by Robert Baer
After he nails down a consulting contract with an Argentine oil company through his friend Garth, Bob resigns from the Agency on December 4, 1997. Two days later we’re packed, everything not movable sold, and waiting in front of our apartment for a taxi to the airport. We have two small suitcases between us.
Somewhere I read that love is a push out from shore and a belief the ice will hold. Boarding the airplane to Beirut with Bob is certainly pushing away, but I’m still not certain the ice is thick enough to support us both.
TWENTY-EIGHT
HONOLULU, July 30, 1997—Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright announced today that she was lifting the 10-year ban on travel by Americans to Lebanon. But she said Lebanon remained very dangerous and urged United States citizens not to go there.
It has been illegal for American citizens to travel on American passports to Lebanon since 1987, during a period Westerners were being taken hostage by pro-Iranian militants.
—The New York Times, July 31, 1997
Beirut, Lebanon: DAYNA
I spend my days walking around Beirut. Although it’s been six years since the end of the civil war, parts of the city look like the fighting was yesterday. The buildings along the Green Line—the battle front between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut—are in ruins, like sand castles hit by a wave. The Holiday Inn on the water is still charred on one side, all the windows blown out. The Lebanese government nominally runs the country, but in fact Hizballah, the radical Shia militia, is the strongest force in Lebanon. Syrian troops occupy half of the country.
I may be out of the CIA now, but it doesn’t really feel like it. I catch myself memorizing the location of pay phones that work, and being suspicious of cars and people I see more than once. In a café I always sit facing the entrance. I even catch myself looking for surveillance. I know it’s dumb instinct. Still, it’s going to be a while before it sinks in that no one is interested in following me anymore.
I eat lunch and dinner at the place we found when we first got here, Abu Khudur’s. It’s a little hole-in-the-wall. But it’s on the same street as our hotel, and it’s open day and night. They know me here now.
“Chicken with no pickle, madam, yes?” Ahmed says in Arabic as he makes my schwarma—the Lebanese version of a wrap sandwich. Ahmed thinks it’s funny that I always order the same thing. He likes to tease me by offering me calf’s brains and intestines.
“When is zowj coming?” Ahmed asks, as he carves chicken off the spit.
Zowj is “husband” in Arabic. Bob and I are not married, but it’s simpler to let people here think we are. Ahmed doesn’t wait for my answer. He’s warming pita bread on the grill. “Za’tar?” he asks. Thyme?
I’ve managed to learn a few words of Arabic and like to practice them when I can. “Zowj fi Paris.” My husband is in Paris. I take a Sprite out of the refrigerator. “Bukra, inshallah.” Tomorrow, God willing. I’m happy that next week I start studying Arabic with a tutor.
I stand at the window, watching the street. Almost none of Beirut’s streets are marked by signs. Even our hotel only lists its address as Hamra—Beirut’s old commercial center. Like the Lebanese, I’ve started to learn my way around by walking the streets, remembering landmarks and the bigger stores.
“Where’s Hasan?” I ask.
Ahmed hands me my schwarma wrapped in paper. “In the south.”
The first day we came here, we figured out that Ahmed and Hasan are Hizballah reservists. When the fighting against the Israelis in the south flares up, they’re called up to join their units. Ahmed still has a bandage on his arm from a wound he got in a fight a month ago.
Ahmed comes around and stands by my table, looking out the window at the stalled traffic. It sounds as if everyone is honking at the same time. Ahmed shakes his head.
The gridlock is worse today, but Hamra is always a circus. Old Mercedes taxis tap their horns to solicit fares. Hawkers and store owners stack their wares on the sidewalks. There’s nowhere to walk except in the street, dodging cars.
A boy on a motor scooter comes racing down the sidewalk, swerving to miss a lady with her shopping bags. “The idiot,” Ahmed says.
“Ahmed, we’re looking for an apartment.” I ask it on a whim, but who knows.
He motions for me to put down my sandwich. I follow him out into the street.
