The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  As usual, HJK was dressed simply in a shalwar kameez, all white, with inexpensive leather sandals. He sat upright, confidently, huge black beard flecked with gray, a simple flip cell phone clutched in one massive hand and in the other a misbaha—the string of Muslim prayer beads, ninety-nine smooth round gemstones for reciting the ninety-nine names of Allah. Nothing to distinguish him from any other Afghan businessman. It made you wonder: Could the stories of his immense wealth be true? Was this massive man really one of the oligarchs of Southwest Asia and the Middle East?

  We gave each other a hug in greeting; he held my shoulders firmly for a long time after the embrace. He liked when I referred to him as “the Great” Haji Juma Khan—one thing he was certainly not lacking was vanity. For his part, he preferred to call me “Mister Ed”—he felt it lent a formality to our relationship.

  He was a man of enormous appetites. Over the months ahead, I ate with him many times, and always marveled at his capacity. He would never glance at a menu. The waitstaff all knew the Great Haji Juma Khan, and they would keep bringing an endless stream of his favorite dishes.

  I’ve never been a big eater; in the course of a long night I’d pick at a couple of chicken kebobs. HJK would always order twenty to twenty-four chicken and lamb kebobs, devouring them without so much as a hiccup. The waiters were constantly rushing back and forth to our table: plate after plate of chicken and lamb kebobs with tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and cauliflower—that’s the staple vegetable of their diet. The average Afghan must eat his own body weight in cauliflower every week. I’m told they’ve been eating the same meals, virtually unchanged, since Genghis Khan’s armies overran the country.

  Haji Juma Khan and I are almost exactly the same age. He grew up in rural poverty, a child of the Soviet occupation. When I was finishing up college, enlisting in the Marine Corps, he was a kid in the trenches: The USSR military machine was laying waste to his land.

  Back home, I’d been through months of expert training, read more than a hundred books on the region, but here was how I truly learned about Afghanistan, through HJK’s eyes—the eyes of a boy and teenager in Baluchistan, near the Iranian frontier, during the years of great bloodshed and upheaval. As we sat in that back table of the Persian restaurant, HJK gave me a full-time course in Afghan history and austerity.

  There was one thing I needed to understand about his country, he stressed as the steaming plates of kebobs and vegetables arrived. The various tribes and peoples—Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Aimak, Turkmen, Baluch—had been forged by the winds of history into an extraordinarily intuitive nation. These were the people who had survived conquest by four great empires. They fought fiercely and fearlessly—but also knew how to fall back, to blend in with the conquerors whenever they needed to.

  Haji Juma Khan told me—echoing Faulkner’s famous remarks about the American South—these ancient conquests are not history. They’re not even the past.

  “We survived Alexander—and we then survived Attila,” he said.

  Genghis Khan, too, and his hordes of horsemen—the Mongols found the terrain impossible to control. And then, the greatest empire of all, he told me: the British, with their disciplined ranks of redcoats. Even with nineteenth-century technological advancements, Afghanistan was too inhospitable; like the Mongols, the Brits realized they could occupy Afghanistan but they could never govern it. When the Afghan tribes finally rose up in rebellion, it was carnage. Some 16,500 British were killed—butchered—when they were already in full retreat from Kabul during the Battle of Gandamak, in 1842.

  It struck me as telling, and strange: Here we were, living in an age of GPS and ever-present cell phones (Afghanistan has the best cell coverage anywhere on earth, much better than Los Angeles or New York; our spooks, for their own intel-gathering purposes, have made damn sure of that), and a man like HJK would drop a reference to that centuries-old massacre.

  Gandamak.

  Said proudly—defiantly—proof of the indomitable national character.

  “That’s something you Americans don’t understand. Time. Yes, time passes differently in Afghanistan. As I boy, I heard this all the time in the years of the mujahideen: ‘Young one, be patient. We can always wait.’”

