To the Death am-10

by Patrick Robinson

  The more modern Camp Delta was quickly constructed for two thousand detainees, but Middle Eastern propaganda television stations still refer to Camp X-ray, because of its association with harsh treatment for its inmates. Human rights groups have called such measures “sensory deprivation,” citing such levels of restraint as unnecessary and inhumane.

  Never mind that most of them had been caught trying to kill, maim, or murder U.S. servicemen or civilians and were meeting a far less onerous fate than prisoners of the jihadists so often do. It might have been tough or even humiliating, but no one had their head cut off. Or worse.

  Within a couple of years, there were six separate detention camps at Guantánamo (named 1, 2, 3, 4, Echo, and Iguana), three of them maximum security, capable of holding eight hundred prisoners between them, all living in solitary confinement.

  Inside these camps, there were numerous detention blocks, each holding twenty-four units. These oppressive cells are eight feet long by six feet eight inches wide, and eight feet high, constructed of metallic wire mesh on a solid steel frame. A couple of hundred prisoners were released to other governments in 2005, but over five hundred were left.

  Ramon Salman landed in Guantánamo after a direct flight from the U.S. Naval Air Station at Boca Chica, near Key West, fifty miles off Florida’s south coast. He was immediately manacled and walked to a reception area, where he was issued the usual prisoner’s gear: two orange boiler-suits, a foam sleeping mat, one blanket, two buckets, a pair of flip-flops, wash-cloth, soap, shampoo, and a copy of the Koran, in case he thought Allah might have abandoned him.

  Salman was then walked slowly to a detention block, a separate one from either of his two cohorts, neither of whom did he realize was in captivity less than two hundred yards from where he stood.

  And from there he was, for a while, left to his own thoughts. And these were private. Salman had not uttered one word since the New York cops had grabbed him in the Houston Street apartment the previous day. He must clearly have been stunned by the experience, seeing his two colleagues bound and gagged in the presence of Officers Carman and Pallizi.

  But he had offered nothing, refused to give even his name, and was identified one hour later only by the police photographs which had been taken outside his apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. Since his arrest: nothing. Not a word on the military aircraft. Not a word to anyone since the flight. His entry card to Guantánamo read simply:

  Ramon Salman, last known permanent address 2, Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Arrested in known terrorist HQ at 75 West Houston Street, New York City, on suspicion of terrorism against the United States. Believed involved in Logan airport bombing, 01/15/12, and other plots to murder and maim involving aircraft. This prisoner is designated ILLEGAL COMBATANT. NON-COOPERATIVE. Possibly Syrian. No passport located.

  At 1900, they brought him an evening meal with the rest of the prisoners. It consisted of white rice, red beans, a banana, bread, and a bottle of water. The guards stared at him for a while, noting his unshaven, dark, swarthy Middle Eastern appearance, the pure hatred in his eyes, and the defiant curl to his upper lip.

  This was the man, they knew, who had made the phone call from his apartment to Syria, the call that had betrayed so much. This was a critical figure in the al Qaeda system. He was, as yet, undetected as a disciple of bin Laden, and nothing was known about him. But he had been coldly planning to blow apart hundreds of innocent American citizens in the airport. But for the sharpness of the Boston financier Donald Martin in spotting the briefcase, he would have succeeded.

  Salman’s current plight may have incensed, or at least drawn sympathy from, the human rights groups. But it did not impress the U.S. guards, one of whom muttered, as they walked away, “For two bits, I’d kick the little fucker’s nuts into his lungs.”

  Happily for Salman, there would be the kind of legal restraint common in the United States military, but there would be little mercy when the interrogation began at 0100. Still, they probably would not behead him.

  The lights in his holding pen went out at 2100. It would be a long time before he was allowed out of the darkness, since the principal objective of interrogation, in its initial stages, is total disorientation, the prisoner not knowing whether it’s day or night.

  They came for him on time at 0100, and immediately placed a hood over his head. He was then manacled, placed in a chair, and the senior interrogator said quietly, “Okay, Ramon. We know you speak English, and we also have in custody your colleagues, Reza Aghani and the Palm Beach baggage man Mohammed Rahman.

