The Meadow (45 page)

Ramm’s team waited. They were not idle, using the time to transform their Church Lane villa into a forward command post. But they had been unable to get maps from the Indian authorities, as representations of this shifting area of disputed borders had been classified, seen as potentially confirming (or denying) one country’s claim over the other. Around the world there were numerous conflicts over statehood and identity in which maps with their defining boundaries were
politically toxic, from Israel’s dispute with the Palestinian people to the civil war raging between Tamils and the government in Sri Lanka. Any maps, even the most basic tourist version, that showed Kashmir, or India’s sensitive borders with China, let alone Bangladesh, had been impounded in the national archives years ago, and the army and its agents had been removing road signs and destroying granite mileage markers throughout the valley since the early nineties, creating a nameless, routeless war in an area that had become engulfed in ambiguity.

Western embassies resorted to US military flight charts dating from the 1950s, single sheets that were overlaid to make composite maps. Having managed to patch together a visualisation of the terrain, Ramm’s team could begin to chart the movement of the hostages. In the absence of intelligence sharing, they drew most of their information from the press and the television news, as did Tikoo, using coloured markers and drawing pins to record sightings on their improvised charts. ‘In a typical hostage situation, you know where everyone is, and you pick up the phone and you know where to ring,’ Ramm said. ‘If you’re in London, and you have a kidnapping, you’re so proximate to it that the policeman says, “OK, let’s cordon off the area and kick the doors in until we find this guy.”’ But there was nothing typical about this crisis.

Ramm would have to be resourceful. He closely studied the short document that constituted John Childs’ debrief, and those of the Westerners who had escaped the kidnappers’ clutches in 1994. From what Childs had recalled, the original group of four captives were taken on a route that roughly shadowed the Amarnath trek, although they had shunned the regular paths through the Betaab Valley, choosing instead to make a series of punishing up-and-over climbs. For the first three nights they had camped above the treeline in remote
gujjar
communities, but on the fourth they had camped a few hundred metres above the Amarnath track. The locations from where Dirk Hasert and Hans Christian Ostrø had been snatched, Chandanwari and Zargibal, were both stopping-off points along the way to Sheshnag. Beyond Sheshnag Lake the path split, the Amarnath route
peeling away to the north-east, while another, little-used route led south-east towards the treacherous Sonasar Pass and into largely uncharted territory. Which route had the kidnappers taken?

Foreign trekkers would invariably head north-east to Amarnath or north-west to visit sights such as Kolahoi Glacier, Sonamarg and Buttress Peak. But as far as the FBI could learn, there had been no sightings of the hostages towards the north, suggesting that the rebels had gone south, into a wild and remote area about which little was known. Given that Ostrø’s body had been found in this direction, this was the most likely theory. It gained ground after Ramm’s team quizzed foreign journalists who had been following the story from the beginning, who told them the gossip on the ground was that the hostages were in the vicinity of the Warwan, a wide, isolated valley running north to south between Sheshnag and the villages east of Anantnag, whose only links to the outside world were over a series of treacherous snowbound passes. One of these routes – the Sonasar Pass – split off from the Amarnath Cave route at Sheshnag, and involved a gruelling and dangerous southerly climb of twelve miles. Beyond, the Warwan widened out into a lush plateau more than twenty miles in length, with as few as a dozen villages lining its flanks.

Studying material from the kidnappings of Kim Housego and David Mackie, the team read that Kim and his parents had been seized near the Meadow and taken to Aru on the pretence of checking their passports. The ransom demands were also similar to those in the present case. Kim’s recollections, written up for the FCO and Scotland Yard after his return to the UK, referred to himself and Mackie walking for three days before being forced at gunpoint to make a painful climb at high altitude, a route that eventually led down through a birch forest into a long glacial valley. Here, in a village at the foot of the pass, they were locked inside a wooden ‘guesthouse’ for several days while the kidnappers deliberated. Later they had been marched down through the valley towards another icy pass at its southern limit, only for the kidnap team to change their minds and march them back up again the following day. Eventually they had been taken back over the pass at the head of the valley before joining a rough,
muddy track at Chandanwari, from where they were taken by taxi to Anantnag. It all seemed to fit what Ramm was seeing on the map.

