by Sam Farran
I shrugged. “Okay, go right ahead. If you need anything, we’ll walk you around.”
But then one of the NSB guys must have given a sign, a nod, something we didn’t see. Two of the CTU guys grabbed us and took our phones. I had wanted to walk away and make a call, let people outside Yemen, back at headquarters, know what was going on, but they grabbed me and prevented that.
They gave our phones to the officers, turned us around, and led us back through the entry foyer of the villa, past the pool table and couches, over to the dining table at the center of the big open downstairs room.
They sat Scott and me at the dining table facing each other. They took our computers and made us put our hands on the table. They told us to sit still. Every time we wanted to say something, they’d say, “Shut up,” and the armed guy behind me would threaten to smack me. Most haunting for me personally, they referred to themselves as “Marines,” not knowing that I was an actual Marine. “Just relax,” they said, playing it cool. “We’re only checking. Don’t interfere.”
We sat at that table a long time—easily more than an hour. I fumed a bit about the Marine thing. I was thinking, Do you actually know what it means to be a Marine? I couldn’t say this aloud, because anytime Scott or I tried to talk, they’d jab us with their rifle butts, but I thought to myself about boot camp. If you only knew the yellow footprints we all have to stand on that first day of Boot… If you’d only walked that path. It’s the first thing you do, standing there on the footprints where you get your first good hazing by the drill instructors.
Of course I couldn’t help but dwell on the label of “Marine.” And, from there, similar thoughts also crossed my mind. They flooded in, as Scott and I waited and as our minds were left to wander. For instance, Lebanese people are never on time. Ever since the Marines beat it into me that I needed to show up ten minutes early for events, I’m the first one to arrive at any Lebanese event or party by like forty-five minutes. I end up helping set up, helping cook, helping the hosts and the maids and the DJs arrange their gear. So I’ve had to relearn my Lebanese time management. I laughed about this, but I was also painfully aware that while the show-up-early Marine attitude could be a source of social awkwardness, the Muslim thing could be, and would now almost certainly play out as, a similar strange cultural cross-pollination.
Time passed really slowly at that table.
I wasn’t nervous. I was still laughing, in a very dark and quasi-confident way, inside myself. This was just another Yemeni thing. This was just another attempt at extortion. This was just part of the price of being there, of helping get the country restarted. I’d have to deal with this and withstand it and carry on. I’d have to show up early, in good Marine fashion, and then be smooth and stay late, as my Lebanese blood allowed me to do. I’d have to pray a little bit and disguise myself.
The time passed slowly though.
The officers went through every room, upstairs, downstairs, the basement. All of a sudden, we saw them start to bag everything. Grabbing things, putting things in garbage bags, not tagging or separating, just taking it all. No labels on anything. They took computers. They took my gun, a Taurus 9mm. There was a safe in the general manager’s office, shoulder high. They said, “Open the safe.”
“I don’t know the combo,” I said, my first lie.
The safe held emergency cash, and I think there was a lot of alcohol in it too, because the whole top of the half wall between the pool table and kitchen was stacked with twenty or twenty-five Johnny Walker Black Label boxes of six bottles each. But there weren’t any bottles.
So I added, “There’s no alcohol in the villa. Management probably put it all in the safe before they fled.”
They nodded. This made sense. I decided to push my luck a bit and asked them to give me my phone so I could call the general manager and get the combo.
They said, “No, you’re not talking to anyone.” Instead, they brought in a dolly, hoisted the safe onto it, and carted it out. They took the whole damn thing.
They also got my advance pay allowance from Universal, $5,000 in cash, US money, which I’d left in my briefcase at my bedside. I had other Yemeni money squirreled away too. They took it all. Then they took my watch, my ring, my wallet.
“What the hell is going on here?” I said.
“Don’t worry. You’re going to get everything back,” they said.
But I started to get angry. “You went through my stuff, and I want to know what’s going on!”
The officers were trying to act nice. “We’ve just been ordered to check everything.”
Everything was taken, even the computer for the security monitors and the internet router. They ripped that stuff right out of the walls of the villa.
I was getting more and more uncertain now. I wanted to believe them. I wanted to believe their good-guy act. But everything was starting to point in a much more dangerous direction. Part of me wanted to fight. The other part wanted to play it cool, just in case this could all be cleared up in a few hours, after I made a few calls, talked to the right people.
They were acting the part of the good guy because they didn’t want us to get violent. But the act had slowly started to fall apart.
“Get up,” they said. “Walk outside with us.”
“What’s going on outside?”
“Need you to help us look around the perimeter.”
“Okay.”
I got up. I really didn’t have much choice.
They told Scott to get up.
“Why’s he got to get up?” I asked. “It’s my villa, my company’s villa. He’s just a guest.”
“Nope,” they said, “we need him to look around with us too.”
When we walked out the front door, one of the 4 × 4 Land Cruisers had pulled into the driveway inside the compound. As soon as we started down the steps, the guard pushed me toward the vehicle.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Put your hands up.”
They brought out heavy-duty metal handcuffs, not chain cuffs but the kind with a solid metal bar connecting either side. I started to get violent then. I started thrashing as they pushed me from behind with their rifles, crosswise, right across my upper shoulders to knock me forward.
