The Silent Man jw-3

by Alex Berenson

  So Nasiji left Ghazaliya for Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, where former Baathists were organizing the Sunni insurgency. He was easily accepted. Everyone in Tikrit knew what had happened to his father. Nasiji had only one quirk. He had no interest in operations against the Shia. Only Americans.

  He quickly gained a reputation as fearless and vicious. In early 2006 he led an ambush against an American convoy traveling through Mahmoudiyah. His men killed three soldiers and kidnapped two more, hiding them in a farmhouse a few miles south of Fallujah. Nasiji interrogated the men for a few days, but they didn’t have much to tell. He told them he’d let them go if they begged for their lives. They knew he was lying, perhaps, but they couldn’t help themselves.

  He watched their mouths move as they spoke, but he couldn’t hear them at all, only the little voice in his head whispering, Kill them. When their pleas were done, he blew out their brains and left their bodies in a field for dogs to eat. Then he uploaded the video to a jihadi Web site, to prove to the world that Americans were weak when they didn’t have tanks or helicopters to protect them.

  After the Mahmoudiyah operation, Nasiji’s anger curdled into something calmer and nastier. Over the course of a year, he and his men had killed two dozen soldiers with ambushes and roadside bombs. A good haul. But hardly enough to make a difference in this war. The American bases were impenetrable. He could only pick soldiers off one by one as they traveled in convoys. Eventually he’d be shot in a firefight, or the Americans would learn his name and seek him out. Inevitably they’d get him. Besides, how would killing even a hundred soldiers make a difference? The Americans didn’t care how many of their soldiers died here, or how much damage they caused.

  “Ordinary people die all the time here and they don’t care,” his brother Amir had said on September 11. “Now they understand.”

  But Amir had been wrong. The Americans hadn’t understood the message of September 11 at all. To teach them, Nasiji would need to give them a lesson they would never forget. He would need to use the knowledge he’d gained in Munich to turn their cities into lakes of fire.

  NASIJI WENT BACK to Tikrit with an unusual request. He heard nothing for two weeks, and he wondered if he’d overreached. Then, near midnight, as he rested in a house in Ghazaliya, his phone trilled. “Sayyid. It’s arranged. For tomorrow.” The voice belonged to a Syrian he knew only as Bas. “Tell me where you are.”

  Nasiji gave his location.

  “I’ll send a car at six a.m. Whoever you’re with, don’t tell them. Just go.”

  “Of course. Bas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.”

  That night Nasiji hardly slept. Curled on his metal cot, his AK laid neatly on a sheet on the concrete floor beneath him, he folded his arms behind his head and wondered: Would the sheikh listen to him? He was nothing, a jihadi like a million others. He closed his eyes and saw his father’s BMW on the overpass. What he’d first seen that day wasn’t the bodies or even the bullet holes, but the puddles of oil and gas leaking from the car. As if he hadn’t been willing to look into the BMW itself, as if the fluid took the place of the blood he knew he’d see when he looked up—

  And then he had, he had looked up—

  No. Enough. Put it aside. “Not what they’ve done to you,” he murmured to himself. “What you’ll do to them.” He passed the night half-asleep, his eyes fluttering open every few minutes. He was glad for morning.

  Six a.m. came and went, and then seven. Nasiji worried that his driver had been ambushed or arrested. But as he was about to call Bas, a white Toyota Crown with tinted windows pulled up outside the house.

  FOUR HOURS LATER, Nasiji found himself in a house south of Ramadi, kissing the hand of a heavy man in a dishdasha, the flowing white robe favored by Saudis.

  The man was Sheikh Ahmed Faisal. He and his cousin Abdul were third-tier Saudi princes — and the biggest source of cash for the Iraqi insurgency. The Faisals did in Iraq what Osama bin Laden had once done in Afghanistan, funneling in cash and jihadis to fight the United States. Abdul rarely left Riyadh, but Ahmed came to Iraq every so often to track the progress of the war.

  Ahmed raised his hand. “Please sit,” he said. The Saudi’s black beard was neatly trimmed, his robe immaculate, making Nasiji conscious of his own scruffy beard and dirty jeans.

  “Thank you, Sheikh,” Nasiji said. “This visit is an honor. Every day, all of us in Iraq appreciate your great kindnesses.”

