Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  That summer I managed to negotiate a tribal escort deep into Marib province to that same village of Al-Husun. My personal experience is that if a respected tribesman on the Arabian Peninsula gives you his word of honour that he will vouch for your safety, you are better off with him than with any number of government minders. The further we drove from Sana’a the more glad I was of this escort. As we approached Al-Husun I noticed that all the local tribesmen had Kalashnikov machine guns slung casually over their shoulders, which they are forbidden to do in the main cities. The desert village was built of sun-baked mud, nestling in a valley beneath imposing purple mountains. A camel walked in endless circles, yoked to a grindstone, while goats foraged amongst the bitter-leafed bushes known as Sodom’s Apple. An elderly villager told me what had happened a few months earlier when the Interior Ministry troops came looking for their suspected terrorist.

  ‘We had never heard of this terrorist,’ he said, ‘but the army attacked us anyway. Their planes flew over very low and we thought we were being bombed so we fought back. Look! They destroyed half my house!’ The old man pointed to a gutted room and to the tail fin of an unexploded missile that poked out from his living-room wall. I edged away from the house fairly quickly after that.

  It was impossible to tell if Al-Harithi and other Al-Qaeda suspects were really using Marib province as a base or not, but I thought it only fair to go and hear what the governor had to say, although I already suspected what he would tell me.

  ‘We have no Al-Qaeda terrorists here,’ he said, patting the magnificent silver dagger in his waistband and sipping sugary tea from a tiny tulip-shaped glass. ‘Believe me, my friend, this whole area is under control.’ As if to reinforce this point, he arranged for me to be taken to a remote army outpost in the desert.

  But if it was meant to impress me, it had the opposite effect. We arrived in the hottest part of the afternoon, bang in the middle of siesta time, and it was hard to find any soldier with his boots on, let alone doing anything worth filming. The camp was a picture of somnolent inactivity, yet Marib province was about to witness one of the most dramatic events in the so-called War on Terror.

  On the morning of Sunday 3 November 2002, President Saleh was enjoying the fresh sea breeze that blew off the coast of Aden. Being on a yacht in the Arabian Sea must have made a pleasant change for Yemen’s strongman. For most of the year, ensconced inside his fortress palace in the mountain capital of Sana’a, Saleh juggled power between his country’s heavily armed tribes, the Islamists and the Parliamentarians. But that day was no holiday for the president: he was about to authorize a landmark action in counter-terrorism. When the call from Washington came through to his yacht, the caller had only one question: ‘Can we go ahead?’ President Saleh’s answer was abrupt: ‘Do it, but make it unattributable.’

  A short distance away across the Bab El-Mandeb Strait, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), a drone known as the Predator, lifted clear of a desert runway in the Republic of Djibouti, climbed to cruise height above the Horn of Africa and headed east. The Predator looks a bit like a giant white cigar with wings. It was designed initially for surveillance, being able to stay in the air for up to twenty-four hours and send back live footage of its target area while still airborne. It had been used in the Balkans, and soon after the 9/11 attacks was adapted to carry anti-tank missiles. The Predator that took off from Djibouti that day bore no markings, but it carried a brace of lethal Hellfire missiles. It belonged to the CIA, and thousands of miles away at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, its flight was being steered with minute precision by operators staring at TV monitors that gave them instant ‘real-time’ information.

  Their target was one of the most wanted men in the Middle East: the same Mr Al-Harithi whom Western intelligence was convinced was lurking in Marib province, plotting death and destruction. The Americans in particular had a score to settle with him over his suspected role in the bombing of their warship the USS Cole two years previously.

  That Sunday, Al-Harithi left his latest hideout in Marib province and set off across the desert in a four-wheel-drive jeep. He had five companions with him and they were heading in the direction of the Indian Ocean port of Mukalla. His departure did not go unnoticed. A Yemeni informer, working for his government’s intelligence service and, indirectly, for the CIA, contacted his masters as soon as Al-Harithi set off. After several previous unsuccessful attempts to capture him alive, US and Yemeni intelligence quickly decided they could not afford to pass up this opportunity: they had to act now or risk losing Al-Harithi for years. But they had a problem. Using the Predator drone might be the surest way to kill Al-Harithi, but public opinion in Yemen would never stomach the killing of Yemeni citizens by the US government. It had to be made to look like an accident.

