by Sam Farran
I hoped—at least for my clients—that my presence and my work might be the first step toward a return to normal operations. I could look at their facilities and make sure nothing had been broken into. I could write up a few reports and advise them when it might be safe for their staff to return, which was important not just for British American Tobacco or Transoceanic or any number of other companies but also for Yemen as a whole. By proving Yemen could be considered safe for Western workers, I felt like I could make a difference for average Yemenis too, because many Yemenis depended on Western aid for food, medicine, and other things. Yemen, then as now, was experiencing the world’s worst humanitarian disaster: famine, disease, and war. I knew that much depended on a return to normalcy for Yemen’s people.
Even commercial companies bring critical business for Yemen. The flow of dollars through normal commerce, rather than black markets and smuggling, means stability for the average person and engenders more widespread prosperity. Capitalism might have its faults, but without it the whole system collapses, and those people in the shadows, the already-starving people I noticed so keenly this time as I passed through the airport, quickly become skeletons, sacrificed to a world gone nuts.
I awoke on the morning after my arrival to begin a day just like a thousand others I’d spent in Yemen. One of my security guys, Abdulghani, was waiting outside the villa where I was staying. It was in the neighborhood of Bayt Bous, a ritzy enclave near Hadda on the south side of Sana’a, squeezed between the Presidential Palace and the jagged slag-heap mountains that rise in the west.
Abdulghani was a trusted employee. I’d hired and trained him myself through Universal Eagles. He still was moonlighting with me, earning a bit of extra money in his downtime from his day job as a Counterterrorism Unit (CTU) Yemeni Special Forces soldier. He was in his mid-twenties, twenty-four or twenty-five maybe, tall, strongly muscled, friendly, with all his family living in Sana’a. When I hired him for Universal, I’d known he was CTU already because it was on his application, but this didn’t cause any alarm. Moonlighting had become common practice in Yemen since military pay came neither regularly nor in large enough quantities for soldiers to make a decent living. Also, since Abdulghani worked for the CTU, and since Yemen’s CTU had been trained through the very program I’d helped reconstitute and run while our Special Forces weren’t allowed in country, I knew he was professional and had no question about his loyalty. Loyalty was part of his training, and he had been going into battle against al-Qaeda, time after time, with American advisors right alongside him. If I couldn’t trust him, whom could I trust? We were on the same side.
A few other escorts and armed guards accompanied us, regular guys. They changed from day to day. I remember the names of more than a few of these guards. One of them was Abdulghani’s assistant, Mohammed Jaboh. Another was named Saif al-Abasi. And then there was Tamim. All three were Special Forces—or CTU-trained guys. Abdulghani was the tallest. Tamim clocked in at about my size, a little stockier; Saif was short like Tamim and me but skinnier. None of them spoke a word of English except “Yes, sir,” and they only knew this because, when I trained them at Universal, we’d drill, and I’d be yelling and screaming at them along with other instructors before saying, in English, “Do you understand?” They’d have to say, “Yes, sir,” loudly in English in reply.
Another thing about these guys, which goes back to the tribal nature of Yemen, is that they were all from the city of Taizz in the South. They’d been recruited into Universal on the recommendation of one of the commanders in the Special Forces, himself from Taizz, there to work for the chairman of Universal, Alwan al-Shaibani, also hailing from Taizz. This meant they were mostly Sunni and mostly lighter skinned, and they were held together not just by bonds of pay or unit esprit but by tribal and familial relationships. These guys were blood. And the blood system operated in, even permeated, all of Yemeni—and most Arab—society this way: you got your guards from your tribes and your city, you got your job through similar patronage, and in turn you were expected to become a patron and benefactor to those around you when and if the opportunity arose.
By Yemeni standards, the first day after my arrival went pretty normally, maybe even lulling me into a false sense of security.
At the BAT villa, I used the kitchen to serve up some food we had ordered and the guards had brought from outside our compound. I spent a couple hours working at a computer to type things up, then went over to the Universal Office for the rest of the morning before finally breaking for lunch.
