A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “Several weeks ago, an emissary of yours approached us to discuss a problem.”

  “Yes?”

  “The problem relates to the presence of Sheikh Osama Bin Laden in your country.”

  “I see, yes, a serious matter.” Wakil’s face showed no emotion.

  “We appreciate this opportunity to discuss this difficult matter with you and we hope that we can be of assistance. We recognize that Osama Bin Laden has been a guest and an ally of your country since the time of the jihad against the Soviets. We acknowledge the longstanding Pashtun tradition of hospitality.”

  Wakil made a brief humming sound and nodded his head in encouragement.

  “At the same time, we are concerned that the presence of Osama Bin Laden is having a very negative effect on the reputation of Afghanistan.”

  Wakil nodded, giving the appearance of understanding. “Mullah Omar has also asked me to inform you that I am authorized to discuss certain matters on his behalf, including the matter of our guest, Sheikh Osama Bin Laden.”

  “We know that the Americans have already made representations to you on this matter and that you are giving consideration to their request, but we also feel that there may be a role for us, perhaps in facilitating further dialogue or clarifying misunderstandings to prevent either side reaching the wrong conclusions.”

  Monteith sat back in his chair in order to show that he had volunteered his assistance and that he was acting in good faith. He offered a friendly glance to everyone in the room.

  After a lengthy pause, during which he impassively considered the surface of his desk, Wakil said: “We are considering two different promises. One is the promise of God. The other is that of the Americans. The promise of God is that if you journey on His path you can reside anywhere on this earth and you will be protected. The promise of the Americans is that there is no place where you can hide that we cannot find you. Frankly speaking, we prefer to believe in the promise of God.”

  “We do not wish to contradict the promise of God,” Monteith replied, after a suitable pause.

  “The Americans lecture us about evolution and a thousand years of progress but all we see is a dark age of suffering and perdition.”

  “My country is a small one,” Monteith said. “We are no longer in the business of issuing ultimatums. Rather, we are interested in finding a common language in the hope that we may discover a way to solve this problem that recognizes the sensitivities involved and that is agreeable to both sides. We are here to listen, sir.”

  “I will tell you, we ourselves are victims of terrorism,” Wakil replied. “We are harassed by Russia and we are struck by American cruise missiles, and sometimes devastated by car bombs and sabotage. Other countries interfere in our internal affairs and we are subjected to international sanctions. In regards to Osama Bin Laden, he was once championed as a mujahid fighting the Russians, but now he is called a terrorist. The issue is not terrorism, it is Islam. There is a struggle in progress between Islam and the Kufr.”

  The door behind Wakil opened, and a young man entered and whispered in Wakil’s ear. With a start, Jonah recognized Nor. He was thinner and there were fresh lines etched at the corners of his eyes. When he had finished speaking he took a seat at Wakil’s shoulder. Jonah had the feeling that he been listening to them. It occurred to him that they were in an anteroom and that the real business of the meeting was being discussed elsewhere.

  Wakil’s face was stony. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have been informed that Sheikh Osama left his residence near Khost some days ago without telling us where he was going.”

  One of the men lining the sides of the room coughed and another dropped his feet from his chair and slipped on his sandals. Wakil strapped his prosthetic back on. The meeting was being brought hurriedly to a close.

  “Do you have any idea where he might be headed?” Monteith asked, glancing at Jonah, a hint of disappointment in his voice.

  Wakil shook his head. “The sheikh surrendered his satellite telephone to us several weeks ago at our request. Contact with him has now been broken. I’m afraid our guest is missing. We cannot help you any further.”

  He got up from behind his desk and limped out, as if commanded, through one of the inner doors. Seconds later, without a backward glance, Nor followed.

  Again, just as they had done a couple of years earlier, they met in the cemetery behind the Chawk Madad. Nor came hurrying through the piles of dirty snow and the profusion of freshly erected martyrs’ flags with his black turban obscuring his face.