  When the news broke the next day that Yemen’s most-wanted terrorist had died when his car exploded east of Marib town, the government was vague about the details. Yemeni officials implied that the car had been carrying explosives and that its occupants had been on their way to attack a shipping target off Mukalla. It was suggested that perhaps the explosives had gone off as the car had driven over a bump, à la Pulp Fiction. Locally filmed footage showed a couple of Yemeni men in traditional dress lifting up pieces of charred wreckage from the car against the backdrop of a sand dune. There was no sign of the bodies. But cracks began to appear in the story when Yemeni journalists interviewed local tribesmen who reported seeing an object in the air just before the explosion.

  The truth might still have been buried with Al-Harithi had it not been for some loose tongues wagging in Washington. Officials there could not resist crowing to journalists in private about this apparent success in the War on Terror. A top terrorist was dead and without the loss of a single American life. The US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was clearly delighted. ‘He’s been an individual that has been sought after as an Al-Qaeda member as well as a suspected terrorist connected to the USS Cole,’ he commented to reporters, ‘so it would be a very good thing if he were out of business.’ Yemen’s President Saleh was less delighted. Faced now with angry questions from his own countrymen, he gave orders that this sort of extrajudicial killing by the USA must never happen again on Yemeni soil.

  Ever since Al-Qaeda was driven from its Afghan bases in late 2001, the Pentagon has been concerned about its operatives trying to regroup in East Africa, especially Somalia. The organization had a known presence in the region in the late 1990s, as demonstrated by the devastating twin bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed over two hundred people, mostly local Africans. Four years later Al-Qaeda struck again with the truck-bombing of an Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa, and narrowly missed shooting down an Israeli airliner with a malfunctioning SAM missile smuggled across from Yemen. To try to prevent Al-Qaeda operations around the Horn of Africa the Pentagon set up CJTF-HOA, the Combined Joint Taskforce Horn of Africa, run out of the USS Mount Witney, a hi-tech US Navy command ship in the Indian Ocean, and drawing on around two thousand US Marines and Special Forces troops based at Camp Lemonier, an old French Foreign Legion base in Djibouti. There was also a naval taskforce involving British, French and Spanish warships circling the Arabian Sea and the Horn of Africa to try to disrupt the flow of arms in the region. In early 2003, as the world’s attention began to focus on the impending conflict in Iraq, I flew down to Djibouti with a cameraman to make a film for Newsnight on just how the Pentagon was going about ‘denying this area to terrorists’, as they put it.

  In the Joint Operations Room on board his command ship, the taskforce commander, Major General John Sattler, explained the rationale behind his mission. ‘We’ve got six countries we’re watching here: Yemen, Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. Now our concern is that the bad guys will try to move westwards to this part of the world from wherever they’re hiding in South Asia and the Middle East and we aim to stop them.’ Sattler, a big, plain-speaking US Marine Corps general, went on to tell
me how they would do this. ‘We’ve formed excellent relationships with all the host governments except for Somalia and we’re training their guys in border security and counter-terrorism. We’re working with their intelligence agencies so we can get real-time info on people on the ground. Heck, I’ve been in a few times to see President Saleh in Yemen and, I can tell you, he’s right on-side.’

