This, far more than the Taliban insurgency, was the gravest threat we faced in Kabul. General Daud had given me a primer on how to spot these foreign-born fighters. The Arabs hiding in Kabul tended to be lighter-skinned, with distinctively Semitic facial structure, but there was also a discernible difference in deportment and disposition.
Typical Afghan men don’t carry prayer beads unless they’ve made the pilgrimage to Mecca—like Haji Juma Khan. But most Arab men carry prayer beads and are constantly fingering them. Though the Arab men would dress in the “Haji pajamas,” as we irreverently called the shalwar kameez, they always looked rather awkward, pulling down and adjusting that knee-length shirt, like an American kid chafing at the tight collar and tie of his First Communion suit.
Inside the mosques, unlike the native Afghans, the young Arab men were uptight and fidgety before worship. While the regular worshippers were relaxing, making casual conversation, the Arabs would keep to themselves and make no eye contact.
But the most important distinction, Daud told me, was the intensity of worship. During prayers many Afghans simply go through the motions, reciting the suras, bowing down on their prayer rugs, no more enraptured than a typical American at his local Sunday church service. The Arabs were infinitely more intense in their worship: five times each day, facing Mecca, heaving upward, and throwing themselves down again with the fervor of Christian Holy Rollers at a revival. Down on those prayer mats, in a psychological state approaching possession, they would bang their heads penitently into the ground—thud, thud, thud—over and over again. It was a wonder that they didn’t knock themselves out cold.
It was the telltale stigmata, General Daud taught me: “After prayer service, always look for anyone who has bruised his forehead by smashing it on the ground.
“Trust me, Ed,” Daud said. “If you see anyone with a dark bruise in the middle of his forehead, he will not be an Afghan. He will most surely be an Arab.”
• • •
The hardest part for me wasn’t working undercover in a war zone, dressing in traditional Afghan attire, or pretending to be someone I’m not—I’d done that my whole career. The toughest moment was that when I entered one of the mosques with HJK, I’d immediately have to give up my weapons.
I had no backup, no surveillance, no one with me but Haji Juma Khan. But I usually kept four weapons on my person. I had my Glock 9mm tucked on my right hip. The 9 was adequate for a shoot-out, but the trouble with the Glock—or any plastic-based semiautomatic for that matter—is that if you get in a close-range fight, tussling and struggling, and you press the gun against someone, the cycling of the slide will often jam—what’s called a condition-three failure. Nothing more useless than a jammed piece. That’s why I’d also brought my personal Smith & Wesson .38 revolver to Kabul; worn on my ankle, it was the ideal “contact weapon.” With that two-inch barrel, you can shove the .38 into somebody’s ribs and it will never jam.
I also carried two knives, strapping them on me from the moment I got out of bed in the morning. I’ve been a knife fighter since I was a kid in St. Louis. A close friend of mine, Lynn Thompson, is the owner of a company called Cold Steel, and when I was about to leave for Kabul, Lynn gave me a handmade Laredo bowie knife, which I always carried on my back. I also had one of Lynn’s five-inch push knives in a special scabbard on my left side.
Legal? Depends who you asked. In Afghanistan, honestly, we did whatever we wanted—whatever we felt was warranted—in terms of our own protection. Working in Mexico was a different story; DEA Special Agent Victor Cortez was once arrested by the federales down there for carrying an automatic weapon.
For me, law enforcement duty in Kabul was like being a federal marshal in 1880s Tombstone. Everywhere you looked, people were packing heat, openly toting AK-47s: security guards at offices, bodyguards of government ministers and diplomats, even ordinary citizens strolling down a crowded street. Everyone was openly carrying. There wasn’t a place in Afghanistan—and I covered the entire sprawling country—that I didn’t see someone toting a Kalashnikov.
Still, despite the outlaw frontier ethic, there’s one place where strict rules do apply: You cannot dishonor a mosque. You have to take your shoes off. All you can bring inside is your prayer rug.
