by Sam Farran
Sana’a itself lies cupped in a bowl-shaped valley amid some of these mountains, a bowl tilted toward the north, which is the direction our plane came in from. As we approached the more populated “suburbs” around Sana’a, houses began to loom up amid the fields, connected by twisted mountain roads and pasture spread out on the plateau tops. Most of the houses were white and square or brown and squat, compounds with gardens and generators and single light poles. Then things got more and more urban, more closely packed, with better roads connecting the denser villages and intersections, a profusion of power lines, bigger buildings, all patterned on what seemed to be a single square, white, blocky architectural plan. I saw a wastewater plant, then the airport: civilian planes parked on the sides of the runway as we touched down, also military planes, a few rows of dusty MiGs and a couple very old American F-5 jets, a pod of helicopters, everything haphazardly placed, though the military equipment was generally pulled out, parade style, in front of deep bunkers, as if the whole country had learned from Saddam Hussein’s experience of having his air force destroyed on his runways a decade earlier.
It was about sunset when my Yemenia flight finally touched down. Sana’a airport has no direct boarding or deboarding from planes into the airport; instead travelers descend a set of mobile stairs on the tarmac, then hop on to the several buses lined up, waiting to ferry them to the terminal. This was my first step into, and taste of, Yemen. And when I say “taste,” I literally mean taste: the wind was blowing at just such an angle that it brought the stench of that nearby wastewater plant full upon us. I covered my face. I wasn’t too squeamish and knew such plants were necessities, but still the odor overpowered the better scents of Yemen, the scents I would learn to love and identify as part of my new home: the wafting up of sand and heat from the Rub al-Khali, the cooking smells of salta and bint as-sahin, the wetter greenery watered by small pipes or fountain channels. All of this was there in that moment, though smothered by that thick, sickly sweet wastewater breeze.
Passage through the airport occurred without incident or delay: customs, passport, baggage pickup. The airport had been built in the 1960s and boasted the best of stucco, tile, and arched white plaster and alabaster; a poor attempt had been made to replicate in mid-modern fashion some of the qamaria windows so famous in Sana’a’s Old City. A qamaria is a half-moon shape, beautiful when done right. The cheaper airport version just made things look dingy, tacky, and a bit dark.
Two members of the defense attaché office, Sergeant First Class Jeff Healy and Major Mark Conroe, met me at the baggage claim. They brought a security detail of local Yemenis whose members lounged outside at the back of the diplomatic vehicles in the parking lot. None of them were kitted up. They probably had weapons in the car but weren’t wearing flak vests or ammo holders; however, they were packing concealed handguns. These were early days. Sure, 9/11 had us on edge, but Yemen was still a functioning country at that time, with police and military forces keeping things in order (albeit third-world style) and a government well accustomed to the idiosyncrasies and balancing acts of long-time president Ali Abdullah Saleh. We all wore civilian clothes: polo shirts, khakis. That would be our everyday attire, except when big meetings or events induced us to wear a suit and tie or, even less fun, our military regalia.
To start, I was housed in a spare bedroom in Lieutenant Colonel Paul Newman’s house. He was the defense attaché, the head of the office over Sergeant First Class Healy, Major Conroe, and a few others of us, and so his place was biggest, a cavernous, tiled mansion behind fifteen-foot-high fences situated in the heart of Sana’a’s ritzy Hadda neighborhood. No one thought I was going to be there too long, given my two-month orders, so it seemed easier and more expedient to put me in a temporary place, where no one had to do extra paperwork, take extra security precautions, do a site survey, contract for a new place, or take any other extraordinary measures.
After my first temporary duty assignment and my decision to sign up for another few months, they moved me out of the temporary bedroom in Lieutenant Colonel Newman’s place to a room in the Sheraton Hotel, much nearer to our embassy but still a temporary solution.
Of course, the Sheraton later became something of a ground zero, when Yemen really heated up after the Arab Spring. The embassy leased the whole hotel and fortified it, moving all its permanent personnel out of the nice houses in Hadda and into the hotel compound. But that was much later, so the atmosphere at this time was no different from that of a hundred other hotels in the Middle East—I was on my own, with a few other short-term embassy employees, a sprinkling of semipermanent expatriates, and a ton of normal businessmen and tourists coming and going. The hotel had a bar on the roof with karaoke and a dance band, a big pool, tennis courts, waiters, a shisha smoking lounge, a couple of restaurants, and a weight room. Not too terrible a place to be. Best of all, it was right next to the embassy, which cut my commute through Sana’a’s horrendous traffic down to almost nothing each day. Furthermore it was located high up on the flanks of one of the mountains, looking down over the bowl of the valley and the bulk of the city, right across the minarets and frosted mudbrick skyscrapers of the Old City toward distant Hadda tucked behind the rising shell of President Saleh’s new mosque.
We worked. We worked hard, and we played hard. These were wild times in Yemen because of the combination of freedom and danger. I got to go all over the country. And the party scene was absolutely crazy down there in Hadda and across the rest of the city.
