by Sam Farran
We chose that sura because it gives you faith in God and has been used by those in dire straits since first the words were uttered by the Prophet. The first phrase specifically states that God does not burden a person more than he (or she) can handle, so it is perfect in trying times. We recited this verse to steel ourselves, to calm ourselves, and to focus on truth and the comfort of truth during that darkest of dark times.
The door opened.
All four of us cell mates stared at each other rather than at the guards who came in. The odds seemed simple: a one-in-four chance that they’d take you. You don’t want to be that one, but you don’t want it to be any of the others either, since you’ve struck up a bond together. A one-in-four chance seemed likely, at least at first, though as the weeks and months wore on, I came to realize that the others were rarely taken out: Haitham was serving a long sentence; they had no need to question him. The others proved less interesting than me, both of them also sentenced and simply being held there. The only person they came and got, regularly, once or twice or three times a week, ended up being me.
Even now, as I think about it and talk through what that time was like, I return in my mind to the clanking of the steel door. It just reverberates in me, like the opening of a death row cell when a prisoner is about to be led to their execution. Truly, death row is the right comparison. I never knew, I couldn’t know, whether any of those walks to the interrogation room would be my last walk of all. Haitham and the others filled our days with stories of people never coming back, of how they—the remaining prisoners—could not know whether the disappeared person had been released, or taken somewhere else, or killed. Especially if they took you out at night, Haitham insisted, there would be a higher possibility of them doing something to you and then dumping you on the side of the road. In Sana’a you don’t find a soul on the road after 10 p.m., except criminals or people in government or security. The Houthis, and the NSB whom they had co-opted, completely controlled those nighttime streets, so no one could question them. No one could find you, or if they did, if they found you—a dead thing among rags and rats and garbage in the gutter—no one would likely lift a hand to do anything about you. Dogs would just scatter your bones, and children would be warned not to play in the area, your last purpose in the world being simply to dissolve away, to rot, and to serve as a reminder to anyone in the area of what happens to those who don’t obey the Houthis’ desires.
The guards came in.
I still hoped, against hope and betting against my cell mates, that I wouldn’t be the one chosen.
But, of course, they called my name. “Mr. Sam, let’s go.”
My heart dropped. I didn’t want to get up. But there was no escaping it.
I saw relief on the faces of my cell mates.
For Haitham it didn’t matter. He’d been sentenced and was just serving his time. But the other two weren’t as certain. They’d been called out, taken down the hall, interrogated. The wave, the exhalation of relief that coursed through their bodies, made me as nervous as anything else. I’d had a taste of interrogation, of ear slapping and being bagged and questioned, but had I experienced the worst of it yet?
The guards lifted me to my feet. They forced my hands out and shackled me in big steel cuffs from which no Houdini-like escape was possible. Instead of putting a bag over my head, they blindfolded me, tightening it really well so that I couldn’t see anything. They took all the precautions, even though the jail itself gave nothing away, no windows, no identification, just a place that seemed dislocated from time and space.
The guards each took one of my arms and helped me out the door, turning me down the wide hallway. We walked perhaps a minute or so, some twists and turns, though we stayed on the same floor. Later, when I was moved to a cell on the second floor, I learned they had an interrogation room on each floor, which kept them from ever having to lead a blindfolded man like me up or down stairs.
We came to another room, and they led me in, leaving me standing in the middle.
That room wasn’t too bad. In fact, the time spent standing there, the moments between the guards leaving and the beginning of the interrogation, stays with me as one of the most enjoyable aspects of the prison. The interrogation room had windows. Or at least one window. So I often felt a breeze from it, so nice, such a change from the cloistered and stuffy atmosphere in the jail cell room. Even though I stood there shackled, waiting for my interrogators to enter, each time I came to that spot and that moment, I let the gentle wind and the freshness of the outdoor air carry me away.
▪ ▪ ▪
WHILE THE BREEZE IN that room took me different places at different times, often I fantasized that it had wafted me to the Corniche in Beirut, that long luxurious walk along the Mediterranean Sea, with the teeming, pulsing city on one side and the blue of the water on the other. I’d place myself, in my memory, somewhere along that strand, next to the lighthouse or the famous arched Raouché Rocks in the sea. At those places, and a hundred more along the walkway, a similar wind blows inward from the sea, bringing with it the sound of laughter from children playing on the barnacled rocks, swimming in the crystal waters, diving for shells, among fishermen with long cane poles and baskets of mullet.
Even though I knew what might be coming next in that interrogation room, the breeze allowed me a sense of escape, of disappearing, of being somewhere else even for a little while. Standing there (not being allowed to sit), my mind nevertheless escaped to imagine and remember a better place for the whole fifteen or twenty minutes they’d delay, thinking they were toying with me, some of them coming and going from the room, getting themselves organized, watching me. I didn’t mind. Let them do what they want. They’d say, “Don’t move,” and they’d make me stand at semi-attention. But even as my brain raced and my heart beat through my shirt, part of me journeyed far away, imagining the Corniche.
