by Sam Farran
“Come out to Qatar,” Ali said. “I want you to check something out with me.”
This was 2006, early in the year. Giuliani Safety & Security had begun working in Qatar to train the Qatar government personnel, and Ali himself was serving as the Giuliani Group’s director of international operations, managing the project and the relationships on the ground.
When I got to Qatar, Ali took me around, showing me his training programs.
“This is your line of work, Sam,” he said, “coordinating training like you used to do in Yemen for the Special Forces and the Internal Security.”
“Well, I know it sounds like a good job.”
I was thrilled already. But Ali hadn’t got to the best part of his pitch yet. When he told me where the training would be held and whom I would be training, I went through the roof with excitement.
“As icing on the cake, brother, it’s not here that I need you.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then where?”
“Lebanon.”
“Hell, yes,” I said, unable to contain my enthusiasm for a job that would take me home.
Ali was planning to expand the training program as a gift to the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF), the policing side of Lebanon’s divided security sector—parts of which are primarily Christian-led and run, parts more Sunni, and parts more Shi’a. Ali and I went together to Lebanon and started setting it all up, getting firing ranges and training areas in Dibaye booked for our courses, getting everything set. The Lebanese concept was to train a first counterterrorism unit cohort all the way from A to Z, fresh from the very beginning of the trainees’ enlistment to the very end, over a three-month period. Ali’s guys, under my supervision, were going to be the instructors.
The plan we put together involved me being on-site through the whole first summer, hands on for the first three-month training rotation and potentially for much longer if the program turned out to be a success. As a result of this plan, I took the opportunity to fly my daughter Amira to Lebanon, thinking it would be a great time to have her with me and let her get to know her (not so distantly) ancestral country and some of her (not too distant) relatives there.
Once all the groundwork was in place, I went back to Jeddah to clean out my desk and complete my handover of responsibilities for British American Tobacco. I then circled back to Doha for two days to check in with Ali and finalize plans before the start of the training program. I left Amira with her aunt at her house in a neighborhood called Khalda, just south of the airport in Beirut.
Crazy as it sounds, right then, at the very moment I went to Doha to put the finishing touches on our training program with Ali and his group, the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War started.
Our program with the ISF was put on hold.
Everyone thought this flare-up of tension between Hezbollah and Israel would last for two or maybe three days, a week tops. Conflagrations of that sort began and ended all the time, not just on the Lebanon border but between the Israelis and the Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem and, in the not-too-distant past, also with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, not to mention other flare-ups inside Lebanon itself, which also tended to involve Syria. The Israelis would come and do their thing, conduct a few air raids, root out some Hezbollah cells, and it would be over. All of us had gotten pretty used to it over a lifetime, even a lifetime like mine, half spent in the United States. Israel’s incursions and Syrian occupations were always present in our minds, only a little bit more troubling than a thunderstorm might be on the Great Plains or a hurricane in Florida.
But this time, when the ground troops really started flowing en masse, we knew it was going to get bad.
And of greatest concern to me, Amira had remained in Lebanon, and I was stuck outside the country, unable to return for her.
Khalda, the neighborhood where her aunt lived and where Amira had her refuge, abutted the airport along its southern edge. Of course, in war airports tend to be one of the most targeted places, and pretty much the first thing, the Israelis started hitting this one with their planes.
I wanted to get Amira out of there.
She’d phone, crying, from the bunkers at the side of her aunt’s apartment building. These bunkers had a long history, actually starting as bunkers, then being converted into a parking garage for the complex, then being hastily remade, right as this bombing started, into makeshift bunkers again.
“Dad, the whole building shakes,” she’d say, as the Israeli strafing and bombing rose to a crescendo a rock’s throw from where she hid. “Come and get me out of here.”