Abdulghani and his team lounged outside the villa waiting for me, should I need to travel. In order to leave my villa, I had to have Abdulghani’s guys with me: they dressed like spies or like characters from a Jason Bourne movie—black sunglasses, handguns concealed under nice suit coats, no long guns visible, earpieces if they could get them—and drove shiny, expensive Land Cruisers.
On the second or third day of this routine, we were stopped by some Houthi tribal militia at a checkpoint just a small distance from our villa, in the diplomatic and high-class neighborhood called Hadda. Three or four child soldiers manned this checkpoint, taking fistfuls of bribes and lifting and lowering the little pipe they’d set up between two barrels as a barrier. One older, more senior guy lounged on the side of the road, chewing qat in the shade. The youngsters harassed us in a very practiced and methodical way. They took us out of our Land Cruisers. They checked me over especially well and found out that I was packing a handgun.
I told them I had a license to carry a weapon.
They said, “Those licenses aren’t lawful anymore. Not from the former government.”
Things started to escalate.
They were going to take the gun, maybe even arrest me, but Abdulghani pulled the older guard aside and “negotiated” the gun back—without paying for it. We were allowed to go on our merry way. But I noticed that, most strangely, Abdulghani hadn’t even bribed the guards with qat money. A bribe would have been the expected thing. It would have been the normal thing in Yemen. It’s what I probably would have tried to do if the situation continued to get worse. But he didn’t pay anything at all.
The following day two cars followed us home from a similar trip around town. Right before we reached my villa in Bayt Bous, they pulled us over. This was an actual police car, not just some trumped-up jalopy. Blue and red lights flashing, siren going off, just like a police stop in America.
I was thinking right away, These must be friendlies, because, first of all, my guards wouldn’t stop if they were at all concerned that it could get ugly. They’d just keep going and dare the police, or the militia masquerading as police, to try to shoot us while we drove. Why stop and make yourself an easier target?
This reassured me. Friendlies just want to harass you and extort a few dollars. There are definite signs as to whether someone is friendly or not—and these signs applied both to Yemeni tribesmen in general and to the city’s new Houthi overlords, who were, after all, not much more than country folk. First of all, if they’re after you and just want to get you, they won’t try to pull you over; they’ll ambush and just start shooting or bombing. Second, the number of people in the truck or the car makes a big difference too. If the truck is stolen, there’ll be twenty people in it, crunched in so that the whole back is just one mass of arms and legs. If a group with twenty people in their truck stops you, they’ll likely take your vehicle to ease the pressure. It makes sense. And, in the context of Sana’a at that time, might definitely meant right.
Another thing that made me think these were friendlies was that they turned their lights on to pull us over pretty quickly. If these were another sort of “unfriendly”—say from one of the intelligence organizations or members of an al-Qaeda affiliate—then they’d case us for a while to assess whether they could take us or not. In that situation the follow would have lasted a lot longer; maybe they’d even scope us for a few days.
Real police would be quicker about things, and they’d
just have a few men with them, say two in front, two in the backseat, maybe three standing in the back bed of the truck manning the heavier, fifty-caliber weapon if they had one. The two police vehicles involved in this incident weren’t even little trucks with big machine guns. They were just sedans. How big of a threat could they pose?
All the signs pointed to a simple police stop.
Indeed, when the doors of the police car opened, uniformed policemen got out. They came up to see us. And they made us get out of our vehicles just like the Houthis had done at the checkpoint the day before. They searched us and took our weapons. But this time they began talking right away about how bad it was that they hadn’t gotten their qat allotment, so I knew it was more a matter of extortion than anything. I knew they just wanted qat. I knew Abdulghani wouldn’t have to use any special magic to get us away without a bribe: when the system works a certain way, you just pay the bribes and keep things within the range of normal behavior.
So I said, “I’m not paying extortion to you but here’s a personal gratitude gift—chew qat today on me.”
