Very likely code, I told them, pointing out a mission to Afghanistan in which my fedayeen unit attacked a Russian bomber using SAM-7 rockets. From troop movement to the moment we fired, our every action was prompted by the recitation of certain sura over handheld radios.
Shortly after the imam confronted me in Seattle with the message that Islamists would “seed” American women and “have this nation,” I traveled to North Carolina for a series of speaking engagements, so I happened to be away when four Pakistani men came to my hometown to hunt me down.
On the Monday morning after I returned from North Carolina, I was sitting in my office at work when Lily, my secretary, patched through a call from Mike, the head of security at the nonprofit where I worked.
“Kamal, we’ve had a series of incidents you need to know about,” he said.
Mike told me that while I was out of town, a group of Pakistani men driving cars with Washington State plates cruised into town. They did not find my place of business, but went to similar organizations asking if anyone knew the whereabouts of a Kamal Saleem. What was Kamal Saleem’s profession? Where did the Saleem family live?
“The people the Pakistanis came into contact with said they appeared nervous and somewhat hostile,” Mike said.
Because they had asked about my family, the news unnerved me. But it did not surprise me. There was a time when I would have done the same thing, I thought.
“The Pakistanis also went to two other locations in town, including the bank you use,” Mike said. “They sat out in the parking lot for an hour working on a laptop computer. Finally, security guards asked them to leave.”
I thanked Mike, and as he left the office, I dialed my wife, Victoria.
“Call the FBI,” I said.
The next day, we visited at an FBI field office with an agent who didn’t look much like an agent in his jeans and pale yellow polo shirt.
“What do you make of this?” the agent asked. “Why are they looking for you?”
I told him about the incident in Seattle outside the mosque. I also told him about another verbal confrontation in Seattle near the Space Needle with a Pakistani activist from the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that claims to be educational, but in 2007 was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a federal case linking an Islamic “charity” with the terrorist group Hamas. The activist and I had gone nearly nose to nose in a debate over the threat of radical Islam.
The agent agreed with Victoria and me that the Seattle incidents and the appearance three days later of Pakistanis hunting me on my home turf was more than coincidence.
Now the agent had some other news. “We interviewed people who came in contact with the Pakistanis. One of them fits the description of a Muslim engineer the Bureau has been tracking for months.”
Beside me, I felt my wife tense.
“This individual is brilliant,” the agent continued. “He’s also nuts. If you haven’t done it already, you need to beef up security at your home. Cameras, alarms, everything. Better yet, move. At least to a gated community.”
The agent’s words echoed Walid’s warning about security in Aspen in July. Now we got serious about it. Not only did we install a professionally monitored electronic security and surveillance system in our house, we also warned our close friends and colleagues about the potential threat.
Three weeks after the FBI visit, my secretary, Lily, answered another phone call at my office.
“Hello, I am looking for Kamal Saleem,” said a man with a thick Middle Eastern accent.
“Your name, sir?”
“My name is Bill,” the caller said. “I am an old friend of Kamal Saleem’s. I used to have his cell phone number, but I have lost it. You know how it goes.”
The man chuckled, and Lily thought she heard a hard, false brightness in the laugh. And she had never met a man with such a thick foreign accent who went by the name of Bill.
“Is Kamal Saleem there?” the caller pressed. “If he is not there, I will just leave a message.”
“I’m sorry,” my secretary said. “We don’t have anybody here named Kamal Saleem.”
Beirut, Lebanon
1966–1971
1
By the time I was eight, I had become a free agent. At home, as long as I handed over some money to my mother and father, I came and went as I pleased. After working with Sarri at the gift shop I got a different job, this time working for a catalog-order clothing distributor. I was a counter boy, serving Beirut retailers who came in, browsed the catalogs, and ordered garments made in sweatshops by Armenian laborers who worked dirt cheap. I worked there for about a year, then became an office boy for an import-export dealer, making coffee, running errands, and carrying documents back and forth between the office and the various embassies.