  “I’ve seen the video from Mahmoudiyah. If we had more soldiers like you, the Americans might be gone already.” Ahmed spoke a refined classical Arabic that Nasiji had heard only on Al Jazeera. The sheikh tapped the silver case on the table between them. “Cigarette?”

  “No, thank you. I’m sure you have many men more important than me to see, so I won’t take much of your time.” Quickly, Nasiji outlined his plan.

  When he was done, Ahmed lit a fresh cigarette and took a deep drag. “Young man,” he said. “Many others have had this idea. They’ve all failed.”

  “I have certain advantages.”

  “Your training. Yes. If not for that, I would not have met you.”

  “If I get the material, I won’t waste it.”

  “But there’s something else. You must understand the consequences of this. When the moment comes, you won’t have doubts?”

  “Has anyone told you what happened to my family?”

  The Saudi nodded. For a few seconds the room was so quiet that Nasiji could hear his own breathing. “These Americans,” Ahmed said finally.

  “They need a taste.” Nasiji didn’t tell the sheikh that if his plan succeeded it wouldn’t destroy just New York or Washington, but all of America. That vision might have been too much even for this man.

  Ahmed stubbed out his cigarette. “Let me ask you, then. What will you need?”

  “To start? A Canadian or American passport, a real one. Also one from Europe. Safe houses in Germany and Russia. Men I can trust in both places. And money, lots of it.”

  “It’s a long list.”

  “It’ll get longer as we get closer.”

  The sheikh nodded.

  “Most of all, we need someone in the United States we can absolutely trust, someone with a bit of land. A few acres so we won’t be bothered.”

  “Inside the United States? Why?”

  “We’ll need to assemble the bomb there. The material itself isn’t very noticeable, but the finished weapon is.”

  “Do you really think you can do this?”

  “I can’t promise success. But it’s not impossible. Acquiring the material is the most difficult part. If God wills that. ”

  “Inshallah,” the sheikh said. “Inshallah.” He clapped his hands together. “All right. First, let’s get you out of Iraq before the Americans find you. We’ll meet in Amman in a week and talk more about your plans. You’ll have the chance to revenge your family, I promise you that.”

  To his astonishment, Nasiji felt his eyes well with tears. He turned away so the Saudi couldn’t see his face.

  FOR THE NEXT THREE YEARS, Ahmed Faisal kept his word to Nasiji. All over the world Faisal and his cousin knew men who wanted to support the jihad. In Montreal, the director of an Algerian community center. In Berlin, the owner of an Afghan restaurant. In Sarajevo, a used-truck dealer. In Chelyabinsk, an imam. All willing to help Nasiji without question. They put him up in their homes, so he didn’t leave a paper trail. They passed along cash. A few provided more crucial support. The Canadian passport in Nasiji’s pocket identified him as Jad Ghani of Montreal. Nasiji didn’t have to worry that an immigration officer would identify the passport as fake — because it wasn’t.

  Jad Ghani actually existed. He was mildly retarded, lived at home, and had been born in Montreal the same year as Nasiji. Jad’s father, a fervent believer, had been more than happy to apply for a passport for his son, using photos of Nasiji. And so Nasiji had a genuine Canadian passport, which would easily get him through border c
ontrols anywhere in Europe or the United States.

  Nasiji’s first big break came when Faisal put him in touch with Yusuf al Haj, who’d served for six years as an engineer in the Syrian army. Yusuf had two great virtues. He spoke excellent Russian. And he was a stone-cold psychopath. The Syrians had discharged him for beating an enlisted man nearly to death when the soldier argued with an order he gave. But Nasiji knew how to deal with madmen. He’d seen Iraqi jihadis as crazy as Yusuf. The key with them was never to show weakness. They were wolves, these men. If they smelled doubt or fear, they would turn instantly.

  Slowly, Nasiji put together his network. He arranged a transport system and put together a workshop in the United States. Along the way he discovered certain weaknesses in his plan that he now believed he’d fixed.

  But without the material, his plans meant nothing. He’d be practicing dry runs and designing dummy bombs for the rest of his life. Russia was his best bet, he knew. The North Koreans couldn’t be trusted, and the Pakistanis were so paranoid about what the Americans would do to them if their bombs went missing that the security of their stockpile was actually quite good.