I slipped the leader of this police unit 5,000 Yemeni riyals, about $25, enough to buy nice qat for both cars of policemen. Prices for qat had fallen substantially since the Houthis took over. No one had money anymore, or what they had, they hoarded, so buying bags for 400 to 500 riyals rather than 1,000 riyals was more normal.
They gave me my gun back, but I knew more incidents like this would happen, likely every time I tried to move around town, because word was getting out that I was a mark.
The fifth day we didn’t leave the villa because Saudi Arabia and its coalition started bombing the city. This was the beginning of the Operation Decisive Storm campaign.
I stayed in the villa pretty much the whole time for the next few days. The Saudi bombing began in Faj Attan, a neighborhood near us but also adjacent to a military depot built into the side of the cliff. We could see Saudi jets scream in from the roof of our villa. Antiaircraft fire everywhere made an entrancing but macabre show. Of course the Yemenis shot nothing down, because their antiaircraft systems were so old. But still it made a good show, even as the bombs walked closer and closer to me.
The same day that I holed up in my villa, I got a call from another American—I think the only other American who had come back to Sana’a. The guy’s name was Scott Darden. He worked for Transoceanic, and he and I had been in touch over the phone and had met once in Dubai before we came into the country.
I answered the phone, and Scott said, “They’re bombing the shit out of the area.” At that time he was staying in the Transoceanic guesthouse and office in Hadda. He was nervous. I could hear it in his voice, not just in the expletives but in the way his throat seemed to be constricted, his words pitched a note or two higher than normal. “This is fucking scary. What should we do?”
“We’re shit out of luck,” I said, because I had just found out that the airport was closed, the runway bombed and potholed, so no flights could come or go. The United Nations was still there, watching, reporting, moderating where it could, trying to calm the two sides down. Just a handful of guys were working in the UN compound though, minimal manning. I was on the phone with them and coordinating through them, hoping they still had a way out.
Al’a, a Jordanian, was my main contact and the guy I was speaking to on the phone just then. I think there were also a few French guys. The rest were native Yemenis, holding down the fort. UN planes would be the only ones allowed to come in or out over the next couple days, taking big risks as they did, but somehow managing to get most of the remaining expats out. In fact, the Saudis issued a warning that any plane in the air, other than those UN planes, would be shot down.
I sent my bodyguards to go get Scott. He came to the BAT villa. The ride across town occurred right during a barrage of shelling, and his face was pale when he arrived. As soon as he got to my place, we received news that a shell had hit near his Transoceanic office and had blown all the glass in, shattering every window.
Scott was a big guy with reddish-blond hair, five foot nine or ten, a couple hundred pounds; he looked a bit like a friendly Grizzly Adams. He also had a good sense of humor, which would be useful over the coming months when we were held in cells adjacent to or near one another. Importantly, Scott had also converted to Islam about ten years earlier—Sunni, I think—and he had studied to make himself nearly fluent in Arabic. Scott’s job required him to be in Yemen as the country manager for Transoceanic, at least when he could, but for the most part he lived in Dubai with his family, a situation very like my own.
I had entered Yemen ahead of Scott by two days on this trip. I’d advised Transoceanic that it wouldn’t be wise for him to follow me. Even if Scott and I both spoke Arabic and were Muslim, I still had an advantage over him. I looked the part, so things were less risky for me. But Transoceanic stood firm in its insistence that it was essential for Scott to come, even though everyone else had pulled out.
The “fireworks” on Faj Attan continued from that point on. By the second day of the air campaign, the bombings had moved up right behind us on the mountain, so we could feel the earth shake as well as hear the explosions. The Saudis pummeled Faj Attan and Hadda nonstop over the next couple days, destroying everything. These were heavy bombs, and they were dropped with impunity. The planes would come in on a first pass, two planes together, and drop some bombs. The ground would shake. Then four or five minutes later, they’d circle back for another pass, dropping more bombs. Then they’d go home, only to return after a few hours for another flyover. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. All the Yemenis thought this was a very cowardly style of war, and the Saudis made these runs in a ruthlessly leisurely manner because they knew the Yemeni antiaircraft guns couldn’t touch them.
