The Caliphate

by André Le Gallo

  The army had sent him to study Islam and Arabic, first at the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, called by its students Langues O, and then to Tunis where the DGSE had an Arabic language school From the school, he had been recruited by Service Action, the DGSE’s special operations branch backed up by the 11th Parachute Regiment of the French Foreign Legion.

  As a student of Islam, Roger had managed to meet al Khalil and eventually persuaded him to provide information on radical Muslim movements. In time, al Khalil had grown in stature and was offered participation in alluring financial propositions. Roger often profited personally from these opportunities. Al Khalil had become more than just an agent in Captain Roger’s life. In a way, the money he made from these deals made up in small part for the life that had been taken from him.

  PART II

  It is in the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.

  —Hassan al Banna, Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

  Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against War. They are witless. Islam says, “Kill the Infidels.”

  —Ayatollah Khomeini, Qom, 1986

  29. Outside Al Khalil’s Office

  The morning after his telephone call with David, Salim took Tariq for a walk in the courtyard.

  “The insights you shared with me last night are worthy of a great leader,” Salim said. “You are right that the Shiites are gaining in political significance, thanks in part to the Americans and their ‘one-man-one-vote’ concept. Taking care of the Shiite problem is major. However, it will follow as night follows day once we take care of the Jew problem. In the meantime, instead of striking against Iran, perhaps we can use its international capabilities to our advantage. Our funders and backers will be happier if we score directly against the Zionist entity. Or against its American parent.”

  Those had not been David’s instructions. On the contrary, David had told Salim to support a strike against Iran. But Salim had turned David’s words in his mind for most of the night. It was one thing to give the Americans information of the state of progress of the Sahelian enterprise. It was something else to do their bidding against another Islamic state, even if it was Shiite. The advice he was giving Tariq was his own, not David’s.

  “What are you suggesting, Salim?”

  “That we give Islam a victory against Israel in its own land. Hijacking an El Al plane or attacking an Israeli embassy has become routine, unexciting. A strike in what they call their homeland will renew your mandate as head of Islam’s hopes. And I’m not talking about blowing up a pizza parlor.”

  “Salim, you are inspiring me. But how can we be successful where the Palestinians have failed? Or even against the United States now that their guard is up?”

  “Nothing is impossible, Tariq, if Allah is with us, and he is. Now is the time to activate one of the support cells in America. In fact, we could have a two-track strategy. Prepare for both an operation in America and another in Israel. At the right time, we will choose one or the other.”

  Al Khalil said nothing for several minutes, picking up sand and letting it run through his fingers. Finally he looked at Salim.

  “No. We cannot dissipate our resources. We must exert all of our forces on one target, and that target has to be the Zionist presence on our land. Hamas will help us. We have many Ikhwan brothers in Hamas.”

  It was time for mid-morning prayers. They stood up and went to the Mosque room.

  30. Paris

  Justin, a member of the Paris CIA station, rushed to reach Le Grand Hotel on Rue Scribe, near the Place de l'Opéra. He crossed Rue Auber and was soon in front of the hotel’s baroque façade. Before he walked in, he rechecked the picture in his pocket to imprint the target’s features firmly in his mind.

  He spoke into what appeared to be a cell phone headset but was an encrypted surveillance communications device.

  “This is Blue Hunter. I’m in place. I’m about to go inside. Anything new on target location? Over.”

  Joyce, in the Paris station’s communications vault, answered.

  “This is Hunter Control. He has not moved. Over.”

  She was sitting in a room crowded with stacks of communications gear operated by two men busy with their duties.

  “I have not heard from Red Hunter or Green Hunter. Are they in place? Over.”

  “They are on their way. They should check in with you in the next five minutes. Out.”

  Joyce called Justin to join her in the communications vault.

  “Typical Headquarters bugfuck,” she said. “They knew this guy was going to have an ops meeting in Paris because they’ve been monitoring his phone conversations. They also knew from the GPS device in his phone that he was here. There was no need to wait until now to tell us. Now it’s a fucking emergency.”

  She was reading a computer screen.

  “Wait a sec. Here, copy down these coordinates: 48.52345N - 2.2250E. Find out where that is.”

  Justin took the numbers, opened the heavy steel door, and felt the air inside decompress. He went to a wall map of Paris hung in his cubicle that was marked with small colored flags showing safe houses, hot spots where there were more likely than not to have concentrations of police such as banks, embassies and official buildings and the areas where his colleagues had been conducting operations during the week.

  He went back to the vault and told Joyce, “It could be the Opera or the Grand Hotel on Rue Scribe.”

  “Well, the signal has been transmitting from that spot since last night so we’ll assume that he spent the night at the hotel and not at the Opera. Headquarters switched the signal to transmit once every thirty seconds instead of once a day when he was in Africa. He, by the way, is CALIPH/1. I’ll give you his photo, true name, and basic bio in a minute.”

  “I’ll get ready and we can move out as soon as Larry and Doreen get here. Where the hell are they anyway?” Justin asked.

