by Sam Farran
Outside the front gate of the house, we’d started to collect a representative smattering of Yemen’s law enforcement and intelligence services, all peering into the courtyard, trying to see what was happening in the house itself through the windows and the opening and shutting front door, watching people come and go from the balconies and the roof. They were interested not only in the noise and ruckus of the party but also in tracking which guests were showing up, how they were behaving, and perhaps who was leaving with whom.
In this gaggle I saw members of the National Security Bureau (NSB), the Political Security Organization (PSO), the Sana’a city police, and the Department of Military Intelligence (DMI). The DMI was represented at that time by young Captain Ahmed Yafa’i—a man who, like Abdulghani Jamil, became a good friend and a good contact for our office as he quickly rose to the rank of general and chief of DMI. Also, like the family of Abdulghani Jamil, Ahmed’s family, the Yafa’i, were favored by President Saleh because their lands straddle the main route south to Aden. All these security and intelligence personnel were gathered together in a huddle, with various nameless lackeys around them, recording who was coming in and going out. I almost had no choice but to approach and start chatting them up, to try to diffuse any rumors they were hearing or calm whatever other fears had taken hold in their minds and at least to listen in and understand their concerns and agendas.
Unfortunately, right then Sergeant First Class Grant ran out of the house and made a beeline right for me, pulling me away from the intelligence officials.
“Sam,” he said, a bit too loudly, “get in here and hurry up.”
I rushed into the dining room, where the table had been pushed aside and a space had been cleared for a dance floor.
Blood covered the ground and was splattered across one of the walls, like a modern art painting.
Sergeant First Class Grant wouldn’t let me stop there, among the drunk but oddly quiet people. He rushed me through that room and into one of the ground-floor bedrooms.
“Get in here,” he said, shoving his way through a posse blocking the door.
There, around the bed, five or six of those newly arrived Special Forces guys stood over the body of a little Ethiopian girl in a short black dress.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
One of the SOF guys was a medic and had brought his kit, which he had strewn over the bed. He was removing the air bubbles from a big syringe, squirting a fine jet of fluid into the air above the bed. He bent down and jabbed the needle into the Ethiopian girl’s arm, which made her stop wailing almost instantly.
Pulling the needle from her arm, he bent the tip of it down and then, with his other, obviously very practiced hand, whipped out some thread already laced through the eye of suturing needle. He sat beside the quiet girl, her dark eyes rolling back in her head, parted her hair down the side of her head, and began to sew shut a several-inch-long gash in her scalp.
The biggest of the SOF guys around the bed, maybe six foot four, muscular, the sort you never want to mess with but who often turn out to be the milder, more empathetic types among that lot, was shaking like a tree in the wind. “Sir,” he said, “we fucked up. I fucked up.”
He told me what had happened in pieces that didn’t all make sense, fractured little bits of a story from which I eventually deduced that he had been dancing with this girl, having a great time, and decided to do the “Dirty Dancing scene,” lifting her over his head to spin her around. Only problem: the ceiling fan. It had clipped her head in the middle of one of these twirls.
This was deep doo-doo.
Especially with the PSO, NSB, and DMI out front. Not to mention the police.
We ended up dressing her in an abaya, the traditional head-to-toe covering some Muslim women wear, with full face covering, though we still had her head wrapped beneath it. She was woozy from the painkiller the medic had given her, so we propped her between us and got her into one of the cars in the courtyard to take her to the Yemen German Hospital in Hadda. For a moment, passing through the gate and beyond the group of baffled Yemeni intelligence officials, we thought we’d made a clean escape. But the PSO officer caught on, jumped in his car with some of his men, and followed us.
We got her into the hospital and kept the PSO at bay long enough to sequester her in an examining room. We’d washed off most of the blood, but her head was still wrapped up with a kitchen towel that now looked like a bandage from World War II.
I told the hospital staff that she was our maid and that we’d had a party. She was working the party when someone spilled on the tile floor, and she’d slipped and hit her head on one of the counters, a good enough story. And the girl didn’t offer any sort of counterexplanation because, by this time, she was unconscious. She was okay; the painkillers and all the excitement had just been a bit much for her. They gave her an MRI. We did the paperwork and wrote down the story, and everyone stuck with it, even when the PSO finally nosed in and alleged, based on rumors, that someone had hit her.
“We want to investigate,” they started to say.
But I cut that notion off right away, saying, “Hey, we’re all diplomats here, and we’re taking care of her.”
That word, “diplomat,” was an important one, conveying strong notions of diplomatic immunity and at the same time carrying strong risk—because if the PSO wanted to make an issue of the event, they could just get the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to declare us, any of us or all of us, persona non grata (PNG). That’s actually a technical term, and it requires the embassy to immediately withdraw a person so designated from the country. No one wanted that. It could be a scandal. Certainly it would be bad for that person individually. It’s never a good thing to have to explain to headquarters why you’ve been forced to leave an embassy assignment.