Around this time, I got a phone call from one of my operations managers from Universal, who was in Jordan at that time. He wanted to check up on me, and he told me to be careful because he had heard the Saudis would be bombing a lot of Houthi posts, not just the big military bases.
I told him that I knew. I’d heard the same thing. And I was witnessing it. I told him we were taking precautions and hiding, and he emphasized over and over again that I should take care of myself. I knew that my phones were tapped, so this worried me. This sounded a lot like advance warning of attacks, like I was somehow “in the know,” and I feared—rightly so—that it would raise some eyebrows among the people listening.
But before that came into play, word got out that we had money and were easy to shake down. The next visit we received involved a crew of Houthis coming to our villa.
We’d just sent Abdulghani out for food. Several of us were sitting upstairs in the majlis or mafraj, a room with big windows on the top story that is unique to Yemeni architecture, designed ages ago to perch on top of the ancient Yemeni mudbrick skyscrapers, some of which are seven and even ten stories tall, so that qat chewers can relax, enjoy the spectacle of the city below, and watch the daylight recede over the mountain faces.
That day it wasn’t just sunset. It wasn’t just qat. We smoked the shisha pipe, but we were mainly gathered together to watch the Saudi fireworks, our new pastime. It was Scott, me, a Kuwaiti-Yemeni guy named Ali, and Moataz, my Syrian friend who worked with me as an advance scout for British American Tobacco.1
We finished up in that room and came downstairs to the living room. Scott got out his computer and started working. I went into another room and did the same, sending off a report to my supervisors at British American Tobacco to tell them that all was okay.
A few minutes later I got a call on the intercom from the guards at the front door: “Mr. Sam, we have some officers here. They aren’t in uniform. They want to come in and inspect the villa for contraband.”
This, we had heard, had become a normal enough thing since the Houthis took over. At the expat offices and villas—manned now almost exclusively by skeleton crews of Yemeni local employees since nearly all the expats had left—co
ps and intelligence personnel would come periodically to check for contraband. In a lot of ways, it was just a more sophisticated checkpoint stop. They looked for alcohol, drugs, potentially pornographic CDs. They’d confiscate a few things, wait for the appropriate bribe to be shuffled under the table, and then leave. Up until that point both Transoceanic and BAT had been lucky or just too obscure to be targeted—even before Scott and I returned, our people reported that the villas had been neither visited nor searched. Maybe we were just due for our shakedown.
I didn’t do anything in particular to get the place ready for them. Even if I wanted to, I didn’t have time. By the time I said, “Yes, they can come in,” they had come through the courtyard to the front door of the villa.
They had three vehicles outside blocking my gate: a Humvee previously donated by the United States to the CTU—Abdulghani’s unit—and two Land Cruisers just like the ones we drove around in. A number of men secured the whole area, spreading out around the house. Five of these guys had US-patterned desert Marine camouflage as well as M4s. This told me they were actual CTU guys. Their tactics and full suite of commo gear confirmed it: this was an American-trained and, at least until recently, American-financed unit.
Whether wrong or right to trust them, I saw their gear and relaxed. Just like at the police stop the day before, inwardly I told myself, Hey, these are the good guys. I couldn’t help it.
Three officers came into the villa itself. They wore slightly more traditional clothes. Rather than suits, they had on long thobes with jambiya knives in their belts. One wore a Western suit jacket over this. The other two did not. All three were still chewing qat from their evening session.
As soon as they walked in, they said, “We’re NSB.” I didn’t know these guys personally. Their claim of being from the National Security Bureau, though sensical, wasn’t ironclad. They could say whatever they wanted. I had no way to know.
Just as expected, they said, “We’re here to check the villa for contraband.”