  “They have both been sensible and told us everything we need to know, including details of your own part in the attempted atrocities against the United States on January 15. However, I would like to clarify your personal details. I believe you are Syrian, like Mohammed?”

  That last remark was a wild swing in the dark, based upon Mohammed’s admitted job in the Syrian embassy in Caracas and the almost certain destination of that phone call from Commonwealth Avenue.

  Salman made no reply. Was he related to Osama bin Laden, whose Saudi-based cousin still owned the Boston apartment? Nothing. Had he worked for Osama? Nothing. Was he an active jihadist? And, if not, why had he delivered the critical phone message back to Syria? Zero. No response. No reply to anything.

  They kept it up for four hours, never threatening. Just probing. Then they took him back to his holding cell, still manacled, still hooded, still in the dark. Every half hour, someone came in and shook him awake. He ate his meals in the dark, he drank his water in the dark. Four times a day, and every night, he was questioned. Ramon Salman was never allowed to sleep.

  At midnight on Friday, January 21, they turned on the pressure. Salman was by now completely disoriented. He did not know whether it was night or day. He did not know what day of the week it was; he had lost count of the number of days he had been in captivity.

  He had not spoken, but he was clearly becoming distressed and was beginning to hallucinate, mumbling incoherently, the guards assumed in Arabic. As Friday turned into Saturday, they suddenly piped deafening music into his cell, cheap rock ’n’ roll, blasting in the confined space. He was not manacled at the time, and the guards watched him clamp his hands over his ears.

  At which point, they walked in and grabbed him, replacing the manacles and the handcuffs and the hood, and then left him for one hour with the music still blaring. When they returned, the tone was very different. “SALMAN! GET UP! SIDDOWN! And listen carefully, because our patience just ran out, and if we don’t get some answers we’re going to beat the living shit out of you.”

  Right then they pulled off his hood, and Salman’s eyes, accustomed only to the dark, almost exploded as they were hit by viciously bright interrogation lights, aimed right at him.

  Simultaneously, from out in the corridor came penetrating screams of pure terror, the sounds of hell, the unmistakable sounds of the torture chamber. There were sounds of men being beaten, of slashing whips, cries and whimpers of appallingly injured people. As fake tapes go, this one often did the trick down there in Guantánamo. The wretched Salman gritted his teeth, clenched his fists, and said nothing.

  “SALMAN!” roared the interrogator. “Right here I’m holding a U.S. Army officer’s baton, and two minutes from now I’m going to smash it right across your mouth. You got just one way out. Answer this question: are you Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, or al Qaeda?”

  Ramon Salman spoke not one word. He just sat there, hunched up, listening to the screams echoing in the corridor. He was shivering now, but something seemed to tell him the Americans were not going to smash his face. Everyone knew the West was soft.

  He kept up this defiance for one hour. And the guards began to think he never would give in. They were wrong. The following night, Salman cracked.

  1930 Sunday 23 January Guantánamo Bay

  Reza Aghani had been kept outside under the hot Caribbean sun all day. He’d been kept in one highly uncomfortable position
for more than ten hours. They gave him food and water, but he was not allowed to move, and there he had remained, isolated, disoriented, hallucinating, probably wishing to hell he had never asked Elliott Gardner to look after that briefcase in Logan’s Terminal C.

  They took him back to his cell and fed him his evening meal at 1900, just bread, beans, rice, and an apple. Then they turned up the music, and left him under rock ’n’ roll assault for an hour. When the guards returned, they turned off the music, manacled and handcuffed him, and asked him the questions he had refused to answer maybe a hundred times.

  Who is your immediate superior? Who gives your orders? What is his name?

  Aghani had had enough. The wound in his upper arm, where he had been shot by Officer Pete Mackay, was throbbing. His resistance had ebbed away. There was nothing he would not do to end this interrogation. And he was very afraid the Americans might just kill him, and no one, including his wife and family in Tehran, would ever know what had become of him.

  His hallucinations were very bad now, and he swayed through some kind of a no-man’s-land, not comprehending the difference between reality and fantasy. He looked at the guard who asked the question. And he thought it was his father. The room kept dissolving into a café he frequented on the Vali-ye Asr. He could not even remember the question he had been asked ten seconds ago.

