Tier One Wild (16 page)

This had all been arranged in advance by Daoud al-Amriki himself, after months of planning and using dozens of cutouts.

Amriki’s operation was being funded out of an al Qaeda account kept flush with cash by benefactors in the Gulf States. The operation that he was undertaking had been one of the last wishes of Anwar al-Awlaki, the former regional commander of AQ in Yemen. Awlaki had been killed by a U.S. drone shortly after giving the order that al-Amriki should get whatever resources he required for his secret mission, no questions asked. This green light had resulted in al-Amriki gaining access to tens of millions of dollars to buy weapons and secure training, as well as a look at data on a thumb drive: dossiers on AQ operatives around the globe who were available for his mission.

The thumb drive came to Daoud with six men, al Qaeda security enforcers who were ordered never to let the data out of their sight. David used a laptop computer to view the information over a number of days. He went through the dossiers, picked his operatives, found his support cells, and developed his plan of action.

Then the thumb drive, the six men, and the laptop Daoud had used to view the data all left.

Al-Amriki picked the best men available for his mission, beginning with the operative here in the Sana’a safe house with him. Miguel was not his partner’s real name. No, Amriki’s partner was Waleed Nayef, a thirty-four year-old Kuwaiti and the son of an executive of NBK, the National Bank of Kuwait.

Nayef had been born in Kuwait City, and he lived a childhood typical of a wealthy family in the oil-rich state. But at the age of twelve he had been traveling with his family on vacation in New York when Saddam Hussein invaded his homeland from the north. His family was allowed to remain in the United States, living with friends in New York’s Upper West Side, until the crisis passed.

Due in part to contacts made in the city while his nation was under occupation by Iraq, Waleed’s father took a job as director of the NBK branch in New York after the war. Young Nayef lived in Manhattan until he was seventeen, learning English along the way, and then his father was transferred back home.

Waleed attended the University of Kuwait and it was there he watched al Jazeera television with rapt attention as the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Around the same time he became radicalized at a mosque in Kuwait City by an influential Iraqi cleric. When this imam returned home and was then killed during the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, Waleed Nayef and several other young Kuwaitis immediately headed north to Baghdad to join the resistance there.

Nayef was smart and hardworking and incredibly motivated, so it was no time at all before he became a member of al Qaeda in Iraq, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Zarqawi was killed by American Forces in 2006 and Nayef was injured weeks later. He returned to Kuwait to recover, and here his influential father realized for the first time that his son had become an Islamist fighter, though he had no idea that Waleed was an up-and-coming operative in a branch of Osama bin Laden’s organization.

After Waleed’s recovery his father arranged for him to return to the United States, hoping this would somehow cure him of his radical thoughts. Waleed agreed to go, promising his father he had no further intentions of warring against the country where he had spent much of his youth. In fact, Nayef only agreed to the journey because he knew it would make him more valuable to al Qaeda.

As soon as he had fully recovered from his wounds, he traveled to North Carolina to attend graduate school at Duke University.

During the three years he lived in North Carolina, Waleed was immersed in American life and culture and language. At the same time, through contacts on the Internet, he once again became involved with al Qaeda, this time allying himself with Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexican–born operational commander of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. For these three years Waleed did nothing more than post anti-American invective on Web sites and message boards, while attending school to obtain his master’s degree in civil engineering. But his secret life and not his academic life was his true priority—the young man knew that his future was in the Middle East, not in the United States.

In 2009 thirty-one-year-old Waleed Nayef traveled to Yemen and joined al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the most powerful branch of the al Qaeda organization. He became a key operative within months, traveling to his home country of Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Europe. He worked high-level operations in the banking sector, transferring money between accounts and meeting with high-profile and high-income supporters of his organization to appeal for donations and sponsorship of projects AQAP was overseeing around the globe. The work was difficult but not dangerous, as he did not operate with a gun in his hand or plant bombs in the roadside against Western forces, as he had done in Iraq. But his operational activity meant that he had to employ intricate espionage tradecraft in all of his dealings. He worked undercover, using a great number of legends and falsified documents, remaining on the lookout for surveillance teams on his trail, and he took intricate measures to avoid electronic eavesdropping of his telephone or e-mails.

