Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  In the relatively short time I was with them the Bedu had accepted me without question, and with the generosity of a people who have little to share but share it anyway. Their lives may have been totally different from mine back in Britain, but we were never short of conversation or humour. For a people who lived in such majestic surroundings they derived a lot of amusement from them, laughing without malice when I tripped over a pile of goat dung or when one of their more independent-minded sheep went off on a little mission of its own. Most of all, I was impressed that they had deliberately chosen this hard life over a softer one in the towns of southern Jordan. The Bedu were not poor. Their many head of livestock made them comparatively rich and they could have sold up and lived in a comfortable flat in Aqaba any time they chose. ‘But,’ said Sheikh Hajji Attayig, when I asked him why he did not do just that, ‘what would be the point? Out here we are free to live our lives the way we always have. There is peace here in the desert.’ For me, the Bedu will always be a special people; despite the rigours of their daily existence, my weeks with them in Jordan were some of the happiest and most carefree of my life.

  Still mentally back in Wadi Rumm, I turned up for my first day at work at Saudi International Bank in the City a week before my twenty-fifth birthday. I was assigned to the ‘dealing room’, a long, low-ceilinged, neon-lit broiler house of a place on the twenty-third floor of a tower block in Bishopsgate. Everyone seemed to be talking at once on the telephone, sometimes into two phones at once, while staring at coloured numbers on screens, then standing up to shout at each other. I was completely bewildered. Between coming back from the desert and reporting for duty I had been given a hefty booklet to read entitled ‘The Floating Rate Note in the Eurodollar Market’. Most of it was gobbledegook to me, but I understood the broad idea: when a government or a company wanted to borrow money it issued a sort of international IOU. Anyone buying this IOU not only got their money back after a set period of time but they also received regular interest payments which could go up or down according to what prevailing bank interest rates were doing (hence they were called Floating Rate Notes or FRNs). Investment banks like Saudi International Bank then traded these FRNs between themselves, buying and selling them at a discount or premium to their original value. Since they dealt in millions of dollars’ worth at a time, the tiniest fluctuation in price could mean large sums gained or lost. As well as trading them for profit, banks also sold them to investors, who built up a portfolio with the aim of getting a better return on their money than they would by simply sticking it on deposit. Because of my Arabic I had been hired to join the sales force that sold FRNs to the bank’s Middle East clientbase. Unfortunately, the week I started witnessed the collapse of a large part of the global FRN market. ‘Perps’ stood for ‘perpetuals’, meaning FRNs that never actually ‘matured’, i.e. paid the investors their money back. The lay observer might think that paying over the odds for a piece of paper that effectively said ‘Yes, I do indeed owe you x sum of money but I have no intention of ever paying it back’ made these investments a bit of a bum deal, and they would be right. Someone had finally realized that these things were overpriced and had started selling. The mood caught on and the market nose-dived in the space of twenty-four hours and then flat-lined. Suddenly, the ready-made clientbase I was about to be given had evaporated. Somehow I managed to hang on to my job and develop a new clientbase of my own, conveniently situated in places like Bermuda and the Bahamas, that just had to be visited.

  A rebel against this corporate world was Andrew, a graduate fluent in several languages who joined at the same time as me and who never missed an opportunity to avoid working. When he was assigned to the Syndicated Deals desk, I found him photocopying the next hundred pages of a Russian novel on to A4 paper so he could read it at his desk while appearing to be poring over the finer details of some financial document. He developed the knack of leaving his suit jacket draped over his chair as if he had just gone off to the loo, when in fact he had left the bank for the afternoon to have tea with friends in St Katharine’s Dock. He even got hold of the key to the chief executive’s suite on the top floor, where he conducted a torrid affair with a girl from Corporate Banking and never quite got caught. Andrew had pithy nicknames for everyone he met, including a stubbornly unhelpful facilities manager whom he dubbed Arthur C. Clarke, because, as Andrew maintained, ‘It’s one of the world’s last great unsolved mysteries what that guy actually does for a living.’ There was also Stevie B. from Huddersfield. When asked on the graduate induction course what he hoped to get out of his first few weeks at the bank, he replied, ‘To learn a bit o’protocol, mate.’ But once he took up his job on the money-broking desk he discovered to his delight that this was not necessary, and his was soon a familiar voice on the trading-room floor, yelling, ‘Gimme a price for First Chicago cable in ten, ya fat bastad!’, meaning ‘Quote me an exchange rate for another bank wanting to trade US$10 million into sterling.’ If you asked Stevie what he had got up to the previous evening the reply was usually the same: ‘Pavement pizza, mate,’ meaning an excess of Beck’s beer had eventually parted him from the last meal he had eaten, which he had liberally distributed outside a bar in Bishopsgate. Stevie certainly put his soul into whatever he was doing; when someone cleared out his desk a few weeks after he eventually left the bank, there, nestling in a bottom drawer, was one of his dealing-room shirts, still damp with sweat.

