Remember Remember (3 page)

“I think most of the ideas have been uncovered and the British Government aren’t exactly sitting on their fat arses waiting are they,” whispered Shan, “so, what’s it to be, a dirty bomb, poisoning the water, bombing the tube again, stealing a nuclear submarine or asking all the takeaways to poison their food? That last one might work!” laughed Shan.

“None of those, it will be very simple, very effective and very British.”

“Well, you intrigue me; so what is it?” he enquired.

Alan avoided an answer by responding, “I don’t think it will be wise to tell you just now because the less people know the better.”

Shan chuckled, “You don’t expect me to write a blank cheque for an unspecified event sometime in the future?”

Alan looked around, took a gulp of Grolsch, looked at Shan and leaning forward whispered, “I need the money for equipment and to build the product. The event will be specified as will a date within the next two years.”

“And what about your fee, your reward?”

“I will expect £100 per head.”

“£100 per head,” Shan laughed, “wow, last of the big hitters.”

“Not if hundreds of thousands die.”

“Jesus Christ – are you serious?”

“I can’t give you the exact number and it doesn’t matter, what I can say is that it will bring this country to its knees, hundreds of thousands of knees.”

“You are willing to kill thousands of people for our cause; but you’re not even one of us, it doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ve worked all my life for government and its causes and it’s got most of my friends and some of my close family killed, which would be cause enough. But that’s in the long distant past, all forgotten; now the cause is me.”

He passed Shan a sheet of paper then continued, “You had better see the list of my equipment needs and while you are reading it I’ll go and get another drink. Do you want the same again?

“Yes, this is quite nice orange, could you get lots of ice please.”

Alan approached the bar and waited his turn. Shan watched him leaning on the bar trying to attract the waiter’s attention and thought, “how can you stand at a bar and order beer and orange juice while contemplating the death of a major part of the population? He makes it look easy; he might just make it work.” Shan smiled to himself, picked up the sheet of paper and turned his attention to the list.

Alan returned with the drinks and growled into Shan’s ear, “These bloody waiters, they spend more time arguing in the back room in some strange European language than they do serving customers.” He put the drinks down and stayed silent now after his outburst while Shan read the list of equipment needs again.

He put the paper down, smiled then said, “Some list, some money. If, and it’s a big if, we were to go ahead with this what guarantee do we have of success?”

“None, but what guarantees did you have in the past? None I’ll bet.”

“But this is substantial money, you’re talking five million just to set it up and we don’t know what ‘it’ is. I don’t think anybody will lend you the money without some inkling of what you intend to do.”

Alan looked around the room again to check they were not being watched then produced a pen and paper from his inside pocket and wrote just fourteen words on the sheet of paper. He then passed it to Shan who grabbed the paper and read it with interest. He passed the paper back, nodded at Alan, smiled and replied, “Now that is some incident, that really is some incident, do you think it could happen?”

“The incident will happen won’t it, of that I’m absolutely sure, but just how effectively we make it work for our purpose, is up to us.”

“I like this, nothing like this has ever been considered before. It’s so bloody crazy and simple it just might work.”

“Kiss, Keep It Simple Stupid, used to be an old military concept, until the West and now everybody else got too sophisticated, let’s go back to Kiss,” responded Alan.

“Well if you could pull this off…”

Alan interrupted him, “when I pull this off, then you will owe me a great deal of money.”

“And they’ll pay you if it works; what do you want from me in the short term?”

“Just to know if you think they’ll back it, because I want to move reasonably soon to get the next phase in place.”

“I think they will back it; go to the next phase and whatever happens I will cover the costs until then.”

Alan smiled back and whispered, “Thanks. I will deliver the goods if you can get the go ahead but I will need substantial amounts of cash very soon and no forgeries, everything must be above board.”

Shan got up to leave as other people were coming into the bar. They looked like tourists, not really knowing whether to sit and wait for table service or go to the bar. Observing this Alan thought, “yet another strange British custom.”

He looked at Shan and whispered, “No mobile phone calls at all, no land line phone calls, no letters or faxes, no emails to anybody about this meeting or the money needed. It must all be word of mouth.”

Shan slumped back into his seat, protesting, “How the hell can I communicate with my people if I can’t even make a telephone call?”

“I don’t know, how do you think people did it before Alexander Graham Bell’s invention?”

“Next you’ll be expecting me to train pigeons I suppose?”

Alan looked around at the tourists who had now decided to approach the still arguing waiters behind the bar, then passed Shan a clipping from a recent edition of the Times newspaper and said, “Read that please, take your time; it’s important.” He picked up the clipping and studied it.

“Death by remote control turns desert into fearful hideaway.

Somewhere in the vast mountainous hinterland known as Yemen’s Empty Quarter, Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal is waiting for death from the sky. For months, one of Al-Qaeda’s most dangerous fugitives has been roaming the tribal lands that stretch across an unmarked border deep into Saudi Arabia.

It is an easy place to get lost, but last week an unmanned Predator aircraft demonstrated to al-Ahdal – and other Al-Qaeda terrorists – that not even the emptiest of deserts is safe from an American strike.

The remote –controlled assault last weekend on a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying six Al-Qaeda members along a dirt track killed Ali Qaed Sunian al-Harthi , better known as Abu Ali, one of two Yemen-based terrorists suspected by Washington of plotting the attack that killed 17 sailors on the USS Cole in Aden harbour in 2001.

The other suspect is al-Ahdal, who remains at large yet now knows that the next time he shows his face outdoors a Hellfire missile travelling at 950mph might be the last thing he sees.

After a difficult week that brought a flurry of new terrorist threats against America, Britain and other western nations, Officials were jubilant that a combination of precise intelligence and flawless technology had accomplished a long-awaited breakthrough in the hunt for Al-Qaeda outside Afghanistan.