All that time, I kept a delicious secret: I was living a double life. During the day, I was Kamal Saleem, just a boy working in a regular job. At night, I was training to kill people. By then, everyone was talking about James Bond, how he would pretend to be someone else, then take out a bad guy with a poison ink pen or a karate chop. Because relatively few people—only those at the mosque, at the camps, and in my neighborhood cell—knew my secret identity, I felt the kinship of spies.
At Sabra, each week seemed to reveal to me a new element of jihad. Imagine a school-age boy, disassembling antipersonnel mines, removing the RDX plastic explosive, and using it to build a new bomb by adding primer and a wristwatch. That was me. At the time, C–4 plastic explosives were fairly new and, we found, more stable and easier to transport than TNT. The fedayeen taught me how to place C–4 in a building for maximum destruction (blowing up structural support columns worked well) and how to rig an automobile’s fuel system with C–4 in order to turn the whole vehicle into a bomb.
I recruited other boys to our cause, going often to Abu Ibrahim’s house to teach them how to take apart an AK–47 and put it back together again.
“If you want to shoot real ammo, you have to come to Sabra,” I told them. They came by the dozens.
Several times, the fedayeen ferried me and a group of other boys into Syria to train young soldiers there. Adults could have done the job, but it was smarter and stealthier to drop us children off at a souk and let us blend into the background until local fedayeen could pick us up and drive us to a mountain training camp. Once the training was over, they would drive us back to the souk where we would again melt into the scenery until we rendezvoused with our own people, who then spirited us home.
For me, it was a boy’s dream—like the American Boy Scouts, but with guns. We learned weapons instead of knots, pledged violence instead of service. But in the summer of 1967, the Muslim world sustained a blow that shook my faith to the very core. A water dispute, territorial tensions, and cross-border clashes had long simmered between Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. That June, they erupted into war.
After watching Egypt, Syria, and Jordan assemble massive armies along their borders, Israel’s tiny military launched a preemptive strike against the mighty Egyptian air force. In response, Jordan attacked Jerusalem and Netanya, another Israeli city. Soon Syria joined in the anti-Zionist assault.
At Sabra, we cheered when we heard on the radio about the colossal firepower arrayed against the Jews. The Egyptian air force was 450 fighter planes strong, more than twice the size of the Israeli air force. The Egyptian army fielded 100,000 soldiers, 950 tanks, and 1,000 artillery pieces. Combined, the Syrians and Jordanians fielded more than 125,000 men, 300 tanks, and 12 artillery battalions. One hundred Iraqi tanks rumbled into Jordan to face off against the Jews.
Our fedayeen were on standby, ready to join the fight, as we knew our brothers in Jordan already had. But no one from Beirut was sent. Two, three, four days passed as Muslim and Israeli forces clashed in Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula, and in wicked dogfights over Egypt. In the hangar, we huddled around a radio and shouted at the news of overwhelming victories: Muslim fighters were killing thous
ands of Jewish soldiers! We were pushing them back! Jerusalem was about to fall!
It was all propaganda.
On the final day of what became known as the Six-Day War, I was at home when I heard from my Christian neighbors that Israel had defeated the fearsome armies of Islam. We had lost East Jerusalem and the West Bank. We had lost the Gaza Strip. We had even lost the Golan Heights.
Sabra was in mourning, as were many in Beirut. The streets in my neighborhood teemed with shell-shocked Sunnis. How could this have happened? How could the Jews, a tiny nation of infidel dogs, have defeated all the armies of Allah?
Three weeks after the war, Israeli Defense Forces General Yitzhak Rabin explained his theory of the victory in an address at Hebrew University:
Our airmen struck the enemies’ planes so accurately that no one in the world understands how it was done, and people seek technological explanations or secret weapons; our armored troops beat the enemy even when our equipment was inferior to theirs; our soldiers in all other branches…who overcame our enemies everywhere, despite the latter’s superior numbers and fortifications—all these revealed not only coolness and courage in the battle but…an understanding that only their personal stand against the greatest dangers would achieve victory for their country and for their families, and that if victory was not theirs the alternative was annihilation.10
But our Christian neighbors, the parents of my friend Marie, had a different explanation: divine intervention.