Right away, on the second or third night after my arrival, Mark Conroe took me to meet one of his best contacts in Sana’a, Abdulghani Jamil. At that time Abdulghani was still the assistant to the chief of customs or some such thing. Over the next year or two, he became the head of Yemen’s countersmuggling unit and then the mayor of Sana’a. Already at that time he drove a big white Land Cruiser and sported fancy suits and sunglasses. I remember—not too long after this first meeting, when he’d climbed the totem pole from assistant to countersmuggling chief to mayor—how he would openly boast of being the youngest mayor in the world at only thirty-five. All this he owed not only to his affable and gregarious personality but, more importantly, to his status as the scion of one of the major tribes on the northeastern approaches to Sana’a, critical terrain opposite President Saleh’s own power base south and east of the city in and around the village of Sanhan. President Saleh needed Abdulghani’s tribe to shore up power in that region, and so Abdulghani found the way before him paved in gold, all doors open, all wishes fulfilled. He knew it. And he knew how to use it to his best advantage.
That first night Abdulghani Jamil and Mark and I chewed qat together, Mark stripping a few fresh leaves from a branch and chewing them lightly, almost suspiciously, while young Abdulghani filled his cheek to the point that the skin became almost translucent as it stretched around the baseball-sized mass he’d created. I took something between the two, my first go at it—I wanted to try the stuff, to get the full effect, perhaps to impress my Yemeni host. He and I were chattering away in Arabic, becoming fast friends, while Mark—with his more rudimentary Arabic, learned at the Defense Language Institute—hung with us.
Mark leaned over at one point, motioned to the qat, and said, “Hey, take it easy on that.”
I was feeling a bit light-headed, a bit carefree, but nothing terrible. In fact, I felt quite good. I shrugged and gave him a green-gummed grin.
“I’m Arab,” I said. “I can handle it.”
“But remember,” said Mark, “this kid”—for in truth Abdulghani was perhaps twenty years old—“is going to be someone someday.”
Mark was right about that, but not right about making me slow down with the qat. I handled it just fine and soon realized it isn’t addictive; instead it’s a great mood enhancer, an enabler for the four-, and five-, and even six-hour world-problem-solving conversations that would become our bread and butter in forming deep relationships with trusted individuals in Yemen.
Mark wasn’
t right about the qat, but he was right about Abdulghani—not just in those first stages of his career progression but even now, as our dear friend has risen in these last frantic years of Yemen’s civil war to serve as minister of state. Abdulghani has proven adept at navigating the different demands of tribe, nation, family, and foreign relationships, even though (and even in Yemen’s darkest days) he sometimes still reverts to being a bit of a big kid. He was just the sort of person with whom we, in the defense attaché office, needed to build a strong relationship.
I was thrown right into the fire with Abdulghani. But the rest of the office was as slammed as you can imagine during these critical post-9/11 days. We had one Naval Criminal Investigative Service officer on loan with us, one Force Protection Detachment officer (to mind our security), a couple other attachés, our boss Lieutenant Colonel Newman, and myself. Not a large crew.
I found myself traveling far and wide all over Yemen, going right away to the Red Sea port of Hudaydah, humid and malarial compared to Sana’a, even in mid-October. There I did the advance work—site security setup, local liaison, and various other organizational tasks—for a visit from the US deputy secretary of state to President Saleh, who happened to be conducting his government business in Hudaydah at that time rather than in Sana’a. Likewise, I found myself in the far south, in Aden, site of the Cole bombing, helping there about every week or every other week. Aden had once been the second-busiest port in the world by volume, as British steamships stopped there in transit to India to resupply with coal and water. The city retained a mixed British and Arab feel, with significant Indian and African influences too; it was a real cultural melting pot and a fun place to be right on the water. I went to the Hadramawt Valley, way out in the hinterlands, where the bin Laden family had its roots. I went to the port of Mukulla in the far east of the country, where the commerce from the Hadramawt Valley flows over a last escarpment and out to the sea, a strange place because it has no real value of its own other than being the connector between the Hadramawt and the rest of the world. And, perhaps strangest of all, I went to the ecologically pristine and totally weird island of Socotra, which looked more like Ireland than the Middle East, with its green, chalky cliffs, plants like the dragon’s blood tree that can be found nowhere else in the world, and a population subsisting off the land.
I even went to Saadah a couple times, in the northern mountains near the border with Saudi Arabia. Saadah is the base of power for the Houthi, at that time only a moderately influential tribe from among many other Zaydi Shi’a tribes that held sway throughout most of northern and central Yemen. The Houthis would rise in power over the coming years as they clung to their mountain fastnesses and battled back against Saleh’s government over the course of a decade of civil war.
I went there, right to their center of power, not once but a couple times during these first years in Yemen—and the place didn’t really seem bad, threatening, or out of the ordinary to me. I’m Shi’a after all. In some ways the Houthis, and the Zaydis more generally, were closer culturally to my Lebanese roots than Americans or even than the Sunnis among whom I’d lived and worked in other places such as Dearborn, Morocco, Algeria, and Libya.
Upon completion of each set of temporary orders, DIA would talk to me about taking other assignments, but each time they just ended up sending me right back to continue the work I was doing in Yemen. At long last, after the first year or so, I got assigned a house of my own in Hadda.