Before we left the car, I looked at HJK, he glanced back at me, and I disarmed. Secreted away my Glock, my Smith & Wesson snub-nose, and my two Cold Steel knives.
I walked in the front door, shoulder to shoulder with HJK. The only things I did manage to smuggle in were my tiny gold cross and my pocket Bible. I never went anywhere without the Bible, gray leather and small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.
It had been given to me by Terrence, one of my close Marine buddies while I was an MP stationed in Hawaii. “Promise me you’ll carry this every day, Ed,” he’d said before he left the USMC to become a minister.
I kept that promise—still do—despite the fact that bringing a Christian Bible into a mosque is considered by most Muslims a sign of disrespect. Like most things in my Kabul life, I had to do it slyly, surreptitiously.
The mosques were always packed—especially on Friday Jumu’ah services. There were at least three or four hundred worshippers, segregated by sex, jamming the mosque to capacity.
Barefoot and solemn—while the muezzin was still making his wailing adhan calling the faithful to the noontime Friday service—we’d proceed to the tables with the small cisterns of water and the tempered silver bowls. Like a gentle schoolmaster, HJK would guide me through the ritual purification—cleansing our hands and our hearts—before we found our places, side by side, unfurling our rugs and facing in the direction of Mecca for the Jumu’ah service.
• • •
I’d never underestimated him; I always had a healthy respect for his intellect. Some reports had him listed as illiterate, but you don’t rise from abject poverty in the badlands of Baluchistan to a position of wealth and international influence by being anybody’s fool.
In hindsight, I can say HJK was probably the smartest man I’ve ever worked. But it was only inside the mosques that I realized how intelligent he really was.
The man does not understand Arabic; cannot speak it conversationally beyond simple greetings like “as salaamu alaykum.” In conversation, he was most comfortable in Dari—the Afghan variation of Farsi—and Baluchi, a distinct northwestern Iranian dialect.
Yet he could recite the Koran—the entirety of the 114 suras—syllable for syllable. Never pausing, never stopping to think: He had the entirety of the Koran committed to memory. I know my Old and New Testament pretty well—the Jesuits back at St. Gabriel’s made sure of that—but I certainly can’t unfurl a prayer rug and recite every verse from Genesis to Revelation.
That’s one of the most intimate acts two men can share—bowing on their knees and praying side by side. Despite not being a Muslim, I would get down on my knees, too. In fact, I had my own personal prayer rug—a beautifully woven red-and-black rug that General Daud had given me as a gift.
I wasn’t reciting the Koran, of course. I was praying to Jesus. Ever since I’d worked undercover in Israel on the Kayed Berro case, at the very start of my DEA career, I’ve always used the Aramaic name, the one spoken by the disciples in Galilee and Jerusalem. Yeshua Ha’Mashiach.
Bowed low on that prayer rug, surrounded by several hundred Muslims, I murmured silently:
“I’m no longer simply working this man. It’s not just another case. Look at us: I am becoming this man’s brother. What am I supposed to do when the time comes to arrest him? I’m not sure I’m prepared—not sure that I’m strong enough—to handle that day. So I’m asking you—and you asked it yourself in the Garden—‘Is there no other way?’”
• • •
We knelt and bowed in prayer, side by side, for more than an hour. After forty-five minutes my knees were burning like I’d been stung by wasps—and the answer
came to me. There was no other way.
I did the only thing left to do—prayed for strength.
Prayed for the strength to do what I needed to do. For the strength to bring down a man who had opened up his heart to me. For the strength to betray a man who . . .
Just then, I glanced up and spotted, about thirty feet away, rising from his prayer rug, a fair-skinned Arab with a well-trimmed dark-brown beard who bore a striking resemblance to the young Pacino. Definitely not Afghan: Syrian, possibly Lebanese, maybe Saudi . . .
And just as General Daud had told me, there it was: the telltale bruise of the fanatic—bluish-black, almost rectangular, dead center in the middle of his forehead.
