The Tightening Dark

by Sam Farran

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  WITH THE MUZZLE of the handgun pressing against my head, I wouldn’t have cared whether Hezbollah or Santa Claus came to my rescue right then.

  I thought that was it.

  They’ve got nothing to lose. They don’t have to report to anyone. They don’t have to affirm anything. I could just disappear. They’re going to do it. They’re going to shoot me right here, in this room, and it’ll all be over.

  I started to recite the Shahada, or profession of faith: There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet.

  That was it—I was ready to die.

  But instead of shooting, the interrogator holding that gun smacked me on the backside of my head with its heavy metal butt. It sent a searing pain through me, right at the base of my skull. I fell forward, to the ground, hard onto my knees.

  They kept beating me with the sticks, two times, three times. Then they launched back into the questions again. Someone from behind clapped both of his hands over my ears again, their favorite move, disorienting me, making me woozy and nauseated.

  Then, not suddenly but suddenly enough—maybe I had blacked out—I was being dragged back to the cell.

  I knew I had lived. I was aware enough to realize that much.

  And even then I found it amusing, as the guards propped me up, gripping me under both of my arms, to think that I had never once walked back from that interrogation room to my prison cell under my own power. They’d always beat enough of the stuffing out of me that I couldn’t manage it. Every time I had to be supported, like a mannequin, like a ragdoll.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  ONE DAY WHEN WE were praying in the cell, the four of us cell mates together, I fell. I dropped to my knees. I couldn’t complete my prayers or stand up for the rukaa’a.

  The guys revived me, brought me water, started asking me what was the matter.

  I croaked out a word or two, pointing to my heart: chest pains.

  They took off my T-shirt and saw for the first time the scar from my triple bypass.

  The Houthis, in their inventory of my goods from the villa, hadn’t found or bothered with my medicine. I’d mentioned it to them, along with the money, the guns, the other things they hadn’t bothered to list on their sheet, but they’d ignored me. Frankly, I was surprised to some extent that, through all the beatings, I’d managed not to have another attack. But it had just been a matter of time.

  This one wasn’t bad. It wasn’t like the first attacks, more like a faintness, a weakness in my breast and in my breath.

  However, Haitham—with all his experience and cunning—seized on the moment and said, “Hey, if you do it like this, just mildly, they’re not going to do anything to help you, so we have to fake a massive heart attack. I’ve seen it happen before. Heart attacks or other issues. If they’re bad enough, then they’ll take you to the hospital.”

  I wasn’t sure about that, thinking they might just kill me instead. But Haitham knew all the ropes. His eyes gleamed as he said, “I know what will happen if you fake it fully: they’ll take you to the hospital to get your meds, and then they’ll also stop beating you. They’ll stop beating you, do you hear me?”

  I was still having minor pains, enough that faking it wasn’t too much of an issue. I just increased my groaning, worked on my acting skills a little, letting it all come out each time another throb of weakness or constriction seized me. It caught the attention of our guards, just as Haitham had said it would. And Haitham and my other cell mates made sure they came by banging on the doors as I laid there on the ground moaning and gasping.

  “The American is dying,” they yelled. “The American is dying, and we don’t want to be responsible for him.”

  The guards told me to shut up, but my cell mates continued their hammering at the door: “He’s had a triple bypass, and you’re not giving him his meds.”

  The guards left but not before saying that they’d see what they could do.

  Five hours later—five hours of me acting and moaning and writhing on the floor of that prison cell—they finally came back, having gotten permission from their superiors to take me in the middle of the night, maybe midnight or even 1 a.m. They put me on a stretcher, bagged my head again, and handcuffed me just like usual. I was still having heart pain but also still faking it, groaning as they eased me into another SUV and drove me to the hospital.

  The beatings stopped after the heart attack. They also moved me to the second floor, perhaps worried that my cell mates, Haitham and that whole crew, had grown too accustomed and friendly with me. The next four or five months continued with interrogations every week or two, though the beatings stopped.

  The advice of my al-Qaeda cell mates had worked.

  Here I was, being protected at this moment by al-Qaeda and—if Hezbollah’s line about protecting my image rather than playing to their base was indeed the truth—by Hezbollah too, as they delicately continued to negotiate for my release.

  CHAPTER 15

  CAPTIVITY’S FINALE

  DURING MY CAPTIVITY I helped the other inmates figure out where our prison was located. The pipe system of communication proved helpful in getting information from old hands like Haitham and anyone else who had anything relevant. I figured that if our facility were abandoned or blown up or taken over in another military action and we had the opportunity to flee, we would be armed with the knowledge of our location and could form a plan on which direction to head. Talking to the other prisoners and gathering information, I put together a few facts: the facility had been built by the United States; Haitham and the other old hands testified to the fact that, prior to the Houthi takeover, someone from the US Embassy had been coming every week to check on their status, and that guy would say he was an American. He’d ask questions through the food gate: who else was kept here, how many upstairs, how many downstairs, those sorts of things.

  This narrowed the list to about three or four facilities that the US regularly inspected. I pieced that information together with my recollection of the amount of time and general direction we traveled on the night Scott and I were bagged.

