The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  Steve had come back to Sana’a on his second tour in the embassy. He was serving as the legal attaché (LEGATT), an FBI role primarily responsible for facilitating domestic US investigations with overseas components, meaning crimes involving US persons or crimes that occurred in America but included an element of foreign involvement.

  Steve was one of the finest FBI agents I had ever worked with. He and I had first encountered one another back in 2002 on his initial tour as a LEGATT in Yemen, back when I was working in the attaché shop. Just before New Year’s Day, two of my colleagues—the operations coordinator, Henry Grant, and our Force Protection Detachment officer, Nick Butros—were preparing to drive with me to Aden for some needed vacation time. Back then, it was permissible to travel around Yemen by car, without a big security detachment, and to go wherever we wanted really, even to hike or ride horses in the mountains or visit the beach down in Aden on the Indian Ocean. With our bags packed and loaded into the car, we pulled into the embassy to officially sign out on our leave when one of the Marines from Post One—the official guard shack and call center for the embassy—ran up to us.

  The young Marine caught my arm as I got out of the car and said, “Hey, Gunner, the ambassador wants to see you and Nick ASAP!”

  I looked at Nick and said, “Did you do anything? ’Cause I don’t remember doing anything wrong, at least this last week!”

  In truth, we were both a little nervous. We’d just had a vehicle confiscated by the Yemeni police. It wasn’t a big deal. We’d been through similar issues in the past, since various elements within the Yemeni military and police structures were always jockeying for power and could try to flex their muscles in our direction on occasion. No matter how innocuous, though, it always ended up being a little nerve-wracking because you couldn’t quite tell whether the media would get ahold of something like that, or whether the authorities—such as our own ambassador—might believe a bit too much of whatever story the Yemeni contingent had cooked up. We’d need to do some “’splainin’” in that case. And interference, or even awareness and concern from the press or the leadership, would make recovery of the vehicle (and explaining whatever shenanigans surrounded the incident) all the tougher.

  The ambassador at that time was Edmund Hull, really a great man and a great statesman. He understood Yemen well, and he and I got along fabulously. On numerous occasions I’d had the opportunity to discuss policy in Yemen with him. Even though things were pretty open for us to travel around Yemen, the State Department had put our embassy—like many others in the Middle East—on “authorized departure.” We were still in a post-9/11 security posture, with a lot of people pretty nervous, and the “authorized departure” status meant that any families or embassy workers who didn’t want to be there were legally entitled to a flight home, as well as reassignment, no negative evaluations for opting out, and so forth. Whenever Ambassador Hull mentioned this “authorized departure” status at meetings or rallies of our very large embassy staff, I’d raise my hand to volunteer to leave. He knew I was joking, of course, so he’d tell me to put my hand down and say something like, “When you leave, you’ll be taking the flag down with you, Sam!” He knew I was addicted to Yemen. And I was happy to play the part of the foil for him, just getting that repeat laugh and helping everyone make light of what was, truly, a pretty stressful environment to work in.

  With our vehicle impounded and a hundred other possible issues in mind, I took some comfort in the good relationship I’d established with the ambassador. I knew I wasn’t in for an ass chewing. But still, the young Marine from Post One sounded pretty panicked, pretty urgent.

  Nick, Henry, and I dropped what we were doing and, in our vacation clothes, went right through security, up to the second floor, and down the hall to the ambassador’s office. His assistant led us right into the big corner space where his desk, a lovely grouping of plush chairs and sofas around a coffee table, and a few glorious windows overlooked Sana’a’s Old City, down below in the humming, honking, brown-hued valley.

  Steve Gaudin was already sitting in one of the ambassador’s armchairs. A few other people were in the room, all of them looking worried. The ambassador spoke into a phone, back turned to us. Henry, Nick, and I stood there, just inside the doorway, until he finished.

  As he turned to us, we could see sadness in his eyes, not tears, but that special sort of quiet, deeply concerned shadow that creeps into the gaze of someone who has taken on the burden of bad news and now must share it with others. He said, looking right at Nick and me, “Change of plans gentlemen. Your leave is cancelled. You’re heading down to Jibla.”

  (I’ll admit it: I drew a breath of relief, knowing now that we weren’t in trouble for the confiscated vehicle or any other weird mistake.)

  “Jibla?” I said. Though I knew Yemen pretty well, I didn’t know where that was. A village most likely. Or a region of some sort.

  “On the outskirts of Ibb, down south on the road to Aden,” the ambassador said. “That’s where you were going anyway, right?”

  “Yes… basically, though we intended to—”

  “Three doctors were just killed there. Shot and killed at the Jibla hospital, which is sponsored and run by missionaries. All three were missionary doctors. All three were Americans.”

  So we changed course. Henry stayed behind to coordinate the response and some of the notification of the families of these doctors, not to mention recovery and transport of the remains. Steve, being the official FBI investigator, jumped in the car with Nick and me to set off for Jibla to investigate. To make a long story short, the investigation itself went well enough. We got there and soon caught the guy who did the shooting. But it was really extremely sad, both for the loss of life and for the damage it did to this community. The killer confessed his motive was based on a mistaken idea that “these missionaries [were there] to convert Yemenis to Christianity, and he was there to stop it”—basic religious extremism, fueled by al-Qaeda no doubt. But all three of the doctors, as well as an American pharmacist who was wounded, had been working in and around Jibla for over twenty-five years. None of the staff at the hospital had ever heard of anyone converting to Christianity during that time. The doctors were just there to help people.

