by Dave Eggers
“Tell them you’re doing a report for college.”
“But I’m not in college,” Mokhtar said.
“They don’t know that,” Hamood said.
The risk in coming back to Yemen, his grandfather explained, was inviting interference. Relatives would want to get involved. Or they would give advice. Or friends of relatives would want to get involved or give advice. There would be random people attaching themselves to the idea, getting in the way, reshaping it or, worst of all, trying to do the same thing, only quicker and cheaper.
Mokhtar booked his ticket to Sana’a, telling everyone but his grandfather that he was doing a research paper about the history of coffee in Yemen. There was nothing less intriguing to everyone he knew in Yemen than the idea of a college student doing research. He would be left utterly alone.
And a student was presumed to be broke, so there wouldn’t be that problem, either. American Yemenis were known to come back from the U.S. with suitcases full of money, ready to throw it around. Mokhtar had to keep a low profile, appear young and unemployed, and stay invisible. He had a highly specific plan to execute—the first part of the plan was to transform Yemeni coffee—and it involved his grandfather, the province of Ibb, and Willem Boot.
He would first go to Ibb, three hours south of the capital, where Hamood lived. Hamood would introduce him to those he knew in the region’s agricultural businesses. Then, in a week or so, Mokhtar needed to be back in Sana’a, to attend the Coffee Quality Institute workshop in Sana’a with Willem and Camilo. Then the coffee caravan.
The caravan was everything. Mokhtar saw this as the ideal way to familiarize himself with coffee in Yemen. He would be with Willem and Camilo, two of the world’s foremost experts on coffee quality. Mokhtar would watch them, learn from them, and meanwhile he would act as a bridge to the Yemeni farmers, speaking their language, sharing their history. The coffee caravan would give Mokhtar introductions to all the Yemeni coffee farmers, and he would be traveling with an entourage that would impress the farmers and give him the kind of standing that would launch his Yemeni coffee career.
Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department was advising all travelers to avoid Yemen. But Willem was traveling at the behest of the U.S. government, so how bad could it be?
Mokhtar knew about the Houthis, a rebel group from the north of Yemen. They had waged an insurgency against the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh for six years before the Arab Spring. They took part in antigovernment protests in 2011, but after Saleh was ousted and Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi ascended to the presidency, the Houthis remained critical of the government and were presumed to be aligned with Iran. Meanwhile Saleh, forced out after the Arab Spring, now had designs on returning to power. Then there was al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which had gained strength during the power vacuum in the wake of the Arab Spring and was considered the most dangerous al-Qaeda franchise in the world. To Mokhtar it all seemed to be part of the neverending political churning of Yemen, and for the time being none of it had anything to do with his immediate aims. He needed to get to Ibb.
A distant cousin, recently married in the capital, picked him up in one of Hamood’s cars, his new wife in the passenger seat, and Mokhtar and the newlyweds made the three-hour drive to the home of Mokhtar’s grandparents, Hamood and Zafaran. Zafaran was, at the time, back in the U.S., living in California, so Mokhtar would be spending time alone with Hamood, the John Wayne of Yemen.
When the newlyweds dropped Mokhtar off, Hamood greeted him from the ornate door of his estate. Mokhtar could see his grandfather had aged. His back hunched a bit more, and he leaned heavier on one of the hand-carved canes he favored. He and Mokhtar walked the grounds of Hamood’s compound, past the guava and fig trees, under a blue sky.
“You told no one what you’re doing?” Hamood asked.
“No one.”
“Good.”
They came to the row of coffee trees hugging the wall of Hamood’s compound. “You remember these?” Hamood said.
Mokhtar touched the glossy leaves. He remembered. When he’d lived with Hamood and Zafaran as a teenager, he’d seen these plants every day but had never realized they were coffee. He’d used the cherries as projectiles, and occasionally chewed on the fruit’s outer layers, but now, for the first time, after his eighteen months of research, he was actually touching a coffee plant and knowing it was a coffee plant.
The leaves were surprisingly firm and lustrous. Their edges were wavy, their surfaces rippled. They were strong leaves, colored a rich Kelly green, and under each leaf array, cherries took shelter. The fruits were baffling in their variety. In any group of fifteen cherries there were fifteen stages of readiness. Some were a bright green, others chartreuse, some transitioning to orange, and then a few fuchsia and, finally, three or four fully red. He plucked a bright red cherry from the tree, feeling the resistance from the stem—the tree didn’t willingly give up its fruit.