  So Nasiji and Yusuf traveled across southern Russia, pretending to be traders who wanted to export Russian motorcycles to the Middle East. For months, they got nowhere. They traveled freely into the closed cities, but the bases where the bombs were held were another matter. Then the imam in Chelyabinsk told them of a security worker in Ozersk who might be willing to help.

  Nasiji plotted the theft but left Yusuf in charge of handling the Farzadov cousins. If the Russians unearthed the plot, Yusuf was replaceable. Anyway, Yusuf had a talent for this work. He frightened people so much that they would agree to almost anything just to keep him calm.

  Nasiji had decided on the Black Sea route because he wasn’t sure what the Russians would do once they discovered the theft. They wouldn’t want to cause a worldwide panic, so they probably wouldn’t make a public announcement. But they might try to close their borders, and the Kazakhs might cooperate with them. Best to get the material into Europe quickly.

  Despite everything, Nasiji had scarcely trusted his eyes when he saw the twin bombs in Yusuf’s Nissan. He pulled a handheld radiation detector from his pocket to be sure. Yes. The radiation signature was faint but distinct. They were real.

  He reached inside the toolboxes and touched the cylinders, one hand on each, the steel cold under his fingers. An electric charge ran through his body, as if he were conducting current from one warhead to the other.

  “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Nasiji said.

  “Hmm?”

  “It’s what the Americans said when they blew up the first bomb.”

  “Someone said that?”

  “Oppenheimer. A Jew American physicist. It comes from a book of Indian prayers. The fireball went up and Oppenheimer said, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

  “That’s how I felt, too, when I saw them. Only I wasn’t sure how to say it.”

  “Do you know what the scientists call them?”

  “Bombs?”

  “Gadgets.” Nasiji said the word in English.

  “Gadget?”

  “It doesn’t translate well into Arabic. It means, a sort of toy. A mechanical device.”

  “Why this word?”

  “Don’t you see? It’s a joke. Such a powerful weapon, and they call it a gadget. Like it’s a mobile phone.”

  “Gidgit.” Yusuf smiled, trying to play along.

  Nasiji closed the trunk. “You’ve done well, Yusuf.”

  AFTER THE TRIP over the Black Sea, which gave Yusuf the chance to dispose of the Farzadov cousins, the bombs arrived in Turkey. Yusuf watched over them in a rental apartment in an Istanbul suburb for four days, and then the next step was ready.

  For a year, Nasiji had been buying toolboxes and cabinets from a factory in central Turkey. He bought them in lots of eight hundred, enough to fill a forty-foot shipping container, and sent them by ship to Trieste, Italy, and then on to Hamburg, where he sold them at cost to German hardware stores.

  Nasiji wasn’t trying to start a hardware business. He wanted to build a pattern of shipments, a key to avoiding scrutiny by customs agents. Hundreds of thousands of containers came through Trieste each year, far too many for customs authorities to examine. So the agents concentrated their efforts on new shippers, shippers who had a history of evading duties, and shippers from countries that were known to be problematic, like Nigeria. Anyone outside those categories — say, a once-a-month shipper from Istanbul with a clean record — had a better chance of being hit by a meteor than being randomly searched.

  The Turkish tool cabinets were delivered to a warehouse in Istanbul’s bustling harbor district. There Yusuf added his own packages, stowing them inside crates 301 and 303. The crates were packed in a container that was put aboard the UND Birlik, a ship that regularly ran the Istanbul-Trieste route. Five days later, the container was offloaded at Trieste and transferred to a truck for the drive to Hamburg. As Nasiji had expected, no customs agent ever even looked at the container.

  NOW NASIJI AND THE CONTAINER had arrived in Hamburg.

  In the courtyard on the Reeperbahn, one of the whores finally found a customer, a young man in a denim jacket. She wrapped her arm in his and they walked toward the little streets where love hotels provided cheap beds by the hour. The man’s eyes slid over Nasiji as they walked past, but he didn’t break stride. No surprise. Nasiji could hang out in the courtyard all night and no one, not even the whores, would bother him. Strangely enough, despite the noise and constant traffic, he found the Reeperbahn a good place to think.