Just as frequently as Amira phoned, a worried Zainab would call too, yelling at me to do something, even though I was as stuck as anyone else, trapped in Doha with all the air traffic into and out of Lebanon absolutely halted, the runways cratered by bombs, and shooting and troop movements escalating all throughout the south. The eastern border with Syria had backed up too, crammed with caravans of people trying to flee from the southern and western parts of Lebanon where the Israeli troops began making their push north toward Beirut.
Amira was only twelve years old then.
My mother lived just down the road in a safer neighborhood, but the aunt wouldn’t chance exiting the bomb shelter to drop Amira off. They wouldn’t leave that bunker for the better part of the first, and most difficult, three or four days, except to sneak back into the apartment to use the bathroom.
Finally, after realizing the thing was going to last longer than a week and would be more devastating than most such events, I called our defense attaché in Lebanon and said, “Hey, my daughter is there. She’s an American citizen.”
“Sam, get her as close as possible to the US Embassy. As soon as we have the means to get the citizens out of here, we will. Drop her off here, and I’ll take care of it.”
But getting Amira out of southern Beirut, all the way through downtown and then to the northern suburbs where the US Embassy had been relocated after the Marine barracks bombing in 1979, formed yet another a problem. After exhausting all my own family as a resource in trying to get Amira to the embassy, I remembered that my friend Assaf Maakaroun had a property in the northern parts of Beirut. I called him, and he quickly sent someone south to pick Amira up.
Assaf is a Christian, hailing from the swath of mountains and impenetrable regions around Wadi Qadisha, the Holy Valley north of Beirut, around the Maronite Christian heartland centers. His heritage and affiliations in the north made it easier by far for him to come and go through the Maronite territories of northern Beirut around the embassy and also down south near the airport—since everyone needed access to the airport.
It had been ten days of constant bombardment, and Assaf’s emissary found Amira in a real state of shock. Just imagine, a young American girl who has spent her life to date in the safe haven of Dearborn, Michigan, all of a sudden finds herself living in a bunker! Assaf got Amira situated in an apartment he owned right outside the US Embassy. He made sure she was cared for, looked after, and comforted. But he couldn’t get her out of Lebanon entirely.
Amira’s escape from southern Beirut to the relatively safer northern part of the city made me much less nervous, but I could still hear the shock in Amira’s voice every time we spoke on the phone. I’d call her, and then I’d call my friend the attaché, and I’d call Assaf, and still nothing seemed to be happening. No one seemed to have a way out—not for civilians, not even for American civilians. In fact, in the end, it took several more weeks for the embassy to get ships in and even evacuate its own staff, which it did while leaving most US citizens to fend for themselves, including Amira.
My attaché friend tipped me off to this, ahead of the embassy’s exodus.
“Sam,” he said, “between me and you, if you can get her out of here, get her out, any way you can, because right now it doesn’t look good for us to even get ourselves out.”
After that advice I didn’t waste time.
In
our line of work, connections are critical, really the only thing to depend on in a time of crisis. I’d already called in one favor from Assaf. But this was a time of crisis indeed. I needed a bigger favor, and I needed it quick.
I called around and found another friend of mine, Farah Nahme. He lived in the far north, in a town called Cheka, which sits on the border between the Maronite and the northern Sunni lands. He had the ability to cross over that area, just as Assaf could get Amira from down by the airport up to the embassy. Farah knew Assaf’s house too. I explained the situation to him, telling him I needed him to get Amira to the Syrian border.
He said, “Tell me when, and I’ll have her delivered to you, but not through the regular Musna border because it’s been bombed. Instead I will have her taken all the way north to Tariq al-Areeda.”
Farah arranged for his aged father to pick Amira up and load her, along with another family, into the back of a pickup truck to take her to the border.
I flew into Syria, though at first the Syrians wouldn’t give me a visa. They stopped me in customs, and I had to explain why I was on an American passport despite speaking a Lebanese dialect. I had to tell them the whole story about how I was coming to rescue my daughter.
