The Steering Group

by M. J. Laurence

  We berthed in Aqaba against a heavily guarded concrete pier, each end barricaded with shipping containers making for a robust chicane-type access route to the ship. The team disembarked with some of the crew and the RM detachment into a rather luxurious Jordanian military owned coach, a sightseeing trip for the crew to Petra, a gift from the Jordanian Government. I love Jordan, I don’t know why – my first confirmed kill for the Steering Group perhaps, the hospitality, the food, I don’t know what it is exactly, it just has a trance-like effect on me. Oman is similar. I think it has something to do with the people, more genuinely real people, no disguises or masks, they are open to conversation, quick to help, always generous and genuinely interested in you as a person. Of course, all this works against your previously made misconceptions and can be a lure into a false sense of security as we were never there to make friends, or be tourists, so no matter how genuine the people we met, we were nothing other than suspicious.

  The marines were our escort out to Petra and did the usual bomb search on the coach before we loaded it with all our kit. A real sense of the moment came upon me as we soaked up the last luxury and comfort those deep coach seats could offer us. I was pleased that all the brawn of the marine commandos were our support to get us out; they had split up between my team in the coach and a couple of 4x4 Toyota Land Cruisers off the ship. It was like being on a holiday tour bus as we set off with some of the ship’s company out into the moonscape of the desert. I was uncomfortable being in that fucking coach, a fucking sitting target winding its way through the barren hills, no end to the number of hijacking points that could have brought the mission to an early finish. I sat with Cheesy, who was also becoming twitchy as we tried to relax despite me wanting the team to be off the coach much earlier than at Petra, but Cheesy was happy to stay in the comfort and cool of the air-conditioned coach for just a little longer.

  I sat back and tried to relax, impatiently taking in the scenery, my head against the glass, staring into the emptiness, my mind wandering back to that trip to the detention facility when I was a boy, how things change as life passes you by. I remember my mind wandering in and out of previous ops, Anna, home and the desire to bring it all to a conclusion. The coach rumbled along the winding road carved through the desert as though it had been made with a snow plough. Amongst the desert debris and the jagged sandstone and granite rock mountain formations, odd groups of people headed off into the desert in different directions laden with either their belongings or goods for trade in distant villages. We were skirting the outskirts of the Wadi Rum as we headed north towards Petra, the light ever changing the colour of the sand and the rock formations as the coach changed direction, with the empty road giving a satisfying feeling of being alone. However, as we drew in closer to the hills the jagged peaks stood over us, making for a perfect ambush scenario. I was perhaps overreacting but was sure a firefight was about to kick off. I hated not being the aggressor, I needed to be in control of our insertion from the start, and it all felt too easy for us to be hit whilst riding along as though we were fucking tourists with no real purpose in this place.

  On arrival at Petra we eventually separated from the RM detachment and the crew from the ship, who went off sightseeing the ancient city. You’ll remember it from the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. From what I saw it’s an amazing place. We took possession of the Land Cruisers and doubled back, checking our tail. We headed south and rendezvoused with Owen, Israeli SF operators and two members of the Israeli intelligence service (Mossad) who would see us through into Israel. We had a prearranged rendezvous at 30°01'22.7"N 35°29'04.7"E just west of Abu Al-Luson. It was a strange encounter. The team was in high spirits, and I was so very pleased to see Owen, fucking crazy streak of American piss that he had become! Fuck… all those memories of the previous ops and of course our time as children in that fucking detention centre – we had a lot to catch up on. It’s really fucking strange how the tapestry of life can bring people back together again and again in the most unlikely places and for the most unusual reasons.