I resisted, but two people took my hands. One of the CTU guys came and clamped on those cuffs. I resisted moving forward. Another guy came up from behind and bagged me over my head. I didn’t see it coming, but suddenly I was in the dark, and they were cinching the cord of the bag around my neck, not too tight but dark, suffocatingly dark.
Oh shit, this ain’t good at all! I thought, as all those videos of ISIS executions played through my head at once.
They pushed me to the door of the Land Cruiser and shoved me in. One person was in the backseat already. Another grabbed me from the front seat, and together they pulled me in, a very professional and practiced bit of teamwork. Scott was put in another 4 × 4. He went through the exact same process, cuffed and bagged and shoved forward at gunpoint. I was wearing a shirt, black jacket, and dockers. I thought about those clothes and how long I might now be forced to wear them as the ride began.
Footnote
1 Moataz would be bagged by the Houthis a few days after me and would spend seven months in captivity too.
CHAPTER 11
CELL ONE
AFTER THEY HAD the shackles on me, after they’d bagged me from behind and shoved me into the Land Cruiser, I didn’t see Scott for the next 120 days. I didn’t see another American for all that time. And I didn’t see the sun or spend any time outdoors for the first 120 days.
As soon as my captors started driving, I put my mind into gear, into one of the modes I had learned during various training scenarios that had been designed and rehearsed and beat into our heads for exactly this situation. You never think, during such training, that it’ll actually be you wearing the almost-stereotypical noose-like bag over your head. It’s always someone else, a vicarious experience, and the lessons
they learned in surviving their captivity (or not surviving it) always seem to have some distance from you personally, some sort of otherworldly dislocation from the matters of day-to-day life that preoccupy us in normal times. Our training had been case studies, PowerPoint presentations, classroom exercises, and then practical exercises—getting followed, evading and escaping, enduring beatings and interrogations, learning ways to stay true to ourselves and our country even during the worst of times. All of that rehearsal and study replayed itself in my head, even as the most immediate part of my mind still said, over and over, This isn’t actually happening to me. I’m just a guy doing my job, a guy with kids and a home, a guy minding my own business.
As the irony of thinking about a hostage situation while also being in a hostage situation wrapped itself around me, the active part of my mind did the things I had trained it to do. I knew the area around my villa very well. I had wandered and driven around that suburb of Hadda many times, in many situations. I started counting the minutes on straightaways, the time of travel, the turns and corners along the streets and alleyways we followed. These twists and turns were difficult for a while, but they led through my own neighborhood, and I knew pretty well that once we left the neighborhood itself, we would have little choice but to merge onto the oddly named “50 Meter Road,” so called because of its width. It formed a belt around and through Hadda and so was almost unavoidable. Despite some disorientation, I felt the Land Cruiser approach it, speed up onto it, and turn to the right, the north. I guessed at our velocity and counted the seconds, expecting a speedbump in the road about five or six hundred meters farther on. We struck that with a gratifying jolt. Then we came to a roundabout I knew, then another roundabout. I was tracking. I hadn’t lost hope of knowing my whereabouts.
Northbound we continued on 50 Meter Road, and even as I concentrated on my location, I kept up a steady stream of protests and questions with my captors: “Where the hell are you taking me?” “What the devil is going on?”
I was trying to create chaos. But my abductors didn’t let themselves get ruffled. They just said, “Ukhras! La tatukullum”—shut the hell up.
“Ishfi,” I’d say—what’s going on.
“L-wain, makhidthni?”—where are you taking me?
I kept this up for a minute or two, but they quickly grew tired of hearing from me. Without much overt anger—really, more professionally than I ever would have expected—they started stripping my jacket off, my shirt, and then most of my other clothes as well: belt, pants, socks, shoes. I was left wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. This was done as a punishment for talking, but also as a way to further cow me and, I later figured, also to strip me of any tracking devices. I tried to fight it, but when they got out their knives and started cutting the fabric and tearing it with their hands, I thought better of resisting or even moving too much. They did not hit me. They were getting their way, even though I was struggling, and their professionalism was both somewhat reassuring—as I thought, maybe, just maybe, I was dealing with people who could be reasoned with—and also somewhat chilling. Trained killers. Definitely obeying orders and doing so in a way much more like a butcher practicing his trade than a bunch of kids up to hijinks. For my part, I decided that I must walk a fine line between provoking them and continuing to register some sort of resistance. This meant a lot of screaming back and forth but no further escalation.
They were in control. They knew it. My resistance wasn’t so much an attempt to change that fact, in the moment, but to set the stage for later situations—thinking I might get a chance to settle scores or speak to a supervisor and lodge a complaint.
That was, of course, wishful thinking. But it was in my mind. All of this could still be a mix up. It could still be a friend playing a practical joke—though a bad one. It could be over in an hour or two once I provided explanations and proof of my innocence for whatever crime they imagined I had committed. I resisted their stripping away of my clothes as a means of posturing for later, holding out hope that I might, indeed, regain the position of moral and physical authority I once had, back when I likely trained these personnel or their bosses and instructors, back when I had been the one initiating the programs that produced the sort of professional maneuvering and dispassion they now used against me.