  There were several Saudis dotted around the dealing room, over on secondment from Riyadh, and while some people at first mistook their shyness for arrogance, they often proved to have a good sense of humour. One young Saudi used to stare down the cheekiest cockney in the room, claiming he was so rich he might just buy up the Brit’s favourite corner-shop to deny him his daily packet of fags. Another, a girl from a wealthy Jeddah family, used to banter with me in Arabic. When I complained one morning that I was ‘tafshaan’ (worn out) after a late night clubbing, she replied briskly, ‘Tafshaan inta? Tayyib. Fassikh wa ijri aryaan!’ meaning ‘Tired? Fine. Then tear your clothes off and run around naked!’

  Although I was a couple of years older than most of the graduate intake, I managed to get myself sent to New York for the coveted four-month J P Morgan graduate-training course on Wall Street. It was an eye-opener. American bankers, I realized, worked crazy hours and took almost no holiday. In between lectures on global derivatives, stock options and corporate finance, we were shown a film of A Day in the Life of a Treasury Bond Salesman. To use the American vernacular, it sucked. Here were these exhausted-looking young men, in the office by six a.m., identical in their white Brooks Brothers shirts with the button-down collars, biting their fingernails while staring at a screen. Again, there was a lot of talking on phones and calling out numbers to each other; I never once saw anybody take a break for lunch.

  But in a way, we had the best of both worlds. As graduates on the Wall Street course we were being paid as bankers and living as students. On Friday nights we would descend on Lucy’s, a bar on the Upper West Side where people often ended up dancing on the bar with the bar staff. Peer pressure dictated that everyone had to try and ‘shoot the worm’ – to slug down a shot of tequila with a fat, mescal-saturated maggot at the bottom, in order to be awarded a T-shirt reading ‘Official Danger Ranger Surfworm Shooter of New York City’ or some such nonsense. There were ugly rumours that the worm would sometimes wake up in your stomach and start squirming around; I must admit I always tucked mine behind my teeth then quietly removed it when no one was looking. My flatmate in New York was the cynical Andrew, the Russian-novel photocopier, whose refined tastes meant he was more interested in going to the opera than shooting the worm, let alone labouring through the reams of corporate-finance case studies we were expected to take home each night. He displayed his enthusiasm for the course by occasionally breaking into his own version of a Bruce Springsteen hit with the words: ‘Bored . . . in the U.S. of A.’ Andrew even failed to stay very long at his own party. Having suggested we
throw one for the whole course, he lost interest halfway through and drifted off into Manhattan for a burger.

  After a month or so we were all bussed out to a campsite in the Pennsylvania woodlands for ‘Executive Challenge’, one of these corporate touchy-feely team-building experiences. The MBAs, who were joining the course halfway through, all wore gut-churning sweatshirts that read ‘MBA – the Chosen Few’. It was October and the trees were a kaleidoscope of golds and reds, the air was sharp with the nip of impending winter and the wildlife was entertaining: at one point we managed to coax a skunk into one of the MBAs’ tents. The American instructors were well-meaning but humourless. ‘Today we’re discussing kinship and kinfolk,’ said one of them, turning to Stevie B. from Huddersfield. ‘Stephen, perhaps you can give us an example of kinship from where you’re from?’ ‘Sure, mate,’ came the reply. ‘In Yorkshire we say it’s ’kin cold.’