“See that?” he points up at a sagging banner in Arabic over Abu Khudur’s neon sign. “It says ‘apartment for rent.’ ” Ahmed points directly at the sixth floor above us. I can just see the wall of a tiny apartment on the roof.
As Ahmed writes down the telephone number from the banner, I bolt my sandwich, then run back to the hotel to call from our room, where it’s quieter.
The man who answers the phone speaks fluent English. He says he’s Dr. Hajj.
“It’s new and has a new couch and some other nice furniture,” Hajj says. “It’s perfect for an American.” It reassures me that he recognizes my accent. Alone in a strange place, the familiar feels good.
Hajj and I ride up together in the apartment’s elevator, a wobbly, rusted cage. The building’s electrical and telephone wires run down the elevator shaft, and as we pass the third floor, the cage snags a wire and makes it spark. Hajj pretends he doesn’t see.
I follow Hajj as he lets himself into the apartment with a key, through another door, and out onto the terrace. I know why he brings me here first—the view is breathtaking: the American University of Beirut framed by the Mediterranean. In the east there’s the snowcapped Shuf, the mountain range that separates the coast from the Biqa’ Valley.
I watch a man on a terrace across the street whistling to pigeons that wheel in the air above him, flying higher and higher until they’re just black specks against the sky. The man whistles three times. They pause. He whistles sharply, and they come back, putting down on the terrace around him. He speaks to them softly, enticing them back into their cages.
We go back inside. The living room is cramped and dark, but it’s freshly painted and clean. There’s a small cutout for a galley kitchen, a bedroom that just fits a queen-sized bed, and a bathroom with a drain in the corner for a shower. The floor is those hexagonal brick tiles you find in French provincial houses. The place is tiny, but who’s going to visit us? We’ll probably spend our time on the terrace anyway. Maybe I could find a kitten to sun itself here.
“Did you just come from the States?” Hajj asks as he follows me around the apartment.
Hajj must be in his early sixties. His tweed jacket and starched blue oxford shirt with button-down collar are distinctly American. He hands me his card. He’s an engineer and a professor at the American University of Beirut.
“Do you like it?” he asks.
I think he is asking about Beirut, and I don’t know what to say.
“The apartment,” he says.
“It’s great. I’ll take it.”
“And Beirut?”
He doesn’t say anything when I don’t answer. I’m glad he doesn’t press me, or ask why we came here. I’m no longer quite sure myself.
I never do get through to Bob while he’s in Paris to tell him about the apartment. I wonder if my phone is broken. But I know he’ll love it, and I call Hajj to confirm. The same day I walk up to Hamra’s main street to buy some move-in items, everything from sheets and pillows to dishes. On the way back I walk past Abu Khudur’s, so I can tell Ahmed we’re neighbors.
I leave the packages at the hotel and go back out to look for a portable washing machine, the kind you attach to the sink faucet. I find one in a small shop off Hamra, put down a deposit, and tell the shopkeeper that my zowj will be back in a taxi to pick it up.
With time on my hands, I stop at a general store with racks of brooms, mops, and cleaning brushes. On a shelf outside, a black and white baby rabbit sits in a small cage. The shopkeeper notices me playing with it through the mesh wire and comes outside.
“Is it a pet?” I ask. He nods, but I’m not sure he und
erstands.
“Yes, you buy.” He says something in Arabic, but I only catch hayawan. Animal.
“Where did you get her?” I ask. I can picture the rabbit running around the terrace of our new apartment.
“In field,” he says, stroking the side of the cage. “If you want, you say.”
“I’d love to have a rabbit, but right now I’m living in a hotel,” I say as slowly as I can. “And I have to ask my zowj.”
“Ask zowj.”
I promise myself that I’ll bring Bob back to buy it as soon as he’s home. The rabbit can be his present to me—Christmas is only a week away.
