The Reluctant Spy (17 page)

We wanted to do a drive-around before our D-Day just to acquaint ourselves with our fourteen target sites. These were the houses Rick had pared down from the mosaic of numbers on his butcher paper. Most of these locations were one-or two-room mud huts with thatched or corrugated-tin roofs. But just as we were starting, I got a call from Rick, who was at our office in another city monitoring the operation.

A friendly intelligence service had just called, he said. “They got a walk-in this morning who said that a big group of Arabs from Afghanistan was hiding in a big distinctively painted house in Faisalabad.”

“Can we talk to him?”

“No, they refuse,” Rick said. “They say they'll pass along any relevant information. But no face-to-face. They're not budging.”

Well, at least we'd be on the lookout for a big house with an interesting paint job. And sure enough, there it was, just outside the University of Faisalabad campus—site Y, the biggest house of the ones on Rick's butcher paper.

“I can tell you right now that there are bad things going on in that house,” said the guy Khalid had assigned to us. “Look, it's the only house in the neighborhood with all the shutters closed.” The house was clearly inhabited because there were outside lights on and cars in the driveway. “It's so hot,” Khalid's subordinate said. “Nobody would close their shutters in this kind of weather.”

“Well,” I said, “we'll need a bigger team on that one.”

Then it was on to site X, the empty lot I mentioned earlier that turned out to have an overhead phone line that snaked to the adjacent house where we found Abu Zubaydah on D-Day.

Back at the hotel in the other city where we had a safe house, we continued to meet with our group of CIA and FBI agents flown in for this special occasion. Unfortunately, some of the CIA guys weren't up to the task. We called them “glory hounds,” and they were guys who couldn't cut it in the agency's clandestine service, but who had volunteered to go anywhere in the world where they were needed for temporary assignments. Many of them had something to prove: Mostly it was that they were wrongly kicked out, or had wrongly flunked out, of the Farm but that they were crucial to important operations around the world. One of them was particularly offensive to a Pakistani security guard standing watch in the hotel. One night, the guard tried to stop this guy while he was moving an unmarked pallet of weapons upstairs. There was a brief, but ugly, exchange of insults, and I had to jump in.

I intervened as quickly as I could.

“Wait a minute, pal, we don't talk like that to these people,” I told our guy. Then I turned to the hotel cop.

“Sir, I'm sorry for my friend. I apologize for his language and behavior. But we're authorized. Everything's okay.”

“I have to look in the crate,” he said.

“No, you can't,” I said. “Really, we have permission. You can talk to the general manager of the hotel about all of this. Please talk to him.”

I knew he wasn't about to talk to the general manager; that would be taking on responsibility well beyond his station. He stepped aside, and we brought the crated weapons upstairs. Later, we'd transfer them to the safe houses.

Our disguises, such as they were, included shalwar kameez—the traditional, loose-fitting pants and tunic top—and the bushy beards we grew, or tried to grow. I have a dark complexion and a heavy beard; by D-Day, no one gave me a second look. My running mate Amir, an Arab American, had light skin and a scraggly beard. You wouldn't even know he was a Muslim. But he ended up looking reasonably authentic, too, perhaps a bit like a Taliban fighter.

On D-Day, our team gathered in the living room of the safe house at 9 p.m., or 2100 hours on the twenty-four-hour military clock we were using. A few days earlier, we'd brought in a half-dozen translators, so we had several Americans, including Amir and me, who spoke Arabic. I climbed atop a coffee table to brief everyone. “Okay, guys, I don't mean to be melodramatic,” I said, “but we're going to have to synchronize our watches.” In fact, it
was
melodramatic and, under the circumstances, absolutely necessary. Our drill required a strict timetable. The teams needed to be on-site at 0150 hours. At 0200 hours, they were to break down the doors, separate the women and children from the men, flexicuff all the men behind their backs, and grab all the computers, cell phones, and anything else that raised an eyebrow. By 0220 hours, they had to be out the door and headed back to the safe house. We knew we'd make a lot of noise, which put a premium on fast and professional
execution. All but two of the teams got in a bus and headed off to Faisalabad, where the vast majority of sites were located.

