Agency Rules - Never an Easy Day at the Office (32 page)

“Nabeel,” the General said, taking the role of a consoling father. “My brother, you should be honored to have achieved all that you have. Allah will bless and reward all those involved.” He had led men in battle prior to joining the intelligence services, commanded field operatives since. He knew the thing that made them stronger and better warriors was encouragement. It pushed back doubt, reservations and the painful memories of lost brothers. He held a different position than the Sheikh, who was nothing more than a battlefield commander. He was the General. His words carried more power in the young warrior’s mind, whether he was part of the mission or not. He just needed to know he had done well.

As the vehicle pulled to a stop outside the majestic wooden gate, the driver blew the horn three times in rapid succession.
The gate was pulled open by two men from the security detail that had raced ahead of them in Takht Bhai within seconds. The driver revved the engine and pulled inside, driving between two buildings into a beautifully shaded courtyard where they parked. The escort vehicle pulled to a stop just inside the gate from where the guards raced to the General’s vehicle. Nabeel stopped him before he could open the door.

“Sir, how do we introduce you?” Nabeel asked cautiously. “Do we tell him who you are?” The General paused for a moment, considering the question.
You couldn’t ask this during the drive, but could bore me with minute details about camp operations?
He didn’t know this man and couldn’t risk being compromised, even by someone Nabeel called a ‘friend.’

“I am Sheikh Abdul Hanif al-Badr, Saudi national,” the General said without thinking, giving Nabeel a fully backstopped identity used during his field operative days. The identity had not been burned by Syrian intelligence and would withstand the most rigorous checking. Nabeel nodded and pulled back his hand.

Nabeel was out of the vehicle first, quickly climbing the three stairs to the veranda of the
hujra
. He gave the man a hearty embrace, as the General came around the vehicle’s rear. Nabeel was exchanging formalities when the General arrived at his side. Nabeel stepped back from the man, allowing the General his first opportunity to assess his host.

“Maulana Sami Ullah,”
Nabeel said. “It is my great honor to introduce you to another close friend of the brotherhood, Sheikh Abdul Hanif al-Badr.”

“As-salaam-a-laikum Sheikh Hanif,” the Maulana said, kissing him on the cheek. “
Keyfa halak?
My apologies, that is the extent of my conversational Arabic.”

“Wa-laikum-as-salam, Maulana sahib.
Ana bakhair
.” the General replied laughing. He had always hated these pretenders to Islam. Becoming a hafiz at a young age and because some unknown seminary in Pakistan had ‘educated’ them, these fools called themselves maulanas, mullahs and Imams. Their entire knowledge of Islam came from the mouths of those who also couldn’t understand Arabic beyond what was written in the Holy Quran.
They make good cannon fodder for our wars, too stupid to know what jihad really means.
“You are better than me. I have no conversational Pashto,” he continued causing the men to join him in laughter.

“Please join us inside,” the Maulana said gesturing to the open door to the hujra. As they entered, the General was amazed at the number of dishes that had been prepared for them. His gaze moved around the room seeing a collection of books on a small bookshelf, a Kalashnikov propped up against it. There were numerous ayats stitched into fine fabrics adorning the walls, along with the black Saudi flag hanging next to another that he didn
’t recognize. Probably another political party in Pakistan, el-Yahad thought to himself.

“Maulana sahib,” he said. “You have gone to too much trouble.” Knowing the traditions of the area, he knew that he would be forced to sample each of them before being allowed to leave the makeshift meal area. “This is just too much.”

“Nonsense, Sheikh sahib,” the Maulana said smiling. “Even this is too little for a guest of our friends in Bajaur. They told me that you had not eaten since leaving Islamabad, so we prepared for a hungry man. Please be seated.”

The Maulana called for his servants to bring the remaining items and cold drinks for the guests, finally taking a seat next to Nabeel on the floor. As the boys, who looked like students from the madrassah, brought in the items, the Maulana shared his background as well as he could in the broken English that he spoke. He explained that he was a member of the National Assembly from one of the faction groups of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, one of Pakistan
’s staunchest religious groups. He had strong ties to the community and recruited many boys for the Afghan resistance. He was in his 60s, if not older, and wore the familiar long beard and shortened shalwar that categorized the mullahs of Pakistan. Compared to el-Yahad, he was a diminutive 5’8” against his 6’1” frame.

“What brings you to our Pakistan, Sheikh sahib?” the Maulana asked, with his mouth full of chicken korma.

Most of the conversation was filled with small talk and general topics. The Maulana tried to breach the topic of what brought el-Yahad to Pakistan and specifically Bajaur, but el-Yahad stayed in character, holding his tongue in the presence of others. Once they got up from the meal, the General excused himself to have a cigarette outside. The Maulana followed him out shortly thereafter.

“It is good to have brothers like you in the cause, Maulana,” the General said, fighting the urge to smirk at the accolades and adjectives the Maulana has used to describe himself. “I have come for two things. First, my brothers in the Kingdom wish to know how the previous donations have been used. Second, I wanted to see how the camp is functioning.” He paused to see if there was a reaction from the Maulana. When he got none, he continued. “It is one thing to see photos and a complete other thing to see with my own eyes.”

“You will be impressed with what you see,” the Maulana said. “I have not seen anything like it since my days in the jihad against the Russians.”

The General paused for a moment, taking a deep drag from his cigarette. “You were part of the jihad?” he asked, quickly doing the math on his age.
He must have been in his late 40s then.

The Maulana smirked at the question, knowing that the General didn
’t believe what he had just said. “Please follow me,” he said moving to a closed door a few meters down from where they had finished eating. Pulling a set of keys from a pocket under his kameez, he slipped it into the doorknob. El-Yahad heard the lock click and the Maulana pushed the door open. “This is my private study,” he said switching on the lights, stepping aside to allow the General to enter. The Maulana closed the door behind him.

