The Afghan

by Frederick Forsyth

‘You will start at the beginning of this episode and describe exactly what happened. Leave out nothing, no tiny detail.’

  So Martin told him. He told him of serving in his father’s lashkar as a teenager freshly back from the madrassah outside Peshawar. He told of the patrol with others and how they had been caught on a mountainside with only a group of boulders to shelter in.

  He made no mention of any British officer, nor any Blowpipe missile, nor the destruction of the Hind gunship. He told only of the roaring chain gun in the nose; of the fragments of bullet and rock flying around until the Hind, eternal praise be to Allah, ran out of ammunition and flew away.

  He told of feeling a blow like a punch or a hit from a hammer in the thigh, and being carried by his comrades across the valleys until they found a man with a mule and took it from him.

  And he told of being carried to a complex of caves at Jaji and being handed over to Saudis who lived and worked there.

  ‘But the Sheikh, tell me of the Sheikh,’ insisted Al-Khattab. So Martin told him. The Kuwaiti took down the dialogue word for word.

  ‘Say that again, please.’

  ‘He said to me: “The day will come when Afghanistan will no longer have need of you, but the all-merciful Allah will always have need of a warrior like you.” ’

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘He changed the dressing on the leg.’

  ‘The Sheikh did that?’

  ‘No, the doctor who was with him. The Egyptian.’

  Dr Al-Khattab sat back and let out a long breath. Of course, the doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, companion and confidant, the man who had brought Egyptian Islamic Jihad to join the Sheikh to create Al-Qaeda. He began to tidy up his papers.

  ‘I have to leave you again. It will take a week, maybe more. You will have to stay here. Chained, I am afraid. You have seen too much; you know too much. But if you are indeed a True Believer, and truly the Afghan, you will join us as an honoured recruit. If not . . .’

  Martin was back in his cell when the Kuwaiti left. This time Al-Khattab did not return straight to London. He went to the Hilton and wrote steadily and carefully for a day and a night. When he had done he made several calls on a new and lily-white cellphone which then went into the deep-water harbour. In fact he was not being listened to, but even if he had been, his words would have meant little. But Dr Al-Khattab was still free because he was a very careful man.

  The calls he made arranged a meeting with Faisal bin Selim, master of the Rasha, which was moored in Dubai. That afternoon he drove his cheap rental car to Dubai and conversed with the elderly captain who took a long personal letter and hid it deep in his robes. And the Predator kept circling at twenty thousand feet.

  Islamist terror groups have already lost far too many senior operatives not to have realized that for them, however careful they are, cellphone and satphone calls are dangerous. The West’s interception, eavesdrop and decryption technology is simply too good. Their other weakness is the transferring of sums of money through the normal banking system.

  To overcome the latter danger they use the hundi system which, with variations, is as old as the first Caliphate. Hundi is based on the total-trust concept, which any lawyer will advise against. But it works because any money-launderer who cheated his customer would soon be out of business – or worse.

  The payer hands over his money in cash to the hundi man in place A and asks that his friend in place B shall receive the equivalent minus the hundi man’s cut.

  The hundi man has a trusted partner, usually a relative in place B. He informs his partner, and instructs him to make the money available, all in cash, to the payer’s friend who will identify himself in a described manner.

  Given the tens of millions of Muslims who send money back to families in the old home country, and given that there are neither computers nor even checkable dockets; given that it is all in cash and both payers and receivers can use pseudonyms, the money movements are virtually impossible to intercept or trace.

  For communications the solution lies in hiding the terrorist messages in three-figure codes which can be e-mailed or texted across the world. Only the recipient with the decipher list of up to three hundred such number-groups can work out the message. This works for brief instructions and warnings. Occasionally a lengthy and exact text must travel halfway across the world.

  Only the West is always in a hurry. The East has patience. If it takes so long, then it takes that long. The Rasha sailed that night and made her way back to Gwador. There a loyal emissary alerted in Karachi down the coast by a text message had arrived on his motorcycle. He took the letter and rode north across Pakistan to the small but fanatic town of Miram Shah.

