The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

  Haitham stood, and with a quick check of the door and a nod to one of our other cell mates—I was still incapacitated from my most recent beating—he moved over to our bathroom corner. There he leaned forward to the mouth of the faucet, cupped his hand over the spigot, and began to speak, then twisted his head to place his ear against the faucet, listening for responses.

  This went on for a few minutes, in a strange, muted tone—not quite a whisper, because whispering wouldn’t reverberate strongly enough throughout the plumbing, but not quite a speaking voice either. Almost a growl.

  Al-Qaeda had trained its members how to use one-way radios, so operating the “pipes” came naturally to them. In quasi-military fashion they would start and stop their questions and answers with Huwwal, “over” or “okay,” as when using those radios, relaying messages from cell to cell, to the cells above, below, left, and right. Haitham seemed adept at this, as he passed messages through the chain and waited for his turn to ask questions of the network. They all knew they had only limited time, a few minutes or hours, depending on when the tank got refilled—though the guards never seemed to catch on or take any steps to shorten or stop the news and rumor relay.

  At one point, after ten or fifteen minutes of this first session, Haitham straightened up and looked at me. “There’s another new guy on the floor above us,” he said.

  My ears perked up.

  “What is his name?” I asked.

  “Shhhh,” the others said, looking to the door and then to Haitham.

  “He’s your friend,” Haitham said. “You came in together, same night. His name is Scott.”

  This struck me like a ray of light. Scott was here still. I simultaneously felt terrible for him and also hopeful. They hadn’t killed him. They hadn’t killed me. They were keeping us together. Perhaps they had a plan in mind for us. Perhaps efforts were being made—by the embassy, by the United Nations, by the diplomatic community, by our families or our governments—to negotiate our release. Even if nothing of the sort was happening, his presence made me feel much less alone. I could almost sense him, an ally, nearby.

  “Ask how he is doing,” I said.

  After a moment of speaking and a longer moment of listening, Haitham replied, “Good. He is good. Okay at least. Though he eats a lot, they say.”

  This made me laugh. Scott had the figure of a full-bodied Midwestern American, and the diet here, in this Yemeni jail, probably already was putting him into starvation mode. I hoped he was making friends with his cell mates, as I had done, even if they were mostly all, to some degree or another, linked to al-Qaeda. The alternative would be not only unpleasant for him but perhaps also deadly.

  Scott spoke Arabic fairly well. He’d been in the region for a while and had even converted to Sunni Islam, so I had to think that he would be accepted fairly well among the al-Qaeda prisoner groups. Not that all Sunnis are al-Qaeda of course, but in some ways it would be more dangerous for me, being Shi’a, than it might be for him, as a Sunni, even though he was obviously a white American man and probably—they would suspect—tied somehow to the US government. Just like Scott, I prayed with my cell mates, five times a day, every day. Most of the time I would follow rather than lead. The choice of leader for prayer just depends on who stands up. Normally a praying group allows the eldest, or the most experienced, to lead. Among my cell mates that would have been me, by at least two decades, but I usually refused because by taking over the prayer, I feared I would also assume a de facto leadership role for the group, as well as responsibility if anything went wrong, if anyone were involved in any sort of wrongdoing. I didn’t want that, not for these guys. Sunni and Shi’a prayers are the same; there’s absolutely no difference between them in performance or intent. The two branches of Islam just believe in a different line of authority from the Prophet Muhammad. My objections were not religious so much as they were practical. I wanted to keep myself somewhat at a distance from these guys. I needed their community, but I didn’t want to accidentally become a leader of that community.

  Scott—I had to believe—would pray with them regularly too, both for his own spiritual benefit and to be better accepted as part of the group. Perhaps he would even find himself confronting the same sort of leadership dilemma I did—whether to accept invitations to lead the prayer, since he would be the oldest among them just as I was. I didn’t know if he experienced that or not—though as I thought about it while biding my time in that prison cell, I imagined he might not feel the same pressures I did due to his status as a white, new convert.

  Either way, I chose my course clearly. I prayed with my cell mates but continued for the most part to abstain from leading prayer. This created tension but also drew a clear line. I participated as one of them, but I would not lead them, spiritually or in any other way.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  A WEEK PASSED BEFORE the guards came and got me again.

  Exactly the same process transpired. The door unlocked with the same bone-chilling screech of metal on metal and creaked open. The same guards handcuffed me and blindfolded me, picking me up off the floor of the cell and leading me out the door, each of them taking one of my elbows. They brought me to the same interrogation room. All of this went down just as before.

  But one big difference permeated the air, as if everything were tinged with a bitter taste or the expectation that something truly terrible and painful was soon to happen: two days earlier, through the empty-water-tank-pipe communication network, I had heard that the interrogators had broken Scott. This didn’t surprise me. Not that I thought Scott was weak. I thought just the opposite—that he had been, and would be, very strong. However, all of our training makes it clear to us that everyone has their breaking point. Everyone breaks at some time, unless they’re pushed past the point of endurance and either choose death or lose consciousness. The Houthis and their National Security Bureau (NSB) allies had found a way to push Scott over the edge without him passing out (like I had done) and without killing him.