  The American officer asked it again, and, as he did so, Aghani caved in. “Salman,” he said. “Ramon Salman. He’s my senior commander.” With his last ounce of defiance, he blurted out, “But you’ll never find him — he’s gone home.”

  That’s Hamas, right? asked the interrogating officer, taking yet another wild stab in the dark, but acting on certain knowledge that the new links between al Qaeda and the Iranian/Palestinian terror group were growing stronger with each passing year.

  The title al Qaeda had become almost generic, and it had ceased to mean anything, certainly not sufficient to pinpoint a terrorist operation. Al Qaeda was operational all around Baghdad and Basra in Iraq, in Iran, in both the south and northeast of Afghanistan, and in the mountains of Pakistan. It meant nothing to an intelligence agency, whereas Hamas very definitely did. It meant Tehran, or Damascus, the Syrian capital, which Salman had called on his cell phone from Boston the night of January 14. And that mattered.

  Reza Aghani elected to answer. He seemed only semiconscious, and he had been deprived of sleep for a long time. He just sighed, and then mumbled, “Yes. Hamas.” Then he slumped forward, and the interrogator shouted for a stretcher to cart the unconscious Iranian terrorist to Guantánamo’s small, twenty-bed hospital.

  The seventeen words Reza Aghani had uttered, under stress, bore all the signs of a man who had given up. The interrogators assessed he had been telling the truth. And they returned with new vigor to the cell occupied by Ramon Salman.

  They shook him awake and turned up the music, slammed the door, and left him. When they returned an hour later, he was rocking backward and forward, in the manner of the insane, and not in time to the fifth-rate rock ’n’ roll. They ripped off his hood and turned on the arc lights, almost blinding him.

  Right now, Ramon Salman did not know if he was in heaven or hell, though he suspected the latter. He could not work out whether he was in a dream or in reality. Like Aghani, he was hallucinating beyond reason, murmuring in Arabic, trying to work out why his children were in the room, why he kept drifting in and out of his favorite underground teahouse in Damascus, the one in Al-Bakry Street, near his home in the Old City.

  SALMAN! YOU KNOW WHAT WE WANT. AND YOU’ALL GONNA TELL US RIGHT NOW. The words bore the drawn-out inflection of the Carolinas, and they were being yelled by a former graduate of The Citadel military academy.

  GIMME THE NAME OF YOUR HAMAS COMMANDER IN CHIEF!!

  Ramon Salman’s head lolled back, and his eyes rolled. He seemed to slide into sleep, and now he was still, his eyes unseeing, facing up to the ceiling.

  The southern infantry colonel’s voice was softer now. And he spoke, quietly: “Come on, Ramon. You haven’t got one thing to gain by keeping quiet. Come on, tell me your commander’s name. Was it the Englishman, the SAS major who joined Hamas? Come on, boy, let’s end this shit right now. Just tell me the truth. Who is he? And where does he live?”

  Ramon Salman looked up and said softly, “Damascus. He lives in Damascus. Sharia Bab Touma.”

  “HE’S RAVI RASHOOD, RIGHT?” The voice from South Carolina was harsher now. “FORMERLY KNOWN AS MAJOR RAY KERMAN OF THE BRITISH SAS. That’s who you work for, RIGHT?”

  The yelled final word almost made the Syrian leap out of his skin. He began to tremble as if terrified that one more word would seal his death warrant.

  “ANSWER ME, YOU LITTLE BASTARD!!” The American voice was now full of venom, edged with menace, as he went in for the kill.

  “WAS THAT WHO YOU CALLED FROM COMMONWEALTH AVENUE LAST WEEK?”

  Salman could stand no more. And he closed his eyes against the pitiless glare of the hot arc lights. “Yes, sir,” he murmured in a barely audible whisper. “My commander in chief is General Ravi Rashood.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The communiqué from Guantánamo Bay came ripping through cyberspace at 2100 and landed simultaneously on the screen of Lt. Commander Jimmy Ramshawe and that of his boss, the director of the National Security Agency, Rear Admiral George R. Morris.

