The Assassins

by Oliver North

  “Oh great,” said Callahan. “So the Jordanians are aware of all this?”

  “It doesn't say—”

  “Are you reading from something?” Callahan interrupted.

  “Yes, sir,” Krull answered. “All this is in the DTI.”

  “This is all in the Detainee Transmittal Information?” Callahan sounded physically pained. “Good grief! The Congressional committees are going to skin us alive over this one. What else is written down that we're going to have to answer for?”

  “The whole Israeli debrief is attached.”

  “Oh man!” exclaimed Callahan. “There's going to be serious repercussions on this one when the press finds out about these guys. Have the ICRC reps down there seen these two people yet?”

  “No, and that's why I called,” said Krull. “Right now, our hands are clean on these two. Neither Tel Aviv nor Amman stations were even informed about these guys. It's all been handled in military channels. But I want to have these two pulled out of the military side of this place and taken to our facility.”

  “Why?” asked the older spy turned CIA bureaucrat. “What's in it for us besides trouble? Why would we even want to talk to these guys?”

  “Because, according to the Mossad interrogation report—which I'm guessing is the result of their psychotropic drugs—these two are apparently part of a much bigger operation,” replied Krull. “Separately, they both admitted to being recruited last year by Nikolai Dubzhuko—a retired KGB colonel who is known to have worked for—”

  “Wait a minute! Let me think,” interrupted Callahan. “Dubzhuko...Dubzhuko...Ah-h yes—Dimitri Komulakov! Dubzhuko worked for Komulakov years ago—and purportedly still does,” the older man recalled, suddenly intrigued. “What else did the Mossad get out of these two Ukrainians?”

  Krull read down further in the interrogation debrief and said, “I'm summarizing here...The royal yacht they were after was to have been taken to a boatyard in Bilbao, Portugal, where it was to have been given a new name, paint job, and registry number—and then turned over to a ‘special crew’ that would be arriving on 1 November—are you ready for this—from Iran.”

  “An Iranian crew?” said Callahan. “What the devil do the Iranians want with a Saudi royal yacht?”

  “The interrogation transcript doesn't say,” replied Krull. “But I'd like to take these two ‘off to the side’ for a few days to see if we can find out.”

  There was a long pause while Callahan contemplated the consequences for the Agency, and himself, of authorizing two Israeli-captured, drug-interrogated Ukrainians, spirited through Jordan—to be held incommunicado at Gitmo. He finally said, “Go ahead and make the arrangements, P. J. I'll draft up a quick message to DOD telling the military what we're doing—but remember, these guys had better be in good shape when the ICRC finds out about 'em. What are their detainee numbers again?”

  “3163 and 7895,” answered Krull.

  “OK, P. J., anything else I should put in this report for Bill Goode when he comes in a few hours from now?”

  “Just one more thing. Apparently the boat these two were after is just one of several yachts and airplanes that were to have been seized.”

  “Does it say how many in all?” asked Callahan.

  There was a pause while the field officer scrolled back through the interrogation report. “Yeah, here it is,” said Krull. “Eleven.”

  Threat Mitigation Commission

  ________________________________________

  Presidential Commission Townhouse

  5 Jackson Place, Washington, DC

  Tuesday, 23 October 2007

  1410 Hours Local

  “Then it's decided,” said Chief Justice Anthony Scironi, sounding resigned. “The seven persons on the list before you are guilty of the crime of terrorism against the United States and are condemned to death. Once again, I ask you to affirm your verdict by so indicating when you are polled by Mr. Frey.”

  Neal Frey, the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, looked up from his notes and then around the room. He had spent nearly seven hours over the past two days presenting a bill of particulars against ten individuals whose “indictments” were in the red notebooks before each of the Commissioners. Then, Georgetown law professor Richard Chambers had proffered reasons why these ten should not “suffer the ultimate sanction”—as he had put it.

  Chambers had made every argument he could think of to spare the lives of the first ten to be “judged” by the Commission. Several, he pointed out, had families and young children who might well be killed or wounded while the Commission's Special Ops were “carrying out the sentence of this Body.” And in three cases, the Commissioners were sufficiently swayed by Chambers's line of reasoning that they decided to “defer a verdict until more information is made available.” The trio would remain in the red notebooks—but with a stay of execution.

  “General Vassar, your verdict on the remaining seven names on the list?” said Frey, looking at the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  The old general grimaced and said, “Guilty.”

  “Mr. Donahue?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Mr. Cook?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Mr. Bates?”

  “Guilty.”

  Finally, Frey turned to the Chief Justice and said, “Mr. Chairman, according to the rules adopted by this Commission, the seven persons on the list before you have been found guilty of the crime of terrorism, for which they are condemned to death.”

  Scironi nodded gravely and said, “Thank you, Mr. Frey...Mr. Donahue. You are both excused until tomorrow morning when we take up consideration of the next ten individuals named in this...” and tapping the red notebook in front of him on the conference room table, the Chief Justice concluded, “… this indictment.”

