my name, or even the fact that I’d told him I grew up in Lebanon. I shook my head at the fact that this man was striking out in his assignment to find people just like me, when I was right there in front of him. I didn’t push it though. Like I said, maybe I’d gotten wiser over the years.

  I still wanted to serve. And still wanted to put my language skills to use. But this episode really made me shift my focus away from trying to do that with the Marine Corps.

  Fortunately, I knew where my skills were better understood and better appreciated. I picked up the phone, the very phone in my “critical desk” cubicle, and called the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

  I connected right to my desk officer and said, “Hey, I’m here at HQ Marine Corps, and you guys still get first dibs on me. If you want me, pull me in.”

  They didn’t know I’d been called up on emergency orders. But because of the attaché training they’d put me through, they still had an arrangement in place to get me reassigned, if needed, from Marine Corps HQ to their offices.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  TWO DAYS LATER I had orders reassigning me to DIA headquarters, where I worked through the logistics necessary to get sent down range, this time to the defense attaché office in the US Embassy in Cairo. These orders came through not as a generic emergency call-up with generic language but chock full of verbiage stating that I had been selected for presidential recall to active duty for the War on Terror. This meant I was no longer a reservist but a mobilized active-duty Marine.1

  Once I got all the details straightened out for my impending assignment to Cairo, I slipped away for two days to Dearborn and put my personal affairs in order: packed my things, saw everyone, had a nice home-cooked meal—though no farewell party. There just wasn’t enough time for a party, and—perhaps more importantly—the whole nation was still in too much shock, feeling too somber, too much in mourning, especially our Arab community in Dearborn as we began to catch the first whispers of blowback, the anti-Arab and especially anti-Muslim rhetoric that has become such a staple of public debate nowadays. All of us were too stunned and too sad to organize, let alone to feel like celebrating, a party in honor of a military deployment.

  Around October 10, after I had returned from Dearborn, my desk officer again called me up. I had airline tickets for Cairo booked for October 12, so I anticipated this might be just a last-minute briefing or perhaps a review of my travel plans, contingency preparations, and other precautions I needed to rehearse, normal activities in the intelligence world.

  But rather than going down such a routine path, the desk officer said, “You need to come in. Colonel Cronin wants to see you.”

  Colonel Dan Cronin had risen to become the division chief, in charge of all attaché affairs in the Middle East. He was waiting for me in his office when I arrived at the DIA headquarters annex in Clarendon, Virginia, right across the river from DC. The building wasn’t anything special, standard 1980s government construction, though different from government buildings nowadays because none of the security procedures or barricades that went into place after 9/11 had been mandated yet. So it had just basic security, mall cops and badging controls at the elevator entrance. The culture at DIA, especially compared to Marine Corps Headquarters, was much less military and much more like a corporate or federal civilian environment: men in suits, women in heels and smart dresses, notebooks and briefcases and nerdy glasses, all much more in vogue than camouflage or spit and polish, though occasionally a person or two scurried down the hall in uniform. I came in wearing a suit but no tie, clean shaven, and fully caffeinated from the Starbucks down the street. I was ready and braced but not especially nervous.

  Colonel Cronin’s station in this building consisted of a corner office on one of the higher floors, a big desk beneath which an even bigger Kashmiri carpet spread, a piece he’d likely collected during his own days as an attaché in the field. The carpet lent the room a touch of flair that contrasted markedly with the somber grays and blues of the government construction. Maps of every regional hot spot covered the office walls, also adding color but giving the space a stronger feeling of purpose and usefulness than the normal supervisory sterility. Real decisions happened there. I imagined Colonel Cronin lecturing from those maps or holding them up (some of the fancier maps were framed, but some were actually pinned or taped up and had been marked with Post-it notes or covered with arrows and circles in various hasty colors by intemperate hands).

  Behind and under these maps, not exactly forgotten but subsumed, lay souvenirs from every single country in North Africa, the Gulf, and the whole Middle East: ceremonial daggers, camel hobbles and riding crops, plaques from various Middle East schools, a copper tea set, a chess board in mother of pearl, plaques with elaborate thank-yous, expressions of gratitude, graduation certificates from schools and training programs, photos of Cronin shaking the hands of famous people in formal settings. All of these were deposited on the walls and shelves, gathering dust under this fresh new whirlwind of maps.

  Beyond this interior scene, a wire mesh obscured the outsides of wide, regular windows. I knew this mesh was a technical countersurveillance measure rather than a sunscreen or antiblast shielding (like later iterations of these headquarters buildings often have). DIA was, and is, an intelligence command after all. Electronic methods of eavesdropping and old-fashioned telephoto lenses had to be taken into account. No one could sit in an office building across the street and tune in to our conversations or watch Colonel Cronin and his staff scribbling on those maps. The facility had a corporate feel, coupled with serious precautions, given a bit of flair in this one office by the colonel’s own personal memorabilia.