  Within moments, it was linked to the CIA’s Middle East desk in Langley, and to the Surveillance Division in Washington, D.C. All the intelligence agencies were alerted. Ramon Salman had spilled the beans. The attempted atrocities on January 15 were a Hamas plot, masterminded by General Rashood, whose address they now had.

  The information confirmed what U.S. intelligence chiefs had long suspected: Al Qaeda had dissipated into a kind of rabble, no longer coordinated without the cash and discipline of their erstwhile leader Osama bin Laden. The real, burgeoning power of the jihadist movement was held by the ruthless military council of Hamas and their ruthless military C-in-C, General Ravi Rashood.

  The duty officer working the first night watch on the second floor of the Ops-2B building saw his own screen flashing the letters GBI. That meant Guantánamo Bay Intelligence coming through. He knew the drill and hit the direct lines to both Admiral Morris and Lt. Commander Ramshawe.

  The admiral was 170 miles away in the Norfolk yards, and Ramshawe’s home telephone was patched through to the Australian embassy. Behind those great wrought-iron gates on Massachusetts Avenue, the young Aussie assistant to the director was having dinner with his fiancée, Jane Peacock, daughter of the ambassador.

  Jane handed him the phone, heard him snap I’ll be there, and groaned. Jimmy kissed her and said, “I’m sorry, really sorry. But this is important.”

  “It always is,” she replied. “See you tomorrow?”

  “No worries,” he called, as he headed for the stairway. “We’re going out. Pick you up at 1900.”

  “When the hell’s that?” she muttered. “Nineteen hundred! Jesus, what does he think I am, a midshipman?”

  On his way around the Beltway, heading east toward the Parkway, Jimmy called the Big Man and told him to stand by for a call in thirty minutes on a more secure phone from his office. When he arrived, he was immediately informed that Admiral Morris was on his way in by helicopter from Norfolk. The breakthrough in Guantánamo Bay was the last piece in a long-running jigsaw puzzle.

  All of the Western world’s intelligence agencies knew of the astonishing defection of SAS Major Ray Kerman during a pitched battle in the Israeli city of Hebron in the summer of 2004. They knew he had found some reason to kill two of his colleagues, and then had vanished.

  Over the next five or six years, there were a number of daredevil attacks by the warriors of Hamas, involving highly trained troops and even submarines. The West suspected there was only one man capable of leading such sophisticated adventures, and it plainly had to be the work of Major Kerman, who was, even by SAS standards, a brilliant operator. />
  However, no one ever knew for sure. The name General Rashood surfaced every now and then, and informers referred to him by name, but no one ever found out who Rashood was, or anything about his background.

  Admiral Morgan and Jimmy Ramshawe were darned sure he was Major Kerman, and a couple of times the U.S. military came within an ace of catching him. But he always got away, and still no one was ever certain of his true identity.

  They were now. The transcript of the interrogation in Guantánamo made it quite clear that the question had been put to the terrorist Salman in an unambiguous way. Major Kerman and General Rashood were one and the same. Better yet, there was now an address, Bab Touma Street in Damascus, a street that ends at the Bab Touma Gate, the eastern approach into the city through the ancient Roman wall.

  The last line of the communiqué from Guantánamo stated that in answer to the question What number Bab Touma? Salman had replied, within a hundred meters of the Gate. And that was enough. That was actually plenty. The CIA would take it from there. The important thing was that General Rashood was right now living the last few weeks of his life. There would be no mistakes. The reign of the world’s most lethal terrorist was drawing to a close.

  Jimmy Ramshawe called Admiral Morgan on an encrypted line. He told him Admiral Morris was on his way. Arnold did not hesitate. “I’ll be right over,” he said. “Gimme forty-five.”

  “No speeding, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to send someone to get you out of the slammer.”

  “On this little mission, young Jimmy, anyone stops my car, the whole goddamned police department will be looking for new jobs tomorrow morning.”

  The likelihood of any Washington cop pulling over the admiral’s White House limousine (for life) driven by a White House driver (until he was late) was remote. In all the many years Arnold Morgan had served his nation, only one cruiser had ever dared to take such an action.