  This was, almost certainly, the Counterterrorism Unit (CTU) compound on the outskirts of Sana’a, just to the northeast of the airport, about two miles outside the city itself. The CTU had another place in town on the northern edge of Hadda, its headquarters. But the prison or jail there was smaller and older, and I think I would have seen and heard the city around us—the call to prayer from the big new Saleh Mosque, the bustle on the streets outside one of Sana’a’s awesome peculiarities: a yummy little Baskin-Robbins store that seemed just like every Baskin-Robbins in America—except, if you knew anything about it, you knew that its owners were al-Qaeda members. From the al-Ahmar family. This oddity, one among many such, was so truly Yemeni—I’d decided for sure we were being held in one of these two facilities, the one in town next to the mosque and the al-Qaeda Baskin-Robbins or the one just out of town that had been built and funded by my own country’s government.

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  AT SOME POINT in my captivity, I was moved to my second cell, up on the second floor of the prison. It was slightly larger: 2.8 rather than 1.8 meters wide. But I still had four cell mates, as before.

  But this time, one of them, Imad, hated me.

  For good reason. He knew I was American. And he knew that I knew him—a somewhat famous al-Qaeda operative who openly boasted of having killed sixty-three individuals, mostly civilians and Yemeni security personnel. Though Imad was his given name, everyone called him the Prince of Ibb. (Ibb is a city in southern Yemen, close the al-Qaeda hotspot of Abyan.)

  I feared Imad like no other person in this prison. I worried that when I went to sleep, I just wouldn’t wake the next morning. I worried, at least for a while, that he might turn the other three guys in the room against me, though he didn’t really need to. Imad was bigger than me. He could have cornered me and finished me off on his own.

  But the other guys banded together to p
rotect me. And they did that because of the bombing.

  Our facility, for quite a lengthy stretch, was getting bombed once or twice a day by Saudi and coalition warplanes. This provided yet another clue that our prison was located in an important military installation, helping me narrow it down to the CTU compound.

  When those bombing runs happened, the guards would often come by, perhaps thinking they’d stir up trouble for me, and casually tell my cell mates and everyone else on that floor of the prison not to worry.

  “The coalition won’t bomb here,” they’d say. “Mr. Sam protects us. He was giving them grid coordinates for their strikes. They won’t ever blow up a place where an American Marine is being held.”

  “See,” they’d say, winking at me through the food hatch, “everyone should be grateful for you, since you’re protecting us so well.”

  Their strategy backfired.

  Maybe my cell mates were just plain dumb, but for whatever reason they took this all literally. And they banded together to protect me, as if I were their good luck charm, from Imad.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  I OWE ABEER a lifetime of gratitude for the faith, the hustle, and the bravery she displayed in first trying to find me and then trying to get me freed from the Houthis. In fact, the life that I live now, with her as my wife, is basically a second life, a second start, because without her work and diligence, without her efforts to get me out of that jail, I might not have any of this additional time and space to give gratitude to anyone or anything at all. It could all have very well ended then and there, in the National Security Bureau (NSB) prison.

  When the Houthis took me, Abeer and I had been dating a little bit but not seriously. She had a crush on me, or so she’s told me. Ever since she first saw me in my Marine uniform at the US Embassy in Sana’a, she’d had that crush. Still, her going to the lengths she did for a man who wasn’t even really a boyfriend, just a friendly acquaintance with whom romance and love might eventually bloom, such devotion and sacrifice, seemed almost unbelievable and turned out to be a big part of my salvation.

  Abeer is a willowy woman, moderately tall for a Yemeni at five foot five but probably no more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. Her family hails from a village called Nihm to the east and north of Sana’a, straddling an important intersection on the road between the cities of Sana’a and Marib, right where that road descends from the mountains into the Rub al-Khali desert on its way down to Marib. It’s very close to the spot where the biblical Queen of Sheba—whom we call Saba in Arabic and Quranic sources—had built her famous dam, the remains of which are still an archaeological and historical site. Nihm’s position in this valley, on the main road, means that it has unfortunately become one of the key battlegrounds in the ongoing war between the Houthis and the Saudi coalition, with the Saudis and Emiratis in control of Marib and the Houthis holding the highlands and Sana’a since September 2014.

  This has made things very difficult for Abeer’s family: coming and going from the village is dangerous, relatives are in constant danger, and family lands and structures have suffered in even greater proportion than the rest of Yemen, which itself has endured warfare, famine, and terrible outbreaks of cholera and other disease ever since the Houthi takeover.

  Abeer’s family also didn’t fare well in Sana’a itself, since their property in the city—a grand villa—shared a wall with former president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s home. This wasn’t Saleh’s Presidential Palace but his original family residence—just as Abeer’s clan hails from Nihm, Saleh’s calls the village of Sanhan south and east of Sana’a home, with both clans, like so many other Yemeni families of note, maintaining separate city and village dwellings.

