Arabian Deception

by James Lawrence

  When they got through the perfunctory greetings, the sheik got right down to business and asked Abdul-Rahman about his travels. Abdul-Rahman picked up the fruit drink sitting on the coffee table in front of him and observed the keen interest from the sheik, who was seated across from him. “Cee Dee, the Shia threat along our northern border has almost completely vanished. Daesh has claimed large territories in the north and west of Iraq, and the major focus from the Iranians is the defense of Baghdad. Daesh continues to grow in number despite the coalition bombings. The morale is high, and they are continuing to expand into territories to the north and east. The coalition air campaign was very effective at first, but Daesh have adapted and are shifting tactics away from vehicle assaults that can be easily targeted from the sky and are instead relying more on dismounted and night operations. They have taken control of Mosul and will soon lay siege to Baghdad. In Kobani, the Daesh casualties have been enormous; the air strikes guided by coalition special forces have made it very unlikely Daesh will succeed. In Syria, the Alawites are being slowly bled to death; both sides lose hundreds each month. But a thousand new Daesh fighters arrive every month, while Assad’s forces enjoy no such benefit. The Alawites are slowing shrinking out of existence. At this stage, it is only the Iranian revolutionary guard and Quds Force who are offering any resistance on the ground. The Syrian air strikes continue to be effective, but the Alawites’ days are numbered. They just don’t have the personnel necessary to sustain a war of attrition.”

  “What about Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?”

  “Cee Dee, he moves daily to avoid the coalition attacks. I met him in a village near Raqqa, and he was in good spirits. He is obsessed with removing the infidels and apostates from the Levant, he is well advised in military matters, and those around him are loyal. As the caliphate grows, so do his ego, ambition, and paranoia. He is very open about his desire to conquer the Arabian Peninsula. The areas he controls are very dangerous; bands of young men rove like wild dogs on the prowl. As time goes on and his force gets bigger, the quality declines, and it gets less disciplined. If Daesh were ever to run out of enemy, I am sure they’d turn on one another within days.”

  For a few minutes both men sat quietly, Abdul-Rahman glanced at the large-screen TV that always seemed to be showing a soccer match of some sort. The sheik thanked Abdul-Rahman and said he must go; he had another appointment. He could see on the young major’s face the conflicting emotions he had about his role. He knew Abdul-Rahman suspected that he was operating independently from his brother, the emir, on this project. The sheik stood and embraced Abdul-Rahman and walked him to the door with his arm around the younger man’s shoulder as if to reassure him.

  After Abdul-Rahman left, Sheik Meshal sat quietly processing the information. There was really nothing new, but it always helped to hear the news reports confirmed by someone he trusted. Sheik Meshal was worried, because he was playing a dangerous game. Many months earlier he, Prince Bandar from Saudi Arabia, and Sheik Rasheed from UAE had hatched a plan to strike a blow against their greatest threat, the Shia of Iran. With the withdrawal of the Americans from Iraq, the nation on the northern border of Kuwait was gradually becoming a satellite state of Iran. Sheik Meshal and his like-minded accomplices funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to the fledging caliphate to counter the influence of Iran in Iraq. Although he’d never had complete control of Daesh, the sheik’s influence on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was declining rapidly. Earlier, when they were fighting only in Syria, the money Sheik Meshal had funneled to them had been essential and provided him a modicum of control. Once Daesh had seized the Iraqi oil fields, outside funding had become less important, as had the people who were supplying that funding.

  Managing the propaganda campaign through Abdul-Rahman allowed the sheik to maintain influence over Daesh and promoted an awareness to the Western powers that intervention was necessary. Sheik Meshal’s aim was Sunni control over Iraq. The risk of an Iranian puppet Shia state to Kuwait’s north was too dangerous for the sheik to accept. The sheik viewed Daesh as chemotherapy and the Iranians as the cancer. He was not a supporter of the extremists; he was a pragmatist seeking a counter to Iran. Since the three royals had developed the plan, they had managed to keep their activities secret and had grown to call the little group the “council.” The multitude of economic and security meetings within the GCC allowed them to meet regularly without drawing unwanted attention. All three men held prominent roles within their respective governments.

