‘I don’t think we have any papers relating to this in our packs.’
The Service’s counsel stood up. ‘We’ll put that right. An error of omission.’
‘Now then,’ said Ms Jarvis. ‘You’re saying that about ten months ago your American counterparts introduced the notion of bringing Abu Omar to the UK.’
‘That’s right.’
‘And how had they come across him?’
‘I gathered that they came across him on the battlefield. He was captured as a prisoner while fighting for IS.’
‘What happened then?’
‘He was in detention in the field for some time and when he was interrogated he apparently agreed to assist them.’
‘I see. And what did he offer?’
‘He was an English boy. He said he was about to be tasked to come to England as part of a terrorist team.’
‘And what did they do to elicit this “offer”?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did they mistreat him?’
‘No. They said not. They provided written assurances that they’d treated him kindly and well within the bounds of the Geneva Convention, and that he’d volunteered his services. When I first met him I asked him directly about this and he confirmed that.’
‘With his handlers present?’
‘Yes, the first time. But later, when I saw him on his own, I probed some more.’
‘You asked him directly?’
‘The circumstances weren’t like that. We were building up to the event itself, and there was no way I could conduct a formal interview.’
‘But you were happy with the Americans’ assurances.’
‘They were what they were. What with speaking to Abu Omar I felt I’d done all I could. I felt as satisfied as I could be that he’d suffered no maltreatment.’
‘But not one hundred per cent convinced, by the sound of it.’
‘One hundred per cent assurance is never entirely possible if you haven’t been there every step of the way.’
‘That doesn’t sound at all definitive. Or reassuring. We’ll leave that to one side, however. We will return to it later. Abu Omar comes over to the UK. Was he handed over to you?’
‘Yes. I took control of his handling while in the UK. I met him with my American colleagues for some time and then it was decided that I should meet him solo.’
‘Decided on what basis, and by whom?’
‘I’m not quite sure on either score. I was told the Americans would no longer be attending meetings. I took it to be because we were nearing the moment of executive action.’
‘When would this have been?’
‘About a month or two before the attack.’
‘So they were involved at least part of the way through Abu Omar’s presence in the UK?’
‘That’s right. Though they kept clear of our operational planning and the policies.’
‘They would do. When exactly did the specific notion of the attack come up?’
‘When he first came back to the UK. It was the reason he was sent to the UK.’
‘According to the Americans?’
‘According to them, and according to him too.’
‘Did you ever wonder why he was speaking to you?’
‘Yes, all the time. As one does.’
‘And what were your conclusions?’
‘People have all kinds of reasons for doing things. Often contradictory, often a close call between a number of things. I wouldn’t like to single anything out.’
‘Well, can you itemize one or two things for us?’
‘I can. But it’s essentially speculation.’
‘Or the professional judgement of the person handling him?’
‘There was a maelstrom of things affecting Abu Omar. One of the factors was that he felt battered by all these things coming from all directions. The Americans had offered him a way out. They’d also probably saved his life. He would have been fearful of a long prison term. He may have liked them. He may have understood that what he was doing out there wasn’t what he’d imagined, or what he wanted to do. He may have wanted to come back to the UK. He had a little son here, in the city. There are undoubtedly other things that I haven’t remembered or that didn’t even occur to me at the time.’
‘You said that he may have liked the Americans. Was that the impression you had?’
‘Not especially. I tried to build a rapport with him. I don’t think they made a particular effort. It was rather more transactional.’
‘Transactional.’
‘Yes. It’s not a critical comment. My approach is to try to build some kind of rapport, a personal trust of some kind. I find it helpful. But we all use the same techniques of validation and verification.’
‘Did you feel that what Abu Omar said was sufficiently validated and verified?’
‘It’s easy to conclude in hindsight that it wasn’t. But remember that we still don’t know, and may never know, the precise circumstances of those final minutes. Abu Omar may have been a victim like the others.’
‘Not quite like the others. The others weren’t carrying a rucksack full of high explosive.’
‘True. You’re right. But he may have been placed in an impossible position.’
‘What’s your gut feeling on that?’
‘I don’t have one. I’m not sure gut feelings help. Some things point to him having acted in bad faith. Once he’d been given the other rucksack, for instance, he could simply have stopped there and then and contacted me. But I don’t know the duress he was under at the time.’
‘How were your relations with the Americans?’
‘Professional.’
‘Professional. Not warm, or amicable, or friendly?’
‘Professional is surely best. It’s immaterial whether we’re best buddies or not.’
‘Unless you want someone to go the extra mile.’
‘That’s a matter of opinion. I’ve always found that pride in one’s work is a better driver than friendship.’
‘Who, then, was running this operation? Was it you, or the Americans?’
‘It was definitely under our control. We are accountable for its outcomes, not them. If the implication of the question is that the Americans were pulling our strings, that’s not accurate.’
‘It wasn’t. I think we will return to this in the next session. May I remind you that in the interim you should not confer with others on the evidence you have given or will be giving later.’
‘I can give you my assurance on that,’ said Jake.