The labor intensiveness, which Mokhtar had read about and knew from Willem and Jodi and Stephen and Camilo and Tadesse, now became alarmingly real to him. To approach one of these trees, then isolate a fruit cluster, then examine fifteen fruits from that cluster, then pull from the cluster only the three or four cherries that were ready that day, each one resisting just a bit—it would take time. It was like shopping for fruit at a market, taking the time with each apple or melon, looking for bruises, examining the color. A picker doing this for every cherry on every tree—that was significant work. To do it well would take both a discerning eye and real physical stamina.
Mokhtar sat down next to Hamood, who had rested his cane against the low stone wall.
“If you’re going to do this,” Hamood said, “you should meet Hubayshi.” Hifdih Allah al-Hubayshi was the biggest local trader in coffee, a dominant force in the business for fifty years. He had billions of riyals—millions of dollars—under his control, Hamood said, but he wore it lightly. He was highly ethical and fair in what was considered a cutthroat business.
“So you know him?” Mokhtar asked.
“I’ve never met him,” Hamood said.
—
Hubayshi did not look like a wealthy man. Hamood had sent Mokhtar alone to meet him, giving Mokhtar the address but not much guidance. When Mokhtar arrived, he found a man dressed in tattered clothes, operating out of a small storefront in downtown Ibb. He was likely the same age as Hamood, but looked far older. Mokhtar introduced himself, expecting Hubayshi would be impressed that he was Hamood’s grandson, that they would immediately begin a partnership. But he got little respect or attention. Hubayshi was brusque and wary.
“You’re a student?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” Mokhtar said.
Hubayshi didn’t seem to believe it. Their meeting ended quickly, and Mokhtar walked back to Hamood’s house feeling rattled. The most influential man in the regional coffee business didn’t want anything to do with him. And what did it mean that the most successful man in Yemeni coffee looked like a pauper?
—
For the time being, it didn’t matter. Mokhtar had more immediate concerns. Willem was coming to Yemen in a few days, and Mokhtar had to be ready. The Coffee Quality Institute was putting on the conference with participation from USAID, with the gathering meant to strengthen connections between Yemeni coffee farmers, brokers and international traders. Mokhtar was to be on a panel with Willem and Camilo, and through Willem, Mokhtar would meet the players in Yemeni coffee, in international distribution and afterward there would be the coffee caravan. Willem had his own ideas of regions he wanted to visit, but Mokhtar knew he would be crucial in gaining access to certain tribal areas. He pictured the journey vividly, the three of them traveling the hills and valleys, meeting farmers and collectives, picking and roasting and cupping, laying the groundwork for Mokhtar’s future in the business. But first Mokhtar needed to establish himself in the capital, and his grandfather Hamood didn’t have a place there. Mokhtar’s mother suggested her uncle Mohamed.
&nbs
p; Mohamed was from Ibb, had worked for many years in Saudi Arabia as an electrician, and had recently retired in Sana’a. Of modest means, he and his wife Kenza lived in a building owned by Kenza’s brothers, Taha and Yasir, and relied on income sent home by their son Akram, a janitor at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. His remittances paid the bills for Mohamed and Kenza and their three daughters and three younger sons still at home. Their house was in the center of Sana’a, so through Mokhtar’s mother it was negotiated that Mokhtar would come to stay for a time, even though they had little room and Mokhtar would have to sleep on the floor.
Which he did. He arrived in early May and quickly made an arrangement where he’d unroll a blanket at night, sleep in the corner of the living room and, in the morning, roll it up, hide his clothes in a corner under a chair, and in general try to be invisible. In exchange, he’d find ways to contribute to the household without causing his great-aunt and great-uncle to lose face. Instead of giving them money outright, Mokhtar bought groceries and household essentials, cleaned and helped with the girls’ homework. At meals, Mokhtar and Mohamed talked politics. Everyone in Yemen talked politics; there was never a dearth of new developments, and Mohamed had seen political violence firsthand.