  There the man trusted enough to go into the high peaks of South Waziristan was waiting at the named chai-khana and the sealed package changed hands again. The reply came back the same way. It took ten days.

  But Dr Al-Khattab did not stay in the Arabian Gulf. He flew to Cairo and then due west to Morocco. There he interviewed and selected the four North Africans who would become part of the second crew. Because he was still not under surveillance, his journey appeared on no one’s radar.

  When the handsome cards were dealt, Mr Wei Wing Li received a pair of twos. Short, squat and toad-like, his shoulders were surmounted by a football of a head and a face deeply pitted with smallpox scars. But he was good at his job.

  He and his crew had arrived at the hidden creek on the Zamboanga Peninsula two days before the Java Star. Their journey from China, where they featured in the criminal underworld of Guangdong, had not involved the inconvenience of passports or visas. They had simply boarded a freighter whose captain had been amply rewarded and had thus arrived off Jolo Island where two speedboats out of the Filipino creeks had taken them off.

  Mr Wei had greeted his host, Mr Lampong, and the local Abu Sayyaf chieftain who had recommended him, inspected the living quarters for his dozen crewmen, taken the fifty per cent of his fee ‘up front’ and asked to see the workshops. After a lengthy inspection he counted the tanks of oxygen and acetylene and pronounced himself satisfied. Then he studied the photos taken in Liverpool. When the Java Star was finally in the creek, he knew what had to be done and set about it.

  Ship transformation was his speciality and over fifty cargo vessels plying the seas of South-East Asia with false names and papers also had false shapes thanks to Mr Wei. He had said he needed two weeks and had been given three, but not an hour longer. In that time the Java Star was going to become the Countess of Richmond. Mr Wei did not know that. He did not need to know.

  In the photos he studied the actual name of the vessel had been airbrushed out. Mr Wei was not bothered with names or papers. It was shapes that concerned him.

  There would be parts of the Java Star to cut out and others to cut off. There would be features to be fashioned from welded steel. But most of all he would create six long steel sea containers that would occupy the deck from below the bridge to the bow in three pairs.

  Yet they would not be real. From all sides and from above they would appear authentic, down to the Hapag-Lloyd markings. They would pass inspection at a range of a few feet. Yet inside they would have no interior walls; they would constitute a long gallery with a hinged removable roof and access through a new door to be cut in the bulkhead below the bridge and then disguised to become invisible unless one knew the release catch.

  What Mr Wei and his team would not do was the painting. The Filipino terrorists would do that, and the ship’s new name would be painted after he had left.

  The day he fired up his oxy-acetylene cutters the Countess of Richmond was passing through the Suez Canal.

  When Ali Aziz al-Khattab returned to the villa he was a changed man. He ordered the shackles removed from his prisoner and invited him to share his table at lunch. His eyes glittered with a deep excitement.

  ‘I have communicated with the Sheikh himself,’ he purred. Clearly the honour consumed him. The reply had not been written. I
t had been confided in the mountains to the messenger verbally and he had memorized it. This is also a practice common in the higher reaches of Al-Qaeda.

  The messenger had been brought all the way to the Arabian Gulf and when the Rasha docked the message had been given word for word to Dr Al-Khattab.

  ‘There is one last formality,’ he said. ‘Would you please raise the hem of your dishdash to mid-thigh?’

  Martin did so. He knew nothing of Al-Khattab’s scientific discipline; only that he had a doctorate. He prayed it was not in dermatology. The Kuwaiti examined the puckered scar with keen attention. It was exactly where he was told it would be. It had the six stitches sutured into place in a Jaji cave nineteen years earlier by a man he revered.

  ‘Thank you, my friend. The Sheikh himself sends his personal greetings. What an incredible honour. He and the doctor remembered the young warrior and the words spoken.

  ‘He has authorized me to include you in a mission that will inflict on the Great Satan a blow so terrible that even the destruction of the Towers will seem minor.

  ‘You have offered your life to Allah. The offer is accepted. You will die gloriously, a true shahid. You and your fellow martyrs will be spoken of a thousand years from now.’

