The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

  Years earlier a remote log cabin had come up for sale and the CIA bought it. It was an impulse purchase, later regretted but occasionally used by senior officers for summer vacations. In October when Marek Gumienny made his enquiry it was closed and locked. Despite the looming winter and the costs, he demanded it be reopened and that its transformation begin.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ said the head of the real-estate office, ‘why not use the North-west Detention Centre in Seattle?’

  Despite the fact he was talking to a colleague, Gumienny had no choice but to lie.

  ‘It is not just a question of keeping an ultra-high-value asset away from prying eyes, nor yet preventing him from escape. I have to consider his own safety. Even in supermax jails there have been fatalities.’

  The head of safe houses got the point. At least, he thought he had. Utterly and completely invisible, utterly and completely escape-proof. Totally self-contained for at least a six-month period. It was not really his speciality. He brought in the team who had devised the security at the fearsome Pelican Bay Supermax in California.

  The Cabin was almost inaccessible to start with. A very basic road went a few miles north of the tiny town of Mazama and then ran out, still ten miles short. There was nothing for it but to use sky-hooks and use them extensively. With the power invested in him Marek Gumienny commandeered a Chinook heavy-lift helicopter from McChord Air Force Base south of Seattle to be used as a carthorse.

  A build team from the Army’s Corps of Engineers; raw materials were purchased locally with State Police advice. Everyone was on a need-to-know basis and the legend was that the Cabin was being converted into an ultra-high-security research centre. In truth it was to become a one-man jail.

  At Castle Forbes the regime started intensive and became more so. Mike Martin was required to change out of western clothes into the robes and turban of a Pashtun tribesman. His beard and hair were to grow as long as the time allowed.

  The housekeeper was allowed to stay on; she had not the slightest interest in the laird’s guests and nor did Hector the gardener. The third remaining resident was Angus, the former SAS sergeant who had become Lord Forbes’s estate manager, or factor. Even if an interloper had wished to penetrate the estate, he would have been most unwise with Angus on the prowl.

  For the rest, ‘guests’ came and went, save two whose residence had to be permanent. One was Najib Qureshi, a native Afghan and former teacher in Kandahar, once a refugee given asylum in Britain, now a naturalized citizen and translator at GCHQ Cheltenham. He had been detached from his duties and transferred to Castle Forbes. He was the language tutor and coach in all forms of behaviour that would be expected of a Pashtun. He taught body language, gestures, how to squat on the heels, how to eat, how to walk and the postures for prayer.

  The other was Dr Tamian Godfrey: mid-sixties, iron-grey hair in a bun at the back; she had been married for years to a senior officer in the Security Service, MI5, until his death two years earlier. Being ‘one of us’, as Steve Hill put it, she was no stranger to security procedures, the cult of need-to-know, and had not the slightest intention of mentioning her presence in Scotland to anyone ever.

  Moreover, she could work out without being told that the man she was here to tutor would be going into harm’s way and became determined he would never slip up because of something she had forgotten. Her expertise was the Koran; her knowledge of it was encyclopaedic and her Arabic impeccable.

  ‘Have you heard of Muhammad Asad?’ she asked Martin. He admitted he had not.

  ‘Then we shall start with him. Born Leopold Weiss, a German Jew, he converted to Islam and became one of its greatest scholars. He wrote probably the best commentary ever on Al-Isra, the journey from Arabia to Jerusalem and thence to heaven. This was the experience that instituted the five daily prayers, keystone of the faith. You would have this at your madrassah as a boy, and your imam, being a Wahhabi, would have believed totally that it was a real, physical journey, and not just a vision in a dream. So you believe the same. And now, the daily prayers. Say after me . . .’

  Najib Qureshi was impressed. She knows more about the Koran than I do, he mused.

  For exercise they wrapped up warmly and went walking the hills, shadowed by Angus, quite legally equipped with his hunting rifle.