Despite lingering complaints at the summary nature of al-Harthi’s execution – and the revelation that Kamal Derwish, an American suspected of links to an Al-Qaeda cell in New York state had been among the other men killed in the car – the Predator strike opened a bold new phase in Washington’s secretive conduct of an unconventional war.

After months of hints that the CIA, supported by American special forces, was preparing for action outside Afghanistan this was the first public sign that intelligence on the ground is at last being processed with sufficient speed for an instant military response.

All but forgotten last week were the countless lost opportunities in Afghanistan, where poor communications, flawed intelligence or an over-extended chain of command allowed Osama Bin Laden and Muller Omar, the Taliban leader, to slip from Washington’s grasp. This time the CIA spotted its man – and nailed him.

Randy Scheunemann, an intelligence analyst who has advised senior officials, said the significance of the Yemen attack was that the highly perishable nature of intelligence had at last been understood. ‘If you get information like this, You don’t necessarily have three hours to make satellite phone calls and to hold inter-agency meetings in time zones 12 hours apart.’ He said. ‘You need rapid action, and the US government has streamlined its procedures to provide exactly that.’

It was soon after the September 11 attacks in 2002 that President George W Bush authorised the CIA to begin ‘lethal, covert action’ against Al Qaeda fugitives. A B ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, the CIA’s executive director, told a private intelligence gathering at the time: ‘Today there is only one rule and that is: there are no rules.’

The capture of Al-Qaeda planners such as Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi Binalshibh – a Yemeni seized in Karachi – has increased the flow of actionable intelligence and helped American officials to roll up Al-Qaeda networks from Buffalo, New York, where another cell with Yemeni connections was exposed last September, to Bali.

It was a little-reported incident in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, that launched the CIA on the trail of al-Ahdal and al-Harthi. In the searing summer heat of August an explosion in a block of flats in the Bir Obeid district rocked market stalls nearby.

One man died instantly at the scene, another on his way to hospital. The two had blown themselves up while making a bomb. When investigators arrived they found a stash of documents and weapons, including rocket propelled grenades. A third man sharing the flat was detained and he provided a breakthrough in the long hunt for the bombers of the USS Cole. Last December a force of Yemeni troops tried to ambush al-Harthi in the tribal village of al-Hosun. The operation turned into a fiasco; 18 soldiers were killed and the terrorist escaped. Now the CIA was back on his tail.

American officials have long insisted that they prefer to capture Al Qaeda suspects alive so that they can be interrogated, not least about possible clues to the whereabouts of Bin Laden. But it was clear to Washington that short of sending a significant invasion force to Yemen, they had little chance of winkling targets out of their well-protected refuge among the Empty Quarter’s Islamic tribes. If they found al-Ahdal or al-Harthi. They would have to kill them or risk another escape.

The Predator took off from an airstrip in Djibouti on Sunday afternoon. The French military outpost 100 miles from Yemen has become a key American base for anti-terror operations. On Tuesday a contingent of 400 US Marines set sail from Norfolk, Virginia on board the USS Mount Whitney, an amphibious command ship that will anchor off Djibouti’s coast to co-ordinate future operations in the region.

In a borrowed French hangar the Predator’s remote operators – known in the Pentagon as the ‘joystick generation’ for their computer guiding skills – watched a bank of video monitors as the 27ft drone closed in on its target. The same pictures, transmitted by secure satellite link, were visible half the world away on CIA screens in Langley, Virginia.

It may never be clear how the CIA knew exactly where to find al-Harthi, but the betting in Washington last week was that the information had come from a satellite telephone intercept.

Either way, the terrorist was doomed from the moment the Predator’s 360-degree revolving camera pod picked up the speeding Land Cruiser. This time there was no need for military commanders to consult White House lawyers or to wait for the President’s approval.

Bush had long ago issued his orders and the rules of engagement were clear. Al-Harthi was the enemy and America was at war. Someone pressed a button and a Hellfire missile roared.”

Shan passed the clipping back to Alan, shook his head and mused, “It still doesn’t prove it was his mobile.”

Alan laughed and replied, “Well that’s a moot point especially when you’re trying to outrun a 950 mile an hour Hellfire missile,” he leaned across toward Shan and continued, “let me give you another example. Two weeks ago I was on the M60 Motorway in Greater Manchester. We were in a traffic jam and the person I was with used their mobile to find out the problem. They tapped in 1200 and a voice said, “You are on the M60 driving due east between junction 21 and 22 approximately 18 miles from Manchester. Don’t you see the point? They know where Joe Public is and they’re not even after him. What chance for Al Qaeda or your colleagues? Not a snowballs. Please understand that as long ago as 1949 a father and son called Wright and especially the son called Peter Wright started developing listening devices to help the US and UK listen to the Russians and there’s been a hell of a lot of technological advancement since then. If you think about it the US have poured so much money and effort into technology that it’s all they rely on now. Technology will find them their quarry and technology will take that quarry out cleanly; at least as the Americans see it. You now deliver anything, electronically or even mechanically and they will be listening. Big Brother really is listening and watching.

The only way we communicate is my way. It’s slow, boringly slow, it’s not even 100% safe, but it’s close to 100% and they won’t send a Hellfire missile down Euston Road. No phones, mobile or landline, no faxes, no emails, no letters, only the minimum of knowledge for each party involved, and only people you have known for years. On top of this is the problem of money and banks. Every single dodgy bank account will now be being watched. The money I need has to come from a clean source as do the people. I know this will take time and my work may not finish for a few years, but the cause will go on for generations and therefore the principles of communication I am encouraging are appropriate.”