  The last two items of note were two uncomfortable-looking office chairs opposite the room’s big desk. I didn’t sit in either but entered and reported to my boss, military style, despite the fact that neither of us wore our uniforms right then.

  He tried to joke around with me a bit, but I wasn’t in the mood, remembering that the last time he called me into the office he reassigned me from Morocco and sent me on a much more difficult and austere mission to Algeria. Nowadays the hotbeds of conflict seemed to be Afghanistan and Yemen. I didn’t think they’d send me to Afghanistan, as I didn’t possess the language skills, and the war hadn’t quite kicked off there yet. So I took a stab at an explanation.

  “I’m going to Yemen?” I asked.

  “You’re going t
o Yemen.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, my orders are for Egypt. I’m ready to go. I’ve done my prep. I’ve got my plane ticket and I’m leaving in”—I looked at my watch—“thirty hours.”

  “Well, things have changed. Sit down, we really need to discuss this.”

  He took one of the pinned maps from his wall and spread it on the desk in front of me.

  Together we looked at the map: Yemen like a cup or sickle curving around the lowest point of the Arabian Peninsula, a wicked mountain chain leading up its western side and not stopping at the border between Yemen and its northern neighbor, Saudi Arabia, but rolling along the whole length of the peninsula, right to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Then, eastward, a vast expanse of desert, the Rub al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, which had no border at all really, just a line in the sand drawn on a map, a no-man’s-land with nary a road, river, or important feature to it, all sand dunes, sabkha, and scrub connecting the interiors of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Other than the big eastern mountain range and the empty desert, the one remaining geographical feature seemed paltry, a chain of mountains and plateaus, separated by deep valleys, all along the southern edge of the peninsula, spanning Yemen and Oman both. This range received just enough rain during the khareef monsoon season to allow a smattering of villages and farms to shelter there. It was the backcountry, the forgotten part of Yemen, and really the place where groups like al-Qaeda held the most sway.

  Colonel Cronin pointed all this out to me. I knew much of it already, though in truth my experience—and my interests, personally and professionally—didn’t really include any of Arabia, except for the constant prayerful focus on Mecca and Medina. Given my background in the region, the culture, and the language, I started way ahead of most other Americans, most other Marines, and even most other attachés, but Arabia just hadn’t been my jam. North Africa, sure. The Levant, of course. I knew Dearborn better than I knew Yemen. I knew DC better than I knew Yemen.

  But sitting there, a warrant officer being lectured by a full colonel, I knew I didn’t have a fighting chance. My cushy assignment in Cairo had been blown away. I couldn’t not go to the place where DIA most desperately needed people. I couldn’t not go to this strange and isolated land where the bin Laden family had its ancestral home before emigrating to Saudi Arabia and making their millions. I couldn’t not go to the hotbed.

  “Look, Sam,” Colonel Cronin said, “you know as well as I do that we tried to get you into Yemen for the Cole bombing. Now we have 9/11, and al-Qaeda is there, and we need someone on the ground to assist both with what’s going on with al-Qaeda and to help tie up the Cole’s loose ends. You’re the best person for this. You’re mine. And you’re going.”

  He said this last bit with extra emphasis. I knew the scene might get ugly, but I wasn’t going down without a fight, wasn’t going to take this hellish assignment without wringing some sort of concession from him. So, I took a chance and said, “Alright sir, you want me to turn in my orders for Cairo and go work in godforsaken Yemen for six months, fine. But let’s make a deal.”

  He said, “Alright, what do you want Sam?”

  “Give me temporary duty orders for two months, and if I like it, I’ll stay there the full six.”

  He must have been desperate. Without even pausing, he said, “Deal.”

  No handshake. Nothing formal. Just his word. I trusted it.

  But he had one last zinger left for me. As I stood and prepared to leave his office, he said, “By the way, you leave in five days. Go home. Wrap up your affairs and be back on the fourteenth. You fly on the fifteenth. Here are your tickets.”

  He picked up an envelope on his desk. Everything done already: orders, plane tickets, diplomatic passport, the whole thing. He’d had his staff working overtime, and all of this negotiating with me was just for show. The decision had been made, and he’d merely been playing nice guy to smooth my feathers. This made me laugh. I respected this kind of strength: self-assured but also concerned enough with the person, with me, to put in place these little precautions and niceties.

  As I was walking out the door, he had some last words of encouragement. “Sam?” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “I know you’re going to do a very good job over there, and I bet you lunch that you’re going to love it.”