  Nasiji wondered when the Russians would publicly disclose the theft. Ahmed Faisal, who had connections in the Saudi intelligence agency, had told him that the FSB had issued a bulletin asking Interpol and the United States to detain the Farzadov cousins. Still, Nasiji believed he was well ahead of his enemies. Grigory and Tajid were no longer around to spill their secrets. Now only three men knew exactly where the bombs were: Nasiji himself, Yusuf, and the man he was about to meet. And so even the cold Hamburg drizzle couldn’t dampen his mood as he waited for his contact, a man who called himself Bernard.

  Bernard’s real name was Bassim Kygeli. He’d emigrated from Turkey in 1979 and quickly realized that Germans preferred to do business with Bernard, not Bassim. So he was Bernard on his business cards and in his corporate records. Starting with rugs and trinkets, he built a successful import-export business. Over the years, he progressed to furniture and then machine tools. He brought a bride from Istanbul and together they had three children. They lived in a two-story white house in Hamburg’s wealthy northern district, halfway between the airport and downtown.

  Yet as the years progressed and his wealth grew, Bernard became more angry, not less, at the United States and Germany. The Americans kept Muslims down and then congratulated themselves for their humanity. The Germans had been American lapdogs for so long that they had no opinions of their own anymore.

  In the late 1990s, Bernard realized he would be more valuable to the jihadi cause if he kept a low profile. He donated thousands of euros a year to the relief organizations that supported Palestinian refugees. That wasn’t illegal and there was no harm in it. But he stayed out of Hamburg’s radical mosques, and he never gave money directly to jihadi charities. As a result, his name didn’t show up on any terrorist watch lists. The CIA and the FBI; the French DGSE; MI-5 and -6; even the BND, the German intelligence agency — none had ever heard of Bernard Kygeli.

  And so Bernard was incredibly valuable to Sayyid Nasiji. Sure, Nasiji sometimes grew frustrated with the man, who had no idea of the risks Nasiji took. Still, he always felt better after a night in the guest room at Bernard’s house, drinking sweet tea and eating the delicious dinners that Bernard’s wife made, kebobs and hummus and grape leaves stuffed with rice.

  The thought of dinner reminded Nasiji that he hadn’t eaten all day,
and he was more than happy to see Bernard’s black Mercedes sedan pull up to the curb in front of the whores, who quickly swarmed the car. Nasiji pushed through them and slipped inside the car, ignoring the whores’ backtalk.

  Bernard eased the Mercedes away from the curb. “Tell me again why we must meet on the Reeperbahn, Sayyid?”

  “Because our friends at the BND would never expect it.”

  “Maybe you just like the girls.”

  “Hardly. How are you, my friend?”

  “The same. Watching the Kurds make fools of us Turks.”

  “While the Americans laugh.”

  “Yes. Meanwhile, Helmut”—Bernard’s oldest child and only son—“spends his nights at cafés. Says his screenplay is almost finished.” Helmut had quit the University of Hamburg a year before, supposedly to make movies. Nasiji had met him twice. He was a foppish manchild who stank of sweet cologne.

  “You ought to kick him out.”

  “I have. Last week. I hope it’s not too late. My fault, you know. I never should have named him Helmut. It was the old days. I was trying to pass.”

  Nasiji had heard these laments before. “How are your other two?”

  “The girls? Like all women.” Bernard steered the Mercedes into one of the tunnels that cut under the Elbe River. The Elbe had been the source of Hamburg’s wealth for centuries, the waterway that linked Germany to the North Sea and the rest of the world. Most of the city lay north of the river, while the giant port complex was located to the south.

  “How’s Zaineb?” After Helmut, Bernard had gone back to traditional Muslim names for his kids. Zaineb was the older of Bernard’s two daughters. Nasiji had only met her once. She was petite, with fine dark hair and a throaty laugh like a bus engine, a laugh that seemed to indicate she found the world impossibly funny. In another life Nasiji would have married her.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Is she around this evening?”

  “Visiting a cousin.”

  “Away again.” Bernard wanted Zaineb to have nothing to do with him, Nasiji thought. Though he couldn’t blame the man. “Maybe one day I’ll get to see her again.”