This young Arab kid was not averting his gaze. Had he made me for an American? Singled me out? He was clocking me hard, taking my measure.
Instinctively, I felt for the Laredo bowie knife at the small of my back, then for the push knife on my left waist—the scabbard was empty. Except for my tiny cross and handheld Bible, I was naked in the mosque.
My mind was racing. The Arab fighters always traveled in numbers. And despite the prohibition against weapons in the mosque, with these foreign-born jihadists, all bets were off. In fact, we knew they often stockpiled AK-47s and other automatic guns and explosives in mosques—under the religious justification that they were tools in a holy war against the invaders and infidels.
What was my next play? What would I do if I was surrounded in the mosque? What if someone had sold me out?
As I rose from my knees, I felt a heavy weight pressing down on me. I started back, feeling a cold tremor shoot up my spine, then realized it was simply HJK resting one of his massive arms around my shoulder.
“Grant me the strength,” I said again silently.
His own strength was astonishing. As he pulled me face-to-face, smothering me in a bear hug, his long black beard scraped down my face and throat like coarse sandpaper. I’m pretty solidly built, but as he hugged me tighter, he lifted me off the ground like I was some six-year-old boy.
Then he kissed me quickly, four times, on both cheeks—traditional among Afghan friends and family at the end of the Jumu’ah service.
Seeing that I was with Haji Juma Khan—unequivocally my protector—the young Arab averted his gaze back to the pale-blue tiled floor.
HJK pressed his hand firmly into my shoulder; with prayer rugs rolled tightly under our arms, we walked together to the front of the mosque.
In my right ear I felt the kiss-like warmth, his breath faintly scented with roasted cauliflower and jasmine tea. For the first time he used the Dari word to address me.
Baradar.
Even today, I can feel the wiry barbs of his black beard pressing into my cheeks.
“You’re more than a friend, Ed,” he said. “I love you today as my brother . . .”
CHAPTER 10
THE LAST CALL
I loved being a street agent. But it was inevitable—with recognition comes rank.
I’d taken a routine fall. We were out in the field near Kabul, looking for one of the myriad illicit heroin labs hidden in caves all over the country, and I slipped on some jagged shale, busted up my knee badly. For weeks I was limping around the embassy compound with my leg wrapped up in a brace and bandages—just like the day Uncle Jim had popped my knee out of its socket.
Eventually, the pain got so bad that I had to return to the States to have an MRI, saw an orthopedic surgeon and then underwent meniscus surgery.
While I was recovering in DC, Karen Tandy, the DEA’s administrator, announced that I was getting a bump up to SES, a member of the DEA’s Senior Executive Service, no longer in the typical chain of command of the DEA but serving at the “pleasure of the President of the United States.”
I told her that I wanted to return to Kabul, but as an SES, I could no longer serve there as country attaché. My new posting meant I was stationed in the United States, briefly in Nevada and then permanently back in the LA headquarters.
I was the associate agent in charge of the Los Angeles Division, overseeing and directing some 850 agents, analysts, and support staff in Southern California, Nevada, and the entire Pacific Basin—all our special agents stationed in US territories like Guam as well as Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. I did an awful lot of traveling and even more writing. I authored the DEA’s global heroin strategy as a budgetary submission to the US Senate, and was a primary contributor to the DEA’s post–9/11 global heroin enforcement strategy for Central Asia.
I also went to work developing the DEA’s Financial Investigations Unit, which was assigned the Bin Laden money trail. In conjunction with the FBI, I led the investigation into the cash from the various halawas—traditional Arabic banking exchanges—that paid for the 9/11 attacks. All told, we identified $300,000 originating in Middle Eastern halawas and channeled through Thailand, purportedly for the 9/11 plot.
But writing up reports for Congress and chasing money trails wasn’t enough. Again, even as a member of the DEA’s Senior Executive Service, the equivalent of a brigadier general in the US Army, I kept going undercover, kept hitting the street.