In short, in just a few years, Waleed Nayef had become one of al Qaeda’s top spies and one of JSOC’s top faceless priorities. His official targeting title by the United States was “AQ Facilitator.”

But even though his job was important and his operations crucial to the success of his new organization, he had long sought something more from his missions. When he was brought in by AQAP leadership and told that he had been selected to join a new operation, he jumped at the chance to work on a mission that, he had been promised, would kill thousands of infidels and greatly affect the West’s ability to fight against Islam.

He was then introduced to David Doyle, the man he knew as Daoud al-Amriki. This was some months prior to their traveling together to Egypt and then to Greece and, at first, Nayef and Amriki shared a mutual distrust of one another. But al-Amriki had slowly begun to rely on the operative he knew as Miguel, and even more slowly he read him in on the mission to come. And Nayef came to respect the American converter to Islam.

The Kuwaiti national was amazed by the full scope of the American operative’s plan. Amriki chose Miguel to be the second-in-command of the mission. Once the action began, Nayef would operate separately from Daoud, and he would be in charge of his own unit of fighters. But his assistance in the training phase would be equally crucial to the operation’s success.

THIRTEEN

On their seventh day in Sana’a, Miguel and al-Amriki were contacted by AQAP leadership and told to gather their belongings, sanitize their safe house, and come to a meeting at a nearby storefront. Here they were met by two men in a four-wheel drive Jeep, and they were driven out of the city. Even though Amriki and Miguel were high-ranking members of the organization, once they passed the last military checkpoint, twenty kilometers outside the capital, they were hooded so they could not see the route they were taking to their destination.

They drove on a series of progressively worsening roads, al-Amriki could tell this by the bumping and jarring of the vehicle’s suspension. They stopped for gas and then continued on. Al-Amriki realized they were heading southeast, from the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck. This was no surprise to him, as AQAP held much territory in the southeastern region of Yemen. This was al Qaeda country, and though that should have been comforting to an AQ operative, here American drones monitored the traffic on the roadways. At any moment, he knew, he could end up just like Anwar al-Awlaki, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, and any one of hundreds of other al Qaeda members who had been taken out by the U.S. from the skies above.

He, and Nayef next to him, did their best to put this fear out of their minds, and they journeyed on to the south with their faces covered.

*   *   *

After six hours of travel they arrived in Al Kawd on the northern shore of the Arabian Sea, some thirty-five miles northeast of Aden. Fighters from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had taken the town the year before after pushing Yemeni government forces out of the area, declaring the region to be an Islamic emirate, and they had spent the intervening months expanding their territory. In many towns and villages, such as nearby Zinjibar and Jaar to the north, AQAP held a tight grip on much of the province of Abyan.

The main threat to the al Qaeda fighters here was no longer the Yemeni military, as the government in Aden had pulled most of its forces out of the area.

No, Predator and Reaper drones operated by the United States served as the biggest danger to the leadership of the terrorist organization. Over thirty drone strikes in the province in the last year alone had killed scores of fighters.

They spent the night at a small walled home there, and then, at first light, they traveled north in the back of a different vehicle than the one they had used the day before.

Al-Amriki and Miguel were taken north to the village of Al Hisn, and then they were instructed to climb onto the back of a mule cart. The driver of the cart spoke little as he transported them on a dirt road to the west.

There were no trucks passing on the road, but the surface was not in such bad condition. Al-Amriki did not understand why he and Miguel were riding in the back of a slow-moving donkey cart. He asked the cart driver, and the man pointed toward a bright clear sky without saying another word.