When we reached the third roundabout northward along 50 Meter Road, we circled it three or four times. I knew we were at Khawlan Street, but I no longer could be sure which way we faced, which exit we might take.
To make matters worse, they stopped the vehicle and pulled me out, right there in the middle of the circle, in the middle of the night, in my T-shirt and underwear, still with the bag over my head and handcuffs on my wrists. Probably no one was there, but I couldn’t get a grip well enough in my disorientation to listen for other voices. I yelled out, but my calls focused on my captors still rather than calling for help. I knew no stranger would try to assist me. That isn’t the Yemeni way—or the smart way when dealing with armed professionals.
My yelling did have one definite effect: they started to beat me.
I fought them, trying to break away. But they held me, grabbing me by the back of my T-shirt. The buttstock of a weapon hit me in the high back. A couple more blows followed, one to the lower back, forcing me to get into a different truck, an American Humvee. I knew what it was in an instant. Anyone who has served in the US military over the last thirty years knows a Humvee in a heartbeat: that GMC engine, that gritty industrial paint, the odd shape of the interior. I almost laughed aloud at the incongruity of my having trained these guys—if indeed they were members of Yemen’s US-supported Counterterrorism Unit (CTU), as I thought—coupled with the fact, the reinforcing fact, that now I was being transported in a Humvee donated to the CTU by the United States in order to encourage the unit to fight al-Qaeda. Ahhh, the best laid plans of mice and men!
I found that funny. But I also found it reassuring. Part of me had expected a swift end when I had been tossed out of the first Land Cruiser into the middle of the Khawlan roundabout. Part of me had expected to be made to kneel, there in the dirt, in the gutter. Part of me still imagined the feeling of the cold earth, the sounds I would have heard in my bound blindness, as one of them—whoever had been chosen as my executioner—approached and cocked the trigger of his handgun. So being tossed into another vehicle resulted in a big sigh of relief, with a stifled chuckle at the familiarity of the Humvee around me.
Also, definitely and undoubtedly, with my heartbeat racing, I lost all track of which direction we had taken. I found myself fully at their mercy. In just a matter of minutes I’d gone from in control, the occupant of a relatively opulent villa, to a creature wholly disoriented and reduced to weakness and insubstantiality.
Two of the CTU members occupied the backseats of the Humvee on either side of me, while I sat, hunched over, in the raised and cramped center space between them. One of the officers from the National Security Bureau (NSB) occupied the front passenger seat. A fourth person, probably also a CTU soldier, had been behind the wheel the whole time, evidenced by the fact that he started the vehicle moving as soon as the NSB officer settled himself.
Even though it may have been dumb, I still yelled and screamed at them. I still struggled between the two soldiers in the backseat on either side of me. The officer in the front had had enough after a minute or two of this.
He turned and said, “Ukhras, ya kelb!”—shut your mouth, dog.
Then he grabbed my face, placing his whole hand over my eyes, mouth, and nose, with the mask there as both a cover and a gag. I could not bite him. But as he shook my head, he both suffocated me and made a terrible sense of claustrophobia descend around me, a further loss of control that struck right down to the basal functions of inhaling and exhaling, of seeing and smelling, and of controlling my own head.
My hands, shackled behind me, kept me stuck in one position, and they began to lose feeling. My shoeless feet felt the cold of the Sana’a night as well as the heat
from the Humvee’s driveshaft, which rumbled away, oily, industrial, and gruff, just beneath me.
We drove on for ten or twelve more minutes. I started counting my breaths as a way to measure time. It seemed like forever, and I lost count once or twice, having to later re-create the counts and the moments I lost count, having to replay the whole experience (I had time enough to do so over and over again those next 120 days), so that I could better estimate where I had been taken: Was I still in Sana’a? Had they spirited me out of the city and into a nearby village? Had they just circled and brought me back to CTU headquarters, not so far from Hadda? Had more time slipped by than I could recall? Where was I?
Eventually we stopped, and they dragged me out again, walking me across uneven ground. That wasn’t much of a clue. All of Yemen, whether a city street or a barnyard, felt much the same way. Rocks, dirt, and garbage brushed against my shoeless toes. It felt like an open area, but they took me quickly into a structure, a fairly substantial structure made of echoing concrete and tile. I was upright, walking between the two men who had been sitting beside me in the back of the Humvee. Each of them held one of my arms. My hands remained shackled. I assumed Scott was there with me, but I didn’t hear him or see him, though I was listening.
Immediately on entering the building, they threw me into a room with a few other people inside. None of the others spoke, but I could hear them, their subtle movements. I guessed three or four in total. My captors set me down on the floor and didn’t say anything to me. I still wore only underwear, T-shirt, bag, and shackles—nothing else.
In a nearby room the CTU guards started to inventory the stuff they had confiscated from my villa, calling the name of each item out loudly so that their voices drowned out anything else that might have been happening: “Wallet. Four credit cards. Military ID. American driver’s license. Passport.”
They opened my briefcase and continued to inventory its contents: “Pens, computer, battery. Chargers. Phones. Three phones.”