  He told me about those adolescent years during the Soviet occupation, watching the survival skills of the older Afghan tribesmen, graybeards who knew every hidden underground aquifer, every piece of arable land, every possible escape route into the high hinterlands and ice-bound mountain passes.

  • • •

  Today, traveling the vast stretches of that country, you see millions of Afghans living like they did at the time of Alexander: no electricity, no flowing water. More than 90 percent of Afghans still do not have access to electricity. Those living in Kabul have access to electricity only four hours per day, every other day. My first days in-country, I visited major Afghan government officials in their homes: With just one simple electric heater for personal warmth, they’d drape their windows with homemade rugs to hold in the heat; at night they’d cover themselves with rugs and blankets.

  Driving out of the embassy compound, you saw that 90 percent everywhere: average Afghans living as they have for centuries. My friend General Daud was right: We have nothing they want.

  Especially in the winter, without electricity, without natural gas, everything is cooked on open wood fires. They often defecate outside their hovels, and the human waste vaporizes. Westerners are perpetually sick in Kabul. Just breathing the air will do you in. Everybody in the embassy was stricken with dysentery.

  During the winter months, most people just hunker down, some living in caves, subsisting on sparse rations of mutton and chicken but mostly cauliflower and rice: the same rudimentary meal every single goddamn day.

  • • •

  In my mind, they were mirror images of each other: No two men were more emblematic of the Afghan instinct for survival than my friends General Mohammad Daud Daud and Haji Juma Khan. This hulking tribal drug lord had survived for thirty years, transshipped metric tons of opium and heroin around the globe, by blending in, cooperating, co-opting, constantly maneuvering—an uncanny ability to shape-shift.*

  But more than just adapting, he found ways to manipulate whoever took the reins of power. He played the Soviet conquerors to his advantage; he’d used the tribal warlords; he’d used the Taliban; he’d used the Coalition, used his high-ranking contacts in the Karzai government. Now—of course, no one was being naïve—he was trying to use me every bit as much as I was using him.

  HJK was tearing into another one of the chicken kebobs, proudly telling me about his fourteen wives and the twenty-nine children he had scattered around the region. He had sixteen sons by the various wives and mistresses. The lists of names washed over me; reminded me of sitting in the pews of St. Gabriel’s, in St. Louis, as a kid and hearing those Jesuits rattle off the progeny of the patriarchs in the Old Testament.

  I could never wrap my head around one thing: For some reason, HJK loved his nephew Abu Aziz more than he loved his own kids. He said it often and openly: He cherished this one nephew more than any of his sons. He shook his head and called his eldest son a word in Dari that roughly translates as “miscreant.”

  He cherished his nephew Abu Aziz so much that it was clear that he was grooming the young man—not any of his sons—to step in as successor to his sprawling “business” empire.

  • • •

  Strange as it sounds, the hours I spent undercover with HJK were becoming a source of solace: an escape from the stress of embassy politics, the constant infighting and war of wills with our CIA agents and the British SAS and SBS (Special Air Service and Special Boat Service) officers.

  On a daily basis, I was never sure who I was going to have more friction with: the spooks or the Brits. Reading the newspapers back home, you’d hear about the united front of the Coalition—sure, we may have done joint operations
together, but as in the days of Patton and Montgomery, more often than not we hated each other’s guts.

  Still, what our own spooks had done that very week with this kid Goldie went beyond the standard internecine bullshit. It was, in my eyes, criminal negligence.

  It had cost me one of my best men. Any cop will tell you that he’s only as good as his informants. “The worst men often give the best advice,” as Sir Francis Bacon famously wrote.

  Informants have put their lives in your hands. You’ve got to woo them, nurture them, care for them, and provide them with a sense of security and protection. In Kabul it was next to impossible to protect my informants. Unlike the rest of us—DEA, CIA and FBI, State Department staffers—they weren’t living in the secure fortified embassy.