  “What’s going on?” Jonah demanded, his breath forming ice crystals in front of his face. It was less than half an hour since Wakil had ended the meeting with them. “This isn’t going anywhere.”

  “You’re not listening,” Nor responded, curtly. “Missing is their way of saying Bin Laden is not under their protection. It means he’s on the move. They’re giving him to you, Jonah.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do I need to spell it out to you? They’re giving you permission.”

  “Permission?”

  “Yes, to deal with him.”

  “We don’t do that,” Jonah said carefully, after a pause.

  “Of course you don’t. But you know people who do, for the right price. Bin Laden’s currently at a place called Farm Hadda on the Kabul river. He’s due to return to the al-Badr camp near Khost on Sunday and he’s taking the Jalalabad road. You ambush him there. The Northern Alliance will take the blame. Problem solved.”

  A MOLESKINE AND A PENCIL

  January 1999

  The following night Jonah climbed the steps to the roof of the Kabul InterContinental and found Beech and Lennard there, sharing a flask of Scotch. They had set a couple of the chairs in front of the windows and they were sitting with their feet on the ledge, contemplating the dark outline of the city. Jonah picked up a chair, brushed broken glass off the seat and carried it over to join them.

  Beech held out the flask and Jonah sipped the warm, peaty alcohol before handing it on to Lennard. He looked around. Monteith was hunched over on the far side of the roof, whispering into the satellite phone. He’d spent most of his time since their return from Kandahar on the phone.

  “Who’s he talking to?” Jonah asked.

  “Fisher-King,” Beech replied.

  Lennard grunted, “That bastard.”

  The flask went around again.

  “I have a question,” Jonah said.

  Beech looked at him. “Go on.”

  “Do you know a CIA guy named Jim Kiernan?”

  “Sure,” Beech acknowledged. “He used to be head of station in Islamabad. I think he’s at the CIA Counterterrorism Center now.”

  “He’s deputy chief of operations,” Lennard added. “He oversees the Manson family.”

  The Manson family was the nickname of the unit within the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that was charged with hunting Bin Laden and his top lieutenants. It was said that within the CIA they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al-Qaeda threat.

  “We bumped into him in Kandahar,” Jonah told them, “down in the mullah’s compound. When Monteith caught sight of him, I swear his whole face fell. I’ve never seen him look so pained. What’s between those two?”

  Beech and Lennard shared a glance.

  “Come on,” Jonah urged.

  “It goes back to the siege of Kabul,” Beech explained, “a difference of opinion on how to prosecute the war.”

  “Which is a polite way of saying Monteith stabbed him with a pencil,” added Lennard, tapping the ash from his cigar against the heel of his boot.

  “A pencil?”

  Lennard shrugged. “He was angry.”

  “I need more information,” Jonah demanded.

  “You’d better tell Chewy the tale,” Lennard said to Beech.

  “OK,” Beech agreed, stroking his beard, assuming the character of the most senior of the Guides. “Let’s see, once upon a time,
which is how these things begin, there was an evil empire that was nearing the end of its days, a fire-breathing dragon called President Najibullah sitting on a pile of loot, and two warriors, Kiernan and Monteith, one rich and one poor, with very different views of how to hasten the empire’s collapse and kill the dragon. Monteith, the pluckier of our two warriors, argued that the CIA should stop the flow of weapons and money to the Pakistanis, our double-dealing, so-called allies in the war against the evil empire. He wanted to cut them out of the picture entirely and to deal directly with the mujahedin. He wanted targeted support for one commander, a genuine leader with Western sympathies who could slay the dragon, take control of the country and rebuild it.”

  “Monteith was backing Abdol Haq, who ran Hezbe Islami, which was one of the mujahedin groups operating in the Kabul area,” Lennard explained. “He had a plan for Haq’s men to infiltrate the city and overthrow the Najibullah regime as soon as the Soviets skipped town.”