  Even though he knew Arabic, Mike Martin realized what a staggering amount he had to learn. Najib Qureshi taught him to speak Arabic with a Pashtun accent, for Izmat Khan’s voice, speaking Arabic to fellow prisoners in Camp Delta, had been recorded secretly in case he had secrets to divulge. He did not, but for Mr Qureshi the accent was invaluable because he could teach his pupil to imitate it.

  Although Mike Martin had spent six months with the Muj in the mountains during the Soviet occupation, that was eighteen years earlier and he had forgotten much. Qureshi coached him in Pashto, even though it had been agreed from the start that Martin could never pass as a Pashtun among other Pashtun.

  But mostly it was two things: the prayers and what had happened to him in Guantanamo Bay. The CIA was the principal provider of interrogators in Camp Delta; Marek Gumienny had discovered three or four who had had dealings with Izmat Khan from the moment of his arrival onwards.

  Michael McDonald flew back to Langley to spend days with these men, draining them dry of every detail they could recall, plus the notes and tapes they had made. The cover story was that Izmat Khan was being considered for release under the NFD rules – no further danger – and Langley wanted to be sure.

  All the interrogators were adamant that the Pashtun mountain warrior and Taliban commander was the hardest man in detention. He had vouchsafed very little, complained not at all, cooperated to the minimum, accepted all the privations and punishments with stoicism. But, they agreed, when you looked into those black eyes, you just knew he would love to tear your head off.

  When McDonald had it all he flew back in the CIA Grumman and landed right at Edzell air base. Thence a car took him north to Forbes Castle and he briefed Mike Martin.

  Tamian Godfrey and Najib Qureshi concentrated on the daily prayers. Martin would have to say them in front of others, and he had better get them right. There was one ray of hope, according to Najib. He was not a born Arab; the Koran was only in classical Arabic and no other language. A one-word slip could be put down to mispronunciation. But for a boy who had spent seven years in a madrassah, one entire phrase was too much. So, with Najib rising and bowing, forehead to the carpet, beside him, and Tamian Godfrey (due to her stiff knees) in a chair, they recited and recited and recited.

  There was progress also at Edzell air base where an Anglo-American technical team was installing and linking all the British intelligence services and those of the USA into one nexus. The accommodation and facilities were up and running. When the US Navy were in residence the base had had, apart from housing and work stations, a bowling alley, beauty salon, delicatessen, post office, basketball court, gym and theatre. Gordon Phillips, aware of his budget and Steve Hill breathing down his neck, left the fripperies much as they were – defunct.

  The RAF shipped in catering staff and the RAF Regiment took over perimeter security. No one doubted the base was becoming a listening post for opium-traffickers.

  From the USA giant Galaxies and Starlifters flew in with listening monitors that could and would scan the world. Arabic translations were not imported because this would be handled by GCHQ Cheltenham and Fort Meade, both of whom would be in constant secure contact with Crowbar, as the new listening post had been coded.

  Before Christmas the twelve computer work stations were established and brought on stream. These would be the nerve centre and six operators would hover over them day and night.

  Crowbar Centre was never devised as a new intelligence agency of its own, but simply a short-term ‘dedicated’ (i.e. single purpose) operation, with whom all British and US agencies would, thanks to John Negroponte’s blanket authority, cooperate without stint or delay.

  To ass
ist this, Crowbar’s computers were fitted with ultra-secure ISDN BRENT lines with two BRENT keys for each station. Each had its own removable hard disk which would be taken out when not in use and stored in a guarded safe.

  Crowbar’s computers were then linked directly into the communications systems of Head Office, or HO, the term for SIS headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, and Grosvenor, the term employed for the CIA Station at the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London.

  To seal the operation from any unwanted interference, the Crowbar address for its communications was hidden under a STRAP3 access code with a Bigot list limited to those in the know: a very few senior officers indeed.

  Then Crowbar began to listen to every word spoken in the Middle East, in the Arabic language and in the world of Islam. By then it was only doing what was already being done by others, but the pretence had to be maintained.