  Chapter 10

  Abu Dhabi, UAE

  Pat left Afghanistan in March of 2010 and moved to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He took a job with a locally owned start-up trading company that resold military goods from global defense manufacturers to the UAE armed forces. Local agents were a Middle Eastern phenomenon. In UAE, a company had to be registered to sell to the government, and the regulations restricted registration to only those companies owned by local citizens.

  Pat’s job as COO at Falcon Trading turned out to be huge success. After only a few years, the company was exploding, and Pat was beginning to make serious money. The CEO was an Emirati. He was a good guy, somewhat eccentric, who rarely interfered with the business. The owner was a billionaire sheik, the brother of the president. He had almost nothing to do with the business directly, but his ownership was still very helpful. Pat had taken a pay cut from his last job in Afghanistan, but within four years his compensation was sufficient to pay off the bank loan on the subdivision. Now he even had enough free cashflow to put Stan and Jessica on a path to finish the subdivision within the next couple of years. His marriage was still a disaster, but the absence of financial peril for the first time in ages was enough to make him content in exile.

  It was a Friday afternoon and Pat had just finished washing the deck on his new boat. He’d named it the Sam Houston, because he sort of identified with him. He was sitting at the table on the flydeck of his used 2012 Azimuth 64, drinking a Sam Adams and watching the Red Sox game on his iPad. He heard someone walking toward his boat on the slipway and looked up to see who it was. It took a few seconds before he recognized the visitor as Mike Guthrie. His telltale limp gave him away. Pat gave him a wave and walked down the stairs to the main deck to meet him at the stern gate, which was backed up against the dock.

  “Welcome aboard,” Pat said. They shook hands.

  “Long time no see. What have you been doing with yourself? Robbing banks?” said Mike as he gestured toward the boat.

  “It’s a little ostentatious, but rents in this town are outrageous, and I figured if I was going to spend crazy money for a place to live, I might as well be able to drive away with it when I’m done with UAE.”

  “You don’t need to rationalize it to me. I love it. When did you get it?”

  “Just a few months ago. Do you want the nickel tour?” Pat took Mike through the glass triple doors into the salon. He showed him the home entertainment center with the pop-up big-screen TV and the three leather couches that surrounded it, then walked him through the galley to the helm and showed him the controls and the sun deck through the front windshield. Below deck, Pat showed Mike the three staterooms and the engine room housing the twin CAT 18 engines. Then he took him up to the flybridge above the main deck.

  “Do you want a beer?” Pat asked.

  “Sure.”

  Pat grabbed two bottles of Sam Adams from refrigerator next to the gas grill, passed one to Mike and took a seat opposite from him at the table. Intercontinental Marina was a small marina adjacent to the Intercontinental Hotel. Behind Pat’s docking space was a parking lot. On the starboard side of the parking lot was the Bayside Beach Club and on port side was the hotel. The bow of the yacht was pointed toward the narrow gap in a stone jetty that leads to the Arabian Gulf. Pat watched as Mike took it all in.

  “How’s work?” Mike asked.

  “It’s good. The transition from end user to seller is easier than I thought it would be.”

  “You’re obviousl
y doing well,” Mike said.

  “I’m getting by. Are you still with the Agency?” Pat asked.

  “Yeah, I’m working out of Langley. I manage the Middle East Desk at DCO.”

  “What’s DCO?”

  “Directorate of Clandestine Operations.”

  “How’s my buddy Tommy doing? I can’t remember his last name—the little guy who talked like William F. Buckley.”

  “He left the Agency and joined the administration. He’s a higher-up in the national security advisor’s staff.”

  “Figures. I’m not in trouble again, am I? Falcon follows the rules regarding export restrictions. I’m not sure what I could have done to wind up on your radar.”