  Obviously, Afghanistan doesn’t have anything like our domestic witness protection program. Every time one of these young Afghans cooperated with us, they weren’t only risking their lives; they were jeopardizing the safety of their entire families. The Taliban and Al Qaeda often practiced “collective” vengeance for those they considered traitors and infidels.

  Once word got out that an informant had helped us, there was no safe haven: I had to immediately get him out of the country. Even today, I’ve got at least a dozen guys who worked our cases who can never return to Afghanistan. Not even for their parents’ funerals.

  You can’t imagine how many fast-track immigration visas I had to get through just to save my informants’ lives because their names had been leaked to jihadists in the Taliban or Al Qaeda operatives. I had to race through some form of visa—usually student—and get them out of Afghanistan before they got whacked.

  In fact, though I was doing my damnedest to keep a poker face throughout dinner, I’d taken a body blow: I’d just lost my first informant in my entire career. This twenty-seven-year-old, Goldie, who’d been working with the US government since we first came in to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban in 2001. Sure, he was an opportunist. All informants are mercenaries: some motivated by revenge, some by money, and some by idealistic or nationalistic concerns.

  Goldie’s motives were financial, but he was an educated kid, and ultimately he wanted to come to the United States, attend college—I was already processing the paperwork to get him a student visa to come to the United States. For some reason he had his heart set on going to a university in Wyoming, though I think he just liked the way those syllables sounded on his tongue . . . or maybe he’d seen a few too many cowboy movies . . .

  I’d sent Goldie undercover pursuing several Taliban associates trafficking in heroin. He was out on a meet; then we lost contact. He went missing for three days. We were looking everywhere for him. Even the FBI said they’d help—but we all knew the Feebs couldn’t find their asses in the dark with two hands.

  As for the spooks, they were no help. It turned out to have been their egregious fuckup. We had to share information about our DEA informants with them because oftentimes informants would work both sides of the fence. I doubt it was a malicious act—probably just incompetence, sloppiness—but within a matter of days Goldie was gone.

  The CIA told their counterparts in the NDS that Goldie was working undercover for us—the NDS was a notorious intelligence sieve.

  When we finally found Goldie, our worst fears were confirmed: He’d been butchered like a lamb, dumped in front of a mosque, strangled to death with wire. They’d pulled the wire so tight that his throat was sliced open ear to ear.

  The executioners believe that there’s Koranic justification—they’re going to be rewarded in heaven for taking care of a “traitor” to Islam. They don’t see themselves as cold-blooded murderers but as Allah’s avenging warriors.

  As soon as my cell rang, I jumped in my Land Cruiser and raced over to the mosque. Goldie was lying in the back of a pickup truck, face drained white. I cradled the boy’s body in my arms. His blood soaked through my shirtfront. What gave me such enormous guilt was that I was just a few days short of securing the visa and passport to get Goldie out of the country. In the last conversation we had, I told him he’d better prepare for the bitter winters in Wyoming . . .

  Then I’d had to notify the family. Goldie’s mother was wailing like a banshee. Inconsolable. I stepped out of legal boundaries, reached into my DEA operations account, and gave the family $10,000 in cash. Completely against department rules, but I thought, Fuck it, this kid gave up his life to help us. The average household income in Afghanistan was between $300 and $500 in US dollars, so my little extralegal death annuity of $10K would, hopefully, set Goldie’s family up for twenty years.

  From that week on—for the rest of my DEA career—I kept a picture of Goldie slipped in with my own DEA identification creds, always in the lanyard around my neck. Not a day would pass when I didn’t look at him. I wanted to stare back at Goldie’s eyes every single day and remind myself of how we’d lost him, and what the stakes of my work as a counter-narcotics leader were really all about.

  “Look at yourself,” HJK said, breaking the long silence. “Your plate is cold. What’s the matter? You have the weight of the world.”

  “Yeah,” I said, letting out a sigh between clenched teeth. “Honestly, I’ve been getting my ass kicked all week. I could use a . . .”