Didn’t always make my bosses happy—in fact, I was held in contempt by a lot of my peers in the DEA—but that’s the only way I knew how to do my job. Like all the good bosses I’ve known—from Rogelio Guevara through Don Carstensen—I’d never ask my guys to do something I was leery of doing myself.
The odd thing was—and I still don’t quite know why—throughout my career, I always have seemed to be saving drug traffickers’ lives. Especially during the course of my years overseeing the Pacific region at SES, in countries like Indonesia, where there’s an automatic death sentence for drug trafficking. Several times I called major dealers—in Thailand, in Malaysia, in Indonesia—and told them that their best bet was to go directly to the local authorities and try to work out a deal:
“Listen, you’re in danger. Don’t go home tonight. If you want to stay alive, your best bet is to start cooperating now.”
I didn’t care if it had the government’s stamp of approval—maybe it’s the old Jesuit in me. I never wanted these traffickers or their families to get killed.
• • •
From my office in LA I ran the investigation to bring to justice the Ecstasy kingpin Yitzhak Abergil, known as the “Mr. Untouchable” of Israel.
For decades, Israel had an internal Mob crisis, internecine wars among violent clans of the Mizrahi—Jews originally from the Middle East: Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco. With the advent of the Internet and inexpensive international travel, Israeli mobsters began looking outside the borders of their country for potential markets.
Virtually overnight, they created the Ecstasy market. Just as Colombian kingpins like Pablo Escobar were able to dominate the importation of cocaine into the United States by making use of long-standing marijuana smuggling routes, the new Israeli Ecstasy kingpins had a unique advantage over competing global mafiosi.
They owned most of the underground drug labs in the Netherlands and Belgium and already had an infrastructure in place for smuggling diamonds, often employing strippers and ultra-Orthodox Jewish teenagers as mules on flights to New York and Los Angeles. No one played the E smuggling game more shrewdly than Yitzhak and Meir Abergil, two feared young brothers based in the coastal resort town of Netanya.
Don’t be fooled by the reputation of 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine, or MDMA, as a harmless “party” drug: The global Ecstasy market is monstrous. In 2005, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime valued it at more than $16 billion. Within Israeli society, control of the trade soon led to bloodbaths. Daring daylight assassinations carried out by car bombings and ex–Special Forces hit men weaving through the streets of Tel Aviv on motorcycles.
As long as they held to Bugsy Siegel’s famous line about gangland murders—“We only kill each ot
her”—the mayhem of the Israeli Mob was confined to blaring Hebrew tabloid headlines and lurid TV newsmagazines. But then innocent bystanders started to get whacked, and the general public said: “Enough!” The turning point came in July 2008, on the beachfront in Bat Yam, just south of Tel Aviv, when Margarita Lautin, a thirty-one-year-old social worker, was mistakenly assassinated in front of her husband and two young children.
The Abergil case predated me, but I got personally invested when I was named SES of our LA Division. Around the same time, the Abergil crime family was bringing its murderous methods right onto our doorstep. The Abergils were major suppliers looking for a distribution network; they decided to partner up with the Vineland Boyz, one of LA’s deadly Latino street gangs. A clever smuggling marriage was made—including such ingenious flourishes as stuffing the Ecstasy pills into toy tigers—and business was booming. But in the drug game, murder always follows money. Their first California hit happened when Abergil gangsters assassinated Sami Atlas, an Israeli drug dealer living in Sherman Oaks, who they accused of ripping off a large drug shipment.
Realizing the multinational scope of the Abergils’ enterprise and the increasing risk it posed here in the United States, we launched an investigation—logging hundreds of hours of wiretaps, interviews with witnesses and accomplices—to bring down the Abergils.
We’d indicted them through Beverly Hills and Hollywood informants; in addition to the murder of Atlas, they were responsible for major importation of Ecstasy obtained from Amsterdam.
As SES, I was often running into friction with the attorneys in the Central District of Los Angeles. They brag of having one of the highest conviction rates of all the US federal courts, but in my opinion, that’s because they only take cases that are virtually prosecuted before they go to court.
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