In part DIA kept sending me back because I’d taken on a significant role training Yemeni military units. Usually this role was handled by another group that exists in most of our embassies, variously called the Office of Military Cooperation (OMC) or the Office of Defense Cooperation. This office would be stocked with similar personnel as the attaché office, but instead of liaison and relationship work, the OMC focused on training and supplying—via military sales programs—our allies with excess or outdated US equipment, a process that augments these partner forces, strengthens the relationships and interreliances between the countries, and provides ongoing economic benefit to US-based manufacturers. Basically, the joke runs, the OMC represents our team of legal arms dealers.
The OMC in Sana’a had been shut down after the First Gulf War, when Yemen sided with Saddam Hussein. We could no longer pretend that sales of arms and provision of training to the Yemenis would be a good strategic move when they were the one country in the Arab world siding against us and our allies.
President Saleh stood by that position for a very short time. He realized soon who would win that war and the extent of the equipment he was foregoing and the training value that came with it. The shuttering of our OMC was a bad thing for him. When 9/11 happened, ten years later, the training had been restarted but the OMC not yet officially reconstituted; our attaché office ran the training. I became the guy tabbed to honcho that program, with a first big success during my time represented in the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the Yemeni Ministry of Defense, our military, and our embassy to authorize this official training relationship.
That’s a bit of inside boringness, really, the military talk, the discussion of those memorandums and training programs. But it gives a flavor of the work being performed. It accounts for why I kept going back, kept getting reassigned. And it also helps explain why I eventually got that house in Hadda rather than ghosting through the halls of the Sheraton as a card-carrying member of the hotel expatriate crowd.
I loved the work in Yemen. But I also loved the people and formed a number of really close, critical relationships that have continued to give back to me, both personally and professionally.
One relationship formed during this time serves as a good example: I befriended the family of a young man who did some work on my car, not only repairing it when the need arose but also washing it regularly—just showing up with a bucket, rags, and soap, ready to do whatever needed to be done. We struck up a friendship in addition to this side-hustle business arrangement, and he invited me to dinner at his family’s house, the type of formal bonding that one doesn’t say no to in this culture.
Their house, as I imagined, proved no bigger than a midsized hotel room, divided up into a bedroom, kitchen, majlis sitting area, and bathroom, shared between three daughters, three sons, and the mother and father of the family. Of the children, the youngest, a girl named Yasmine, had a real spark intellectually—a passion for life and a curiosity that I found incredibly hopeful and also sad, given her family’s financial situation. I knew she wouldn’t have the opportunity to get much schooling, to realize any of the potential I saw, which, quite frankly, her family saw too. They’d already banded together—the work her brother did washing and repairing my car was one example—to scrounge whatever money they could to send her to a good elementary school.
I ended up chipping in, making sure she had books, materials, that sort of thing. And by the time I left Yemen a few years later, I’d formalized the situation even further, paying regular visits to the family and becoming something of her sponsor and adopted godfather. Throughout the coming years, even after I left DIA and undertook other work, I stayed in touch with the family and continued to support Yasmine, paying for vocational school after she completed high school at only fifteen years of age.
▪ ▪ ▪
ONE MORE IMPORTANT PART of the mission in those days: parties.
Embassy parties. Private parties. Planned parties around holidays and commemorations. Impromptu parties.
Lunch meetings that spun into afternoon qat chews and then diverged into trips to someone else’s house, a meeting with a dignitary or well-connected person we just had to get to know, a session smoking shisha in a parlor, drinking coffee at 2 a.m. outside the zoo or the parade grounds or at a swanky café in Hadda beneath the shadow of Saleh’s huge and ever-growing new mosque.
We were making the critical connections that would facilitate the work we’d been sent to do: government connections, business connections, con
nections with influential private citizens and NGOs doing humanitarian work in remote places or right there in the tougher-to-reach corners of Sana’a’s Old City.
Sometime during that first year of our operations, Sergeant First Class Healy got a follow-on assignment and left our office. He was replaced by a new operations coordinator, Sergeant First Class Henry Grant, who loved throwing parties. His place in Hadda became the new hot spot in town. All the diplomats and attachés from other embassies joined us nightly, or at least several times a week, with the regulars being our counterparts from the British, French, Dutch, and German embassies. To the Germans we quickly learned to extend qualified invitations—“You have to bring your own drinks”—because, wow, those guys could down a lot of beer. Of course, a lot of girls would also show up, especially Ethiopians, a lot of them maids, and a lot of Yemenis from the top classes of Yemeni society.
One night we had a bigger party than usual. I think this one was sort of a welcome party for a group of Special Operations Forces (SOF) soldiers who’d come in specifically to augment, and eventually take over, the training portfolio I’d been tasked with in the interim. At this event we probably pushed our attendance at Grant’s house up to the max, 100, maybe 150 people. It was a zoo. One young State Department guy got so drunk, he started puking all over, and as a nondrinking Muslim, I was the sober one and had to drive him back home.
By the time I got back, the party was raging even more maniacally and had started to attract attention. I sort of switched modes then, from participating to trying to make sure we kept on the right side of things. As the sober one, I felt a bit responsible.