TWENTY-NINE
Nov. 4, 1997. Argentinean Bridas has said it was close to signing an agreement with Afghanistan’s Taleban to build a gas pipeline between Turkmenistan and Pakistan, crossing through Afghanistan. “The state of negotiations is well advanced, we are in the final stages,” Sebastian Otero Asp, the head of Bridas’ Afghan operations, said. Bridas has a rival in a consortium led by Unocal to build the pipeline. Unocal announced the creation of its consortium to build a $1.9-billion pipeline in the Turkmen capital Ashgabat at the end of October. But the president of Unocal, John Imle, said in Islamabad last week that it had held no negotiations with any of the factions in wartorn Afghanistan and would wait until there was a government to deal with. Otero said Bridas was holding negotiations with the Taleban authorities. “Now we are discussing with the acting Minister of Mines and Industry,” he said. Otero said Bridas would start building the pipeline as soon as the deal was signed, despite the country being divided and the anti-Taleban opposition alliance being recognized as the legitimate government by most of the outside world. “As soon as we sign, we will start building. Bridas doesn’t want to get involved in politics at all. Our main interest is to make business—there is a market in Pakistan and there is gas in Turkmenistan,” he said.
—Alexander’s Gas and Oil Connections, www.gasandoil.com/goc/company/cnc75004.htm
Paris, France: BOB
I don’t pay attention to where the short Argentine oilman with a silver mane of hair is taking me until we’re inside the restaurant, a hamburger place packed with tourists and the odd French businessmen slumming it. I wait while Carlos walks up and down, searching the booths for the man we’re having lunch with. Carlos finds him, and summons me to join them.
Sitting in a dark booth is a man dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a checkered wool shirt. “Howyudoin,” he says, standing up to shake my hand. His American accent is nearly flawless. “My name’s Ahmed Badeeb.”
I don’t know why Carlos didn’t tell me we were having lunch with Badeeb—he’s a legend in my old circles. During the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, he was the bagman for the Mujahidin. He would show up in Peshawar with suitcases filled with tens of millions of dollars, all in neat, cellophane-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills, and hand them out to the Afghans like candy. The Mujahidin used the money to buy the arms that brought down the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War—not a bad item to have on your résumé. Badeeb is now chief of staff of Saudi intelligence.
He asks me something I can’t hear because of a little girl shouting and crawling under the table next to ours. I lean in closer.
“How’s your Dari?” he repeats.
“So-so,” I say.
“You’ll learn it fast.”
I’ll wait to figure out what he means by that.
Badeeb stops a passing waiter and looks at Carlos and me. “Cheeseburgers?”
He doesn’t wait for our answer. “Your very best meat, sir,” he tells the waiter, “and medium rare.”
While we wait for our lunch, Badeeb and Carlos talk about a meeting next week in Riyadh. It’s to discuss raising money for Carlos’s Turkmenistan-to-Pakistan gas pipeline.
I stay out of it, but I’m curious to see how this unfolds, and I’m fascinated by the venue. I always imagined power lunches like this taking place in a cloud of cigar smoke in some baroque drawing room, over a port, and not a cheeseburger.
The burgers come. Badeeb pours ketchup and mustard on his, carefully holding the lettuce and tomato in place, and we eat in silence for a few minutes.
“When will you be able to leave for Afghanistan?” Badeeb asks, looking up from his hamburger.
Carlos looks at me with an expression that says there is only one answer to this question, and I’d better know what it is.
“Oh, almost anytime,” I say.
For the last two months I’ve been consulting on the Middle East for Carlos. He runs his company, Bridas, like his personal fiefdom, hopping around the world in his private jet. He likes it that I’ve set up in Beirut because it’s a convenient hub for the places he does business. Kabul is a new twist, but I can’t say I’m not interested. I’ll run it by Dayna if and when it gets serious.
“What about the Russians?” I ask. “They couldn’t be happy about it.”
It’s pretty much a given that the Russians want all Central Asian pipelines to go through Russia rather than Afghanistan. They want an economic stranglehold on these countries.
Badeeb waves his hand in the air as if he’s swatting away a fly. “The Russians are bluffing. They wouldn’t dare try to stop this pipeline.”
Badeeb and Carlos go back to talking about financing, calculating that construction will start next year.