  “What makes you think you’re on my radar?”

  “Because you don’t have a social life and you’re here,” Pat said.

  “Guilty as charged. I have a proposition for you,” Mike said. Pat didn’t have a poker face, and Mike could see he didn’t want to hear any more.

  “Just hear me out,” he said.

  “I’ve been in the UAE for the past two weeks, meeting with members of the UAE government, including the owner of your company, who is also the head of national security, and his brother, the crown prince. The UAE leadership is very concerned about what the US government calls ISIS and what they refer to as Daesh. The United States, of course, shares the same concern.

  “After we withdrew from Iraq in 2012, chaos ensued. Now a third of Iraq is governed by the Kurds, a third is governed by Iran through a proxy government, and a third is controlled by the ISIS caliphate. The southernmost ISIS-controlled city in Iraq is Fallujah, which is only a day’s drive from Abu Dhabi.

  “The situation is even worse in Syria. Assad is barely holding on with support from Iran and Russia, and ISIS controls most of the major population areas. The big bosses in UAE are asking the United States for help. Beyond a few special operators, Obama has no intention of putting boots on the ground. We’ve been providing air support against ISIS targets in both countries.

  “The GCC countries are asking the United States to step up our efforts to supply weapons, ammunition, and equipment to the anti-ISIS forces in both countries. We’ve been trying, but have had little success in this area, especially in Syria, where many of the recipients of our supplies have been radical elements who aren’t much better than the ones we’re trying to get rid of. The most effective force has been the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq. We’ve been reluctant to supply these forces, out of deference to Turkey. But the situation has now become desperate enough that the Agency has been given the green light to supply the Kurds, with the caveat that it must be kept secret.”

  “Which is why you’re telling me all of this,” interjected Pat.

  Mike went on, “We’re going to funnel the purchases for the Kurds through UAE. Your UAE company, Falcon, will buy from the manufacturers and suppliers. The UAE government will provide the end user certificates necessary to export the goods and bring them into the UAE. Once the products arrive at Al Dhafra Air Force Base, Falcon will sell the goods to your private company, Trident.

  “The US government will pay you for the goods and you will deliver to the Kurds. This has all been cleared at the top level, both in the United States and in UAE. The export licensing will all be approved with UAE as the recipient. The end user certificates will all be provided by the UAE armed forces GHQ; we will give you the contact info. This is a project that will make you a lot of money, and it will also allow you to do something very important for your country.”

  “I see you’ve shifted from altruism to greed to motivate me,” Pat said.

  “I think you should do it for both reasons. This is a very sensitive operation that requires full deniability. There are very few arms-trading companies in the Middle East managed by people we trust and who can keep a secret. There are only one or two countries in the Middle East who would support us on this project. The UAE is one of them. By a sheer stroke of luck, the one company in the Middle East managed by an American happens to be in the UAE, and that manager happens to be someone I’ve had good experience working with in the past. So, this is your lucky day.”

  “Weapons, money, Middle East—what could go wrong?” Pat said.

  “So, are you in?”

  “No, I don’t think this is something I want to do.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve had bad experiences with the US government. I’m one of those guys who peaked as a captain. The political stuff is just not for me. I always end up in trouble. Look what happened in Afghanistan.”

  “I know about what happened to when you were at the Pentagon. That was a rough deal. But the private sector can be just as rough. Look what happened to your building company during the mortgage crisis. Afghanistan was a success story; no harm came to you. I looked out for you then. I’ll look out for you on this project as well.”

  “You and I have history. We served together, and I trust you. The rest of the bottom-feeders in Langley and D.C., not so much. I don’t want the exposure.”

  “Give it some thought. This is a golden opportunity, not only to make a difference, but also to make some serious money.”

  “I’ll think about it, but I really don’t want to get caught up in government stupidity again.”