  “It was a fairy tale,” Beech recounted. “Instead the CIA, encouraged by Kiernan, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad and had the deepest pockets in town, stepped up the supply of weapons to the Pakistanis. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military supplies, including Chinese and Egyptian 122mm artillery rockets. The Pakistanis passed them on to all and sundry with the largest share to Hekmatyar, their pet Islamopath. With the rockets, they could hit the city from twenty-five kilometers away, which meant everybody and anybody could have a pop at the dragon without much risk to themselves. Pretty soon a couple of hundred rockets a week were crashing down in Kabul and ordinary people were dying in droves. Monteith was furious. So was his protégé, Abdol Haq. He accused the other mujahedin groups of behaving like terrorists and blamed the Americans and the Pakistanis for arming them. Monteith fired off a rant to London and the issue was raised by the MI6 liaison officer in Washington in a weekly meeting with his counterpart at the CIA. As you know, shit flows downhill, and pretty soon afterwards Kiernan went careening up the Great Trunk Route to our office in Peshawar to confront Monteith. At that time, the Guides were located in a suite of rooms on the second floor of a dilapidated colonial-era building near the bazaar. It was freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer. Monteith had his own office, right by the stairs at the entrance, where he could see exactly who was coming and going. It wasn’t much more than a broom cupboard. He had a desk and a chair. That’s it. There were never any papers. He was convinced that the landlord was being paid by the ISI to spy on us, which he probably was, and so he never wrote anything down. He kept everything in his head. The only thing that he had on his desk was a row of pencils. He’d sit in that office and whenever he needed a job done he’d throw a pencil at whoever was walking past. If you got hit you did the job. We’d pile past that door at top speed but he’d always get you. He was a deadly shot. The story was that he’d been the army’s javelin champion as a junior officer. The angrier he got, the more he’d sharpen the pencils. So on this particular day, Kiernan storms into the office and he and Monteith proceed to have a furious stand-up argument. Kiernan tells Monteith that the idea that there is one mujahedin leader who can bind the country together is the same old naive, messianic bullshit—in fact the Afghans have been selling it as an idea to the British since Queen Victoria’s time and still the Brits are falling for it and there’s no way that the Americans will. He tells him that Haq is no better than any of the other warlords. In fact, he says, they are all rapists and murderers—what of it?”

  Beech paused to take a swig at the flask. “Now, for Monteith that was the final straw. He lost it. He grabbed the nearest thing, which in this case was a pencil, and flung it at Kiernan. It went right through his cheek. Imagine the scene: Monteith was standing there, totally mortified by what he’d done, and Kiernan had a pencil sticking out of his face. You can guess what followed. The CIA demanded Monteith’s head on a platter and London threatened to return him to regular soldiering. There was no way Monteith was prepared to go back to square-bashing and so he had to write a letter of fulsome apology. And that’s why the two don’t exactly see eye to eye.”

  “And it’s why Monteith stopped throwing pencils,” Lennard added. He passed the flask to Beech, who took a swig and passed it to Jonah.

  Monteith looked thoughtful. He’d walked across the roof to them with his hands deep in his pockets.

  “They want their bloody pipeline,” he said. “They think that with Bin Laden out of the picture the negotiations can open again.”

  Yakoob Beg leaned forward with his face reflecting the dull red embers of the brazier in the center of the room. Monteith sat opposite him, shifting uncomfortably on his haunches. Jonah was squatting in the shadows in the corner of the room beside a small round-faced boy who was holding a plate of dried mulberries. They were in the hujra, or guest room, of Yakoob Beg’s villa in the Kabul suburb of Wazir Akhbar Khan. Twenty-four hours had passed since their return from Kandahar and Monteith was growing increasingly restless.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  Yakoob Beg glanced down at the pages of the open Moleskine notebook in his lap. “The facts as I understand them are these, my friend. Since he left Kandahar Bin Laden has been making inquiries about somewhere to house his family in comfort and safety. The old Soviet collective farm at Hadda has become available and we understand that he is inspecting it for suitability.”