  After Frey and Donahue excused themselves and left the room, the Chief Justice turned to Peter Newman, handed him a single, folded sheet of paper, and said, “General, you have heard the verdict of this Commission. The seven individuals named on that document have been condemned to death. In accordance with the law that created this body, you are hereby ordered to carry out the sentence.”

  Newman had been summoned to the conference room when the Commissioners returned from a brief recess for lunch. The Chief Justice had called and told him that the first of the verdicts were going to be handed down early in the afternoon and that he should be present for the decision. Now, the Marine rose from his seat by the window, said, “Aye aye, sir,” and started for the door.

  But before Newman could exit the room, Russell Bates said, “Mr. Chairman, a procedural question.”

  “Yes, Russell?” said the Chief Justice, looking over his reading glasses at the former CIA Chief.

  “Mr. Chairman, don't we need to make clear the sequential order in which these sentences are to be carried out?” asked Bates.

  For more than twenty-four hours Scironi had been trying to keep these strong-willed Commissioners in line and focused on the task at hand. On Monday afternoon they had established the priority in which the cases would be determined and had decided, based on input from Frey and Donahue, to take them ten at a time. Throughout the process of presenting the evidence “for” and “against” the accused, Bates had been adamant about only one—Samuel Mubassa.

  The information against Mubassa provided by the CIA had been sparse to say the least—and Frey had said so. But when the Commission convened this morning, Bates brought in a sheaf of papers that he said “proved conclusively that Mubassa was one of the most secretive and dangerous financiers of Islamic terrorism in the world today.”

  When Donahue protested the inclusion of “independently compiled evidence,” the Commission split two-against-two on whether the “new information” could be used in the case against Mubassa. In the interest of moving things along, Scironi had broken the tie, and voted with Bates and former FBI Director Donahue to allow the evidence to be considered.

&nb
sp; But now, the Chief Justice wasn't so sure he'd made the right decision. In response to Bates's query about the order in which the sentences were to be carried out, Scironi asked a question of his own: “Why does it matter, Russell? Don't you trust General Newman to expeditiously fulfill his responsibilities under the law?”

  Bates suddenly realized that he was pushing too hard—and was inviting suspicion upon himself. He looked from Scironi to Newman, now standing by the door, and said sullenly, “I just want to be sure that the most dangerous threats are dealt with first.”

  “I'm sure that's exactly what General Newman will do,” replied the Chief justice.

  Operations Directorate, 7th Floor, CIA HQ

  ________________________________________

  Langley, VA

  Tuesday, 23 October 2007

  1630 Hours Local

  “What have you got for me?” William Goode asked the two women who had just knocked on his open door. Kate Deming, his principal deputy, was standing beside Iris Collins, one of the best analysts in the Operations Directorate. Collins had done her Ph.D. thesis at MIT in mathematics.

  “Well, I'm not sure what we found,” Deming replied. “It's really rather strange—even spooky, but if you have a few minutes, I'd like to have Iris explain it to you before we go any further.”

  Goode set aside the interrogation debrief that he had just received from Guantanamo, arose and motioned them to seats at a round table on the other side of his office. Collins began, “I did a full database search, just as you asked me, going back to the beginning of modern Islamic terrorism in the 1970s. You were right—they really do have what appears to be a fixation on the number eleven. For example: ‘New York City’ has eleven letters; ‘Ramzi Yusouf’—the terrorist behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center—”

  “I get it,” Goode said. “They both have eleven letters. Tell me what else you found.”

  “Yes, sir...there are many more,” she said, “‘George W. Bush,’ ‘Colin Powell,’ ‘nuclear bomb,’ ‘Saudi Arabia’—all eleven letters—and I now have compiled a list of three hundred and two dates, names, and places that are linked to radical Islamic terrorism—including ‘Afghanistan,’ ‘the Pentagon,’—all of them with eleven letters,” she said, breathlessly.

  Goode noticed that her eyes were wide from lack of sleep and too much caffeine. He said, “Iris, take a deep breath. This sounds to me like the stuff of pure coincidence—the kind of thing that conspiracy theorists incubate.”

  “Well, I considered that when I first started my analysis, but that's only a tiny part of my resource material,” Iris said. “Most of what I have used comes from CIA and FBI database documents, and includes material taken from interrogation interviews and field reports,” she added.

  “OK, but I'm guessing that you could do a computer run that would find a string of names and places that had some kind of link to almost any number you used,” Goode told her.

  “Then what about these, sir?” Collins held up another sheaf of paper and began to read from one of the printouts in a quick staccato cadence, “New York was the eleventh state to become part of the U.S. The words ‘Trade Center’ have eleven letters. The first plane that crashed into the Trade Center was flight number eleven. It was carrying 92 passengers—nine plus two equals eleven. Flight number 77 hit the other tower, which is eleven times seven. It had sixty-five passengers—or six plus five—eleven. The total number of victims in both planes was 254. And September eleventh was the 254th day of the year—two plus five plus four, in both cases, is eleven. And from September eleventh to the end of the year, there are a hundred and eleven days.”

  “Interesting,” said Goode, “but I find it hard to believe that the perpetrators of 9/11 were somehow able to orchestrate and coordinate all of those ‘elevens’ into that event.”