After lunch Carlos walks out with me onto the Champs-Élysées. It’s starting to rain. Carlos doesn’t have an umbrella, and I offer him mine. He looks at it for moment, but doesn’t take it. Instead, he asks me to spend another night in Paris so I can meet one of his bankers tomorrow for lunch.
“I have a flight in three hours,” I say.
“But this is a very important lunch.”
I start to tell him that Dayna is in Beirut, expecting me home, but then decide Carlos won’t care. I know enough about his world to realize that while there’s nothing more important than family, family never gets in the way of business.
“I’ll be there,” I say. “But I absolutely must go back to Beirut tomorrow afternoon.”
I walk up the Champs-Élysées to call Dayna from a phone booth. Her cell rings once and then turns off. I feel panic setting in. It’s two days before Christmas, and I was only supposed to be gone for two nights.
I should have told Carlos no and just gone back to Beirut. And the more I think about it, the crazier the idea of our moving to Kabul to work with the Taliban seems. Why would the Taliban ever accept me, an ex-CIA operative? But I can’t turn down the proposal out of hand. Garth introduced me to Carlos, and I can’t embarrass him.
The next day, when I show up to the Plaza Athénée, one of Paris’s great Beaux Arts hotels, Carlos and the banker are already in the restaurant, two Kir Royales on the table in front of them. Carlos sees me, and signals to the waiter that I need one too.
After Carlos introduces me to the banker, they ignore me and talk about interest-rate spreads. Every time the banker makes a point, he shoots his sleeve, exposing his dime-thin, gold Patek Philippe watch, and gives his neck a quarter turn as if his collar were too tight.
I look at my own watch. I have exactly three hours and twenty minutes until my plane takes off for Beirut. I pick up a menu, catching Carlos’s eye. I ask him if he’s ever had the sole here. He looks over at me, doesn’t answer, and goes back to talking to the banker.
“What kind of wine do you like?” I interrupt again, pushing the wine list in his direction.
Irritated, Carlos picks it up. He doesn’t like the choices, and catches the steward’s attention. He orders a bottle each of white and red, wines I’ve never heard of. But from their names they sound expensive.
As Carlos and the banker leave off interest rates to discuss a Swiss investor they don’t like, I continue worrying about my flight. I can’t disappoint Dayna and miss it. I push my chair back and say I have to make a call. Carlos waves me away in the direction of the door.
All the phone booths around the Plac
e de l’Alma are occupied, but after maybe fifteen minutes of waiting, one frees up and I try our cell that Dayna has. It’s busy. Who could she be talking to? I try a second time, but it’s still busy. On the third try, a canned voice tells me in Arabic that the phone number is no longer in service. It feels like feral cats are eating the inside of my stomach.
Carlos doesn’t even look my way when I sit back down. The waiter pours me a glass of white wine. I don’t touch it, and instead glance at my watch. I now have two hours and twenty minutes before the plane takes off. I try to remember what Paris traffic is like on Thursday afternoons, another wasted thought. The only thing predictable about Paris traffic is that there’s always a snarl on the way to the airport. The premier plat hasn’t even arrived.
When the banker starts to talk about his summer house in Provence, my frayed nerves turn white-hot with fury. I consider ripping his Patek Philippe off his wrist and dropping it in the flower vase. Carlos glances over at me, probably wondering if I’ve lost my mind.
There was a time not long ago when I would have moved heaven and earth to sit at a meeting like this, listening to two players in the Great Game redraw the map of Central Asia. But right now I can only think about getting home for Christmas with Dayna. In the chaos that is my life, she’s the only certainty I have. There’s no way I’m going to let this relationship become a throwaway like so many before.
I push my chair back again. “I have to leave.”
“Is something wrong?” Carlos asks.
“A family emergency.”
Carlos looks at me in disbelief. I turn and walk out, and then half run across the lobby.
I make the plane, and the next morning Dayna takes me to see a little rabbit she’s found. She can’t locate the shop right away, and we walk the neighborhood in a grid. The store’s closed, but she sees the cage just inside the front door. We peer into the window. The cage is empty. Too bad, she says. He must have sold it.