  When Crowbar went operational it had one other access. Apart from sound, it was interested in vision. Also piped into the obscure Scottish air base were the images the National Reconnaissance Office was picking up from its KH-11 Keyhole satellites over the Arab world and the yield of the increasingly popular Predator drones whose high-definition images from twenty thousand feet went back to the American Army Central Command, or CENTCOM, headquarters at Tampa, Florida.

  Some of the more penetrating minds at Edzell realized that Crowbar was ready and waiting for something but they were not quite sure what.

  Shortly before Christmas 2006 Mr Alex Siebart recontacted Mr Lampong at his Indonesian company office to propose one of the two general-cargo freighters registered in Liverpool as suitable for his purpose. By chance both were owned by the same small shipping company and the firm of Siebart and Abercrombie had chartered them before on behalf of clients who had been amply satisfied. McKendrick Shipping was a family business; it had been in merchant marine for a century. The company chief was the patriarch, Liam McKendrick; he captained the Countess of Richmond and his son Sean captained the other ship.

  The Countess of Richmond was eight thousand tons, flew the Red Ensign, was moderately priced and would be available for a fresh cargo out of a British port by 1 March.

  What Alex Siebart did not add was that he had warmly recommended the contract to Liam McKendrick if it came his way, and the old skipper had concurred. If Siebart and Abercrombie could find him a cargo from the USA back to the UK, it would make a very nice and profitable triangular voyage for the spring.

  Unbeknown to either man, Mr Lampong contacted someone in the British city of Birmingham, an academic at Aston University, who drove himself to Liverpool. With high-powered binoculars the Countess of Richmond was examined in detail and a long-range lens took over a hundred pictures of her from different angles. A week later Mr Lampong e-mailed back. He apologized for the delay, explaining that he had been upcountry examining his sawmills, but that the Countess of Richmond sounded exactly right. His friends in Singapore would be in touch with details of the cargo of limousines to be brought from the UK to the Far East.

  In truth the friends in Singapore were not Chinese but Malaysians; and not simply Muslims but ultra-fanatical Islamists. They had been put in funds out of a new account created in Bermuda by the late Mr Tewfik al-Qur, who had deposited the original moneys, before transfer, with a small private bank in Vienna that suspected nothing. They did not even intend to make a loss on the limousines, but to recoup their investment by selling them once their purpose had been served.

  Marek Gumienny’s explanation to the CIA interrogators that Izmat Khan might be coming up for trial was not untrue. He intended to arrange exactly that, and to secure an acquittal and release.

  In 2005 a US Appeals Court had decreed that the rights of prisoners of war did not apply to members of Al-Qaeda. The Federal Court had upheld President Bush’s intention to order the trials of terrorist suspects by special military tribunals. That, for the first time in four years, gave the detainees the chance of a defence attorney. Gumienny intended that Izmat Khan’s defence would be that he had never been in Al-Qaeda, but a serving Afghan army officer, albeit under the Taliban, and had nothing whatever to do with 9/11 or Islamist terrorism. And he intended that the court should accept that.

  It would require the Director of National Intelligence to request his colleague the Secretary of Defense, to ‘have a word’ with the military judges of the case.

  Mike Martin’s leg was healing nicely. He had noted when he read Izmat Khan’s slim file after the concordat in the orchard that the man had never described how he had acquired the scar on the right thigh. Martin saw no reason to mention it either. But when Michael McDonald arrived back from Langley with the more copious notes from Izmat Khan’s numerous interrogations, he had been concerned that the questioners had pressed the Afghan for an explanation of the scar and never received one. If the existence of the scar was by any chance known to anyone inside Al-Qaeda and Mike Martin bore no such scar, he would be ‘blown’.

  Martin had no objection for he had something in mind. A surgeon was flown from London to Edzell and then by the newly acquired Bell Jetranger helicopter to the lawn of Forbes Castle. He was the Harley Street surgeon with full security clearance who could be relied on to remove the occasional bullet and say nothing more about it.