  All alcohol consumption is haraam—strictly forbidden in Islam. Talking to believers, you’ll get different justifications for the prohibition, but most give you a famous sura of the Prophet:

  O, you who believe! Intoxicants and gambling, sacrificing to stones,

  And divination by arrows, are an abomination of Satan’s handiwork.

  Eschew such abomination, that you may prosper!

  But let me tell you how it really is: In Shiraz—and virtually every other restaurant and kebab joint we frequented—the staff always keeps a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black hidden in a cupboard in the back.

  I can’t count how many times I watched these guys—Afghan politicians, cops, military officers, even the highest-ranking government officials—getting blind drunk on Johnnie Black and then staggering to mosque the first thing the next morning to bow down on their pristine prayer rugs before Allah . . . I’ve been to many parties in Afghanistan where the cops and the NDS guys were eating pork—tantamount to blasphemy. And I still have no idea how they got it into the country. I never saw a pig in all my years living there.

  But I did want a stiff shot of spirits right then.

  HJK nodded at me, offered a wry smile. “Listen, Ed, you’re not a Muslim. I will allow you to have a glass of wine.”

  He gestured to one of the waiters with a flick of his massive right hand. Instantly, I had a simple drinking glass of red wine placed in front of me.

  We touched our glasses, his filled with water, mine red wine.

  “Our Lord’s first miracle was turning water into wine,” I said, softly, more for my benefit than his.

  He didn’t know the exact details of the Gospels, but he smiled.

  “Yes, Jesus is a disciple in Islam.”

  “A disciple?”

  “A great prophet, a righteous messenger of Allah. We, too, believe Isa will return one day—as a man, to serve Allah’s will . . .”

  • • •

  Perhaps it was Allah’s will. Who can say? But it was the cancer that cemented our friendship. Cancer—his and mine—formed the final, immutable bond of trust. On that hot July morning, we literally stripped ourselves naked to the waist in my sweltering office in the embassy compound . . .

  For all his well-honed survival skills, his ruthlessness in attacking external threats to his power, Haji Juma Khan couldn’t beat one enemy through sheer cunning: the virulent, rapid cell mutation attacking his hulking body from within.

  • • •

  On that morning there was an unmistakable note of hesitancy, almost a tremble, when he spoke. HJK was one of the most confident, controlling, domina
nt men I’ve ever met. Now something had changed. Why was he calling my cell sounding positively frightened?

  “Mister Ed,” he said, “I have to see you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I need to see you to explain,” he said.

  HJK came to my office in the embassy compound—accompanied by his beloved nephew, Abu Aziz—and, from the moment he sat down, started telling me about his recent health concerns. He wasn’t feeling his normal bull-like strength. He was worried about the strange red splotches that had developed slowly, mysteriously, over the course of months. He’d been to see some local tribal doctor in Baluchistan, but he didn’t have the medical knowledge, let alone the technology, to tell HJK whether or not it was cancer.

  I watched as he methodically unbuttoned the top of his shalwar kameez. I immediately saw the four large growths on his chest. Huge external skin tumors. They were bad. In fact, it was amazing to me that he had let the situation go on as long as he had. These were five-inch tumors: raised and asymmetrical, a deep shade of scarlet.

  Sitting next to him, I held his gaze.

  I told him this was nothing to take lightly.

  “How do you know?” he said.

  I pulled up my own button-down shirt, made a half-turn, and showed him my torso. In the center of my back, just above the lumbar region, I have an enormous raised white-and-pink scar that forms a near-perfect cross.

  “What happened to you?” Haji Juma Khan seemed genuinely concerned.

  “Malignant melanoma,” I said.

  Now I told him the story: how I’d been snorkeling off Kona in Hawaii, back in the summer of ’94, diving down deeper and deeper into the clear azure water . . . and when I surfaced, pulled myself out onto the boat, my old boss Don Carstensen noticed something strange on my wet back.