Kim said he had overheard the name of the village in which they had been kept for most of their time as hostages: Sukhnoi (pronounced ‘Sook-nes’). Ramm’s team eventually found it at the head of the Warwan Valley, just south of the Sonasar Pass. Might the hut Kim and David were imprisoned in have been used again, one year on, to hold Don, Keith, Dirk, Hans Christian and Paul? Were they its wooden walls that provided the backdrop to the recently released photos? Ramm thought it possible.

FBI headquarters at Quantico in Virginia chipped in, closely examining all the kidnappers’ photos. It was just possible that the flowers visible in one picture of the hostages sitting on a rock might grow only in a certain place.
Gujjar dhokas
also varied subtly from valley to valley, and the lichen, mosses and grasses that roofed them could help to determine elevation and orientation, their exposure to the sun and growth patterns helping create a compass grid for the images. Then there were the missing personal items. The detectives began drawing up a list: Don’s yellow-and-black Casio altimeter, Nikon SLR and Tamron lenses; John Childs’ Canon, with his social security number etched on its base; Paul’s Nikon camera inherited from his grandfather; Julie and Keith’s stolen travellers’ cheques; and Hans Christian’s missing Norwegian Army-issue boot. Five passports. The FBI also called on John at home in Simsbury. ‘They would come with photographs of dead militants, who all looked like they’d been in a freezer for some considerable time,’ John said. ‘They looked like strangers to me.’

Al Faran had killed once. Would it do so again? Roy Ramm wished he had been running the show from the start. An experienced negotiator would have sensed that tensions in the rebel camp had been building to dangerous levels before the killing of Ostrø, and measures could have been taken to ease the pressure. This was the kind of delicate operation Ramm specialised in. It relied on psychological profiling, human instinct, technical intelligence and everyone working to the same purpose.

Once, he tried to talk to General Saklani about profiling, explaining how negotiation teams spent as much time seeking out information on those behind a kidnapping as talking to them. But the war-weary general changed the subject. Like all who served in Kashmir, after a number of years at the front line it had ceased to matter to him where the men he saw as terrorists came from, whether it was Bahawalpur, Mirpur, Kotli or Khost. It mattered even less if they were motivated by religious belief or politics. To Saklani and his colleagues, they were simply a mass of faceless and illiterate
jihadis
, clinging to a false ideology. All of which was unsatisfactory for the foreign teams, who began assembling their own files instead.

Comparing the demands made in 1994 and 1995, they zeroed in on the man at the centre of both: Masood Azhar. The FBI and Scotland Yard made representations to visit Masood in Tihar jail, but as they expected they were refused. Instead they raided Western intelligence archives to discover deep linkages, reports, nuggets and speculation that had remained dormant, but that when put together portrayed a very different Masood to the blethering fundamentalist pigeon his Indian captors represented him as. A copy of his confession from 1994, obtained by the FBI from a friendly Indian intelligence source, showed that he had readily admitted to travelling to Kenya, Somalia and Sudan in 1991 and 1993, describing how he had been dispatched by Maulana Khalil, his mentor from the Binori Town
madrassa
in Karachi, to corral veterans of the Afghan war who had been deported by Pakistan after the conflict ended.

‘In Sudan, Masood had met Osama bin Laden and his nascent al Qaeda group, founded in 1988 in Afghanistan,’ read one report Ramm saw. The FBI requested more information on both bin Laden and al Qaeda, which in 1995 were perceived as minor players. Reports gathered by British foreign intelligence and its allies’ agencies suggested that bin Laden had armed, funded and transported fighters idling in Africa to a new front opened up by the Islamic Union of Somalia that was facing down US forces sent to bolster a failing international peacekeeping mission, with Masood Azhar providing the rhetoric in the field. Through bin Laden, this report suggested, Masood had
come into the orbit of Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed, who in 1993 had had a central role in the ground-shaking events that would later be depicted in the movie
Black Hawk Down
. Working with bin Laden again, Masood had travelled to Yemen to redirect yet more militants to the Somali
jihad
, meeting
mujahid
leader Tariq Nasr Fadhli, also an Afghanistan veteran, who was suspected of being behind two hotel bombings in Yemen in December 1992 that had targeted US Marines headed for Somalia.

