A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  Monteith called them together before the Khyber Collage. He had clearly ignored the directive to dismantle and send it to a museum. It had grown larger in size in the last two years, spilling over to fill half of another wall of the briefing room with more newspaper clippings, photographs of fire-breathing imams, and frame grabs of jihadist websites and satellite channels. Strings of ribbon showed an intricate web of alliances among Sunni extremists worldwide, including Chechen rebel groups, Palestinian radicals, Kashmiri militants, the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. It was Monteith’s assertion that it had only been since 1996, when the Taliban swarmed into Kabul and Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan after half a decade in Sudan—at about the same time as the Afghan Guides were disbanded, Monteith liked to point out—that al-Qaeda had taken on its current incarnation as a worldwide revolutionary vanguard operating in more than sixty countries from a secure base in the Hindu Kush. A base provided by the Taliban and their Pakistani masters. Monteith called them an army of occupation, Pakistani proxies ruling a client state, and he hated them with a passion.

  The Taliban sat at the center of the Collage, fed by three distinct streams: the first, weapons and money from Saudi Arabia via the ISI; the second, a ready source of fanatical foot soldiers from the Pakistani madrasas; and the third, revenue from the opium trade, with Helmand province as the center of production. And in each case the hand of the ISI’s chief of Afghan intelligence, Brigadier Javid Khan, Monteith’s arch-nemesis, was detected and highlighted for all to see.

  For the skeptics at the Foreign Office and within MI6 who regarded Afghanistan as a backward hellhole and posed the question of why the Pakistanis or for that matter the Saudis should bother with it, Monteith liked to describe the Taliban regime as an ideological picket fence, a buffer zone built by the Pakistanis against the Soviets, and those who came after—the Russians and the Central Asians—to block their access to the Indian Ocean. As for the Saudis, he said that they would always need somewhere to dump their delinquent sons.

  The team was five strong, including Monteith. He said that any more would be a crowd given the liaison difficulties at the other end, but Jonah suspected that they were the only ones who were not dead or had not refused to come out of retirement. They sat on white plastic chairs facing the collage: Jonah, Beech, Lennard and Alex.

  Monteith liked to call them his waifs and strays. They were the British Afghans—the Afghan Guides. Between them they spoke Mandarin, Dari, Pashtun, Russian, Armenian and Arabic. They spanned fifteen years of war and civil war in Afghanistan. “Chinese” Lennard, the oldest, the son of a Lancastrian construction engineer and a Chinese merchant’s daughter from Singapore, had carried Blowpipe missiles manufactured by Short’s in Belfast to Abdol Haq’s mujahedin group Hezbe Islami and showed him how to use them to knock out the Soviets’ Sukhoi bombers. He was a graduate of St Martin’s School of Art and carried a wooden paintbox in his pack. He painted watercolors, capturing the Afghan fighters grizzled, battle-scarred features, their jutting chins and enormous hands.

  Andy Beech was the son of a Church of Scotland minister and an Armenian tapestry weaver. A graduate in theology, he’d taught Ahmad Shah Massoud’s commanders in the Panjshir valley to use burst transmission radios provided by the CIA to coordinate attacks on the Soviet-trained Afghan army in the Salang Tunnel and at Bagram airbase.

  Alex Ross was the youngest and brashest, an orphan wolf-child. The son of a Para sergeant who’d won a George Medal and drunk himself to death and a German barmaid from Munster.

  He was Monteith’s fixer—his ever-eager “foster” son.

  Then there was Jonah—Chewbacca behind his back. The polyglot son of a Palestinian scientist and a black English barrister; he’d been the Arabic-speaking interpreter who’d worked for Monteith when he reluctantly returned to regular soldiering and commanded a battle group in the first Gulf War. Monteith referred to Jonah as his bluntest instrument—an unstoppable force and an indestructible object.

  The Guides knew each other’s secrets, each other’s skills and weaknesses. They’d shared shell scrapes, and brewed tea together in the midst of other people’s firefights. They knew that you measure out captured land, outcrop by rocky outcrop, in brews of tea. They forgave Monteith everything for the way he protected and shielded them from outside interference.