  We gathered around the leeward side of one of the Land Cruisers and sat in the sand to catch up on the intel Mossad and Owen had pulled together, the Israeli SF covering our position. Owen’s secret came out: he was working for the CIA with Mossad. That just made Keith and I fall around laughing. It made perfect sense of course! Couldn’t believe it, Owen, CIA of all things. Well, it made working together much easier. Keith was keen to interrogate the information Mossad had on his targets and their crossover involvement with our arms dealers who had headed inland from Haifa. The Mossad guys were Avner and Shmuel, who we called Samuel which really annoyed the shit out of him. Talking with Avner was like having a chat with a friendly doctor about how to care for a baby or something equally as pleasant, despite the conversation mainly revolving around the subject of killing terrorists. He listened very intently, never interrupted and always carefully formulated any answer he gave you with a happy smile after a pregnant pause taken for his time to think. He looked like he was related to Cheesy in some fucked-up way which I just had to point out to Cheesy, who gave me the finger. Shmuel was different, black hair shaved very short revealing a huge semi-circular scar in his scalp, and he always interrupted anything you said with a question, or to ask if you were sure. He would be Baz’s opposite number in so much as he was not someone you’d pick a fight with in a hurry. They were both very well informed and at the top of their game. They knew all the team as well as Keith and I. The intelligence world is a small community and allies get to know the players on their side of the coin. Reputations can be quietly significant to all involved. I’m not sure if we should have felt honoured that they knew us or concerned; either way, I was pleased to use them as a guide to get us started.

  The conversation focused mainly on the whereabouts of specific names, which fortunately or unfortunately brought into play various other groups all sides were interested in following or eradicating. It was going to be a joint effort. We needed to head up to Jerusalem for our first engagement with Keith’s target cell before they made the crossing into Lebanon or Syria. The intention would be to just rattle a cage and see in which direction all the rats ran. Mossad would ensure we didn’t venture into other ops they were conducting, to avoid any crossfire, but additionally to make our job there legal, if that’s the correct term for what we were embarking on.

  It’s fair to say the next few weeks were just us doing the hard yards tracking down the trail of the arms dealers and terrorists. Getting behind the scenes takes time and, even though we had live intel from reliable sources, terrorists just don’t come out to play when you want them to. Although it has to be said they can be careless with their movements and their identities, but what the terrorist doesn’t expect is for SF and intelligence teams from the West to get down in the dirt and move at the same speed as them. Drones, hard intel, photos, bank accounts, global CCTV footage, airline intel and telephone lists all help piece the crumbs together but it’s not enough. Understanding the target, the culture and the enemy’s life story is what allowed us to get into their backyard and fuck their shit up.

  Just a simple thing in your enemy’s culture, such as understanding how they got their name; for example, in the Middle East a man’s name will derive from his father and his forefathers, so tracing people becomes simpler (providing the name is genuine). If we could get into a family then pressure points could be used to get us to our target. We didn’t need direct intel, just an entry point, a person, a place or a website, a frequently used restaurant, whatever, anything. I had learned this because of my time in Russia, my family connections, the years spent with the customers of the arms traders incognito; it was all training on the job back then, the Steering Group had known it, and now it was my bread and butter. Keith had done the same, spent time in Iran, done the hard yards living within a family getting under the skin of the people traffickers who had led him to the terrorists we were now targeting. It made us completely unpre
dictable, more deadly than the people we were targeting because we operated at a level both above them and below them. That’s why they developed the sleeper cells in the West, to grow the terrorist in and amongst the crop, a weed that goes undetected until it’s either pulled by us motherfuckers or it kills the surrounding plants in a self-detonation, another true phasmid of modern warfare.

  We exited west into Israel and followed what is now called the Pentagon Tour. It got the name because the route that we developed was so successful. It became the standard route for following known terrorist groups, arms dealers, people traffickers and anyone else looking to conduct their dirty business. It’s now a common route well-trodden by coalition special forces coordinated by the Pentagon (Washington), who would initiate a ‘tour’ either clockwise or anti-clockwise in consultation with other nations. It involves a route from Jordan into Israel, Jerusalem to Beirut, then east into Syria and down through Iraq to Bagdad and onto Basra before going waterborne through the Gulf round to Aden and finally across to Djibouti. I have no doubt that after our ‘tour’ there were many who followed, some taking in interesting detours, like Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia, as the need arose.