  He looked at his watch. It was 8:30 a.m.

  “They were up half the night keeping tabs on FARC visitors from Colombia,” Joyce said. “It looks like the French Government is negotiating with the FARC over hostages. CALIPH/1 could start moving any minute, unless he likes to sleep late. I’ll tell Larry and Doreen to go directly to the Place de l’Opéra. You can connect with them after they get there. You’re Blue Hunter. Larry will be green and Doreen will be red. Go.”

  Justin walked into the hotel and made a quick recon. When he was with the Marines in Iraq, “recon” meant skulking in the streets of Fallujah fully armed and anticipating hostile fire at any second. This was much better without giving up the feeling of contributing to something greater. His earphone suddenly came to life. He took a quick scan of his immediate surroundings and was satisfied that no one could overhear his conversation.

  “This is Green Hunter. We are approaching Place de l’Opéra heading east on Boulevard des Capucines. Over.”

  “This is Blue Hunter. No sight of him yet. But be aware that the hotel has exits on Rue Scribe, at the corners of Scribe and Capucines, and of Capucines and Auber. There may be another one on the northern side but I haven’t had time to check it out. If he takes a taxi, they’re on Rue Scribe by the main entrance. Over.”

  Justin walked through the central part of the ground floor, a vast sitting area lit by an equally large skylight. One dining room was round with balcony-type French windows thirty feet up. Another dining room was flanked by tall cream-colored Greek columns going up toward a Sistine Chapel-like ceiling. Justin searched for an informal breakfast restaurant where he thought his man might be having coffee when he spotted him.

  He again looked around before he said, “This is Blue. He is walking toward the Scribe side, probably for a taxi. Pick me up corner of Scribe and Capucines. Over.”

  “Roger, out.”

  With Larry driving the ten year old white Renault Clio Hatchback with custom BMW-3 engi
ne installed by CIA technicians to give the little car a dependable source of power, they followed al Khalil’s cab down Rue Royale through Place de la Concorde and west along the Seine River until they reached Passy.

  “Hunter Control, this is Blue Hunter. Target took a cab to the sixteenth arrondissement and went into a building on Rue Chernoviz next to a grammar school. Red is on the street and we are around the corner on Rue Raynouard. Over.”

  “This is Hunter Control. Determine identity of target’s contact,” Joyce said. “Out.”

  An hour later, Justin reported back to Joyce, “Hunter control, this is Blue. Target just exited the building with another male in his late thirties to mid-forties. Right side of his face, I can’t describe it exactly but it’s unusual. The right of his mouth is up like he’s smiling but he’s not. Looks like he could star in a horror movie. We’ll try to take photos.”

  Using the cameras in the side-view mirrors, Doreen and Justin were able to take the photos they needed as the two men walked to a neighborhood restaurant. The unknown male eventually broke off from al Khalil. The team followed him to his car and continued to tail him.

  As they drove by the Porte de Bagnolet Metro station, Larry said smiling, “I think I know where our friend is going.” When their quarry turned left on Boulevard Mortier, he added, “I knew it. This guy is DGSE. I can’t believe it! CALIPH/1, a terrorist by any measure, is an agent of French Intelligence!”

  ***

  During their meeting in the safe apartment on Rue Chernoviz, al Khalil had not revealed his major change in direction. Instead, he solicited funds. Captain Roger’s reply was “We already give you more money than I can account for with my supervisor. Why do you need more?”

  “We are really making progress. You know that unless I gather the extremist imams under my tent, someone else will. And French interests will not be safe.”

  “What about that American professor killed in Paris? We know that was you. You’re not living up to your side of the bargain.”

  “We all know that he was a CIA spy operating in France, so I did you a favor as well. Besides, we never agreed that Americans in France were included under ‘French interests.’ I’m keeping my jihadists under control. Unless I can pay them and show that we’re active, they’re going to go elsewhere or go out on their own and your churches and malls and official buildings and metros will be see one firebomb after another. Who do you think has kept suicide bombers away from ‘la belle France’?”

  Al Khalil knew Roger well enough to understand that he wanted to continue the relationship. Roger’s financial and career advantages were at stake.

  ***

  Commandant Leroux had to do what he most disliked about his job as head of the DGSE’s Technical Directorate—ask for assistance from the DGSE’s sister service, the DST, the Direction pour la Surveillance du Territoire, France’s internal security organization. He made the call from his Boulevard Mortier office.

  “We have intercepted a new signal that will be of interest to you. We have been tracking it for several weeks through our intercept site in the Kourou Space Center in French Guyana. It was an encrypted microsecond burst. Unfortunately, there were much higher priorities for the use of our Cray computer here. However, yesterday… no, two nights ago … our center on the Oregeval Plateau at Alluet-le-Roi, in the Périgord, picked up the signal. But now it’s more frequent. Instead of once a day, the signal is transmitted once every thirty seconds.”

  Lacoste interrupted, “Probably a simple locator transmission. If we can’t break the encryption, we should be able to find out where it’s coming from.”