Miguel leaned over to Doyle. “Drones,” he said, which was plain enough to Amriki, but it seemed somewhat paranoid to think the CIA flying overhead targeted every vehicle in the province. Doyle presumed a Hellfire missile would be at least as effective on a donkey cart as it would on a pickup truck, so he did not see the point in this level of subterfuge.

They were not targeted and ninety minutes later they found themselves approaching a small hamlet on the banks of Wadi Bana, a wide gulch just south of a mountain range that rose from the brown earth like the arthritic spine of a starving cow. The cart pulled into the small rustic village and then stopped. They were asked to climb out and then an al Qaeda commander in the Arabian Peninsula recognized by al-Amriki and Nayef appeared in a darkened doorway, and he beckoned the men to join him under a thatch awning.

“
A salaam aleikum,
” said the man.

“
Wa aleikum a salaam,
” replied the new arrivals.

“Welcome to your new home, brothers.”

Al-Amriki looked around him in the village. Goats and children ambled in the road, old men and women in burkas milled about.

“Where is the base?” Al-Amriki asked.

“
This
is the base,” the commander said. “The American drones fly overhead, and they see this as just a small village on the banks of the wadi. But, my brothers, it is much more than this. Look carefully.”

Daoud did as instructed, and soon he saw. Between the rustic stone buildings, motorcycles were hidden under brown tarps. The building’s roofs were similarly covered with brown canvas, creating tentlike firing positions on the roofs from which armed men peered down, covering the roads with their weapons and scanning the skies with binoculars.

A long barn just ahead next to a corral filled with barnyard animals was missing one of its walls. Across a stretch of dirt and sand what appeared to be a nondescript building stood, but al-Amriki realized that it was a solid baked-brick structure, in front of which were stacked row upon row of tractor tires painted brown. In front of the tires was a long line of what al-Amriki recognized to be wooden target stands.

He knew now he was looking at a firing range; men could fire from under the cover of the barn and not be seen from the air.

As he walked with Miguel and the AQ commander, he was shown obstacle courses disguised in the twists and turns of a small market, a bomb-making factory in a pair of simple buildings with a covered walkway between them, a garrison that held forty armed men and their gear that was actually more than a dozen one-room homes with adjoining portals in the walls, and an underground armory built into a hillside and reinforced with sandbags, cement, and rebar.

The American AQ operative had been to secret bases here in Yemen, as well as in Pakistan, Somalia, Eritrea, and Lebanon. But he had never seen anyplace like the one in which he now stood.

Al-Amriki looked out across the complex. “It looks just like a normal village.”

“It does, and to the drones in the sky, that is exactly what it is. We have a mosque, fifty-four individual homes, a market, a madrassa. Even livestock and children and women. From the air it appears as if the roads in our complex are connected to the roads of Al Hisn, but in actuality they are not. We have checkpoints to prevent anyone from venturing anywhere near here other than those who are allowed entrance.”

“And what about security in the base?”

“Twenty armed sentries at any one time. We have them on the roofs, as well as on the hillsides on all points of the compass, but they carry radios instead of rifles. The drones have strong eyes. We have heavy machine gun emplacements, as well.”

“And where will my men be billeted?” asked al-Amriki.

“In the clinic on the far edge of the village, closest to the wadi. You and your men will be protected by both Allah and the Red Crescent on the roof.”

“And our training?”

“Will take place in the larger structures, as well as down in the wadi in the narrow cuts of earth that will block out a clear view from above.”

“I am very impressed. You have thought of everything.”

The older man nodded without emotion. “The reach and strength of the Americans has only made us more powerful, brother. We have lost many Shahid along the way, but those of us who have survived the Americans for ten years are mightier than we would have been without this challenge.”

*   *   *

The twelve operatives who would join al-Amriki and Miguel on their mission trickled in over the course of the next day. In ones and twos they came into the village in mule carts, each time thinking they were just stopping here for a moment before heading to some walled military complex farther up in the hills to the north. Quickly they were escorted into the small white clinic building, where they met al-Amriki and Miguel, the two men who would lead them on an operation that they knew nothing about.