‘We shall adjourn until Monday,’ said the Chair.
9
As soon as Jake Winter left the inquiry room and was changing into his jeans in the small room set aside for those anonymized, alphabetized witnesses, his mind turned to the unseasonably warm spring day almost a year before when he’d been called down to London. Bloody London, as it was known in the office. Not to Jake Winter. Though he was glad to be working in his unprepossessing northern hometown, with its familiar grey terraces and grey skies, he was always happy to go down to bloody London. Besides, he’d been rather chuffed to be selected for this ‘special task’. Before, that is, he found out what it entailed.
The air conditioning had been down in the knackered old train that dragged itself the length of the country into King’s Cross and he’d sat primly in the tut-tutting, whingeing hubbub and the can-strewn detritus of those who’d thought that knocking back a few lagers on the ten o’clock train was the remedy to it all. But he’d been happy enough, with a juicy bit of casework in the offing.
He’d been placed in a holding pattern in the anteroom to Stuart Calloway’s office before being wheeled in, the bashful young operative come blinking from the sticks. Stuart was all affability and mid-Atlantic tonality, with the uplift at the end of the sentence and the insistence on naming the person towards whom he was directing his remarks at the end of each utterance. Frank and Jimmy, Jake’s two new oppos, had deferred to the big b
easts, Stuart and his US counterpart, as they shared gossip of London and Washington and insincere smiles over the rack of lamb and the Gigondas in the executive dining room. Jake had followed suit.
‘This is gonna be so big,’ Stuart had said, with considerable if unintended foresight. ‘You’ll wanna see the whites of this guy’s eyes,’ he drawled alarmingly at the end of the meal. ‘Run along now, do your worst.’
Abu Omar was waiting in a safe house with a babysitter.
It was a done deal already, George had made clear. ‘Bought sight unseen, “no sale” an impossibility, caveat emptor, no return to sender. Pig in a poke for all I know. Stuart tells me we’re in desperate need of brownie points at Langley.’
Abu Omar proved not quite as disappointing as Jake feared. The sullenness was to be anticipated but the spark of connection – meeting a countryman, a native of the same town, and not another bull-necked, bullying American – seemed to fire momentarily. They chatted over a cup of tea about nothing in particular, each sizing the other up, while Frank and Jimmy chafed to, as they put it, ‘get down to business’. This is business, Jake wanted to say, but didn’t waste his breath.
Over dinner that evening, Frank and Jimmy set out their prospectus for the future. They began with a stock preamble. Notionally based at HQ in DC, they’d done their stints in Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan, but were now essentially roving reporters on the international terrorist threat. Jake muttered the obligatory polite words of awed respect. Frank and Jimmy said they were on TDY in the UK for as long as this little thing took. Alphabetti spaghetti: the curse of the spooks.
They’d cavilled at everything. This, too, was normal. It didn’t matter especially, at that point. Jake was used to it; there were always – almost – ways to iron things out along the way without having a fight. Abu Omar had sorted out his own accommodation, it turned out, before returning to the UK. There was no possibility of establishing the parameters of where he might live. Special security procedures had to be instituted at the safe house on which they finally agreed in the rural outreaches of the city to make it impossible for him to blow up his US case officers. Frank and Jimmy were unhappy at living in what they’d been led to believe was a war zone so were chauffeured up the M1 twice a week for meetings and straight back to London afterwards.
The arrangements and conditions for crash meetings took days of negotiation. They arm-wrestled over the presence of a second British case officer, especially after they learned that George had selected Leila.
‘No issue with a woman or a Muslim per se,’ Frank had said. ‘But we gotta consider the impact on our friend. No way is he gonna accept this.’
This was remitted to Stuart, who overruled George. ‘I bow to no one in my insistence on inclusion,’ he said, ‘but I don’t believe in tokenism.’
The legal niceties were a bore.
Niceties! thought Jake: those things that Frank and Jimmy considered indicative of British prissiness. He had spent a wearisome afternoon, together with George and a legal adviser, with them plus their two attorneys in a stiflingly warm, windowless conference room in Head Office.
What had been Abu Omar’s role in the battlefield?
Enemy combatant.
What did that entail?
Why, fighting.
Yes, but in what capacity?
Soldier.
OK, but a soldier in line with the Geneva Convention or a soldier committing acts that might be construed as war crimes?
The former.
You’ve established that beyond reasonable doubt?
Check.
How?
We asked the guy.
No further corroboration?
You try collecting evidence out there. No, we polygraphed the guy and he came through.
With flying colours?
He passed.
‘Anyway,’ the Americans had asked, ‘you seen any evidence to the contrary? Far as we knew, the burden of proof is to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt, not the other way round. You seen anything in all those thousands of beheading videos, for instance, to suggest our boy took part?’
The legal adviser had shaken his head.
‘This is crucial,’ George had said. ‘We’re going to have to talk to the boy himself about this. It’s a minimum requirement.’
‘We’d advise against that,’ they’d replied. ‘Disruptive. What’s he gonna say?’