  “You may be right. In any case, the source seems to be within our borders and that’s why I’m calling.”

  “Just send me everything you have. It would have been better if we could have had it earlier. It may be too late to make any arrests now. We’ll see.”

  Leroux hung up. He wasn’t interested particularly in an arrest.

  The DST, part of the Ministry of the Interior, are just cops, he thought. Promotions are based on collars.

  He shook his head. The better way would be to let the agent run and discover his entire network.

  31. DGSE Headquarters

  Kella was in her cubicle at her new job in the DGSE building which, so far, was bare of personal items, such as family photos or favorite decorations. Most of her new colleagues were men, about half of whom were in uniform. The atmosphere and the corridor décor were also strongly military. Her feelings about that were fairly agnostic. Her parents had been killed by soldiers but her grandfather was a general. She was the object of considerable curiosity. After all, the boss was her grand-père, she was a woman, and she was an ENA graduate.

  She had been looking forward to this moment since she learned that her request to be assigned to the Maghreb, or North African, section had been successful. A file marked “CIMETERRE” was on her desk. She opened the red cover of the Tariq al Khalil operation and began to read. Excited, she noted the romantic inference of the name, meaning scimitar, and its invocation of the Muslim conquests that had made this Arab battle-sword notorious.

  After her DGSE junior-officer training, she went through a series of interims in each of the five directorates: Strategic, in touch with the users of the information to determine its adequacy, relevance and timeliness; intelligence, the HUMINT collectors; Technical, the intercept operators, France’s equivalent to the American National Security Agency; and Operations, or “Action,” the special military groups organized into maritime, air, and ground divisions.

  The file was organized chronologically with the most recent reports on top. She flipped to the back and read Captain Roger’s version of the recruitment. It read well. Roger had been adept at meeting and developing al Khalil. In time, al Khalil shared information about the leading personalities of terrorist groups in Indonesia, the Jamaat al Islamiya whom he had met in the Afghan training camps. After the Bali bombings, Roger had claimed credit for al Khalil’s information that led to the eventual arrest of Abu Bakr Bashir, the Jamaat leader.

  Kella was shocked to learn that the DGSE funded al Khalil to the tune of twelve thousand dollars a month. Several assassinations in Northern Mali and in other countries of the Sahel were attributed to al Khalil’s group by other sources. However, there was no reporting on those assassinations from Roger. His accounts of IMRA activities in the Sahel focused on social services and health care. It seemed al Khalil was also obtaining funds from the gold and uranium mines of West and Saharan Africa. Some of his military training camps were identified, including the one she and Steve had overflown. She found no mention of his use of Unmanned Air Vehicles or of yellowcake.

  She went back over the assassinations reported on by other sources and noted it included Tuaregs. She looked at the bracelet given to her by Thiyya and had mixed feelings. Was she on the wrong side?

  “How are you doing Kella?” asked a tallish man in uniform who had stepped into her small space. He wore jump wings and several decorations. She had met him fleetingly during her first day on the job. It was Commandant Jocelin, the Maghreb section chief. She wasn’t sure whether to get up but he sat down in a chair beside her desk. His long legs took up the rest of her space.

  “Just fine, sir. I’m starting to review the CIMETERRE file. Very interesting.”

  “Yes. You have to meet Captain Roger. He’s the case officer. What do you think of the case so far? CIMETERRE is very knowledgeable and has saved French lives. He’s given us information that has helped us prevent several attacks against French targets.”

  “I’m reading it chronologically and I haven’t gotten very far yet. Isn’t al Khalil a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and haven’t they been behind several terrorist events?”

  “That depends what you mean by terrorism. Besides, al Khalil has agreed not to operate in France.”

  She wasn’t happy with that answer. It was too reminiscent of paying tribute to the Barbary Coast pirates several hundred
years before—or of paying off a gang so it wouldn’t rob your store. Concerned she might have to reveal what she knew about al Khalil’s activities, she decided not to pursue the topic. She knew she shouldn’t hold back that she was part of the DGSE. Then again, perhaps the DGSE was better informed than she was, and too many comments from her might suggest she was not a team player, or that she was not sufficiently sophisticated to understand that al Khalil had his uses.

  Jocelin stood up.

  “Well, keep reading. I’m glad you’re with us and I look forward to a major contribution from you. I look forward to your ideas.”

  After his departure, she did keep reading and noticed the file contained information from other intelligence services, including Israeli and Egyptian intelligence. Typically, the reports showed Khalil unequivocally as a terrorist. However, the word “self-serving” was liberally sprinkled in the margins of these reports by Captain Roger and reflected the view in the DGSE that both the Israelis and the Egyptians had their own reasons to cast aspersions on al Khalil.

  The most recent reporting on al Khalil was from his case officer, Captain Lucien Roger, who had met him in a Paris safe house located on the Rue Chernoviz a few weeks before. Al Khalil’s Paris visit had involved both the Technical Directorate and the DST.