“I only need two to three days to get my daughter and get out,” I said, putting a fifty-dollar bill in the folds of my passport book.
They stamped me with a one-week visa. As crazy as it sounds, Syria wasn’t then what it is today. Back then, before the Arab Spring, it was very modern and easy to travel through, especially for someone with language and cultural understanding. I simply rented a car, drove from Damascus to our predesignated spot at the Tariq al-Areeda border crossing, got her, and brought her back to Doha after a couple more days in Syria, which I needed just for her to decompress and realize she was okay now, okay with me. Safe with me.
Perhaps this should have been my warning. Perhaps this should have been the moment I compared life in the United States to the unpredictability of life in the Middle East. But that message didn’t sink in. I focused on her, on getting her back to safety. But I didn’t reflect on my own safety or how the work I was doing in the region might, at any point, put me in peril.
Footnote
1 The 2018 HBO series The Looming Tower tells much of Ali’s story.
CHAPTER 7
ARAB SPRING
FOR THE NEXT several years, between roughly 2006 and 2009, I continued working for the Giuliani Partners in Doha as the project manager of its suite of training programs. The idea for training the Lebanese Internal Security Forces (ISF) never got picked up again after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah conflict. But the work in Qatar proved to be right in my wheelhouse: intelligence, counterintelligence, FBI-type stuff with investigative training and creating role-playing scenarios. We also did more advanced training for the Amiri Guard, which is like our Secret Service, designed to accompany and protect Qatar’s ruler, the amir.
Ali Soufan remained my boss as the director of international operations for Giuliani’s office. His role included—among many other things—not only supervision of the training programs that I led but also consultation on Qatar’s new Industrial Cities. I was in the best shape of my life, running three miles a day, doing meaningful, vigorous work, and loving life.
My family remained in Dearborn except for parts of each summer. Then the kids would come and spend some of their time with me. They were still in high school and didn’t want to leave their friends and come to the Middle East, at least not permanently. Visits were fun and gave all of us something to look forward to. The kids had their lives and passions in America. They couldn’t uproot themselves, and I didn’t expect them to.
We’d just gone through the difficult situation extracting Amira from Lebanon the year before, and things were falling apart for me on the home front. I needed to be home more often. I needed to rest more, I knew that.
But I couldn’t leave the Middle East. At first my work there had been somewhat compulsory, those Global War on Terror mobilization orders, the frantic pace of that critical juncture in America’s involvement “over there”; then it became a matter of self-worth, of doing work that I felt really made a difference, especially during those years in Yemen. By the time I got into the groove of my contracting role, especially in this new incarnation in Qatar, the value and the inescapability of being “over there” came perhaps from knowing I was helping make a difference on a bigger scale and in a critical place and time. Just as important, though, was the money I made, earnings I couldn’t equal by running a gas station or a restaurant in Dearborn. I was really socking it away in a manner I hadn’t planned or even really dreamed of. I was not just supporting my immediate family back in America but also helping my family in Lebanon and elsewhere. I felt very fortunate to be in such a position, and I liked giving back where and when I could.
When I came home for Christmas that year, I started feeling really weak. At first I thought it was just exhaustion, that my lifestyle and frenetic activities were catching up with me finally. But when the weakness wouldn’t subside after a few days in the Dearborn cold, I went to the doctor for a checkup.
The doctor informed me, after a few tests, that I had significant blockage in my arteries. They shuttled me right to the hospital, and I was put under for what they thought would be a simple stent or balloon clearance procedure. When I woke, though, they told me they had discovered three arteries blocked at 90 percent each and opted to perform immediate triple-bypass surgery.