  Aden was and remains the wild west of the Middle East and nothing can prepare a person for it. It is a place of utter chaos and disorder. Terrorism, kidnapping, inner conflict, landmines littered everywhere and complete civil unrest being the norm. Seeing an execution on the street wouldn’t raise an eyebrow from any local passers-by. The strangest thing is, you must be seen to have a sidearm – the pistol is the symbol of a leader, and the holder is somehow less likely to get hit… well, not first! Yemen has decayed into another fighting ground between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalitions, another example of ‘your enemy today will be your friend tomorrow who will help kill your old friend from yesterday’ – what a fucking mess. I think a lot of our time following intel and the terrorists felt worthless and frustrating as we always seemed to be getting further away from what was most definitely getting nearer. At times in my days spent in pursuit, I got depressed at the continuous steps back I had to make in order to move forward. It’s never a clean fight, it’s a labyrinth, a hall of mirrors, endless boredom followed by split seconds of lightning strike action. A firefight was the ultimate release of frustration and a way to actually get some sort of weird satisfaction from the thought that I could make a difference and I was succeeding. A firefight would pull me closer to my team, release anger and yet push normality still further out of reach.

  We arrived on the outskirts of Jerusalem some 10 days later. Jerusalem is absolutely fascinating in a different way. It’s a place of worship and conflict simultaneously coexisting alongside each other. Since Suleiman the Magnificent to the present day, I don’t think there will have been a single day when someone hasn’t thought of attacking this city. I don’t pretend to know the city’s entire history, but from what little I could glean from our friends from Mossad it had been captured and recaptured 44 times and attacked 52 times! I, however, would liken it to a scene from Tatooine in Star Wars, equally as dangerous and unpredictable with as many different cultures and religions walking the streets as there were aliens in the film. The two operatives from Mossad had a list of safe houses the arms dealers were known to have used. They gave us the intel, addresses, photographs of the traders and more importantly their customers and all their last-known meeting points, telephone calls, the whole package. My attention was drawn to a familiar name, a name on our list: Nasser Tamei (Yugoslavian arms dealer). We set about rattling a cage at an address on the outskirts of the city.

  For self-explanatory reasons the bad guys always like to try and cloak themselves in society and as such always seem to find a nice quiet residential area in which to do business, and this was no exception. We went with Mossad as far as the San Simon residential district before we left them smoking cigarettes in the Toyota Land Cruiser as we went on foot towards the target address on Rav Ashi Street. We didn’t have the luxury of time or the patience to undertake a slow surveillance operation, we went in on trust, on second-hand intel from Mossad (not something we would have relayed to the Steering Group in a hurry). We had parked the vehicles some distance away, the SF guys going to the rear of the building and Mossad later positioning themselves in the apartments across the road to observe. The area was calm, quiet, very little traffic, just the sound of kids playing in the apartment gardens walled off from the street. The flats were relatively modern, all low-rise, three to five storeys high and clustered along the estate road littered with ageing cars and refuse collection bins. The flats were all similar in design and construction, sandstone-coloured brickwork, with A/C units bolted randomly on the outside fascias, humming in the warm breeze as the occasional resident leaned out of their apartment windows to hang washing on makeshift lines.

  This was my target but Keith was I/C for this op and we just casually went up to the apartment’s lower ground floor access gate, which was open, up to the building’s main entrance and pressed the intercom for apartment 5. Mossad had indicated that this building was only in use by maybe 10 families, all usually working, so we shouldn’t encounter any innocent civilians. We expected two people, Nasser and an unknown, in our target apartment. We waited patiently for a few moments then a crackled and somewhat tired voice echoed through the intercom. Keith gave a name and the buzzer released the lock into the building. The lift was out of action so we ascended the stairs, cold air greeting us from the air conditioning, our eyes blinded slightly as the interior was dark by comparison to the Jerusalem sunshine outside. We paused on the first-floor landing to adjust our vision.