  After three weeks of wasted time Dr Al-Khattab was now in a hurry. The resources of Al-Qaeda down the entire coast were called upon. A barber came to trim the shaggy mane to a western-style haircut. He also prepared to shave off the beard. Martin protested. As a Muslim and an Afghan he wanted his beard. Al-Khattab conceded it could be clipped to a neat Vandyke around the point of the chin, but no longer.

  Suleiman himself took full-face photos and twenty-four hours later appeared with a perfect passport showing the owner to be a marine engineer from Bahrain, known to be a staunchly pro-western sultanate.

  A tailor came, took measurements and reappeared with shoes, socks, shirt, tie and dark grey suit, along with a small valise to contain them.

  The travelling party prepared to leave the next day. Suleiman, who turned out to be from Abu Dhabi, would be going all the way, accompanying the Afghan. The other two guards were ‘muscle’, locally recruited and dispensable. The villa had served its purpose; it would be scoured and abandoned.

  As he prepared to leave before them, Dr Al-Khattab turned to Martin.

  ‘I envy you, Afghan. You can never know how much. You have fought for Allah, bled for Him, taken pain and the foulness of the infidel for Him. And now you will die for Him. If only I could be with you.’

  He held out his hand, English-style, then recalled that he was an Arab and embraced the Afghan. At the door he turned one final time.

  ‘You will be in paradise before me, Afghan. Save a place for me there. Inshallah.’

  Then he was gone. He always parked his hire car several hundred yards away and round two corners. Outside the villa gates he crouched, as always, adjusting a shoe so he could glance up and down the road. There was nothing but some chit of a girl two hundred yards up, trying to start a scooter that refused to fire. But she was local, in jilbab, covering the hair and half the face. Still, it offended him that a woman would have any motorized vehicle at all.

  He turned and walked away towards his car. The girl with the spluttering engine leaned forward and spoke into something inside the basket above the front mudguard. Her clipped English spoke of Cheltenham Ladies’ College.

  ‘Mongoose One, on the move,’ she said.

  Anyone who has ever been involved in what Kipling called ‘the Great Game’ and what James Jesus Angleton of the CIA referred to as ‘a wilderness of mirrors’ will surely agree the greatest enemy is the UCU.

  The Unforeseen Cock-Up has probably wrecked more covert missions than treachery or brilliant counter-intelligence by the other side. It almost put an end to Operation Crowbar. And it all started because everyone consumed by the new atmosphere of cooperation was trying to be helpful.

  The pictures from the two Predators which were ‘spelling’ each other over the UAE and the Arabian Sea were going back from Thumrait to Edzell air base, which knew exactly why, and American army CENTCOM at Tampa, Florida, which thought the British had simply asked for some routine aerial surveillance. Martin had insisted that no more than twelve should ever know he was out in the cold, and the number was still only at ten. And they were not in Tampa.

  Whenever the Predators were over the Emirates, their images contained a teeming mass of Arabs, non-Arabs, cars, cabs, docksides and houses. There were far too many to begin checking out everyone. But the dhow called the Rasha and her elderly master were known about. So when she was in dock anyone visiting her was also of possible interest.

  But there were scores. She had to be loaded and unloaded, refuelled and victualled. The Omani crewman scrubbing her down exchanged pleasantries with passers-by on the quayside. Tourists wandered by to gawp at a real trading dhow of traditional teak. Her skipper was visited on board by his local agents and personal friends. When a single clean-shaven young Gulf Arab in white dishdash and white filigree ‘thub’ skullcap conferred with Faisal bin Selim, he was just one of many.

  Edzell’s operations room had a menu of a thousand faces of confirmed and suspected AQ members and sympathizers and every image from the Predators was electronically compared. Dr Al-Khattab did not trigger red flags because he was not known. So Edzell missed him. These things happen.

  The slim young Arab visiting the Rasha rang no bells in Tampa either, but the army sent the images as a courtesy to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the National Reconnaissance Office (Spy Satellites) in Washington. The NSA provided them as a service to their British partners at GCHQ Cheltenham who had a good, long look, missed Al-Khattab and sent the images to the British Security Service (Counter-intelligence), more commonly known as MI5, at Thames House, just down the embankment from the Houses of Parliament.