  The three of us spent that New Year’s Eve in an empty house waiting to continue our investigation the next day. We did some more investigating. We tied up some loose ends. And we prepared to head back to Sana’a, unable to accomplish much more.

  Walking out of the hospital that next morning, on New Year’s Day, we confronted the amazing spectacle of something like seven or eight hundred Yemeni women, all of them in abayas, black from head to toe, like a sea of ravens flocking together in the square in front of the hospital. All of them were crying, wailing for the doctors. These doctors had been members of the community. More tellingly, one of them, a woman, had been there forever and helped birth over 1,000 children, removing many of the dangers and discomforts of delivery for a generation or more of the region’s women.

  These ladies in their veils were the mothers, the grandmothers, the aunts, and even some of the children, now grown, whom this doctor helped into the world. The hospital staff told me this woman would go to people’s houses in the middle of the night to deliver babies, not just in Jibla but even up in the mountains. The way these people loved her so dearly, as one of their own, across cultures and religions, seemed unbelievable to me.

  But the sight of all these women coming out to mourn her affirmed it most strongly, and the image gave me chills; it still does. Unlike the assassin, and unlike many other people nowadays who can’t see past the abaya or the color of someone’s skin, constantly mistaking compassion and religiosity as a virtue belonging only to their own sect or people, the Yemeni women in this crowd didn’t care that the doctor had been American. They cared about her humanity, and they loved her for it. They understood and appreciated the sacrifice that she, and the two other slain missionaries, had made for them.

&
nbsp; To top it all off, in their wills, this woman doctor and one of the others had requested that they be buried there, in Jibla, rather than transported back to their homes in America. We found this out when Sergeant First Class Henry Grant started to coordinate preparation of the remains for a flight home. And so, according to their wishes, we ended up giving the two bodies over for burial in the Jibla cemetery, two Christians interred amid a hundred generations’ worth of Muslim tombstones.

  So when Steve Gaudin called in 2009 asking for my help to smooth things out with his commo gear, I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, say no. We’d been through a harrowing (and poignant) moment together. Brothers like that don’t say no to one another.

  I asked Ali for a bit of vacation time and jumped on the first plane to Sana’a.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  MY TRIP TO YEMEN went without a hiccup. And I got right down to business, as I normally did, attending a number of dinners, parties, and social events—how else does business get done? The owner of a company called Griffin Group happened to be my neighbor during one such dinner. Griffin Group specialized in providing local Yemenis as guards for Western facilities and businesses. He asked me to come on board as the general manager for the company. This would be a promotion from my role with the Soufan Group, where I served as the director of training. It would be, more or less, my own show—a good thing. I told Ali of the new opportunity, packed my bags, and was rather suddenly living in Yemen again.

  During the first year of that contract, I helped develop Griffin from a local security company into an international establishment by arranging contracts with several other international security firms, such as Olive, Control Risk, and Salamanca, all of them populated with and owned by people I knew and had either trained, or trained with, elsewhere. Bringing the standard of training for Griffin’s Yemeni guards up to this international level allowed us to start working and setting up joint ventures with places like the nearly finished Belhaf Oil Terminal, out near Mukalla, as well as with the US Embassy, where Griffin won the contract to provide many of the local guard force personnel who augmented the Yemeni soldiers posted outside and around the embassy gates.

  After some disputes with the company managers, I eventually left Griffin and took a job with the larger, truly international firm Control Risk, working as a consultant in business development and security. I took the job with a decent monthly retainer, but most of my earnings would be commission based, and I thought—given my contacts not only in Yemen but also in Qatar, Lebanon, and Morocco—that I was going to really capitalize.

  Then, about a month later, the Arab Spring started.

  All of my contacts, especially the security managers—all of them personal friends—refocused their efforts on evacuation and totally shelved any notion of business development. None of them were expanding their current programs or launching new ones. This was bad for Control Risk and for me personally, having bet on making most of my money through those fat commissions. I found myself in Yemen on a much tighter, much less comfortable budget than I’d anticipated, especially as things really started to heat up with the Arab Spring.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  THE ARAB SPRING STARTED in Tunisia, of course, with the self-immolation of Muhammad Bouazizi in protest of wage stagnation and lack of jobs. It quickly became a more general protest against the tyranny of many of the region’s long-standing, autocratic governments. The protests often began on university campuses, among students and the more progressive elements of society in and around those universities, though the working classes and other marginalized groups joined the protests in the hope they might gain new and much-needed liberties either through concessions from their current governments or overthrow of the system. Many of these protests turned violent and did indeed lead to the toppling of several tyrants. The ouster of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is perhaps most famous, followed by the downfall of Libya’s Muamar Qadafi. Yemen did not avoid this fate.