  The message through the pipes told me that he had gone down yelling and screaming, telling the authorities, the interrogators, whomever he was facing at that moment, that he had something to confess to.

  But I didn’t know what that something was.

  And so, as I was led into the interrogation cell this time, my mind was filled with uncertainty: What has Scott said? How will this change their attitude toward me and their questions of me? How should I best respond, both to keep myself alive and also to not endanger Scott any further?

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  IN THE WORLD OUTSIDE, unbeknownst to me but as I certainly hoped and prayed, the efforts to find me and, perhaps, rescue me continued. After Yasmine and Abeer found out I was missing, they called the authorities, American and Lebanese. This set in motion all the government efforts and also the grim and difficult work of informing the rest of my family. The FBI and State Department traditionally perform this role—unless the individual held in captivity is active military, in which case an officer in uniform comes to the family’s front door. It’s a scene played out in a million movies, one that you think about in this line of work, one that you sometimes talk about with your family—what it means, what they should do, how they should expect to react and interact with the various authorities, and what assistance they can expect from those authorities.

  In this case, the FBI and State Department began the task of contacting my family, my mother, my kids, my ex-wife, showing up in conservative, staid, solemn suits, the classic men in black, women in black, waiting on the doorsteps of the houses to be shown in and made as comfortable as they could be, given this uncomfortable task, in seats and on sofas in the very same living rooms where I had spent at least part of my life raising children, being a brother or an uncle or a husband, being a normal dad—though one who had been absent, serving overseas, for many months and years.

  These FBI and State Department personnel did not call beforehand. They did not send warning. My ex allowed them i
n, made them tea, and got them situated before they gave my family the news that I had disappeared and was presumed to be in captivity, perhaps imprisoned or held hostage, in Yemen.

  My mother took the news the hardest. She was in the States staying with my sister at the time, so she found out pretty quickly.

  My brother Hisham—her middle child—had died a few years back of a heart attack. I happened to be with her in Lebanon at the time, visiting from Qatar, when we got the news. I was driving her down to Tyre from our village, Tebnine, to have lunch. It was very early in the morning stateside, mid-afternoon in Beirut.

  My nephew Matthew called. “We’re rushing my dad to the hospital,” he said. “He’s got a blockage in the arteries, taking him in to have surgery right away,”

  To try to reassure Matthew, as I drove down the mountain toward Tyre, I said, “Hey, look, look what happened to me. I had the same sort of blockage, triple-bypass surgery, and here I am, alive and well. They’re going to do the same thing for your father, and it’ll be alright.”

  But as soon as they started prepping Hisham for the operation, with the line still open between Matthew and me, I heard in the background my sister screaming, “NO, no no no.”

  My mother knew right away what was happening. Right away she knew what those repeated words must signify. She heard it and knew. And she started crying and screaming beside me in the car.

  Now, only a few years later, she was faced with this new tragedy: me, her oldest son, missing, and dead for all she knew. This didn’t go well for her. She experienced a nervous breakdown and wouldn’t talk to anyone. For the next six months she couldn’t stop crying. Not one day went by without her crying. She stayed in the States throughout that period, living with my sister, so she had some support, and they didn’t have to track her down in Tebnine. But it must have been grueling to see her that way. It must have been a nightmare for my sister, having to not only deal with her own grief and uncertainty about my situation but also provide comfort and care for our mother.

  My daughters were told by my ex. My oldest son was living with his wife. My younger son already had been stationed out at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. My ex and daughters told them, both of them over the phone. They called up and spread the news to our family, sparing them the visit by the black-clad FBI and State Department personnel. Other than that, the FBI asked our family not to speak to the media or to anyone outside the family as it might interfere with the investigation and perhaps, if all went well, with negotiations or rescue efforts.

  No one wants a media circus or the frenzied attention, not while grieving, and especially not while negotiations are ongoing or while there exists the possibility of escape or rescue. Only if and when the government efforts failed would my family consider going out wider. Only then would it make sense to ensure the world knew about my plight and that of Scott Darden, just so we wouldn’t be forgotten, just so that the Houthis might know that we could not be made to disappear silently, without notice. In that way media attention could be good. But, as part of our training and our family discussions ahead of time, we’d reviewed some of this scenario, and we’d decided to heed the advice of the experts—at least until their efforts proved ineffective in obtaining my release.

  These are scary conversations to have and hypothetical when you’re still safe and sound at home. But those talks proved to be a big reassurance to my family: they knew what to do. And they knew what my expectations and wishes would be. They knew they must trust the authorities and let the process work before taking any last-ditch measures like publicizing things through the media.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  ON THAT DAY OF questioning after Scott cracked, I was led to the same little interrogation room, the one with the window open and the breeze, the lovely breeze, blowing in across my face, filling up my nostrils with that tempting scent of freedom, the outside world. They left me standing there longer even than usual—perhaps for forty-five minutes—beautiful and calming but also unnerving. I knew an extra dose of tension filled the air. I knew the experience of this bout of interrogation wasn’t going to be pleasant.