Being declared PNG was one option. But these services could be subtler and still make things difficult. They could just whisper to some of our superiors, not even at the ambassadorial level. This was more of a veiled threat and maybe did not carry the same stigma as getting PNG’d, but it could still make our lives harder. Or they could mess around with inspections—paying visits to our villas, checking cargo we shipped in, asking for documents in triplicate, just generally making things difficult. We didn’t want any of that.
I knew all this. And I’d already staked our position by using the “diplomat” word. So I softened our approach a bit, saying, “We’re all diplomats, and she’s our maid. You’re welcome to interview her but not any of these guys. I’m the senior officer here, so you can talk to me.”
The girl, thankfully, remained soundly passed out.
And the PSO let the matter drop (probably yet another benefit of my having chewed a few bundles of qat with some of them in other, less anxious times).
The MRI came back okay, no fractures. And the doctors, taking off her bandage, admired the stitches in the girl’s head—which I explained by telling them that one of the SOF guys worked as an orderly in our embassy health clinic, a bit of a stretch but not too far from the truth. We’d done the stitching ourselves but just wanted to bring her into the ER to make sure she did not have more serious injuries, like a concussion.
This seemed to satisfy everyone.
The PSO departed.
Some of the Ethiopian girl’s friends came to pick her up.
And the SOF guys owed me big time, which never hurts, especially in a country like Yemen. We Marines can fight. But it’s always good to have the most lethal people on the battlefield squarely in your corner, even if they’re only there as trainers.
▪ ▪ ▪
THAT INITIAL TWO-MONTH TEMPORARY set of orders quickly turned into two years, then three. I came home about every three or four months for a few days of leave. But the deployment, the pace of it, and the very different life I lived in Yemen compared to Dearborn made a wreck of my marriage with Zainab.
Sometime in 2003, having come back on a long series of flights, layovers, more flights, and a sto
p in DC for outbriefs, I arrived home tired. I’d had no hot food for several days, so Zainab and I went out to dinner.
She looked at me, like a different person from the woman I remembered and loved, and said, “I’ve already talked to a lawyer. She’s drawing up the papers. I want a divorce. It’s not working out between us. This life isn’t working out for me.”
I was hurt. I wanted to keep the family. I knew I was gone too much, and we had started to develop different views on life. Zainab was independent; she wanted to be more independent and pursue what she wanted to pursue, so taking care of four kids and running our shared family businesses was taking a toll on her. She didn’t want to do it anymore.
I considered not going back to Yemen then, but the orders kept coming back, that same presidential recall to fight in the War on Terror, and I didn’t have a real choice in the matter.
It was my duty.
And my duty was, more and more, my identity.
Footnote
1 I still have those orders (as do many soldiers and sailors activated at that time for the same reason) because the wording, that presidential activation, and the start of the War on Terror, even then, seemed weighty and worth holding on to, a unique thing in our country’s history, a turning point, for better or worse.
CHAPTER 6
CONTRACTOR
ONE THING I prided myself on most during my years working for DIA in Yemen was the ability to form lasting relationships with important people there. These relationships proved, time and again, to be important, mission critical, and even lifesaving. I truly enjoyed the social aspect of my duties, even though every relationship, no matter how genuine, had to be viewed as a point of potential future leverage to make things happen for our embassy and our country. Among the relationships that combined both business and social aspects, I include my friendships with Abdulghani Jamil, Ahmed Yafa’i, and many others. I first met these Yemeni power players while I served in an official government capacity, but they proved key to my transition into a civilian career too.
Yemen, like most Arab countries, does business based on personal relationships. In American professional situations, while personal relationships are always important, there’s an understanding that business contracts are formed between entities, whereas in an Arab context the personal relationship retains primacy, and the contract is often viewed as between not two entities but the people themselves. As a result, it’s the time, understanding, and friendship—dear and constantly nourished friendship—that get the work and the deals done.
Although I recall using my relationships to some advantage or another in scores and scores of incidents, big and small, one of the most important happened just before the start of the Second Gulf War, when Vice President Dick Cheney came out to the Middle East on his tour of all the Arab countries, frantically drumming up support for the coalition’s plan to invade Iraq.
Yemen had been the one Arab country to support Saddam Hussein during the First Gulf War under George H. W. Bush, so the importance of Cheney’s visit to Yemen wasn’t lost on anyone. The White House wanted the visit to be a success. Our embassy wanted it to be a success. Even Yemen knew it was a big deal. President Ali Abdullah Saleh wanted to be on the right side this time.
I ended up facilitating the security for the visit, calling in favors from numerous close Yemeni contacts in order to bring the Yemeni security up to the (somewhat unrealistic) standard the Secret Service expected. I had to call one of Saleh’s nephews, a general at that time, to ask for additional security at the airport. Saleh’s threats and bribes to the local sheiks increased safety much more than any troop deployments would.
In the end Cheney’s visit lasted no more than a half hour, but it was critical. And it would not have happened—with the Secret Service threatening to cancel the visit over additional security requirements—had it not been for these local military and political contacts I’d developed.