  Yet again and again the vacuum of Somalia kept cropping up in our conversation. With no effective central government since 1991 the country has long been awash with warlords and weapons, a failed state to which America has been loath to return after getting such a bloody nose in the backstreets of Mogadishu in 1993. Early reports of Al-Qaeda setting up bases there after 2001 were probably exaggerated, but it was easy to see how its operatives could take advantage of the anarchic situation of fiefdom and thuggery. CJTF-HOA had no foothold on the ground there, although the CIA had reportedly been running a network of paid informers inside the capital, Mogadishu. In Djibouti’s Camp Lemonier (itself the intended target of a thwarted Al-Qaeda attack) there were blackened Special Forces helicopters ready to fly combat teams on missions into Somalia, but the troops I met in Djibouti were bored and frustrated. We flew with them by helicopter up to a remote firing range near the Eritrean border, the Special Ops soldiers wearing ostentatious Superman ‘S’s on their uniforms, refusing to put on helmets and not flinching when the helicopter’s flares went off with a bang by accident as we touched down on a bare mountain-top. The next day we watched them use laser sights to guide in a pair of US Marine Corps jumpjets that then obliterated their target, a rusting hulk of an old tank. It was impressive to watch, but I could not help thinking this was the wrong sort of war to be training for here in the Horn of Africa. Al-Qaeda and its shadowy operatives are unlikely ever to present themselves as open targets in broad daylight, choosing instead to mix with the local population and exploit anti-Western sentiment and an easy supply of weapons wherever they find them. The war against terrorism in East Africa is essentially a war of intelligence, and I suspect that the Supermen of Special Ops in Djibouti have had some very dull months in camp there.

  I made one more trip to Yemen before my fateful visit to Riyadh largely put an end to my go-anywhere-anytime field-reporting days. In December 2003 I got a call from someone close to the Yemeni president. ‘Frank, you’ve got to get down here quickly,’ he said. ‘There’s an amazing story about Al-Qaeda. Believe me, it’ll be worth your time.’ I put down the phone and went straight to see Kevin Bakhurst, the editor of the ten o’clock news. ‘It’s a fishing trip,’ I told him as he swivelled round to face me in his glass goldfish bowl of an office. ‘It’s a gamble. It could be a great story, it could be a complete waste of time, I can’t tell. The Yemenis won’t tell me much over the phone.’ Bakhurst did not hesitate. He gave me one of the best cameramen in the business, Tony Fallshaw, and we were soon on our way to Sana’a airport. A minor customs official there tried to throw his weight around, making us wait on a bench while he blew cigarette smoke at us, but I took the opportunity to pass round a photo I had had taken of myself with the president when I had interviewed him. It worked wonders and we were through customs within seconds.

  The story turned out to be an intriguing one, though not quite as dramatic as we had been promised. The Yemeni Justice Ministry, under pressure for detaining so many suspects to keep the Americans happy, had come up with a novel approach to winning hearts and minds. It had set up a team of religious scholars to go round the prisons and convince Al-Qaeda supporters of the error of their ways, using the tenets of Islam rather than the threat of punishment to make them turn their backs on violence.

  We were ushered into a book-lined meeting room to meet a group of ‘former’ Islamist fanatics who had apparently repented in prison and had now been released after signing a pledge not to support terrorism. They looked a tough lot and seemed none too pleased at having a TV camera trained on them. The man sitting next to me looked exactly like Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh, the Yemeni member of the Hamburg cell, with his thin face, wispy beard and sneering lips. As if reading from a prepared script, he and the other former convicts declared their opposition to violence and their commitment to peace. I was not convinced. Twenty-five years of living in and visiting the Middle East had given me a good idea of when someone was telling the truth or not. These men may have signed a pledge of peace, but I could see the anti-Western hostility in their eyes. It mattered not a jot to them that I spoke Arabic and went to great lengths to explain to Western audiences the root causes of Muslim anger; all they could see was a kafir, an unbeliever, and worse still, one from a ‘Crusader nation’, Britain. I asked them what had made them change their minds, but my questions were making them uncomfortable so the cleric leading the discussion changed the subject.

  Judge Hammoud Hittar seemed an impressive character, dressed in a neatly wrapped turban and expensive-looking thaub. A learned scholar of Islam, he told me how he used this knowledge to outmanoeuvre fanatical prisoners when it came to discussions on Islam and jihad.

  ‘Sometimes it can take months,’ he said, ‘before we convince someone to renounce violence.’