They’d gone ahead anyway, Frank and Jimmy sitting in the corner of the room just about keeping the smirks from their faces as Abu Omar gave the anodyne denials he’d clearly rehearsed.
The dry issue of control and governance was left to ripen and rot after the Americans’ opening shot: a fourteen-page memorandum of understanding giving them decision rights in the case. Jake was told that Stuart didn’t want to have an open disagreement with them at such a delicate point in relations and that Legal would work on this quietly behind the scenes. It seemed they never did; the MoU was never signed. When Jake asked Frank and Jimmy, they were amused. ‘Hell, never figured you for a bureaucrat,’ said Frank, and he and Jimmy laughed. That had been an end to it.
After four weeks Abu Omar moved into the flat he shared with his four associates. Abu Omar said they claimed to be asylum seekers from North Africa but nowhere could they be located in official records. The flat was in a block where surveillance could not easily deploy. The four, who Abu Omar said called themselves Salman, Jamal, Abid and Hassan, were to be his co-conspirators in whatever was planned. Equally evident was that Jake, Frank and Jimmy were entirely dependent on Abu Omar for all their information regarding the as yet unspecified plot.
For the first three months there was little reporting other than that the five of them prayed together and slept long hours in the flat as a long, hot, somnolent summer stretched towards September. Abu Omar had still not been able to provide sufficient descriptions of the others for surveillance to identify and follow them. He claimed that they lived off benefits, just as he did, but was unable to identify how, when or where they received them. Jake suggested he might generate an opportunity to go through the belongings of the others.
‘If they’re out, then,’ he said, ‘you could risk a discreet look. Have a cover story ready. We can talk through possibilities. They must have something. Bank cards, social security papers, travel documents, phone contracts, something. Anything.’
‘They’re never all out at the same time,’ said Abu Omar, blinking slowly and turning his hooded eyes to Jake.
‘Are you not trusted by them?’
‘I’m trusted,’ he said indignantly. ‘We fought together.’
‘But you know nothing about them?’
‘You don’t need to know anything when you’re in the battlefield, fighting for each other.’
Jimmy nodded in sage confirmation.
Thirteen weeks in, Abu Omar volunteered, ‘There’s this guy who’ll provide the necessary when it comes to it, says Jamal. Jamal’s gofer, he calls him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Never met him.’
They’d always been playing catch-up, that’s just how it was with Abu Omar. The tantalizing lead, without the possibility of corroboration, then the race to see what it meant. Jamal’s gofer, whoever the hell he was. The numerous meetings in places that sounded wholly convincing yet could never be found. The cars for which Abu Omar could provide no colour, marque or other identifying detail. ‘It was dark, man, how the hell do I know what make it was? It was, like, normal size and the dashboard lights were blue. Or maybe white. I’m not interested in cars, man.’
Were there echoes now, thin and faint or booming and ominous, with Rashid? No, thought Jake, but he wasn’t certain. He placed little stock on certainty generally, but a little of it wouldn’t have gone amiss just at the moment.
Frank and Jimmy’s immediate boss, Tom, a tall, straight-backed linebacker of a Texan with the blue-eyed certainty of the true believer, came to visit. Whether it was to rally the troops and rais
e morale, an exercise in intelligence tourism, or the chance for a spot of light Christmas shopping in Bond Street wasn’t clear. Certainly it was to take his measure of Jake and George. He described himself as a great friend of Stuart’s; whether this was a warning or he thought it would serve as a character reference was equally opaque.
‘How’s our boy doing?’ he asked.
‘He’s OK,’ said George.
‘OK? That the best we can do, guys?’ He directed his question at Frank and Jimmy. They looked at each other. ‘Or maybe this is your great British understatement.’
George smiled.
‘It’ll be fine,’ said Jake. ‘He’s great. We need to get things moving. That’s maybe all.’
‘This guy’s a one-off,’ said Tom. ‘He doesn’t show it but he has cojones. Like all you English. You need to get to the beat of his heart is all. Frank’ll tell you that.’ Frank nodded. ‘Once you do, it all comes together.’
‘They’re all one-offs, of course. By definition,’ said George.
‘Hell, you’re right, George.’
Jake said, ‘The current reporting about IS identifying informants among foreign fighters with unexplained absences from the battlefield. Do we need to worry about that?’
‘I saw that,’ said Tom. ‘Good point, Jake. Kind of thing circulates all the time. They push this stuff out. We took good care of this boy. And he’s got a head on his shoulders. Anyway, unexplained absences. It’s chaos out there. On their side everything is unexplained. He was out of the field maybe a week. Frank?’
‘This was how we worked it,’ said Frank. ‘He was captured in battle. No one else saw it, no one else saw him in captivity. We’re certain. He was taken in for assessment and singled out as of potential use. He begged to work for us. He’d had enough. Jimmy and I looked him over, liked the goods. Decided we’d give it a roll of the dice. Some work, some don’t. This guy did. We gave him a wound to take back, and a cover story. And we hit pay dirt. They’d have executed him there and then if they didn’t trust him. We know what we’re doing. You got an issue with that?’
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