When he was growing up in Ibb, Mohamed had seen heavy fighting in the 1970s and ’80s between the Yemeni government and those who wanted the region to be a socialist state. The socialists, benefiting from significant military and financial support from the Soviet Union, tried to purge the region of tribalism, and made it a point of strategy to eliminate local chiefs. One of their targets was Shaykh Mohamed Nashir al-Khanshali, tribal leader of al-Dakh in Ibb province—and, improbably enough, the brother of Mokhtar’s grandfather Hamood. In 1986, al-Khanshali was driving his car when he was struck and killed by a rocket fired from a bazooka. Mohamed saw it happen. He pulled al-Khanshali’s charred body from the vehicle.
—
When Mokhtar arrived in May of 2014, the Marxists were long gone, but intertribal warring in Yemen was again in full swing. Historically, Yemen, when not being invaded or colonized by outside powers, from the Ottomans to the British, was fighting itself. It wasn’t until 1990 that Yemen had become the Arabian Peninsula’s first multiparty parliamentary democracy. In 1993, elections were held, and in 1999, Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh was elected president of the newly unified country. He was not popular for long, and the Arab Spring swept Yemen up in its dreams of a more democratic and equitable Middle East. Under pressure from within Yemen and from the international community, Saleh eventually resigned. He was replaced by Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, but by then the Arab Spring’s yearlong power vacuum had emboldened insurgent movements. There were the Houthis, a rebel group named after its leader, Husseyn al-Houthi, who were dissatisfied with the leadership in Sana’a—who historically ignored their region, they felt—and had been staging raids and seizing land in the north. In the south, with Aden as its capital, there was talk of secession.
Meanwhile there was the growing presence and threat of al-Qaeda in Yemen, known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Al-Qaeda had been operating in Yemen for twenty-two years, beginning in 1992, when it bombed a hotel in Aden commonly used by marines; that killed two people. There was the 2000 attack, off Aden’s coast, on the USS Cole, which took seventeen lives. In 2007 eight Spanish tourists and two Yemeni drivers were killed by a car bomb in the province of Marib, and a year later, another twelve civilians were killed by a car bomb outside the U.S. embassy—Benghazi before Benghazi. In 2009, a suicide bomber from Yemen was killed in Jeddah while trying to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s top counterterrorism official. (The would-be assassin had detonated a bomb hidden in his anus, killing himself but only injuring the Saudi minister.) In 2011, AQAP took control of Zinjibar, a city in Yemen’s south. In 2012, they coordinated a suicide attack near the presidential palace in Sana’a, killing more than one hundred Yemeni soldiers.
The United States, with Yemeni cooperation, had for years been targeting AQAP with drone strikes, which for Yemenis had become a fact of life. In April 2014, at least four drone strikes had been confirmed, killing anywhere between thirty-seven and fifty-five people, including between four and ten civilians, depending on whose report one was reading. On April 19, just a few weeks before Mokhtar arrived, CIA drones struck a truck carrying suspected militants, killing ten of them but also killing three laborers who happened to be nearby.
—
Still, in the spring of 2014, there was reason to be cautiously optimistic. President Hadi had just overseen the National Dialogue Conference, and after ten months of discussions, the delegates agreed on the basic provisions of a new constitution. Shortly after, a presidential panel approved a plan to make Yemen a federation of six regions.
Whether this would assuage the Houthi rebels in the north was unclear. For now, Mokhtar needed to worry about Willem, who was arriving in a few days from California. Assessing the risk was difficult and highly subjective. The capital wasn’t considered a particularly safe place for Westerners, but most international embassies were still operating in Sana’a, and there were still thousands of tourists and foreign workers all over Yemen. There were commercial flights going in and out of the capital, so that pointed to at least some level of confidence in the relative stability of the country. But then again, the State Department warnings about travel to Yemen were dire. How and why the USAID conference was going on as planned was not entirely clear.
Then there was the recent warning, issued by video from AQAP’s leader Nasser al-Wuhayshi, that they would hunt down “crusaders” from countries such as the United States, England and France. In the week before the conference, there had been attempted kidnappings of German and Russian nationals in Sana’a. On May 5, the day before Willem arrived, a French security contractor, guarding the European Union delegation in Yemen, was killed and another contractor wounded when gunmen opened fire on their car in the diplomatic area of the capital. The same day, a security officer was killed by two gunmen on a motorcycle outside the Defense Ministry’s linguistics institute. In all, fifty-three people had been assassinated in March and April.