  It was said that if you could get hold of Yakoob Beg’s Moleskine you would learn the identity of every commodity trader and protection racketeer from Marseilles to Mumbai—Turkish heroin syndicates, Bulgarian people smugglers, etc. It was also said that the Moleskine had been an impromptu gift from Monteith back in the eighties, and written on the inside front cover, next to “In case of loss please return to,” was Monteith’s name and the address of a long-forgotten safe house in Bloomsbury.

  “You are confirming that what Nor has told us is credible?” Monteith insisted.

  “It’s credible.”

  “And you have identified a group prepared to undertake the task?”

  Yakoob Beg pursed his fleshy lips. “Of course, it can be arranged if you are prepared to pay the right amount. But it is short notice and there are fewer groups available for hire than there were before the Taliban. I cannot guarantee that those available are best suited to the task.”

  “It is not a pleasant task,” Monteith told him. “I don’t expect pleasant people.”

  “I have asked the Uzbeks to come,” Yakoob Beg said, “at your request, but I cannot vouch for them. You must make your own judgment. You have an expression in Latin, caveat emptor, yes? It means buyer beware.”

  The moon and the frost lent everything the silvery patina of an old photograph. They were standing in the shadows beside the outer wall of the compound. They had abandoned their room full of sleeping bags for fear of eavesdroppers. Monteith was speaking, his voice barely rising above a whisper. “I’ve been told that capturing Bin Laden alive could deepen complications. According to the Americans, evidence that he ordered the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings might be difficult to produce in court. None of the informants involved in the case have direct knowledge of his involvement. Trying him could prove embarrassing, particularly if it comes to light that the Clinton administration has concocted a secret policy with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to tolerate the creation and rise to power of the Taliban.”

  “So we do as Nor suggests?” Alex said.

  “The Americans cannot sanction an assassination,” Monteith explained. “They have a presidential executive order preventing it.”

  “But they want their pipeline,” Beech said.

  “They want their pipeline,” Monteith agreed.

  “So they want us to do their dirty work for us?”

  “Something like that,” Monteith replied.

  Alex shrugged. “Nor is right. If we kill Bin Laden, the chief suspects will be Massoud’s Northern Alliance.”

  Beech glanced at Jonah, who c
ouldn’t help but feel that what was being discussed involved crossing an invisible line, beyond which the consequences were difficult to determine.

  “Can we be certain of Nor?” Beech asked.

  “He’s never lied to me before,” Jonah replied, uneasily.

  “We abandoned him,” Beech said. “Can anybody tell me what he’s been doing for the last two years?”

  “Not really,” Jonah replied. Nor had been vague on the specifics of his activities when Jonah had questioned him. He claimed that he had remained in touch with Brigadier Khan, his handler in the ISI, that he had taught at one of the camps near Khost, but had offered no specific details.

  “Can we double-check with the Pakistanis?” Beech asked.

  “There’s no time,” Alex said, “and no indication that they would share the information with us.”

  “Nor was the best bloody source we had here,” Monteith replied, making no effort to hide his irritation. “He never let us down.”

  “But we let him down,” Beech argued. “And what about Yakoob Beg’s Uzbeks? Do you really think that they are appropriate for this task?”

  “Appropriate?” Monteith growled. “They are entirely appropriate for the task.”

  “They are available,” Alex added, “and within our price range.”

  “Do they know the identity of the target?” Lennard asked.

  “There’s no reason for them to know,” Alex said.

  “Killing people in wartime or even in self-defense is one thing,” Beech said. “Arming and training people fighting for their freedom is another. What is being discussed here is an assassination. Cold-blooded murder.”

  “Are you taking the piss?” Alex retorted. “This is Afghanistan.”

  “We do this and we step outside the boundaries of what is legal,” Beech insisted. “There’s a reason the Americans have a law against it.”

  “We stand in the eye of a storm,” Monteith said. It was obvious from the set of his shoulders and his upturned nose, the expression of the terrier-like quality that he was renowned for, that Monteith would brook no opposition. “If we don’t act now and stop Bin Laden, mark my words, we face the prospect of a resurgence of terrorist violence the like of which the world has never seen.”