  Here a young probationer, keen to impress, ran the faces of all the visitors to the Rasha through the Face Recognition database.

  It is not all that long ago that the recognition of human faces relied on talented agents who worked in half-darkness poring with magnifying glasses over grainy images to try to answer two questions: who is the man/woman in this photo and have we ever seen them before? It was always a lonely quest and took years before a dedicated scrutineer developed the sixth sense that could recall that the ‘Chummy’ in the photo had been at a Vietnamese diplomatic cocktail party in Delhi five years earlier and was certainly for that reason from the KGB.

  Then came the computer. Software was prepared that reduced the human face to over six hundred tiny measurements and stored them. It seems every human face in the world can be broken down by measurement. It may be the exact (to the micron) distance between the pupils of the eyes, the width of the nose at seven points between eyebrows and tip, twenty-two measurements for the lips alone, and the ears . . .

  Ah, the ears. Face analysts love the ears. Every crease and furrow, wrinkle and curve, fold and lobe, is different. They are like fingerprints. Even the ones on the left and right side of the head are not quite the same. Plastic surgeons ignore them, but give a skilled face-watcher both ears in good definition and he will get his ‘match’.

  The computer software had a memory bank far bigger than a thousand faces stored at Edzell. It had convicted criminals of apparently no political persuasion at all, because even they can work for terrorists if the price is right. It had immigrants, legal and illegal, and not necessarily Muslim converts. It had thousands and thousands of faces taken from demonstrations, as the protesters rolled by the hidden cameras, waving their placards and chanting their slogans. And it did not confine its database to the United Kingdom. In short it had over three million human faces from all over the world.

  The computer broke down the face talking to the master of the Rasha, compensated for the oblique angle of shot by picking the single image where the man raised his head to look at a jet taking off from Abu Dhabi airport, secured its six hundre
d measurements and began to compare. It could even adjust for added or shaved facial hair.

  Fast though it worked, the computer still took an hour. But it found him.

  He was a face in a crowd outside a mosque just after 9/11 cheering enthusiastically whatever the orator was saying. This orator was known as Abu Qatada, fanatical Al-Qaeda supporter in Britain, and the crowd he was addressing that late September day of 2001 was from Al-Muhajiroun, a jihad-supporting extremist group.

  Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior. From there it went up to the formidable lady running MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. She ordered that the man be traced. No one then knew the probationer had uncovered the chieftain of Al-Qaeda in Britain.

  It took a bit more time, but another match came up; he was receiving his doctorate at an academic ceremony. His name was Ali Aziz al-Khattab, a highly anglicized academic with a post at Aston University, Birmingham.

  With what the authorities had, he was either a highly successful long-term sleeper or a foolish man who in his student days had dabbled with extreme politics. If every citizen in the second category were arrested there would be more detainees than policemen.

  For sure, he had apparently never been anywhere near extremists since that day outside the mosque. But a fully reformed foolish boy is not spotted conferring with the captain of the Rasha in Abu Dhabi port. So . . . he was in the first category: an AQ sleeper until proven otherwise.

  Further discreet checks revealed he was back in Britain, resuming his laboratory work at Aston. The question was: arrest him or watch him? The problem was: one aerial photograph that could not be revealed would not secure a conviction. It was decided to put the academic under surveillance, costly though it was.

  The quandary was solved a week later when Dr Al-Khattab booked a flight back to the Arabian Gulf. That was when the SRR was brought in.

  Britain has for years possessed one of the best ‘tracker’ units in the world. It was known as the 14th Intelligence Company, or the Detachment, or more simply ‘the Det’. And it was extremely covert. Unlike the SAS and the SBS it was not designed as a unit of ultra-hard fighters. Its talents were extreme stealth and skill at planting bugs, taking long-range photos, eavesdropping and tracking. It was particularly effective against the IRA in Northern Ireland.