I’d think about sunsets at a little café right by the rocks by the lighthouse. Visiting there, I’d go to that place and sit for long periods, watching and listening to the waves, smoking shisha and saying nothing, or joking with friends if I felt more social.
The place has a timelessness to it, having endured conquests and empires. The Phoenicians probably sat there, enjoying that same breeze, then the Egyptians when they came and the Greeks under Alexander. The Romans. The Byzantines. Saladin retook the area from the Crusaders. Then the Ottomans came. All these people, all these cultures, one by one had experienced moments like that of intense peace and satisfaction—perhaps even sometimes, individuals like me, who would later be imprisoned and tortured, would remember Beirut and the way the breeze came from the sea. That gave me comfort. It made me feel not alone, at least until the door slammed and my three interrogators came in, giving me the rudest of rude awakenings.
▪ ▪ ▪
JUST LIKE THE FIRST TIME and like most such sessions from there on out, my opponents numbered three. Only one or two did the talking. Always the third remained in the background, sitting, asking whispered questions, directing the work. The two talkers would play good cop and bad cop. The whisperer either outranked the other two or served as some sort of monitor.
The first of them started out the session by introducing himself. “I’m Abu Saleem,” he said, using a kunya, the traditional Arabic means of identifying oneself as the father of one’s firstborn son, in this case, “father of Saleem.” It made a good nom de guerre. It prevented me from knowing too much about him, like his tribe or his identity, though I could be reasonably sure that he was a father, even if Saleem were a stand-in name for his son.
This man told me about himself, reintroducing himself from our first session on my arrival in the jail. He did this to soften me up, to humanize himself, and to try a little bit to win me over. “I am with the NSB. I’ve had your file ever since you came back to Yemen.”
“I know. I understand who you are.”
“Look, I don’t want you to go through any of this. I don’t want any of us
to go through any of this. I don’t care about having you here. Just tell me what your mission is from the United States government and I’m going to make you a deal to forget about it and let you go.”
I didn’t have an answer for this, anything different to say than I had said before. All I could do was protest: “What mission are you talking about? You say you know ninety-five percent, but the other five percent is nothing. There is no mission. I’m here for the specific reason to clear up my personal situation, get my people out, and leave.”
No second question came. I could feel something like a current of electricity pass through the room, a charged look exchanged among the three men. Then, bam, totally without warning, a stick slapped across my shoulder, like a cane or a branch, the feeling of it like a hundred beestings at once.
“See! That’s your fault,” the bad cop said. “You’re doing this to yourself. You cooperate, we’re not going to do anything to you.”
The good cop, more softly, stated his earlier proposition again: “Tell us what you’re doing, and we’ll let you go. We’ll even guarantee you transportation from here to the borders of Saudi Arabia and release you to the Saudis. Just admit to what you’re doing here.”
“Again, what are you talking about?” I said.
“We know you’re getting specific instructions and getting warnings from the American Embassy in Jordan,” he said. “Right here, on this date [he mentioned the same date that the bombings had started] right on this date you received a call from…”
Indeed I had gotten a call from a friend, a Jordanian who had been my operations director in Yemen and had gone to Jordan for medical attention. When the bombings started, he called just to check on me. These bastards had intercepted that phone call and had somehow come to the conclusion that it equaled some sort of warning.
“You know very well this call is from the American Embassy in Jordan.”
This was pure fantasy. I had a hard time not laughing, not making fun of them. If it weren’t for the stickman behind me, ready to swing again, I probably would have.
“It’s not,” I said. “It’s not from the embassy or from anyone else associated with the bombings. This guy worked for me. He was one of my employees. His name is Ismail al-Kaylani. He was calling just to check up on me. He was just worried.”
“No, he’s not. We intercepted the call. He’s telling you to take shelter because the coalition is going to bomb here and here and here.”
“No, he was just telling me to be cautious, like any concerned friend might do.”
“You were sleeping in the basement when we found you. They were giving you the places they were going to bomb. You were sleeping in the basement because you were worried and because you had advance warning.”
“No, Ismail was just telling me to be cautious, in general, nothing specific, telling me to be cautious because the coalition is bombing everywhere and just be careful.”
“We traced it to the US Embassy…”
The conversation went back and forth like this. I thought, for the briefest while, that I might make some headway, that I might clear the whole situation up, prove to them that Ismail’s call was innocent, just a normal call, just what a friend might do. But whenever I protested, I’d get whacked with the stick. The fourth time the stick broke; I heard it crack and break, and they went and got another one.
Every time I’d say no, every time I’d tell them that I had no advanced warning about the bombings, they’d whack me again.
They tried a new line of questioning: “Where’d you get the information that there are ten thousand Pakistani troops coming to the border of Saudi Arabia to invade Yemen?”
“Where’d you get that?”
“It’s right here, on the recording of you.”