Later that night, at site X, we had to sort out the chaos that attended the takedown. The bad guys included two Syrians and one Palestinian—Abu Zubaydah. All three of them had moved from the third floor to the roof when they first heard the battering rams hit the doors, and all three had been shot trying to jump to the roof of the house next door. One Syrian was dead when he hit the ground. The other was screaming from a bullet wound to the femur. Abu Zubaydah had three wounds and was unconscious and bleeding profusely.

When we got to the third floor, we discovered what this little group of terrorists was planning. The wounded Syrian was apparently Abu Zubaydah's bomb maker, and he was plying his murderous trade. Bomb components were arrayed across a table; a soldering iron was still hot. On an adjacent table was a map locating the British School in Lahore. These killers had selected a target—teachers and children, including a lot of American children. It made me sick to my stomach.

My orders were to take all prisoners alive if possible. One Syrian was dead. Nine others, who were never allowed up to the third floor and didn't even know the identity of its star attraction, were captured and turned over to our guys for interrogation in one of our safe houses. My top priority, under the circumstances, was getting Abu Zubaydah and the wounded Syrian to a hospital immediately. But the senior Pakistani security guy with us had other ideas. Abu Zubaydah apparently had killed one of his men and he wanted revenge. “We will fuck with him,” he seethed. “Then he's going to die.”

Not a chance, I said. “Look, I'm going to get fucked if he dies before we get him to a hospital. Those are my orders. This is non-negotiable.”

It was now 0230, and we had to move quickly. We heaved Abu Zubaydah into the back of a Toyota minitruck and followed the Pakistanis to a Faisalabad hospital. In a sense, my workday was just beginning.

IT IS DIFFICULT
to describe the scene at the Faisalabad hospital. Conjure up the worst, most unsanitary and primitive conditions you have ever seen in an American hospital; then imagine, if you can, conditions in that hospital deteriorating precipitously and you begin to get some idea of what we encountered.

The hospital's doors and windows were wide open, allowing mosquitoes to feed as they saw fit. Of course, geckos perched here and there, feasting on the mosquitoes, but the insects had a huge numerical advantage, which allowed them to zero in on patients not protected by mosquito nets or simply alight on floors slippery with human blood and other bodily fluids. The odor wasn't exactly antiseptic. Medical personnel, meanwhile, had a novel method for sterilizing hypodermic needles: After use, a needle would be rinsed in tap water, then plunged into an industrial-size bar of Irish Spring soap. When time came for an injection, a doctor or nurse would pull a needle from the bar, rinse it again in water, and administer the shot to a patient. “This is like being in a nightmare,” Amir said after we walked in, and he was right.

The doctors weren't expecting us—a bunch of Americans dressed up as Pakistanis, except for our bulletproof vests and weapons—and they certainly weren't expecting the kind of traumatic injuries we delivered to their tender mercies. Abu Zubaydah was bleeding out from his bullet wounds, and the docs had no choice but to do emergency surgery to clean him up, stop the bleeding, and sew him up as best they could.

Abu Zubaydah's cell phone, scooped up in the raid on site X, kept ringing, which would have given us a leg up if one of our Arabic speakers—Amir or me, for instance—had been able to answer it. But we couldn't; no one could answer it because the FBI agents, in their infinite wisdom, had tossed it into an evidence bag at the “crime scene.” There it remained, sealed tight, outside of anyone's reach. I was not happy.

“Whose stupid idea was it to seal up the phone?”

“It's evidence of a crime,” said one of the FBI agents.

“No, it's a communication device. The phone's not evidence of a crime. Everybody's got a phone.”

“We can't open the evidence bag,” he said. “It would break the chain of custody.”