  Monteith hurried through the door, followed by one of his assistants clutching a folder. A few seconds later Fisher-King stepped in, silent as an interloper. He leant against the wall at the back of the room and offered no comment.

  “Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban and Afghanistan’s de facto head of state, is seeking advice on how to deal with Bin Laden,” Monteith explained, briskly. “He recognizes and acknowledges that the presence of the Saudi is detrimental to the reputation and international standing of his regime, but he says that he cannot expel him because he has been a guest of the Afghan nation since the days of the jihad. He’d like to meet with us.”

  “What does he want?” Beech asked.

  Monteith flared his nostrils and cleared his throat. He’d never liked being interrupted. “We know the mullah is seeking assurance that if Bin Laden is given up his dependents will be cared for. We know the Saudis have offered shelter to his family. As for what else he wants, we’ll have to hear what he has to say.”

  “And what do the Americans think?” Beech asked.

  “Let’s just say the Americans do not recognize the Taliban need for a face-saving formula. There was no common language. All the Americans can say is ‘Give up Bin Laden!’ The Taliban are saying: ‘Do something to help us give him up.’ The Americans have not engaged these people creatively. There have been missed opportunities.”

  “What kind of opportunities?” Lennard asked.

  “Opportunities to resolve the issue,” Monteith replied.

  Lennard and Jonah exchanged puzzled glances.

  “Let me get this straight, you think that we’re going to have a sit-down meeting with Mullah Omar, make some promises you know we can’t keep, and at the end of it he’s going to hand over Bin Laden to us?” Beech asked.

  “Perhaps,” Monteith snapped. “Next question …”

  “When do we leave?” Alex called out.

  It was the kind of question that was more to Monteith’s taste.

  He clapped his hands together and said, “Next plane. Dress warm. It’s going to be cold.”

  Jonah glanced over his shoulder to see that Fisher-King had slipped unnoticed from the room.

  THE PROMISE OF UNCLE SAM AND THE PROMISE OF GOD

  January 1999

  Monteith swept the distant ridge with his binoculars, standing among the broken glass and upturned chairs on the rooftop of the Kabul InterContinental.

  “Towards the end, Hekmatyar had his rocket batteries there,” he said.

  “They fell upon us like a plague,” Yakoob Beg agreed, pulling at his beard thoughtfully.

  “And Dostum was there to the east,” Monteith said, pointing towards the ancient citadel that the Uzbek warlord Dostum had occupied in 1992.

  “We were surrounded.”

  The contrast between the two men was stark: Yakoob Beg was large and round in a white robe and turban. He was flat nosed, Chinese looking, with characteristic Hazara features inherited from thirteenth-century Mogul invaders—the so-called Y-chromosome of Genghis Khan. Monteith, by contrast, was hunched and squat, with his weight concentrated in his shoulders. His legendary red hair was mostly gray now, but his Celtic ancestry was clear to see in the rash of freckles on his hands and face.

  Jonah joined them at the blown-out window. Looking out at the ruins of Kabul and the barren ridgelines that surrounded it, you could be forgiven for thinking that an act of God, perhaps an earthquake, had sent the city tumbling down a funnel, leaving nothing but a heap of rubble at the bottom. But it was a man-made cataclysm. A medieval war. He knew. He’d slipped in and out of the city a couple of times to carry me
ssages from Monteith to Yakoob Beg in the mid-nineties, during the siege, when Kabul had been a battleground for competing warlords: Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of the Panjshir; Dostum, the Uzbek butcher; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Islamist fanatic. They’d slaughtered each other for the right to rape and steal. They’d flattened mud-brick block after mud-brick block. They’d seeded the rubble with thousands of mines and unexploded shells.

  As they watched, a column of red Toyota Hi-Luxes, with armed men crouching in the beds of the trucks, drove up the hill and turned off on the road north to the Salang Pass in the direction of the Northern Alliance lines.

  “The Taliban are preparing for a fresh offensive,” Yakoob Beg observed.