This was news to me. I suspected they were listening to my calls. I suspected that they were recording my conversations. But now they’d given me proof.
I thought about this claim for a few minutes, thought through why—if at all—I had been talking about Pakistani troops. Then, ah-ha, I remembered—and hoped once again that I might convince them of my utter, stupid innocence, that all this was just terrible coincidence and that I wished, truly wished, that the Saudis had never started bombing them.
I said, “If you notice what time the call is, I was watching Al Arabiya news, and just happened to be reading the ticker tape that scrolls along the bottom of the newscast. I was just reading it aloud from the TV, and telling someone that on the phone, and anyway, if I remember right, those troops weren’t being put there to invade Yemen but just to protect the Haramayn, the Two Holy Mosques in Mecca and Medina. Go back and watch Al Arabiya. It was public information at that time. I had no special information, and that will prove it.”
“No, it’s not public. It wasn’t public. It was secret info.”
“You seem too dumb to realize what’s on the news,” I said, my temper getting the better of me.
(This resulted in a good whack from the stick.)
“I can’t believe you’re asking me something stupid like that. It looks like we failed.”
(A whack from the stick again.)
“What?”
“Us Americans, we failed. I was sure we trained you guys better than that.”
That one cost me not just a whack but two whole sticks, two sticks broken across my legs, back, and front, buckling me to the ground from my standing position.
▪ ▪ ▪
THROUGH THE PAIN of the beatings, I thought about Ismail al-Kaylani.
I’d taken him under my wing, much like Yasmine, first meeting him when he was a young, bright kid of twenty-three or twenty-four years old.
I brought him into Universal Eagles as an assistant trainer for the Canadian Nexen security contract. Then I saw his potential; I noticed that he was a really sharp guy, so had him join in some State Department–sponsored training through ITI, which I had brought to Yemen to help train the CTU, the same guys who had snatched and bagged me. I’d arranged to put Ismail and one other good civilian colleague named Muataz al-Sari through the driving and shooting portions of the ITI training, right alongside the CTU. Muataz al-Sari was bagged by the CTU three days after I was just because of his affiliation with me. He ended up staying seven months in the same jail.
Ismail worked for me in Yemen but had ended up in Jordan the previous week, the circumstances working out well for him so that he didn’t also get taken. The previous week, on a day off, he had come to the office to pick up something. He was heading to a wedding, I believe, and a fight broke out between two guards. Ismail, being one of the supervisors by then, tried to break up the fight. He got pushed, twisting as he went down, and landed awkwardly, breaking his leg. We had to fly him to Jordan to get medical attention.
Although he timed things perfectly to avoid the Houthi raid on our compound, he watched from his convalescent hospital room as the Saudi bombing started and so placed that fateful call to me, concerned about me and Muataz. He did nothing more than a normal friend and good employee might do, but the timing made it look like I was receiving these “advanced warning” calls from Jordan—at least in the eyes of the paranoid NSB agents who had been tasked by the Houthis to find out anything, anything at all, that might be useful to defend themselves from the Saudi planes that circled with impunity over Sana’a’s skies.
▪ ▪ ▪
THE BEATING ENDED AFTER about two hours, when, half-conscious, I couldn’t be forced back onto my feet anymore.
They knew they could get nothing more from me, not in that session. They continued talking to me. They continued asking all the same questions, again and again, but I had lost the ability to respond.
They dragged me back to my cell.
They threw me in.
Just like on my first arrival, I couldn’t stand up.
The guys—Haitham and the other two—looked at me and saw how much pain I was in. I told them what had happened. They struggled to help me take off the silly Bermuda sh
orts and found that both of my legs were black and blue, with wicked red lines showing where more bruises would emerge.
For the next week, I “relaxed” as they let me recover a bit. No more beatings. No more interrogations for a little while. I was their new toy, and they had all the time in the world with me. That grating steel door never opened, no one came in or out, only the food hatch moved, morning, noon, and night.
CHAPTER 14
RESCUE EFFORTS
THE WATER FOR our prison cells, for the whole building—as with most buildings in Yemen—came from a tank mounted on the roof of the facility. Water isn’t a public resource, as in most of America, but gets provided privately. This worked to our advantage, because the Houthis, in establishing themselves as the ruling power in Sana’a, couldn’t—couldn’t really be expected to—figure out all the systems: how to keep the electricity running, the roads clean, the government functioning, the gas and food rations intact, the airport open, and every water tank adorning the roof of every government building filled.
How was this to our advantage? Wouldn’t a lack of water be a bad thing, resulting in some thirsty hours or lengthy times without the ability to flush our toilets or clean ourselves?
Those deprivations—even the lack of drinking water—ended up being well worth it. Because when the tank on the roof ran out of water, the pipes between the jail cells dried out and became our only method of communication with one another.
Haitham, having been prisoner longest, first demonstrated this on a day not too long after my arrival.
The toilet in our bathroom gurgled.
The faucet in the bathroom belched and gave off a foul odor.