Those were the rules, FBI rules. I was in charge, yet I couldn't overrule and “break the chain of custody.” But that was one rule that needed breaking. It was just so stupid. I should have opened the bag and snatched the phone. Worst case, some FBI knucklehead would have yelled and put up a fuss and that would have been the end of it.

We knew we had to get Abu Zubaydah to a better hospital. Security also had become a major problem. We had scooped up dozens of al-Qaeda suspects at all the sites that night, but we figured there were probably hundreds of others in and around Faisalabad. About two hours after our arrival at the hospital, we heard the sound of gunfire outside. Word had spread among the al-Qaeda types that we had Abu Zubaydah and we had him at this hospital. The bad guys were driving by and leaving a message with their bullets. Message received: We had to get Abu Zubaydah out of there ASAP. The Pakistani security guy assigned to us, a real pro, got on his cell phone and had a helicopter touch down in the hospital parking lot within twenty minutes. His people cordoned off the area so the shooters couldn't get near and we were airborne in less than five minutes, bound for what we hoped would be a better hospital.

Within minutes of our arrival, we wheeled in Abu Zubaydah, and the young Pakistani doctor took one look at him, shook his head and suggested, in effect, that the odds of this patient's living through the day were roughly equal to winning the big one in the Powerball lottery. “Seriously, Doc, he's got to live,” I pleaded. “He's an important guy, and we really need to get him the best care we can.” My orders were to tell the doctors to stabilize him as best they could, stop the continuing bleeding, and treat him beyond that only if a new emergency popped up. Our plan was to get him Western medical care as soon as possible.

Rick called with word from the director's office at headquarters: “It's 24/7, CIA eyes on,” Rick said. “You can't leave his bedside.” The doctor had left the room so we could talk and hadn't returned when I rang off. I grabbed a spare sheet, tore it into strips, and went to work, tying Abu Zubaydah to the bed. Then the doc returned: “What are you doing?” He plainly
saw
what I was doing, but his mind couldn't get around what his eyes were telling him.

“No offense, Doctor,” I said, “but I don't know you and my orders are that this man cannot leave until we take him out of here.”

“He's in no condition to leave,” the doctor replied. “He's in a coma.” Abu Zubaydah was unconscious and still bleeding, requiring one transfusion after another. But he seemed to be breathing regularly, although at an accelerated rate, and I didn't think I was jeopardizing his situation by securing him.

“Just as well,” I said. “I'm going to keep him tied down.” The doctor shook his head again, this time over the bizarre behavior of these American intruders, and left the room.

I just sat there, on a metal folding chair, and stared at Abu Zubaydah for hours on end. This hospital was far superior to the facility in Faisalabad, but its open-window policy was identical, which meant mosquitoes—very aggressive mosquitoes. I'd been perspiring. I'd been in the same clothes for two days. I was struggling to stay awake. In short, I was one ripe candidate for the hospital's entire mosquito
population. At one point, I turned on every ceiling fan in the area to high, just to blow the little bastards away from me. It helped, but my exposed skin was slowly turning into one uninterrupted welt.

Amir was my savior. At one point, he called to ask whether I needed a break. “Oh, my God, yes,” I said. He arrived a bit later and spelled me while I found an empty hospital bed and crashed for a few hours, not even bothering to get out of my clothes; then it was back to my job of watching a bad guy adrift in his own private twilight zone.

Another time, Amir phoned to ask if I needed anything. “Yeah, I haven't changed my clothes in a couple of days. I have one change of clean clothes back at the hotel. Do you mind stopping by and getting them for me?” An hour later, Amir delivered the goods and watched our package while I used the bathroom and changed clothes. Fresh socks, fresh underwear, and a fresh T-shirt: I would shower when I could, but for now, I was all set. The T-shirt was bright red, a Christmas gift from my kids, and it featured the yellow image of SpongeBob SquarePants on the front.