  As a Hazara and a Shiite, Yakoob Beg was a member of an ethnic group that had been declared infidels by the Taliban—more than eight thousand Hazaras had been killed in Mazar only a few months previously. But Yakoob Beg was first and foremost a survivor. Like so many of his fellow residents of Kabul, he had developed a capacity to adapt his behavior to accommodate whoever was in charge, while keeping a watchful eye out for whoever might come next. He maintained high-level contacts with the Northern Alliance, who were occupying front lines north of the city, and the Taliban, who currently controlled it. Presumably, he paid them both. He lived in Wazir Akbar Khan district, one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods, in a large compound that had remained miraculously untouched by the years of occupation and civil war. Most of the houses that surrounded his were now occupied by the elderly warriors from Kandahar who made up the bulk of the Taliban leadership, and their Arab allies. Jonah knew that Yakoob Beg had received a regular stipend from the Department throughout the late eighties and early nineties, when he had provided information and other services to the Afghan Guides, but as to his main source of income, that was well known. He was an opium trader.

  “The Taliban delivered us from anarchy,” Yakoob Beg said. “They were the only ones single-minded and brutal enough to achieve it. The people of Kabul had lost all hope. The Taliban gave it back. So they were prepared to put up with a great deal in order to prevent the past from returning. Even fear.”

  “The people are frightened?”

  “The Taliban have become increasingly extreme in their methods. At first, they were attractive, fascinating even, from a certain point of view, but in the end, they were just like all those that came before.”

  “What are the people saying?” Monteith asked.

  “That the Arabs bring money every month and the Pakistanis bring guns and without their support the Taliban could not hold the city.”

  “Do you believe that?” Monteith asked.

  “Outsiders have always sought to determine events in Afghanistan,” Yakoob Beg replied. “We have had many puppet-masters: the British, the Russians, now the Pakistanis …”

  “And the Afghans have always sought outside assistance to gain local advantage,” Monteith retorted.

  “It is our curse.”

  “It is your game.”

  Yakoob Beg smiled. “And yours …”

  “But if the Arabs were to withdraw their support?”

  Yakoob Beg seemed to be laughing at him. “Do you think that you can outbid the Arabs?”

  They drove for hours across a vast snow-covered plain scored by eroded riverbeds, towards the shark’s-teeth of a distant mountain range. Huge black vultures soared on the thermals overhead. Pylon lines, long since stripped of wire, ran along the roadside as reminders of a time when Afghanistan had ready supplies of electricity. There were three of them crammed in the back of a taxi: Jonah, Monteith and Alex. Beech and Lennard had remained as backstop in Kabul, maintaining communications with London from the roof of the InterContinental.

  The approach to Kandahar was dominated by gibbets festooned with ribbons of cassette tape and pyramids of smashed television sets. The painted arch called the chicken post at the eastern gate was guarded by kohl-eyed Taliban wrapped in blankets. They poked their Kalashnikovs through the windows, smashed the taxi driver’s Hindi cassettes and unspooled the tape to the wind. Jonah reflected that Nor’s prediction, made in the cemetery in 1996, had been right—Afghanistan had slid into the Dark Ages.

  Inside the city, the taxi edged between market stalls, sliding in the icy slush. Packs of starving orphans detached themselves from the mud and ran alongside the car until they were driven off by men with whips. There were no longer any women to be seen, and for some reason that was what bothered Jonah the most.

  They parked beside a small nondescript door in a high-walled compound and armed Taliban surrounded the vehicle, forming an attentive perimeter. Two youngish chowkidars with white turbans and fuzzy beards came in close and opened the doors. Jonah eased himself carefully along the back seat and out into the street. One of the men took him by the arm and guided him to the wall. There were traces of lipstick on his lips and he was smiling in a way that Jonah found unnerving. The man pressed his groin against the back of Jonah’s thigh and searched him. His hands moved under Jonah’s armpits, across his ribs and stomach and between his legs, where they rested for a few seconds, cupping his balls.

  “Turn around,” said a voice in broken English. The young man removed his hands and Jonah turned with his back to the wall to find himself staring down the barrels of several guns. Beside him Monteith and Alex shared nervous glances. An older man wearing a white turban studied them carefully.