  Truth be told, that son of a bitch collected his lunch in Yemen the following year when he came out to do his annual visit. I was still there, still working away, seriously overstaying not just the two-month promise I’d made but also the six-month tour they’d wanted me to do, leaving Yemen three years later. Yemen hooked me. Without a doubt I owed Colonel Cronin lunch—I was there, in the thick of it, loving every minute.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  BEFORE LEAVING DC I had the opportunity to sit down with one of our previous defense attachés from Yemen. He gave me a good, thorough briefing and ended with an admonishment: “Whatever you do, don’t fly Yemenia.”

  I whipped out my ticket and saw the word “Lufthansa” written across the top. I showed it to my colleague, and he said, “Yeah, that’s good. But remember, never do Yemenia. And also remember that Yemenia is the better of Yemen’s two airlines. Never, ever, under any circumstances, fly their smaller airline, which mostly just goes between domestic locations and Djibouti. That one is called Sa’ida or Happy Airlines, and it’s literally chickens in the overhead compartments and qat chewing in the aisles.”

  I didn’t yet know much about qat, the mild narcotic leaf that almost all Yemenis chew in big wads in their cheeks, though I was to learn. But the upfront warning about these airlines certainly rang true and was driven home later that week.

  On October 15, I arrived at the airport in DC with a one-way ticket to Yemen (remember: right after 9/11!). I didn’t think anything of it, but that was a mistake. What could go wrong with a Lebanese man trying to get to Yemen right then?

  The woman at the check-in counter looked at me, then at my ticket, and said, “Hold on a second, sir.”

  She picked up the phone, called a number, turned around, and smiled at me while acting like she was continuing to process my ticket. In my mind I knew exactly what she was doing, since I’d been involved in similar screening processes at the border in Michigan and elsewhere over the last several years. I swallowed my pride and braced for what would happen next.

  About thirty seconds later two FBI agents showed up at the counter.

  “Excuse me, sir,” they said. “Can you step aside and come this way with us?”

  Then, once we’d moved to a private room out of view of the main passenger area, they said, “Can we see your ID?”

  Something perverse and pugnacious in me wanted to extend this moment, to toy with these earnest agents a bit, nothing too aggressive, just playing the system: I gave them my Michigan driver’s license rather than my military ID or my diplomatic passport. I wanted them to have to do a little digging. I wanted to see what their process was like. After all, I was going to Yemen, leaving lovely America, and so I wasn’t exactly in a rush to board the plane! There’s a quality admired in the Middle East and actually all throughout the Mediterranean world that’s a little different from normal American straight-shooting behavior. Perhaps Odysseus best exemplifies it: clever and bold navigation of a difficult situation through a combination of mental gamesmanship and physical audacity. I think this incident—in which I behaved in a semielusive, semicombative manner when I easily could have explained myself—is an early example of a trait that served me well later, in Yemen and elsewhere, as I used it to get things done and gain respect in non-Western cultures.

  At that particular moment, though, I’d gotten myself into what looked like a pickle. Still, I was calm, knowing I held an ace in the hole.

  The agents started firing questions fast and furious. They thought they’d caught a big one.

  “Where are you heading?”

  “Yemen, the capital, Sana’a,” I said.

/>   They made furious notes.

  They asked a number of other questions. I provided truthful but perhaps veiled answers, never mentioning the embassy or my role there. I didn’t want to give away my little game yet.

  Finally, one of them asked the thousand-dollar question: “What is your purpose traveling there?”

  I wasn’t going to lie outright, so I had to come clean. Handing them my diplomatic passport, military ID, and military orders, I said, “You know what I am now, right?”

  “Yes,” they said, visibly deflated. They didn’t laugh—they had very little sense of humor—though I was chuckling inside.

  They took me back to the luggage counter and told the woman there that she was clear to process me for boarding. Poor lady, she probably wasn’t told anything more and just had to send me through. She likely never knew what was going on and likely got home that night to her family with a strange story about busting someone headed for Yemen on a one-way ticket, only to have the feds send him through without even a decent roughing up.

  My flight on Lufthansa took me to Frankfurt for a layover, and there, much to my chagrin, I had timed things badly. Lufthansa and its risk management and security people decided it would be best to cancel all future flights to Yemen. The second half of my ticket instantly became worthless. I had to find a new way to get to the country. The only carrier available? Yep, Yemenia.

  No chickens in the overhead compartment, but a six-hour delay on the runway. A stop in Rome for additional passengers. Another delay, three or four hours there. A lot of praying by the passengers on the plane, probably by the flight crew too. And then we landed in Sana’a at last, coming in low and fast over the terraced green mountains just in case anyone decided to test a surface-to-air missile or an old Soviet-era ZPU antiaircraft gun. All was peaceful and fairly smooth, though somehow in the eastern distance the whole world seemed to dissolve away, the terraced green slopes giving way to jagged, burnt-looking hillsides and then to the haze of sandstorms and sinuous dunes where the Rub al-Khali desert bumped up against Yemen’s backbone of mountains.