  When they came in, they started right away with a new line of questioning. They didn’t mess around with good cop / bad cop. They went right to the heart of the matter: “What is your relationship to Scott Darden?”

  I stuck with the truth, explaining for what felt like the umpteenth time that I was just a security consultant for the same company Scott worked for, Transoceanic. No lies in that. But the answer didn’t satisfy my interrogators, not that day it didn’t. Scott had broken down. I knew from the pipe-line communication system that he had asked to confess, but I didn’t know what the subject of that confession would have been. I had my suspicions from my work with Transoceanic in Somalia—all those unmarked planes and unmarked containers of matériel—that the work Scott did involved shipping and transporting goods for certain other intelligence agencies. But all that was just a guess on my part.

  And all I could rightly and truly tell them was that I had been hired to help Transoceanic assess the safety of restarting its operations in Yemen: my role had nothing to do with classified work, not on my end, and it certainly had nothing to do with tipping off or informing any of the coalition bombing activities, as the Houthi and NSB interrogators still seemed to think. If Scott had started to tell them stuff that put me on worse footing, that made my activities look more suspicious, then all the information I’d previously told them—truthful information—would look false. The last thing I wanted was for these men who had already beat me unconscious several times to think that I had been playing with them, telling them half truths, hiding things.

  At the time, I didn’t know with certainty the extent or the purpose of Transoceanic’s work in Yemen, although I had my suspicions. And, worse, I didn’t know what Scott had told them either, so I couldn’t even begin to imagine how my interrogators now viewed me. Or what they expected me to say.

  Truth be told, they probably didn’t know either. But after Scott’s confession, they sure as hell meant to have another go at me and see if I would also crack and tell them interesting things.

  When I continued to say what I had always said, they got angrier and angrier: “You’re lying. You work with him. You work with them. You know what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing. All I know is that he’s a logistics manager for the company and that he previously worked in Afghanistan.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “I met him a month ago for the first time in Dubai. We’ve been exchanging emails for three or four months about the security situation in Yemen, just getting prepared. I only met him and his boss that one time in Dubai, a month ago.”

  The breeze from the window blew across my face, like an exhalation. I stood my ground. Anything more than that, I didn’t know. I wasn’t going to start making stuff up to appease them.

  But they didn’t believe me.

  And they wanted to hear more and different answers.

  All of a sudden, the sticks came out and the beatings started. We were going at it, back and forth, the same questions, the same answers, the same beatings. It lasted like that for an hour, maybe longer. They’d yell and scream. I’d yell and scream in response. And they’d hit me.

  But that wasn’t the worst.

  For the first time during all of this, one of them chambered a round and pressed the muzzle of a handgun to my head, right above my eye, right at the soft spot at my temple.

  “That’s it,” they said. “We’re done with you. We know who you’re working for, and if you’re not going to confess, then fuck it, we’re done with you.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  AGAINST ALL THAT I had said to my family about letting the official government processes work, my mother reached out to friends in Lebanon to see if anyone from the Lebanese government could help. Hassan Hammoud, a cousin of mine in Lebanon, my mother’s nephew, thought he could make some things happen. He was able to get
in contact, through another relative—this is how it works in Lebanon; everything depends on whom you know and whom you are related to—with the nephew of Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament and the most powerful politician in Lebanon. He reached out to Hadi Jaber, the Lebanese ambassador to Yemen.

  Interestingly, I knew the ambassador well and had even been in touch with him the same day that I was taken. The ambassador and I were trying to figure out a way to extricate Scott and me from Sana’a on the UN plane that he was getting out on. He boarded that flight. I did not, as the NSB had bagged me that very night. So the ambassador, now working from Lebanon, knew my situation and offered his help. He did not have good access to the Houthis, so the efforts failed through these official government channels. However, this approach bore fruit in an unexpected way. While official diplomatic channels on the Lebanese side failed, the unofficial channels—through Hezbollah’s shadow government—had stronger ties to the Houthis. Someone from their camp reached out, made some calls, and told my cousins and the Nabih Berri camp that they could get me out very easily. But they—Hezbollah!—were worried about what the consequences would be for me. They are, of course, a Shi’a group. But, to their credit, they understood my role as a US Marine and my role as an attaché. They were concerned about the optics for me if they ended up being the ones to rescue me and ferry me somewhat illicitly out of Yemen and back to Lebanon. From the outside, helping rescue an American might seem like a win for Hezbollah, because they could use that to score points in any negotiations with the West. But, internally, their chief concern was their power base, a population that had grown up on a steady diet of anti-Western rhetoric. Helping me, if it got out, would be bad for them politically. And I think, to save face, they billed this as them “being conscientious” about my reputation, lest I be soiled in US governmental circles as having too close ties to Hezbollah.

  I wasn’t aware of any of this, of course, and I probably wouldn’t have—no, I’m certain I wouldn’t have—given a fig for the optics at the time. But now, looking back at it, I am amazed at the complexity involved and how Hezbollah’s leadership was able to both offer help and then delicately back away.