  It was all done with a local anaesthetic. The incision was easy, for there was no bullet or fragment to be extracted. The problem was to make it heal in a few weeks but look much older than that.

  The surgeon, James Newton, excised a quantity of flesh tissue beneath and around the incision to make it deeper, as if something had come out and created a concavity in the meat. His sutures were large, clumsy, unstraight stitches, drawing the edges of the wound together so that they would pucker as they healed. He sought to make it look like the work done in a field hospital in a cave, and there were six stitches.

  ‘You must understand,’ he said as he left, ‘this scar is supposed to be over fifteen years old. A surgeon would probably spot that it cannot be, but a non-medical man should accept it. Especially if it has twelve weeks to settle down.’

  That was in early November. By Christmas nature and the body of a very fit forty-four-year-old had done an excellent job. The puffiness and redness were gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘If you are going where I think you are going, young Mike,’ said Tamian Godfrey on one of their daily hikes, ‘you will have to master the various levels of aggressiveness and fanaticism that you will be likely to encounter. At the core is self-arrogated jihad or holy war, but various factions arrive at this via various routes and behave in various ways. They are not all the same by a long chalk.’

  ‘It seems to start with Wahhabism,’ said Martin.

  ‘In a way, but let us not forget that Wahhabism is the state religion of Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden has declared war on the Saudi establishment for being heretics. There are many groups way out on the extremist wing beyond the teachings of Muhammad al-Wahhab.

  ‘He was an eighteenth-century preacher who came out of the Nejd, the bleakest and harshest part of the interior of the Saudi peninsula. He left behind him the harshest and most intolerant of all the many, many interpretations of the Koran. That was then, this is now. He has been superseded. Saudi Wahhabism has not declared war on the West, or on Christianity; nor does it propose indiscriminate mass murder of anyone, let alone women and children. What Wahhab did was leave behind the seedbed of total intolerance in which today’s terror-masters could plant the young seedlings before turning them into killers.’

  ‘Then how come they are not still confined to the Arabian peninsula?’ asked Martin.

  ‘Because,’ cut in Najib Qureshi, ‘for thirty years Saudi Arabia has used its petrodollars to fund the internationalization of its state creed, and that includes every Muslim country in the world, including the place of my birth. There is no reason to think any of them realized what a monster was being set free or how it would be diverted to mass murder. Indeed there is ample reason to
believe now, a bit late in the day, that Saudi Arabia is terrified of the creature it has funded for three decades.’

  ‘Then why has Al-Qaeda declared war on the source of its creed and its funding?’

  ‘Because other prophets have arisen, even more intolerant, even more extreme. These have preached the creed not simply of intolerance of anything not Islamic, but of the duty of attack and destruction. The Saudi government is denounced for dealing with the West, permitting US troops on its holy soil. And that applies to every secular Muslim government as well. For the fanatics they are all as guilty as Christians and Jews.’

  ‘So who do you think I shall be meeting in my travels, Tamian?’ asked Martin. The scholar found a stone the size of a chair and sat down to rest her legs.

  ‘There are numerous groups but two are at the core. Do you know the word “Salafi”?’

  ‘I have heard of it,’ admitted Martin.

  ‘These are the back-to-the-beginning brigade. They really want to restore the great golden age of Islam. Back to the first four Caliphates, over a thousand years ago. Wild beards; sandals; robes; Sharia’ah – the rigorous legal code; rejection of modernity and the West which brought it. There is no such earthly paradise, of course, but fanatics were never deterred by unreality. In pursuit of their manic dream Nazis, Communists, Maoists, followers of Pol Pot have slaughtered hundreds of millions, half of them their own kith and kin, for not being extreme enough. Think of Stalin’s and Mao’s purges – all fellow Communists but butchered for being backsliders.’

  ‘When you described the Salafis, you were describing the Taliban,’ said Martin.

  ‘Among others. These are the suicide bombers, the simple believers; trusting their masters, following their spiritual guides, not very bright but completely obedient and believing that all their deranged hatred is going to please the mighty Allah.’