  Chapter 11

  Abu Dhabi, UAE

  Pat was wearing a pair of Bose headphones, kicked back on a hammock, with a Kindle to his face, when Steve Tidman slapped him on the leg. Pat could feel the plane starting to descend. Steve was a loadmaster, and he was signaling Pat to prepare for landing. Pat got out of the hammock, unclipped the carabiners that connected it to opposite sides of the C-130J Hercules, moved over to the nylon cargo seats lining the walls and buckled up.

  When he had first started running supplies to the Peshmerga in Northern Iraq, Pat had used chartered cargo haulers. The charters had proven unreliable and expensive, and Pat had also had concerns about operational security and pilferage. Nine months ago, he had invested in two C-130 Hercules cargo planes. The Hercs had a range of twenty-one hundred miles and could land on a three thousand-foot dirt airstrip with a forty-two-thousand-pound payload. The Trident mini-fleet stayed busy shuttling cargo from Abu Dhabi to Northern Iraq and sometimes picking up deliveries in Europe and Asia. Mike helped out, by arranging for the UAE government to provide Trident with a dedicated hangar and landing rights at Al Dhafra Air Force Base in Abu Dhabi.

  Pat felt the plane touch the runway. It took another fifteen minutes before the plane finished taxiing. The tail ramp opened, and he was greeted by bright sunshine and a wave of hundred-degree heat. Before exiting, he went forward and thanked the two pilots, Frank Belonis and Jack Carpenter. Both had thousands of hours flying the four-engine turbo prop and years of experience landing in dangerous places with the Air Force Special Operations Command. Steve Tidman was also former AFSOC. The fourth crew member on this aircraft was David Bell. Dave was a retired green beret. Having someone on board with regional language skills and the ability to provide security had proven to be very helpful on the Iraqi leg of some deliveries. The second aircraft crew was a mirror image of the first.

  Pat looked inside the hangar and could see the other crew moving air pallets that were part of the next shipment. He walked into the hangar to have a closer look. The boxes stacked on the aluminum pallets were tied down with green nylon webbing. On the boxes were company markings that read “Raytheon” and the words “Javelin” and nomenclature of either the missiles or the control launch units.

  Pat didn’t have any say over what they delivered. The CIA told him what to buy, and he went into the market in his role as Falcon COO and negotiated the purchase. Most items required export licenses, which meant Pat had to provide the manufacturer an end user certificate signed by the UAE government. Technically, it was the UAE who was importing the goods, but once they arrived in UAE, they were sold to Trident and then delivered to the Peshmerga in Iraq.

  After Pat delivered th
e goods, he submitted an invoice to a contract office that managed black programs at the Department of Defense and got reimbursed. He then paid Falcon, who in turn paid the suppliers. The money was as originally advertised, and up until recently the risks had been manageable. But now all that was starting to change.

  Pat slid into his Ford Explorer and was pulling out of his parking space when his phone rang. He saw it was Mike Guthrie and answered it on the Bluetooth.

  “Mike, thanks for getting back to me.”

  “I tried earlier, but your phone was off.”

  “I just landed. I was in Iraq.”

  “Everything okay on your end?”

  “The trip was fine. I wanted to talk to you about these Javelins.”

  “We had this discussion six months ago, when the order began. What’s left to discuss?”

  “I wanted to know if the situation has changed.”

  “No change, continue as directed.”

  “Do the big bosses still want to go through with it now that our little operation has been leaked to the press?”

  “The administration are the ones who leaked it, Pat.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “The press reports on the support to the Syrian rebels fighting Assad and ISIS has been horrible, embarrassing even. The DoD spent half a billion dollars training and equipping a battalion-sized force of supposed Syrian resistance fighters, and the moment they were finished, all but thirteen disappeared. Assad has crossed the red line the president set in Syria by continuing to use chemical agents. The arming of Syrian opposition groups has been a total failure. The only bright light has been the successes of the Peshmerga, and the administration wanted the word out that they had a hand in it. They needed to counter all the bad press.”