“We are hearing of miracles!” I heard Marie’s mother exclaim. “One Israeli tank took out ten Syrian tanks! Egyptian fighter planes fell from the sky as if struck down by angels. Certainly, the Jews were fighting on the side of God!”
I did not understand how this could be so. How could Allah abandon us this way? I remember that my mother was baking pastries in the kitchen when I went to ask her, “Why has Allah lifted up the Jews and not the Muslims?”
“Allah would never do such a thing,” she replied sharply, wiping a spot of flour from her face. “America must have helped the Jews. America must have been hidden, lying in wait, and ambushed our soldiers. It is the only explanation.”
It was not until many years later that I realized my mother did not know what to say, and so she simply made something up. But at the time, I accepted her explanation. It gave me one more reason to hate America.
2
Following the Six-Day War, Yasser Arafat shuttled between Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan. Despite Israel’s success against the national Muslim armies, groups like Fatah and the PLO were growing stronger. In 1968, we celebrated at Sabra when our brothers held their own against an Israeli attack on Fatah headquarters in the Jordanian village of Karameh. The stories came back that Arafat himself had dashed back and forth across the battlefield, rallying the fedayeen to hold their ground. Only 28 Israelis died versus 150 fedayeen. But we considered it a great victory because the Israeli troops who had vanquished Syria and Egypt had failed against us.
The same year, when I was about ten years old, I lucked into a job selling clothing in a European boutique. I had been prowling the Hamra on a tourist-packed summer day, looking for an arcade where I could waste some money, when the boutique owner, a Frenchwoman who was harried and desperate for help with a huge afternoon rush, hired me right off the sidewalk. After that, I spent two years flattering lady tourists and rich Maronite women, helping them pick out sexy outfits to wear for their men.
Throughout these years, the Palestinian refugee camps scattered around Beirut grew more and more like glorified dumps. Raw sewage drained into some areas. In another place, a slaughterhouse was erected nearby and the stench of blood hung over the camp in a sickening cloud. In response, we focused on recruiting Palestinians who had lived in Lebanon for a long time. We tried to radicalize them, inspire them to stand up and fight not only for their cause, but for Allah. For Islam.
“The Christians live like kings,” I heard the adult fedayeen say. “The Palestinians live like their servants. The refugees are our Muslim brothers. We must support them against the infidels.”
Our second recruiting target was Sunni Muslims. We went into the mosques and preached a message of solidarity, encouraging the Lebanese Sunnis to align with the Fatah and the PLO. We did not recruit the Shia, whom we considered perverse.
But as adolescence bloomed inside me, I started to worry that I was somewhat perverse as well. From afar, I watched the infidel’s life and wanted it for myself. I was sprouting up physically, growing tall and broad in the shoulders. At age thirteen, I was nearly six feet tall. My hair had grown into dark waves, but my skin was light and my eyes were blue like the sea. I began noticing girls noticing me. The infidel boys dated girls—openly kissing them even while riding the bus. I wanted to try that. I wanted to be like Bond and have a beautiful redhead in a Jackie Kennedy dress, and the minute she sees me she just faints.
But every time I saw a pretty girl, I melted like chocolate. Inside, I was just about to explode. When I was twelve, my father had taken me for a walk to talk about these things. I was happy to have time with him, but it felt to me like a mandatory checkmark on his parenting chart: a quick trip with me around the neighborhood to get the sex talk monkey off his back.
Now I found my confusion growing. I had learned in Islam that women were sinful and had to be covered up. If that was so, why did I want them so badly?
Maybe Abu Yousef would know.
I found him in the hangar at Sabra smoking a cigarette, as usual. When I told him my dilemma, he tucked his Marlboro into one corner of his mouth and pulled a pen and paper from the breast pocket of his fatigues. Squinting around a curl of smoke, he jotted something on the paper and handed it to me. I read an address that I knew to be downtown. A notorious address: Souk al-Shramit. Market of the whores.
