A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  “You have evidence of this?” Jonah asked, skeptically.

  “We have solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade,” Winthrop snapped. “We know that Mani al-Tikrit, the director of Iraqi intelligence, met with Bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in July 1996.”

  A silence followed while Jonah stared at a huddle of miserable-looking ducks and reflected on the fact that there was no way that Bin Laden could have been in Sudan in July ’96, and there was no way he was prepared to share that information with Winthrop. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan that summer, and Nor was shadowing him.

  “We have reports that place Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, and Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague in April 2001,” Winthrop told him.

  Monteith was right, Jonah thought: they really were going to invade Iraq.

  “You take a strong man like Saddam out of the equation and you’ve got to be prepared for the consequences,” Jonah told him. “There’s a real risk of civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds.”

  “We know what we’re doing,” Winthrop told him.

  I doubt that very much, Jonah thought. He stamped his feet. It really was bloody cold. He wished that Winthrop would come to the point. “What is it you want from me?” he asked.

  “You’re an interesting case, Jonah. I’ve been reading your file.”

  “Don’t believe half of what you read.”

  “It says that you’re arrogant and opinionated.”

  “Obviously, some of it’s true,” Jonah conceded.

  “In my book that makes you a bad work colleague.”

  “I’ve been told that.”

  “But it also says that you show an aptitude for working under pressure and on your own. It seems to suggest that you are one of those solitary people who make a virtue of not needing company.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And you’re an American citizen.”

  “Yes,” Jonah acknowledged.

  “And for three years from 1993 to 1996 you ran a double agent inside the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And then you terminated the relationship?”

  “Yes. The funding was withdrawn.”

  “Am I right to say that Nor was in conflict with your department at the end?”

  “He was always in conflict with the Department,” Jonah replied. “It was in his nature.”

  Winthrop shook his head in irritation. “But specifically, by the end?”

  Jonah sighed. “He thought that we had abandoned the people of Afghanistan. He thought that we had abandoned him.”

  “And what did you think?”

  “Mostly, I agreed with him.”

  “He was your friend,” Winthrop observed.

  “Yes, he was my friend, but he was also the only person we had inside the ISI and the best live source we had on Afghanistan. We knew the ISI were operating outside the control of their own government and that they were up to their elbows in Afghanistan, and he was the living proof of it. He knew every warlord, every drug baron, every tribal chief, every loose-cannon jihadi and every mullah on the make. To me, it didn’t make any sense for us to abandon him.”

  Winthrop’s eyes narrowed angrily. “And at any stage did you for one moment think to yourself that we should have been informed that you had a so-called asset inside the ISI?”

  “I ran him as an agent, I didn’t control who had access to the information that he generated. For that you need to speak to my superiors.”

  “We have, Jonah, and we have expressed our anger and disappointment in the clearest terms. You ran a covert operation with a clearly unstable agent in an allied intelligence service and when you were done with him you cut him dead and in doing so shepherded him straight into the hands of the enemy. In doing so, you compromised not only your own security but that of all of us.”

  In the silence that followed this outburst, Jonah’s apprehensions gave way to something like rejoicing. The Americans didn’t know about Kiernan.

  QALA-I-JANGI

  December 2001

  They circled back on the south side of the lake, past an empty child’s playground and a boarded-up ice-cream stand.

  “Tell me again how you recruited him,” Winthrop said.

  Jonah replied cautiously, aware that he should be on his guard against the suggestion that he had conspired with Nor since the very beginning.

  “When I first met him, he was all over the place.”

  “That was at school?”

  “Yes, at school. He was a couple of years younger than me. My father and his father were academics in the biology division at the same university. I guess he looked up to me—there weren’t many pupils from ethnic minorities. It wasn’t exactly overt racism, but there was a lot of hostility. I tried to protect him.”

  “Protect him how exactly?”

  “Help him curb his temper. Stop him rising to the bait. It worked for a short time and he was a model student, but then I left and he punched a magistrate’s son. Then he got caught drinking. Then he got caught smoking cannabis. Eventually the school expelled him. His father washed his hands of him. Some relatives came up with some money and sent him back to Jordan. The next I heard from him he’d traveled to Pakistan and from there crossed into Afghanistan. He wrote to tell me that he had joined the mujahedin.”

  “He was a Muslim?”

  “And a Baathist, and a Sufist, and an anarchist and an atheist. I don’t think he really believed in anything. Like I said, he was all over the place.”

  “And when did you next see him?”

  “At Sandhurst. Out of the blue he’d joined the British Army.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did he join the army?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose he did it because I had.”

  “He looked up to you?”

  “Yes, I suppose. He idealized me.”

  “And by that stage you were in military intelligence?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you recruited him?”

  “Yes.”

  “It didn’t bother you that he was your friend?”

  “No. I couldn’t see him lasting in the regular army. I couldn’t believe he’d got in. He stuck out like a sore thumb.”

  “More than you?”

  Winthrop had a point. “I didn’t see why he should have to put with what I did. I thought what we were offering him would suit him better.”