  On our last night in the Pennsylvania woods there was a sing-song round the campfire. The night air resounded to the hiss of ring pulls on Budweiser cans and the mournful verses of ‘American Pie’ when suddenly there was a cry of alarm. Someone had been listening to the radio and it seemed that Wall Street had crashed. Badly. It was Black Monday in October 1987 and the New York we had left a few days ago was now in shock. There were reports of ruined investors throwing themselves off skyscraper window ledges, and many of the Americans on the course wondered openly if they would still have a job when they got back to the city. At least one was in tears.

  But the course ploughed on and I took the opportunity to write some racy dispatches for Midweek magazine in London, still indulging my journalistic cravings a good eight years before I left banking. I befriended Manhattan’s Puerto Rican doormen, got them to recommend the best salsa music joints, then liked the music so much I went down to Latin America three times before the course was up.

  Back in London, two summers later I was introduced at a drinks party to Rupert Wise, who was also an Arabist and a banker. ‘You’ll have so much in common,’ said our mutual friend, leaving us to circle each other like wary sharks. It reminded me of when I was about five years old and was being nudged by my parents to ‘Go and make friends with those children over there.’ Rupert was short, fit and tanned, with a boxer’s build and a steely glint in his eyes (he turned out to have been a boxing blue at Cambridge). He now launched into a stream of flawless Gulf Arabic; I replied in backstreet Egyptian. At the time I thought it was a pointless pissing contest to see who could speak the best Arabic, but in fact he was checking me out as his possible successor to run the Bahrain office of Flemings, a small but successful Scottish investment bank named after its nineteenth-century founder, Robert Fleming.

  A few weeks later I was summoned for an interview at the bank’s elegant head office in the City, which was decorated with the world’s finest collection of Scottish paintings. I was quite happy where I was at Saudi International Bank, and Flemings were not even offering much of a pay rise, but Rupert took me aside and told me this was an opportunity of a lifetime and I would be a fool not to take it. He proved to be right. I signed on the dotted line, then worked out my notice at SIB. I had saved up a bit of money so I took three months off to go round Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall had just come down, followed by a trip round Brazil and Chile. I was in my twenties and had an incurable itch to go travelling. I sent back an article for Midweek magazine which resulted in a cover photo of a sequinned girl at the Rio Carnival with the caption: ‘Sex, Samba and Soccer. Frank Gardner in Rio’, a byline I have never quite been able to match since.

  When I turned up for my first day of work at Flemings I was put under the wing of my new mentor, Mark Bullough, who immediately took me out for a champagne lunch. ‘Let’s get one thing straight,’ he said as the waiter discreetly popped a Bollinger cork into a crisp white napkin, ‘holidays take precedence over everything.’ I wasn’t sure if he was being serious, but as I was just back from the Amazon jungle this was music to my ears. Mark was tall, bald and very entertaining; he looked like a benign version of John Malkovitch. He wore bow ties with collars and studs and rode everywhere on his motorbike, including to post-Velvet Revolution Prague and back for the weekend with a girlfriend on the back. He spoke almost no Arabic, but told me how what little he knew had sometimes caused misunderstandings. In Oman, he told me, a meeting with a prospective client had turned to farce when the host asked him which angle he wished him to face. Perplexed, Mark replied that he was there to talk about Jardine Fleming Unit Trusts. ‘Oh,’ said the client, ‘I thought you were from Filmings, not Flemings.’ (When printed in Arabic the two words are indistinguishable.) But the biggest gaff had taken place in Saudi Arabia. Mark described how he had been invited to a banquet in the oil-rich Eastern Province. At the end of the meal the sheikh had called out to Mark at the other end of the table to ask him whether he was full or would he like anything else. Summoning his meagre reserves of Arabic, Mark had tried to ask for a coffee, but had confused the Arabic word for coffee, qahwa, with qahba, meaning prostitute. When he asked in all innocence for a qahba the table apparently collapsed with laughter, but the sheikh had replied with a straight face. ‘Of course, Mark . . . but would you like black or white?’