  ‘But surely,’ I asked, ‘isn’t there a risk that some people will just say anything and sign anything in order to get out of prison and then go back to plotting attacks?’

  Judge Hittar was realistic. ‘Maybe,’ he admitted. ‘But then we watch them carefully after they come out, and besides, they have pledged on their family honour to behave.’

  The British Foreign Office was impressed with Hittar, so much so that they invited him to London a few weeks later and asked him to address an audience of counterterrorism specialists on the lessons Yemen had learned in adopting this unusual method of combating violent religious extremism.

  But the US Embassy in Sana’a, I learned, took a fairly dim view of this programme, suspecting that it was a way for dangerous men to get back on the streets, where their number-one target was the US Embassy. Washington preferred a more direct approach to tackling terrorism and we were apparently the first journalists to be given a glimpse of it. In a barren, rocky gully in the desert outside the capital we were taken to see the US Army’s Green Berets training Yemen’s secretive Counter-Terrorist Unit. The Americans were huge men in shirtsleeves and dark woollen deerstalker hats and they all seemed to be called Hank and Al. We found them taking the Yemenis through a hostage-rescue scenario, showing them how to force entry into a hollow, plywood hut with no roof, then take out the targets inside. The Yemeni troops were on a high. Just that week they had brought about the capture of the country’s most wanted terror suspect, Muhammed Al-Ahdal, without a shot being fired. A tip-off from an informer had led them to surround a house in Sana’a where Al-Ahdal was getting married. At dawn they sent in a messenger to tell him his situation was hopeless and that for the sake of his new wife and relatives he should surrender. Unusually, for someone supposed to be an Al-Qaeda fanatic, he did just that.

  In Sana’a I stumbled on a story that had never been made public. A diplomat I knew vaguely at one of the Western embassies in the capital told me he had some information that was too sensitive to discuss over the phone. We should meet face-to-face, he said, so I suggested a nighttime rendezvous on the roof of one of the centuries-old mud-walled houses in the Old City, which had been turned into a cheap hotel for backpackers. I knew that the rooftop was one of the most secluded places in Sana’a and it would be almost impossible for anyone to eavesdrop on our conversation.

  Leaving Tony, my cameraman, at the hotel, I made my way through the silent backstreets shortly before midnight. It was a route I knew well, having first explored this part of the capital as a backpacker myself in 1985, but I always found it enchanting. The narrow, twisting alleyways with their ancient, carved wooden doorways, the white stucco patterns beneath the crenellated rooftops, the glimpses of walled gardens where date palms ringed small allotments of verdant vegetables that fed several families and their livestock, all added
to the impression of a timeless world that hid a thousand secrets.

  Entering the seven-storey building, I ordered a pot of mint tea from the bleary-eyed boy on reception and asked for it to be brought up to the roof. He disappeared behind a curtain while I climbed the hundred or so stone steps, emerging at last on to a whitewashed rooftop bathed in the silver light of a full moon. Far away on the horizon I could just make out the dark silhouette of the volcanic mountains that ringed Sana’a, reminding me that we were over eight thousand feet above sea level up here.

  My contact was bang on time, ducking his head to pass through the low doorway that led out on to the roof and taking a few minutes to get his breath back. We exchanged small talk until the mint tea arrived, leaning on the parapet and admiring the view; he then told me what was on his mind.

  I ought to know, he said, that just three months earlier the British Embassy had been the target of a failed Al-Qaeda suicide-truck-bomb plot and that two other Western embassies had also been targeted. Since the British Embassy building was situated on a busy crossroads the bombers’ plan was to drive at full speed through the main gate with a truckful of explosives then detonate it in the inner courtyard, obliterating the front half of the Embassy. The would-be bombers came from Arab countries outside Yemen and they had reached the stage of making reconnaissance circuits of the Embassy walls, filming as they drove. But their plan was foiled by Yemeni intelligence after one of them was caught having a very un-Islamic affair with a Yemeni woman.