  “And what were you offering him?”

  “The Department manufactured an incident for him and had him slung out of the army on a trumped-up drugs-smuggling charge in 1993. We inserted him in the Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, who were active in East London at the time, and it was at that point that the ISI first noticed him. From there he embarked for Bosnia with a relief convoy. In Split on the Bosnian border he met up with a Pakistani veteran of the war against the Soviets, who we knew to be an agent of the ISI. At the time the ISI were monitoring the so called “Afghan Arabs,” who were active in the tribal areas. Nor fitted the profile: he was Jordanian and Sunni, disaffected with First World military skills; a golden boy gone wrong. The ISI recruited him on spec and sent him off to Afghanistan for training with the extremist group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the HUM. He became the backbone of the Afghan Guides. He was our man on the inside, feeding us information about the composition of extremist groups in Afghanistan and the extent of Pakistani meddling there.”

  “Why do you think he took the assignment?”

  Countless reasons, Jonah wanted to reply: because he was a maverick; because he fit the army like an ill-fitting suit; because he was without anchor; because he was bored; because he was too intelligent; because I asked him to do it. “I think it was the challenge. He relished the excitement.”

  “And then you cut him dead?”

  “It wasn’t my decision.”

  “Did you feel let down?” Winthrop asked.

&nbs
p; “Yes, I suppose I did.”

  “And you left the service at about the same time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “They closed down the Afghan Guides and downsized the Department and my wife gave birth to our daughter. I took it as an opportunity to try a different life.”

  There was a pause. “But that life didn’t agree with you?”

  “It didn’t work out. My marriage broke up.”

  “You were married in 1990 and your wife left you for another man in 1999.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Another pause. It was inconceivable that Winthrop did not know about the kidnapping but he chose not to mention it. It hung there unspoken between them.

  “And then you came back to the Department?”

  “Yes. Monteith offered me my old job back.”

  “And at no stage did you attempt to re-contact Nor?”

  “At no stage,” Jonah replied. He was right; it was Nor who had contacted them.

  Winthrop stopped and contemplated the pelicans on their rock at the center of the steaming lake.

  “We’ve got him,” he said.

  For a split-second Jonah didn’t understand and went on staring at the pelicans as they shifted from foot to foot and folded and unfolded their wings, then he spun on his heels and found himself face to face with Winthrop.

  “Where?” Jonah demanded.

  “Afghanistan. In the military intelligence compound at Kandahar airport.”

  “Where did you find him?”

  “He was captured by Northern Alliance forces at the fall of Kunduz in November. From there he was transported to Qala-i-Jangi. He may or may not have been involved in the subsequent disturbances. He was pulled out of the cellars by US Special Forces a month later.”

  The massacre at Qala-i-Jangi had been widely reported in the Western media, largely because it involved the first American death in combat in Afghanistan. After the surrender of the Kunduz garrison, General Dostum’s Northern Alliance forces had loaded four hundred prisoners onto trucks and transported them to his citadel at Qala-i-Jangi. With night falling, Dostum’s men failed to body-search the prisoners and during the night eight killed themselves with concealed hand grenades. The following morning, a fight broke out when one of the prisoners made a lunge at Mike Spann, one of the two CIA interrogators assigned to the Uzbeks. Spann shot several prisoners before being beaten to death. The prisoners then broke into one of the fort’s armories and seized mortars and grenade launchers. The fighting continued for four days, growing in ferocity as Dostum’s men, supported by US Special Forces and SAS soldiers, pounded the citadel before moving in and pouring burning oil into the cellars. The last eighty starving survivors had not emerged until the middle of December.

  “Is he talking?” Jonah asked.

  “He hasn’t said a word.” Winthrop ran a hand through his hair. “You think you can coax him back into the fold?”

  “Are you making me an offer?”

  Winthrop snorted. “This isn’t a fucking courtship, Jonah. Just because you’ve been forsaken by your country doesn’t mean that we’re going to leap at the chance.”

  “I have citizenship,” Jonah protested.

  “We have room for but one flag, Jonah, the American flag. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American but something else also isn’t an American at all.”

  “So what do you want from me?” Jonah asked.

  “We want you to go to Kandahar and get him to speak.”

  Monteith was standing, straight-backed, ever the soldier, on the edge of Horse Guards. Seeing Jonah emerge from the park, he fell in beside him. “Well?”

  “They’ve got Nor.”

  “Christ,” said Monteith, unconvincingly, Jonah thought. He reflected on Winthrop’s jibe—just because you’ve been forsaken by your country.

  “Is he talking?” Monteith asked.

  Jonah shook his head. According to Winthrop, Nor hadn’t said a word since he had been hauled out of the cellars of Qala-i-Jangi.

  Monteith breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that.”

  “I’m leaving for Kandahar tomorrow night.”

  Monteith nodded eagerly. “It’s best if you speak to Nor first. Find out what he wants.”