  Flemings sent me round three continents to familiarize myself with its global network of offices. But I had not been with them long before something happened which profoundly affected both the Middle East and our business there. On the morning of 2 August 1990, a friend woke me early with the news that Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Setting out before dawn, Saddam Hussein’s massed tanks had simply rolled across the border and driven down the main Basra Highway to the capital, Kuwait City, meeting little resistance. Iraqi paratroopers also landed in the city by helicopter and quickly secured the key points. Much of the country and its ruling family were away for the annual summer holidays; those who had stayed behind could hardly believe this was happening.

  Yet the warning signs for the invasion had all been there. Iraq had been grumbling that Kuwaiti oil wells were drilling diagonally across and under its border, and that Kuwait was exceeding its OPEC quota, thereby depressing the oil price. Saddam’s regime also resented the suggestion that it should one day pay back some of the billions of dollars loaned by its neighbours Kuwait and Saudi Arabia while it was fighting Iran in the 1980s. Saddam had taken to seeing himself as the champion of the Arab world against non-Arab Iran (Iranians are Persians, not Arabs), and he felt his neighbours owed him a debt of gratitude for stopping the encroachment of the Iranian Islamic Revolution at the Iran–Iraq border. In short, he did not feel that Iraq’s ‘sacrifices’ during that war were sufficiently appreciated.

  Iraq had been a rich country when Saddam attacked Iran in 1980. Now it was exhausted by eight years of war and the coffers badly needed replenishing. Kuwait must have presented a tempting prize: it sat on close to 10 per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and with only a tiny population to provide for it was rich beyond belief. Iraq had made a grab for Kuwait before, in 1961, when its forces were repelled by British troops. Now Saddam set his sights on swallowing up his southern neighbour, looting its treasury and renaming it ‘the nineteenth province of Iraq’. In the summer of 1990, Iraq’s Republican Guard divisions moved south from their bases and began to stage manoeuvres close to the Kuwaiti border. The world wondered if Iraq would really invade Kuwait, but the experts came to the wrong conclusion. By the time everyone realized what was going on, Iraqi forces were in effective control of Kuwait.

  For my employers Robert Fleming, the Iraqi invasion presented both a crisis and an opportunity. We had a large clientbase in the Gulf and a small office in Bahrain. Because of my Arabic coupled with my basic banking experience I had been hired to join the bank’s Middle East marketing team, the plan being for me to go out and run the Bahrain office the following year. Now, with war looming, our clients and local staff would need reassuring immediately, while there might be some new business to pick up from other banks, which were
hastily cutting credit lines and abandoning the region to its fate.

  ‘It’s quite clear,’ said Mark Bullough. ‘You’ll have to go out there at once for a couple of weeks to look after the Bahrain office.’

  I had just returned from an extensive tour of the bank’s Far East offices and knew this news would go down badly with Carrie, who had seen very little of me this year.

  ‘Why can’t you go?’ I ventured.

  ‘Sorry, old bean. Holiday in Scotland already booked. Besides, you’re the most junior member of the team. Oh, and you’ll need to take respirators [gas masks]. You never know what Saddam might have up his sleeve. Good luck.’

  To be fair to Mark, soon after that he did drive alone through the US front line in Saudi and over the border into Iraq-occupied Khafji to meet a Kuwaiti client, still wearing, he claimed, a stiff collar, bulled shoes and a pinstripe suit.

  I was told to report to the Scots Guards barracks in Hounslow, where a favour had been called in by one of the regiment’s former officers who was now working in the bank. A gruff Scots quartermaster handed me a cardboard box packed with respirators, NBC (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical warfare) suits, rubber overboots and several decontamination kits, enough to protect me and the staff of the Bahrain office from Saddam’s chemically tipped Scuds.

  Within forty-eight hours of the Iraqi invasion I was on a plane for the Gulf. When the BA flight stopped off in Bahrain, I noticed I was almost the only person getting off. At the time nobody knew whether Saddam’s tanks were simply going to roll on southward, invading Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, so the eyes of a lot of passengers were following me when I got off that plane. In the airport terminal a large poster advertised the services of a certain Japanese bank, calling it ‘your friend in the Middle East’. Yet beneath the poster stretched a long line of Japanese bankers who couldn’t wait to get the next plane out. All over the Middle East credit lines to Arab clients were being cut, a move that was to cost our competitors dearly.