Everyone was shocked about this, including my boss, Ali Soufan, who pointed out that just the week before I’d been running around with the top young officers, training them and running them ragged, not to mention running for leisure myself, playing kick-ass racquetball a couple times a week, and lifting. I think, truly, had I not been in that level of physical fitness, I might not have survived. I might have had a heart attack long before. I might not have weathered the bypass surgery as well as I did. Any of a million other fates might have befallen me. But here, again, the Marine Corps and the Marine mentality paid big dividends for me. It had taught me the benefits of keeping myself in good physical condition, and even though a genetic trait or maybe a dietary issue had led to this heart condition, I was able to survive it and hardly miss a beat, heading back to Qatar within a couple short weeks to resume my position with the Soufan Group.
▪ ▪ ▪
ON NOVEMBER 1, 2008, exactly thirty years to the day from my first enlistment, I retired from the Marine Corps. So much had happened over those thirty years! It gave me pause, looking back on the family I’d raised and supported, the work I’d done, the crazy twists of life that had led me from Lebanon, through Libya, to America, and then back to the Middle East. I didn’t hold a big celebration or party. Usually after thirty years of service, the unit you’re in puts on some sort of retirement ceremony, but for me, being in Qatar—although still doing my drills in association with the Defense Intelligence Agency and with various embassies to help new personnel acculturate—I didn’t belong to a robust unit. I sort of fell through the cracks. But that’s okay. I knew where I was and who I was, and the quiet reflection upon my retirement was as good for me as a larger ceremony would have been.
Once you’re a Marine, you’re never not a Marine. The culture of the corps stays with you. I knew that I’d soon be attending Marine birthday celebrations, balls, and formal events, breaking out my old uniform, and celebrating with brothers in arms I’d known and respected for years or sometimes with newbies who would sop up the stories I had earned the hard, old-fashioned way. The Marine Corps culture doesn’t just abandon its members. It lives on. And that would really prove to be a big comfort to me later, when I was taken hostage. Never once during my Marine Corps career did I feel abandoned—perhaps misunderstood and misused a little, as was the case when I first tried to volunteer my language skills—but I was always included and always valued as a Marine among Marines.
▪ ▪ ▪
AROUND TH
IS SAME TIME, the company in Doha converted from Giuliani Security to Soufan Group. Rudy Giuliani was running for president in 2008, so he divested himself of his big overseas contracts, knowing the lucrative deals he had with Qatar and elsewhere might follow him on the campaign trail and cause his opponents to question whether he could lead without bias. More specifically, with regard to Qatar, newspapers around this time started accusing Qatar of sponsoring terrorism, and our firm was working there, so Giuliani had to choose whether to fight those claims or just step away from them.
He stepped away.
He could have gone on the air, put out an official statement, or said something to the effect that the state of Qatar wasn’t sponsoring any terrorism. He could have emphasized that the firm was not involved in such things. He could have clarified that we were training the Qataris to protect not just themselves but also our American interests on the ground.
But he didn’t. He just let the American press badmouth the amir and gave off the impression that he had bigger fish to fry, that he could afford not to stick up for his clients or for the work of his team over in Qatar.
This of course upset many in the Qatari leadership and eventually led them to cut the ties with Giuliani. As they did this, they simultaneously had a conversation with Ali Soufan, reassuring him that they liked his team, the work he and his guys were doing, and wanted him to continue. They offered him the opportunity to start a security academy, the Qatar International Academy for Security Studies and I continued working with the Soufan Group in exactly the same capacity as I had for Giuliani.
I kept working with the Soufan Group for about another year, until mid-2009, when fate took me back to Yemen once again.
▪ ▪ ▪
IN JUNE 2009 MY FRIEND Steve Gaudin called me from the US Embassy in Sana’a, needing help with a shipment of communication equipment they knew would be intercepted and held up by Yemeni customs for a long time. This was my old role—facilitator, negotiator, problem solver. I agreed to help, but not because the work seemed particularly interesting or difficult: it would probably just require a couple calls to the likes of Abdulghani Jamil or Tariq Saleh, maybe a qat chew or two. Really, the reason I went for what should have been a couple days or maybe a week’s worth of work was Steve himself.