The room was an amazing homage, a historical record of the Maulana
’s activities during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Photographs covered the walls, some black and white, others in color, each chronicling who he had met, spent time with and the depth of his involvement. On another wall were neatly organized, framed photographs of young boys, each with a gold nameplate below them. They were engraved with the names and date of martyrdom in memory of those who had gone from his madrassah. He had never seen a wall of honor like this. As he stood taking in the names and faces, the Maulana stepped alongside him, saying, “They were like sons to me. I will never forget what they did for Islam.”

“It is beautiful,” the General replied. “Allah-hum-do-lillah, you shall be rewarded for their sacrifices. You have sent warriors in Allah
’s name.”

He moved away from the wall, looking at the many photographs along the others. It was a who
’s who of the Taliban and its supporters. El-Yahad recognized many faces from not only the conflict, but also his own personal interactions. Mullah Omar, Khalid Haqqani, Osama bin Laden, and the good doctor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, all in the photographs with a younger version of the Maulana. He was also in photographs with Americans, Brits and many Pakistani military officials. The Maulana was well connected, he thought to himself, it’s a good thing that my identity is backstopped otherwise he could have problems with the man. El-Yahad stopped at one photograph, taking a longer look than he had the others. I know these people.

“Maulana sahib,” the General called. “Who are these Americans?”

The Maulana walked over to him, pulling his bifocals from his chest pocket. “Ah, our friends from the CIA,” he said, pointing to the individuals. He pulled off his bifocals, taking a moment to clean them on his shirt before putting them back on. “This is Chris… Andrews, I think his name was. He taught our boys explosives. This is David Northwright, the weapons trainer. And this last gentleman is Tom Davidson, a great man. He taught close quarter combat,” he explained pointing at each man as he spoke. “I have lost touch with David since he was stationed in Columbia. Andrews was killed in Nuristan by a mortar shell. No one knows what happened to Davidson. He just disappeared one day.”

El-Yahad looked hard at the photo of Davidson, recognizing facial features. Davidson hadn
’t disappeared. No one knew his new identity.

* * *

The car whipped around the corner, flashing its lights at two men standing outside a gate before turning them off. The men rushed in through the walk-through and pulled the gate open from both sides. The car passed through and the men slammed the gate shut just as quickly as they had opened it, returning to their positions outside. The facility, a disused warehouse, was located in Islamabad’s industrial estate. The six-acre warehouse was purchased nearly a decade ago through a shell company and converted into one of the intelligence service’s largest off-book detention and interrogation centers. This was where high-value targets were brought and housed until they could no longer provide usable intelligence. The lucky ones were either released or turned over to the courts for prosecution. The center was highly secure and its location was need-to-know only. Most visitors that came to the facility were transported in official vehicles that went to great lengths to avoid direct routes in case someone might be following or the passenger might be trying to track their path.

As the vehicle entered the compound, another gate was opened to the interior of the facility where the car was ushered in. There were already three other vehicles parked there, including an emergency vehicle for medical services. The Premier stepped out of the vehicle and noticed that there was no military markings anywhere in his eye line, even the men were dressed in nondescript black clothing rather than their standard issue military fatigues. As they walked in, he took note that not one of the men they passed in the parking area or the corridors stopped to salute the General or show any recognition of who he was.
Where were they?

“General,” Chaudhry said. “Where are…”

The General stopped dead in his tracks and turned on a dime, right into the face of the oncoming Prime Minister, causing him to jerk backwards to avoid impact. “It’s not General here,” he said in a muted voice. “This is a black site for high value targets. No one has a military rank within these walls. They can’t know who each individual is for security reasons,” he said, pointing to an area beyond the Premier’s vision.

“Who can
’t know?” Chaudhry asked, confused by the General’s coded statement. “And what am I supposed to call you?”

“
Ahsan,” he said. “You can call me Misbah.” He turned around again and resumed his stride down the corridor until he reached a door approximately two hundred yards into the facility. The General opened the door, waiting for the Premier to join him and step inside, entering quickly behind him and closing the door.

The room was a large, air-conditioned area with television screens of various sizes covering the walls.
A team of four operators controlled each of the screens that intermittently changed the video feeds to monitor all the activities within the facility. The Premier took in the various pictures of the exterior of the facility, interrogation rooms, the holding cells and the corridors as they flashed across the screens, wondering why there was no sound coming from anywhere. The Prime Minister moved from screen to screen looking for volume controls to be able to hear what was going on in each of the videos that he was seeing, but could find none. He found his way to one of the operators and leaned over the console asking, “Why are things so quiet?” The operator looked up at him, wondering who he was and why he was bothering him, then looked over to the General for instruction on what to do with the question that he was asked. The General gave an imperceptible nod and the operator returned to monitoring the screens without answering the Premier’s question. The Premier turned to the General even more confused. He jerked around with the quiet of the room erupted with screams of pain coming from one of the screens. He pushed his hands to his ears to try to block out the bloodcurdling screams, only to have it change as the operator turned the dial to another video feed that was blasting American music into a holding cell. As the operator continued rotating the knob, the sounds in the room continued to change giving the Premier an understanding of why the room was kept so quiet. The General called to the operator, “I think that’s enough.”

“What the hell is going on here?” Chaudhry asked, looking to the General for answers.

“Ahsan, this is the one and only time that you will be here,” he said. “Our…guests… are subjected to hours of loud annoying music, wild variations of temperature and behavior modification controlled by trained personnel and interrogators with one single goal – break the detainee mentally and physically. That is how we got that file of information that you read on the way here.”