—
Willem Boot had been in dicey places before, and Camilo, as a Colombian, was not unfamiliar with dangerous settings or unstable governments. But they couldn’t have prepared themselves for what they encountered in Sana’a. Before leaving the United States, Willem had received an e-mail from GardaWorld, the firm handling security for the conference. In all capital letters, the e-mail insisted that the recipient open the e-mail, print its attachments, sign and return all applicable forms. Included in the e-mail was a twenty-six-page Yemen security handbook, containing highly detailed and alarming security instructions covering a wide range of possible events—a terrorist attack, hostile crowd situations, potential mail bombings and kidnapping, which the guide called extortive assault, or short-term kidnapping. One document, titled Isolation Preparation (ISOPREP), requested a two-page list of Willem’s personal characteristics, handwriting and next of kin, so authorities could identify him in the event of abduction. The handbook said, “There is no need to overreact to security problems, merely to keep one step ahead of the opposition. Applying a small percentage of time and effort to one’s personal security can positively deter the terrorist and deflect his interest towards softer and more accessible targets.”
When Willem landed in Sana’a, he was met by an Irish security contractor who said he’d be taking care of his welfare while in Yemen. He guided Willem to two large armored SUVs parked outside the airport, and after that, Willem never saw him again.
In one SUV, there was a driver and another security contractor, armed with a machine gun. The second SUV followed, carrying three contractors, all heavily armed. The contractor riding with Willem gave him an envelope, and in the envelope was a cell phone and instructions to turn it on and call the number listed, for a man named Khaled. Willem tried to turn the phone on, but it didn’t work.
The SUVs sped through the city, stopping at no checkpoints. At the hotel, armed guards stood outside the gate and in front of the lobby. Willem assumed he was safe, so he took his bags up to his room, unpacked and, with nothing better to do, began brewing coffee. He’d brought his Chemex kit and two large French presses.
—
That night Mokhtar walked out of his uncle’s house, got into a taxi and directed the driver to the hotel. It was simple for him—there were no guards, no cell phones in envelopes, no security contractors from Ireland. When Mokhtar and Willem met in the hotel lobby, and Willem related the story of getting to the hotel, something subtle shifted in their relationship. Willem was his teacher, but now Willem was in Yemen. He needed Mokhtar as much as Mokhtar needed him.
They decided to do a test run—just a short trip out for dinner, to gauge the security risks for a few foreigners traveling within the city. Mokhtar arranged to have his family’s beige Lexus SUV driven by his grandfather’s driver, Samir. Samir arrived at the hotel in the early evening and Willem, Camilo and Mokhtar got in. Within a few blocks, they were stopped at a checkpoint. The SUV’s tinted windows obscured the presence of Willem and Camilo in the backseat, so Samir and Mokhtar did the talking and got them waved through. It worked at the second checkpoint, too.
The third checkpoint was different. The soldiers there seemed to be an irregular unit. They wore different clothing and scarves and almost immediately they were shining flashlights through the windows, discovering Willem and Camilo.
“Who are these people?” the soldiers demanded. “What are they doing here?”
They ordered all the windows open, all the doors.
“We’re just going out to eat,” Mokhtar said.
But he’d lost control of the conversation. He was rattled, and Willem heard a change in his tone of voice. Mokhtar sounded tentative, unsure.
The soldiers, all chewing qat and seeming agitated, inspected Willem’s and Camilo’s passports and searched the car. Willem thought of kidnappings, that they’d be taken away and sold off. Mokhtar was thinking the same thing—not that he’d be kidnapped, but that his two friends and mentors, for whom he felt entirely responsible while in his country, were about to be made into currency or worse. Weeks ago, in Mill Valley, they’d all gone out to dinner—Mokhtar, Willem and Catherine, and their son Vincent. Catherine had expressed her fears about the trip, and Mokhtar could see in her eyes that she was gravely concerned. He reached across the table and took her hands and said, “Willem is now part of the al-Khanshali tribe, and we will protect him with our lives.” She thanked Mokhtar, seeming reassured, and said, “Just make sure he doesn’t bring home a second wife.”