This type of thing happened repeatedly, and not just with VIP visits. Shipments of armored vehicles would be impossible to get out of port, not allowed into the country or held up with red tape, requiring payment of some sort of bribe, or they’d just get detained under murky circumstances. Our office would get them through, leveraging these same contacts and trust. For the State Department, even for the agency, it was tough to get vehicles or even communication, or “commo,” gear through the ports. But we could get it done because we’d taken time to develop our friendships. For many of these shipments during my time working at the embassy, the deputy for customs was Abdulghani Jamil. Abdulghani earned big points with us for getting such things done—and quickly. One day after being asked for help, he would often have the shipment complete and the containers or vehicles lined up in the embassy courtyard!
Even after successes like this, the fun—and the work I was doing—couldn’t last forever.
▪ ▪ ▪
IN 2004 I FINALLY fell through the cracks with DIA, my string of consecutive ongoing mobilizations in support of embassy work in Yemen and elsewhere coming to an end. DIA didn’t renew my orders, so I went back into the Reserves. I returned to Dearborn for a couple weeks, but it wasn’t the same without Zainab. And the jobs I returned to there, at my family businesses, just didn’t compare with the meaningful work I had been doing in Yemen. That feeling of hollowness because of the split with Zainab, combined with the difference in value I felt between the everyday world and the work I had been doing in the Middle East, meant that I was ripe when British American Tobacco (BAT) contacted me to be its security manager in Saudi Arabia.
I accepted right away.
My family stayed in Dearborn, just as if this new job were another military deployment overseas.
I worked in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during my first assignment with British American Tobacco. And I also worked out a deal to continue drilling as a reservist, using the time allotted for drill weekends and my two-week summer training to help embassy personnel in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s capital, familiarize themselves with Jeddah, hosting them and taking them around to meet the right friends. It was a good arrangement, since the contacts I made in Jeddah for British American Tobacco both facilitated the security BAT needed and also were good people for our embassy to know. Basically, I continued my role as a problem solver and relationship manager, all with a security focus, doing it full-time for my civilian employer and part-time for the embassy in fulfillment of my Reserve obligation.
This went on for almost two more years.
During my time in Saudi Arabia, I was able to watch—and participate in—the ebb and flow of pilgrims to Mecca, completing the Umra, or minor pilgrimage, almost every weekend myself. There was excellent snorkeling in Jeddah too, with the shores of the Red Sea really a pristine wonderland. I didn’t partake in that much though, remembering my near-drowning experience in that Dearborn gym class all too well!
At one point in 2005, I just happened to call up the regional security officer (RSO) for our consulate in Jeddah to have our periodic coffee catch-up meeting. We’d do this every other month or so, with me coming to the consulate just to shoot the breeze, meeting him at the Marine House, or maybe going with him somewhere out on the town. I remember on this particular day, as I went through the gate of the consulate, thinking to myself how easy it would be to breach the compound there, for when the gate opened up, nothing prevented a second car from ramming its way inside after a first car entered legitimately. The only real protection was the bar of the gate and then a couple half-asleep Saudi guards in a Dushka truck outside.
We had our coffee, focusing our talk on some of the really bad security things going on back then: a couple of bombings had just happened in Riyadh and also in Dammam at one of Saudi Aramco’s entrances. I think I also mentioned the gate to my friend, the security officer. And then I went on my merry way back to the British American Tobacco office.
Within minutes of reaching my desk, I got a call from one of my BAT trade marketing representatives in the field. “
Mr. Sam,” he said, “the American embassy”—which is what they called the consulate—“is under attack.” He reported shooting inside. “They’re going wild.”
The consulate had been breached, right at that gate, just as I imagined.
I ran back to my car and sped to the consulate, or as close as I could get, but the whole area was blockaded by the Saudi police and military forces. Smoke rose from behind the consulate walls, a block or so away from the nearest spot I could approach. All I could do was watch.
Needless to say, the attack on the consulate changed the posture for all our work in Jeddah and Saudi Arabia. Things got a lot stricter. People became a lot more careful. Though I’d made good contacts and maintained great relationships, my employers wanted to button things up, and I wasn’t interested in working that way.
At about that same time, I received a call from an old friend, Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who’d pursued Osama bin Laden before 9/11.1 By this point Ali had left the FBI to begin his own consultancy, initially working in part with Giuliani Safety & Security, out of the Giuliani Partners. He’d cut ties with the FBI after disagreeing with the George W. Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, water boarding, and other practices. Ali was one of the first to stand up against those policies, and he did so on the grounds that information obtained through such means was not reliable, in addition to the techniques themselves going against our values as Americans. He’d made enough of a name for himself that he leveraged his reputation and connections to start his private practice under the umbrella of Rudy Giuliani. I’d met Ali when he was in Yemen working as one of the leads on the FBI’s investigation of the Cole bombing, and we’d hit it off pretty well since we both spent our youth in Lebanon and then came to America to grow up and live the American Dream. I was excited that he called me.