  “This way,” he said. They followed him through the door and into a dirt yard littered with car parts.

  There was a man, unmistakably an American, sitting on the steps of a single-story house with an M16 resting on his lap. He had a shaved head, a goatee, shades, black chest-webbing, and his muscled arms were “fully sleeved”—tattooed from shoulder to wrist. On his head, there was a black baseball cap with a logo on it of a wolf’s head in a rifle’s cross-hairs. The man was clearly a bodyguard, a private security contractor.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he growled.

  A second American emerged from the house and came towards them. He was wearing chinos and a navy-blue windbreaker. His hair and mustache were silvery white and expensively groomed. CIA or State Department, Jonah guessed.

  “I didn’t see who it was at first,” the man said.

  “How are you, Jim?” Monteith asked.

  “I’ve had better days.”

  “Who the fuck are they?” the bodyguard demanded again.

  “You’re a soldier. They’re soldiers,” the man identified as Jim said to his colleague. “I know these guys. They’re Brits. And mostly harmless. Go get in the car.”

  When the bodyguard had stepped out into the street, Jim paused briefly in the doorway to the compound, looking at Monteith and then at Jonah. “Our assessment is that Bin Laden is neither weak nor stupid enough to leave Afghanistan and the Taliban are unlikely to ask him to leave, which means that there is no business to be done here. You’re wasting your time.”

  “What did you say to them?” Monteith asked.

  “I told them we know that he’s guilty. I told them to turn him over or face the consequences.”

  “And what did they reply?”

  “They say they’re going to do something but they’ll do exactly nothing. So when they’re done with you, you should go home and tell whichever multinational is paying for your ticket to stay the fuck away from the Taliban.”

  “Our ticket is paid for by the British government.”

  Jim laughed. “You crack me up.”

  He stepped out onto the street. They listened to a vehicle engine start up on the other side of the wall.

  “Who the hell was that?” Alex asked.

  “James Patrick Kiernan. He used to be CIA head of station down in Islamabad,” Monteith told them.

  “Friend of yours?” Alex asked.

  “Not exactly,” Monteith admitted.

  The man in the white turban, who had remained impassive during the exchange with the Americans, indicated for them to enter the h
ouse. Monteith led the way. They were shown to a meeting room, where they were offered sugared almonds while they waited. Half an hour passed.

  Eventually the man with the white turban reappeared and escorted them down a dimly lit corridor to an office with a bare, metal-topped desk. A row of elderly men with weathered faces and gray stringy beards, peg-legs and plastic arms occupied the chairs that lined the walls. Monteith called them “junkyard demons” and said that they were impossible to kill, and you could see what he meant: with their outsize features and scar tissue, shrapnel-filled bodies and ill-fitting prosthetics, they looked like monsters in a cheap horror flick. These were the men who had hammered the Soviet Union into submission. They were unstoppable.

  A door opened, a different door to the one they came in by, and a man in a black turban limped in.

  “Welcome to my house, Englishmen, welcome,” the black-turbaned man said. His handshake was soft but he had a straight gaze that was gray-green and gave the impression of being visionary. “My name is Wakil Jalil Khalili. We are honored by your presence.”

  He spoke in English and gestured to the three nearest empty chairs.

  “Please take a seat.”

  Watching Wakil sit was like watching an old bed frame collapse. He removed his prosthetic leg and rubbed the stump. “The Mullah Mohammed Omar regrets that he cannot speak with you in person but he has asked me to offer you his greetings.”

  “Thank you,” Monteith replied. “Please convey our greetings to him also.”

  “You have come a long way,” Wakil said, standing his leg on the floor by his chair. “It is cold. This year it is very cold.” He leaned forward across the desk and clapped his hands together lightly. “You will take tea?”

  A tea boy appeared with a tray filled with a variety of mismatched cups and saucers and a metal teapot, and served them all tea. The old men poured the tea into their saucers and slurped at it. After the tea boy had retreated and Monteith had made several compliments on the sweetness of the tea, he began.