  “It’s only a matter of time,” Jonah told him. “And then we’re all in trouble.”

  PLAQUES AND TANGLES

  December 2001

  It was Monteith who was responsible for the departmental mantra that the best lies are sandwiched between truths. You have to believe it yourself, Monteith would say. And mostly he did.

  He was Jonah Said, spawn of a Palestinian biologist and a black barrister of Guyanan descent. He had been born in the USA, while his father was studying for a PhD and his mother was volunteering at a civil rights center. But he was raised and educated in England, in suburban obscurity, and as far back as he could remember the things he had aligned himself with were designed to outrage his parents’ liberal sensitivity. He ran wild at school, failed his O-levels, was a pothead from fourteen to seventeen and deemed responsible for a flurry of hastily terminated teenage pregnancies. He pulled himself together briefly enough to sit his A-levels at a community college, and against all expectations secured a university place in Edinburgh to study Arabic. On obtaining an undistinguished degree, he spent a couple of years back in the USA, mostly in New York, where he lived a nocturnal life, tending bar and sampling the range of available drugs, settling on crack as his narcotic of choice. He lost touch with his parents. His abiding memory of that time was of traveling down a tunnel, a shaft of light crackling at the edges—night after night—from the stack of liquors to the customer to the till. He joined the British Army in 1989, catching a plane back to the UK and walking into a London recruiting center. It was a characteristically impulsive gesture that possibly was prompted by the death of a friend in New York as the result of a heroin overdose (an occurrence that he failed to mention in his interview for the Regular Commissions Board). Against all expectation, he was awarded a commission. It was conceivable that the army was under some pressure to recruit from ethnic minorities, and after all, his parents were by that stage pillars of the establishment, his father an eminent professor and his mother a Queen’s Counsel, soon to be elevated to the House of Lords. In quick succession, he attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and the Platoon Commanders Battle Course in Warminster. His army career was at best undistinguished. He served as an interpreter in the first Gulf War, a platoon commander in West Belfast, a liaison officer in Bosnia, and most recently as an instructor at Catterick Army Garrison in Yorkshire.

  Other facts were hidden. That he was polyglot; that he obtained a master’s degree in Dari and Pashtun at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies under an assumed name. That he had earned but was deprived of the right to wear both the Commando dagger and the Parachute wings. That he had completed selection at Hereford. That he was on permanent attachment to a super-secret arm of the UK Defence Intelligence Agency colloquially known as the Department, which had been cut adrift of the Ministry of Defence and was nominally answerable to the Secret Service, MI6, but utterly deniable in the event of compromise. That it was his home. And his garden was the failed, failing or rogue state. He slipped in and out of ransacked cities, jungle hideaways and mountain caves.

  What was also clear was that all those years ago, when he rode a train out of the suburbs, he had no intention of ever going back.

  It was always strange to be back. It was December 29, the day after his meeting with Winthrop. He was due to fly to Afghanistan that night. He had decided to visit his father first.

  He parked the car under an old yew tree and sat for a while listening to the slow swish of the wipers on the windshield, staring fondly over the steering wheel at the large and rambling red-brick Victorian building with its wooden clock tower and glass conservatories.

  He remembered a wildcat childhood spent
clambering across its roofs and racing through its hothouses, hiding in long-neglected closets, pulling open drawers of pinned butterflies and beetles and peering at specimen jars filled with coiled, unsettling shapes floating in formaldehyde.

  Built in the 1870s, and set in twenty-four acres of Berkshire parkland dotted with fishponds, Silwood Park was the home of Imperial College’s research station and had been the location of his father’s office for as long as Jonah could recall. It was also at Silwood, at the start of an unusually hot summer, when the whole of England reeled in the heat, that Rashid ed-Din, a young Jordanian biologist with a doctorate from the American University in Beirut, had arrived at the faculty and moved into an office across the hall from Jonah’s father. He had brought with him a veiled wife and three children, including a quicksilver son named Nor.

  Jonah had first spotted the boy from a lookout post in an unruly thicket of rhododendrons on the outer edge of the ornamental gardens. He had almost completed his first cycle of daily perimeter checks and was wondering how the day would unfold. It must have been mid-morning, and already the sun was baking hot. He lay among the leaf litter and stared across a drought-racked lawn at the boy, who was sitting by one of the fishponds, with his feet immersed in the water. Nor was wearing only a pair of shorts, and the first thing that Jonah had registered was that his skin tone was not so very different from his own. In such circumstances boldness was required. He had crawled out of his hide, climbed to his feet and approached slowly, careful to remain out of the boy’s line of sight. He remembered that the ground was hot beneath the soles of his feet.

  He had been almost within touching distance, when Nor had casually glanced over his shoulder at him. “I thought it rained here?”

  “Not this summer,” Jonah had replied, mid-step.

  “Do you always sneak up on people?”

  “Not always.”

  “Where are you from?”

  Jonah had shrugged uneasily. “Here.”

  “You don’t look like you’re from here.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “I’m not,” Nor had said, indignantly.