  Our hearts were pounding as we ascended the final stairs and banged on the apartment door – no CCTV, the locks released, then Keith went into action. Nasser was on the floor and pinned down within a second, and I casually stepped around the struggle to see if we had company. A kettle was boiling, only one cup, two different cigarette brands in the ashtray, maps, and soldering equipment on the kitchen table still smoking, various tools left holding rolled-up maps stretched over the table, and two unmade beds. Hugh and Smudge quietly entered the apartment whilst Cheesy, Baz and Hugh kept a vigilant eye on the street, its approaches and the surrounding apartments. Keith, however, was immediately into Nasser, who what when where, nice calm voice but his knife going ever so slowly into Nasser’s ear. It wasn’t a loud uncontrolled vicious interrogation or anything dramatic, but an effective pantomime of show-and-tell encouraged by the very real prospect of a messy death. I think as the blood came from the side of Nasser’s head, running down his face into his eye and mouth, he would have begun to know how deep and how serious the injury he was receiving was about to become. The talking became a whisper of exchanges, almost a polite conversation, before Keith released him, hauling him up onto a chair. Haifa, mortar attack on a coalition warship. The SF guys were out the door.

  This first round of show-and-tell wasn’t exactly what we were seeking and only confirmed that Nasser had been working with multiple groups as a trader or middle man at best. Giving up small but good intel immediately is a useful tactic during interrogation if it’s sufficient enough to appease the interrogators. It wasn’t what we were seeking and we knew this line of conversation was a diversion, a valuable segment of information enough to keep us interested, but Nasser had totally underestimated our intentions, purpose and our depth of knowledge of the terrorist activities he was involved in. We had just over five hours to take this guy apart before the team came back from Haifa. I started a deep search of the rooms, looking for any intel, phones, notes, maps, receipts in clothing, photos of family and friends – everything was a clue. What I found that was more interesting than anything else was protective clothing, Russian respirators and NBCD equipment packed away in large rucksacks, exactly the same shit we had used in Drobeta. The maps didn’t give it all away in an instant, but the missing chemicals (or another shipment) from Romania – Drobeta (Operation R
IAR) – were definitely on the move, perhaps making their way to Iraq from Lebanon. It wasn’t that long before they would reach their intended destination. Time was no longer on our side and we needed to wrap things up with this encounter and step things up. The invasion of Iraq was now fully underway.

  Keith had entered into new and more persuasive discussions with our captive. Questions regarding BZ, Substance 78/EA-2277/US Army code EA-2277 NATO code BZ/Soviet code Substance 78. We watched his reactions, his ability to hide the truth diminishing second by second; it was obvious to us that he knew he had finally been uncovered. Information began to flow now that he was submerged in this, his own personal tempest of an interrogation, and information flowed right up to the point of his last breath. Information that wasn’t perfect, but enough, enough to get us moving forward. The information from Nasser enabled us to be on our way and head into Iraq. We had well and truly rattled a cage in Jerusalem and now needed the eye in the sky to locate a convoy headed east out of either Israel, Lebanon or Syria into Iraq.

  As for the mortar threat which the team had deployed to neutralise, they found two six-mortar arrangements welded into the back of a delivery vehicle and taken up to the roof of a multi-storey car park near the docks in Haifa – the intention being to launch an unprecedented attack on a visiting frigate. It was a very crude arrangement and had there been no intervention on our part it could have been a very effective weapon and made headline news, feeding the terrorist propaganda machine. However, the outcome was somewhat different. Having eliminated not only the threat of the mortar attack but also Rolando Hernandez (the missing accomplice to Nasser, our South American arms dealer – probably the source of the US chemical weapons), a name on our original list, plus four terrorists known to Mossad, the diversion of resources had proved to be incredibly worthwhile. We were now embarking on a hunt for the convoys and a shoot-to-kill mission for Leon Antunovich, Otto Meiser and Keith’s terrorist cell all headed into Iraq with WMD(b) – weapons of mass destruction (biological). The dots were being joined up – arms dealers, Russian suppliers on old routes and the terrorists, coupled with the demand for weapons and war brewing again in the Middle East.