“Many of our warriors go there to take care of their needs,” Abu Yousef said, exhaling a plume of smoke. “These are tested women. They are young and beautiful, and they are clean. Not like the secondhand whores from Syria and Egypt. And don’t worry about the money. Fatah takes care of the bill. The women will take care of you.”
And they did.
3
In 1969, Yasser Arafat became chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The following year, in May, a Palestinian cell crossed from Lebanon into the Israeli farming village of Avivim, where they ambushed a school bus, killing twelve people, nine of them children. Back at Sabra, I am now ashamed to say, we celebrated this mission as though Allah had given us some great victory.
That is the truth of jihad: It is a war in which no territory need be taken, no strategic objective seized. To shed the blood of the infidels—even children—is reason enough to party in the streets.
That same year, backed by the Soviet Union and Syria, Arafat decided to launch raids on Israel from inside Jordan. But Hussein ibn-Talal, the Jordanian king, ordered a full-scale assault on the PLO, and his army crushed Arafat’s forces. It was a stunning blow, one that caused Arafat to move his headquarters to Lebanon. There, even though he had been defeated, we welcomed him like a liberator.
I was at Sabra on the day a huge column of Russian trucks brought hundreds of rifle-slung fedayeen into Beirut all at once. It was like a parade, a festival. Crowds of Palestinians lined the roads that crisscrossed the camp. Women hooted—that yodeling sound of celebration. Men cheered and held up pictures of the Leader.
They have only pictures, I remember thinking. I have been praised by the Leader himself!
The trucks rumbled by bristling with weapons: DShKs, Katyurshas, rocket launchers. Little children darted up and down in front of the crowd, some of them waving toy guns.
Abu Yousef was not so excited. I stood beside him in the front row of the crowd and when I looked up, his mouth was smiling but his eyes were not.
“Our lives will never be the same again,” he said.
He later explained more. The Palestinians from Jordan considered themselves the “real” Palestinians. N
ow they would come and take over the camps, wrestling the command structure away from the Lebanese and other Sunnis who had made common cause with them. The rules would change. Alliances would change.
“Now, Kamal, you must be careful to whom you talk and what you tell them,” Abu Yousef said. “We will have new commanders, men we do not know. Be careful.”
4
In March of 1978, a Palestinian woman named Dalal Mughrabi led the slaughter of Israeli children. She and a fedayeen unit from Fatah slipped into Israel on Zodiac boats, landing on a beach north of Tel Aviv. Carrying explosives and automatic weapons, the twelve-fighter unit hit the Coastal Road and hijacked a bus full of families on a day outing. During a clash with an Israeli Army force led by Ehud Barak, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, Mughrabi and the fedayeen began shooting passengers as they tried to escape. When she realized her unit could not defeat Barak’s forces, Mughrabi blew up the bus, killing thirty-five civilians, thirteen of them children.
Historians have said the attack marked the first time women were recognized as full-fledged Palestinian militants, and they are right. But women had trained with Fatah and the PLO long before that.
I trained with women at Sabra. There were not many of them, and they were not there as a matter of equality or for any recognition of revolutionary fellowship with men. It was only that Arafat, Abu Yousef, and others had deduced that by using women, they could fool the Jews. Of course, the Israelis had long known that their enemies were using Muslim children as pack mules and assassins. And as the Americans had in Vietnam, the Israelis learned they had to kill or be killed.
But the Israelis, our leaders decided, had never seen us deploy a woman. To that point, the IDF had no reason to search beneath a woman’s abbayah, and would have been committing a gross and unpardonable violation of a Muslim woman if they had. So we began to train a few women to smuggle weapons and wear the martyr’s bomb. But privately, Abu Yousef let it be known that a woman was not a man’s equal. Though research had shown they could withstand mental pressure more steadfastly than men, their tolerance for physical pain was much lower.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 13