  Initiated at and focused around Sana’a University, the Arab Spring in Yemen really heated up when one of the most prominent generals under President Ali Abdullah Saleh—Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar, who had been waging a series of significant campaigns against the nascent Houthi movement in the northern mountains—switched sides from supporting Saleh to opposing him. This divided Sana’a fairly neatly in half. Ali Muhsin controlled the northern and western parts of the city from the strategic location of the 1st Armor Brigade’s base and headquarters. He also controlled the university area and the Technology Hospital.

  Ali Muhsin was a prominent, founding member of the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated political group called Islah. At one time he had also been involved in supporting and recruiting for al-Qaeda, and his political party remained ideologically aligned and tacitly supportive of al-Qaeda in Yemen. The powerful sheiks of the al-Ahmar family—who aren’t actually related to Ali Muhsin al-Ahmar despite their similar names—supported this opposition as well. Also, strangely, the Houthi rebels—whom Ali Muhsin had been fighting for the past decade—overcame their issues with the very radically Sunni al-Ahmar as well as their issues with Ali Muhsin and joined the opposition, citing a desire to overthrow Saleh.

  In Yemen, political and military alliances tend to follow long-term trends—North versus South, Zaydi Shi’a versus outsiders (like the Egyptians, who sent 70,000 troops to Yemen in the 1970s, and the Ottomans), and—more recently—Shi’a versus Sunni. But those long-term trends also have a lot of flexibility, as this cooperation between Houthis and Islah during the Arab Spring demonstrates. Yemenis are opportunistic and put the advantage and survival of their family and their clan ahead of other political or ideological allegiances.

  This four-headed opposition—Ali Muhsin, students and liberals, Islah, and the Houthis—together controlled significant parts of the capital and most of the area north of Sana’a. The Saleh family’s base of power in Sana’a, however, was located around the headquarters of the internal security forces—not so very far from the 1st Armor Brigade and the defense ministry, skirting the north side of the city along the border between the lands held by the al-Ahmars but just inside the territory of Abdulghani Jamil’s clan, where Sana’a International Airport was situated. The airport stayed open, in government control, along with the significant military jet fighter presence. The US Embassy also lay within Abdulghani Jamil’s territory on the east shoulder of Jebel Nuqum, the mountain overlooking Sana’a. Hadda, in the south, remained in Saleh’s control, but the main route between Hadda and the embassy, called Zubayri Street, also happened to be the on-again, off-again demarcation line between the two sides, a tense standoff zone and often the area where outright fighting started.

  Ali Muhsin took control of a strategic hill near the 1st Armor Brigade that held the radio and TV stations. He started giving away government land on the hill to squatters so that they would occupy and defend it, even as protestors—led most conspicuously by Tawakkol Karman, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts during this time—congregated in Tahrir Square, or Freedom Square, which just happened to be the name of similar squares in each of the nations where the Arab Spring happened.

  The Saleh family and the political party they led, called the General People’s Congress (GPC) or Mutamar watched the Arab Spring spread from one country to the next in the Middle East. It came a bit later to Yemen than elsewhere. And they actually understood that Tahrir Square would be significant terrain. So they occupied it before the students and the opposition groups got there.

  While the fight and the protests centered on political demands, their very urban nature meant that a lot of civilians ended up accidentally in the crosshairs. For instance, you could often walk down Zubayri Street and see it lined on one side by 1st Armor soldiers or Islah loyalists and on the other by ISF, the police, the Republican Guard, or Special Forces (all loyal to Saleh, largely due to who their commanders were—Saleh’s sons and nephews elevated to high rank in the military and security). As a civilian you could switch sides, have lunch
in one place and coffee in another, talk to everyone. But you also might get caught in a flare-up at any time. Just north of Zubayri Street, on Hayl Street, about twenty-five to thirty civilians died in a particularly grievous massacre. This incident caused a rift between Islah and the Houthis, breaking their alliance when it looked like they might dethrone Saleh after all.

  Things dragged on in this stalemate and only came to a close during Friday prayer, on June 11, 2011, when Saleh was bombed at his own mosque in one of his palaces (not the new mosque that was still being built). The bomb was planted in a personal area and activated by a cell phone, whose signal needed to be in the immediate vicinity to trigger it, so the user had to have been near.1 The Political Security Organization, still loyal to Saleh, recovered the sim card from this trigger device and traced its number to the 71-9 prefix, which pointed to one of the two big phone companies in Yemen, Sabaphone. Sabaphone was owned by Hamid al-Ahmar, chief among the al-Ahmar clans.

  Saleh survived but was pretty badly wounded. As he was being loaded onto a stretcher, his son, Ahmed Ali Saleh, who had been nearby but was uninjured, began to take charge. He already commanded the Republican Guard and the Special Forces. He was the heir apparent. He jumped on the phone to his subordinate commanders and was about to order an artillery barrage on the Usbahi area of Sana’a, where a good portion of the al-Ahmar family have their city dwellings, intending to wipe it out despite what such an atrocity might cost in collateral damage, in the deaths of innocents who just happened to live nearby, or the fallout in the court of world opinion.