  Because of the extreme proximity of these two city residences, every time the Saudi coalition (or, later, the Houthis) targeted Saleh, the windows or doors of Abeer’s family’s house would also get blown out. They’d have to run and hide, then return, over and over again for those several months. Her family would have the unenviable task of rebuilding their house about four or five times over the first years of the Houthi uprising.

  They couldn’t just leave either, as the property had been in the family long enough that it held not just commercial but also really deep, long-standing sentimental value. Her grandfather had owned the land initially and had been one of the major businessmen in Yemen. With their roots in Nihm, her father and uncles spread their wings in Sana’a, becoming agents for Emirates Air and Saudi Arabian Airlines in Yemen, as well as venturing into flying—as pilots for Yemenia and Qatar Airways. One of these uncles owns the Sana’a exposition center. The family had been blessed with well-to-do status, for sure, but they were also tied to that wealth, trying to weather the storm and be there as part of the new Yemen, whenever the new Yemen might arise from the rubble and ashes of the war.

  Family, especially the connections of a family of the sort Abeer was blessed to have, is critical to getting business done in any Arab country. Abeer enjoyed the knowledge that her moderately prominent uncles and father could provide some protection for her. But still, as she started asking around about what had happened to me, she knew she was putting not just herself but her whole clan at risk. The Houthis had demonstrated time and again that if you crossed them, they would blow everything up. They might let you flee with your life—as they had even done for some of the al-Ahmar family as their initial push progressed southward from Saadah to Sana’a—but they would also not hesitate to take over your home or even blow up and level the buildings, just as a warning to anyone who might consider similar resistance. It all depended on how they felt about you: Would you behave? Would you come around to support them? Or would you become a thorn in their side?

  Abeer asked and asked about me. She asked everyone she knew. She asked in social situations. She asked in official situations.

  She met with her uncles and explained what was happening, seeking their advice and assistance, their networking support.

  In short, over those first days and weeks of my captivity, she made enough of a nuisance of herself that one of her girlfriends finally admitted she knew a person who could perhaps help in the NSB. The girlfriend arranged a meeting with this NSB officer and, reluctantly, because he felt bad for Abeer (and perhaps because Abeer’s friend also used her leverage on him), he agreed to bring Abeer to NSB headquarters.

  The NSB headquarters building hunkers in a shadow between the Ghamdan Old Palace, the Al-Bakiriya Mosque, and the wall of the Old City. It’s made, at least on the outside, of imposing heavy blocks of gray stone. Inside that gray stone facade, a cluster of mid-1980s office buildings surround a courtyard, and several narrow lanes divide the buildings; all of this, like almost every other official Yemeni building or unofficial villa, is surrounded by walls. It’s a strange place for an intelligence agency, being much more reminiscent of the semiofficial palace it had been before the NSB was created as a counterweight to the Political Security Organization back in the 1990s. The Ghamdan Fort used to fire its two antique cannons at night during Ramadan to signal the start of the Iftar feast. The place was, and is, without a doubt, part of the ancient heart of Sana’a. And Abeer, in going there and making a nuisance of herself on my behalf, both challenged the patriarchal underpinnings of Yemeni society and upheld the best traditions of Arab women, who have been known, time out of mind, to be tough and fearless and ready to take matters into their own hands.

  On the appointed day for the visit to NSB, Abeer’s girlfriend’s acquaintance, along with another man who worked at NSB, picked Abeer up and took her in, where she was made to wait in one of those semiofficial parlors that reek of administrivia and interminable delay. After perhaps half an hour, they ushered her into an even smaller “interview room” and pretty much dispensed, right away, with any niceties: the questioning began, and she found herself much more under interrogation than ever she expected she would be.

  “Why do you know Mr. Sam Farran?”

  “What’s your relationship to him?”


  “Why are you concerned about him? We’ve heard you’ve been asking everyone in town.”

  Abeer held up a bottle of medicine, which she’d gotten from the maid in my villa. “He has a heart condition. He needs these pills,” she said.

  The men took the pills, looked at them, shook them in their bottle, and gave them back to her, promising nothing.

  They showed her out of the headquarters building, perhaps thinking they were done with her. Maybe they weren’t satisfied with her answers, and having given nothing away, nothing at all about my status or location, not even confirming or denying that they were holding me in one of their prisons, they thought she would lose interest and give up.

  But they did not know Abeer.

  The next day she showed up at the gates of the headquarters building again.

  And the day after that.

  On the third day they brought her back into the same waiting room, and after a nervous pause, some official fluttering of hands, they ushered her into the same tiny interrogation room again.

  They asked her the same sorts of questions, almost as if trying to verify her story.

  This got them nowhere. She gave them the same answers. She tried to provide them with my heart medicine. After a fruitless back-and-forth, with both sides feeling somewhat exasperated, they sent her home again.

  She kept coming back.

  After what must have been the fourth time they brought her into the building, things went a little differently. One of the uncles of Sayyid Abd el-Malik al-Houthi himself entered the room. He asked all the same questions. He looked at the heart pills. And he seemed unexpectedly sympathetic. Abeer thought she might be getting somewhere. She thought she might have found a person who could assist in finding me—if he didn’t already know where I was—and perhaps could also help in getting me released.