Kenya, Sudan and Yemen. A trap laid for US forces in Somalia. Osama bin Laden’s cash and Masood’s invective. Ramm and the FBI were building up an alarming portrait of the man al Faran demanded be freed. French, German and British intelligence had further snippets, as did the Saudis. They warned that Masood’s influence extended deep into Europe. During the early nineties he had travelled extensively across Britain, where he was hosted by a
maulvi
in east London. Raising funds and recruits, his oratorical reputation preceding him and packing out mosques up and down the country, Masood had targeted working-class Pakistani expatriates, who maintained strong links with their old homes and had transformed places like Mirpur, in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir, into boom towns.

In Birmingham, Masood befriended Abdul Rauf, formerly a judge in the
sharia
court at Mirpur, who in those days made his money as a baker in Bordesley Green. According to British intelligence, Rauf was a keen fund-raiser, having helped set up Crescent Relief, a charity that sent donations to Pakistan. Rauf introduced him to ‘his rootless teenage son, Rashid, whom he said was in need of a mentor’. It would be some years before that relationship would lead to the wayward Rashid Rauf enlisting with Masood in Pakistan, hooking up with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda too. There were others Masood recruited as well. A file note sent to Ramm mentioned Omar Sheikh, the LSE student who was used by the Movement as the bait in the kidnapping of Paul Rideout and three other Western tourists in New Delhi in October 1994.

Studying Masood’s finances, other connections emerged. Not only had Osama bin Laden funded some of his operations, the US
intelligence community found compelling evidence that in Pakistan the ISI had been underwriting his organisation, making monthly payments of up to $60,000 to the Movement. In two classified memos circulated to the American embassies in Islamabad and New Delhi, the CIA highlighted how the Movement was also ‘discussing financing with sponsors of international terrorism’. The bankers were thought to include the then Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Masood’s outfit had ‘new support groups founded across Europe, and headquartered in the UK’. These groups’ strategy was also changing, according to the CIA memo, with Western civilians now a target and self-contained terror groups being ditched for a much more fluid and united movement of like-minded
jihadis
.

There was compelling evidence that this transformation had already started. The CIA learned that the Movement had moved its training camps out of Pakistan-administered Kashmir to Khost, re-establishing them alongside camps operated by Osama bin Laden and protected by the rampant Taliban, Afghan student medievalists wreathed in black who by 1995 controlled nine of Afghanistan’s thirty provinces. They had begun to besiege Kabul too, and were emerging as likely rulers of the entire fractured country. ‘Masood Azhar was a dangerous emerging force,’ an FBI report concluded. Was this, Ramm wondered, why the Indians would not countenance freeing him? Or did they know none of it? There were no answers forthcoming from New Delhi, but what Ramm had discovered was a frightening portal into the future, that reflected grimly on the present crisis too.

An alarming picture of the Movement and its General Secretary Masood Azhar was emerging. But what of the hostages and their captors from the mysterious al Faran, about which no intelligence could be found? The foreign detectives began to examine the letters secretly written by Hans Christian Ostrø, both the ones found on his body and the many others that had made their way by various means into the hands of the police. Working on copies supplied by the Norwegian Embassy, they started with the Arvind Cotton Classics advertisement that DSP Kifayat Haider had found hidden inside the
dead man’s shirt, the one that he had used to reveal he had stashed a message to his family ‘in my balls’. A few lines higher up on the page, unnoticed by the Kashmiri police, was another short message written in minuscule lettering. Dated ‘August 6’, it was entitled ‘Escape Part 2’.

It began with a time. ‘0.30. I talked with Dirk and shared some thoughts and questions with him. We have been thinking about the same things: about the women and how to get away. If we have not escaped, I think we will do it in the middle of this month if nothing happens.
Inshallah
, if God wills … Light up the flame, sing and be joyful.’