  “That's not what I'm suggesting, sir,” Collins replied. “What this data search and accompanying analysis seems to indicate is that radical Islamic groups intentionally initiate dramatic terror events so that they are coincident with the number eleven—meaning a date or a place or both. Then, in the aftermath, while the world press is reporting on the attack, their sheiks, imams, mullahs, ayatollahs, their Web sites and other propaganda organs connect other coincidental ‘elevens’ to the event, claiming an even greater correlation. In the minds of their adherents—particularly those who are illiterate or superstitious—such connections tend to give those who plan and conduct the attacks near mystical powers. For example, the Madrid train attack in March 2004. There were eleven bombs planted—though not all detonated. The attack was perpetrated on the eleventh of March—exactly 911 days since the U.S. attacks happened on 9/11. And 191 civilians were killed that day—one plus nine plus one equals eleven. Great significance was attached to these connections in the radical Islamic media, which went even further by falsely asserting that 111 people were killed at precisely 11:00 a.m. in the morning.”

  Goode had to admit that these facts were beginning to outweigh his skepticism. He turned to Deming and asked, “Do we have anything on why these ‘jihadis’ are so enamored with the number eleven, Kate? Why do they put so much emphasis on the number eleven? Does it have a religious significance? Is it some kind of a code? What's the link?”

  Deming, who had served most of her career in the Middle East, replied, “The number eleven is linked in much of the Orient and Middle East to mystery and power, and has been since ancient times—well before Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. It's considered a master number. All forms of ancient studies of numbers—including mysticism, occultism, numerology, and the so-called secret wisdom of Kabala—all give significance to the number eleven, and numbers that can be divided or multiplied by eleven—like twenty-two, thirty-three, and so forth.

  “Al Qaeda adherents rely heavily on the significance of the number. Osama bin Laden seems to have based his life on eleven-year cycles, ”Deming said.“ When he was eleven, his father died in a plane crash, and he claims that's when he first became aware of a messianic mission to purify Islamic lands for Mohammed. Eleven years later, when he was twenty-two, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and bin Laden says he was ‘driven’ to expelling them from the country. We know that he never led a column of Mujahadeen against the Soviets as he maintains, but his followers don't seem to care much about the truth. When he was thirty-three, eleven years later, Saddam invaded Kuwait, and bin Laden was enraged when ‘infidels’ of America and Great Britain ‘invaded’ Saudi Arabia, then ‘occupied’ Kuwait, and in the process ‘defiled their most holy lands.’ And eleven years after that, when he was forty-four, we had 9/11. ”

  Goode was nodding as he listened carefully. “Is bin Laden's the only Islamic terror group with this ‘eleven fixation’?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” Deming replied. “The PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah all give prominence to September 11, 1922, the date when the British issued the Mandate of Palestine. The literature from all these groups charge that by changing boundaries of Islamic nations to satisfy ‘Zionist Infidels’ more than 100,000 Muslims were killed outright by the British, and most of the militant Islamic Web sites claim that three million have been made homeless since then. That's another reason that the date and the number eleven have significance.”

  When Deming paused, Iris Collins picked up, “And exactly fifty years later we were introduced to what we might call ‘modern Islamic terror’—during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.”

  “That was before you were born, Iris,” said Goode with a smile.

  “Yes, sir,” said Collins without missing a beat. “According to my data, the Olympic games were scheduled to end on September eleventh, and...” she paused to check her notes, then added, “there were 121 countries that participated—”

  “Which is eleven times eleven,” Goode said, beating her to the punch.

  Undeterred, Collins concluded, “And there were eleven Israeli athletes killed by the terrorists.”

  Impressed, Good
e asked, “Have you worked out any probability factors, Iris?”

  She nodded and handed him a single 8½ × 11 sheet of paper. It read:

  The Significance of the Number Eleven

  in Radical Islamic Terror Attacks

  IX. Summary Probability of Coincidence

  1. This computer-generated probability analysis is based on 845 historical, anecdotal, and database accounts of radical Islamic terror events.

  2. All duplications were purged before the final analysis.

  3. The analysis also sampled 3,497 non-Islamic terror events since 1972 (M-19, Baeder Mienhoff, Red Army Faction, F-17, FMLN, Red Brigades, Sendoro Luminoso, FARC, etc.) and found only fifteen such events that correlated in any way with the number eleven.

  4. In forty-seven of 845 Islamic terror events, no correlation with the number eleven could be established, yielding an error factor of .05563, which has been programmed into the final probability analysis.

  5. Nonfactual data, disinformation, mythic and/or disputed examples accounted for 2.635 percent of total content and were discounted for the analysis.

  6. The computer ran 200 different probability tests based on the final numerical values of these data, and then the results were averaged for a weighted single probability analysis.

  Conclusion: The probability of a future Islamic terror event correlating directly with the number eleven is 94.5 percent. The most likely coincidence is a date in which the number eleven is a base numeral or a master number.

  Goode finished reading the summary, looked up at his two assistants, and said, “So the bottom line here is that the next radical Islamic terror attack is most likely to take place on the eleventh or twenty-second of any given month?”