Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged “old faithful”
was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev’s phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction.
The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a “listener” rather than a “watcher” and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography.
All this information, from the professors and scientists, analysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became.
From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military brass sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply “the Black Hole.”
It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner’s air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military—in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, arsenals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction—research facilities, assembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots.
The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, assumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex.
But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them.
A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth analyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and Analysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of analytical hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.
Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad.
At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street. The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic, and into darkness.
He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot.
Abu Fouad and the woman had been told to wait up to half an hour. If the Bedou had not shown up, they were to abort and go home. They actually waited forty minutes before returning to the car. Both were frustrated.
“He must have been detained,” said Abu Fouad to his companion. “An Iraqi patrol, perhaps. Who knows? Anyway, damn. I’ll have to start again.”
“I think you’re crazy to trust him,” said the woman. “You have no idea who he is.”
They spoke softly, the Kuwaiti resistance leader looking up and down the street to ensure no Iraqi soldiers had appeared while he was away.
“He’s successful and cunning, and he works like a professional. That’s all I need to know. I would like to collaborate with him, if he’s willing.”
“Then I have nothing against that.”
The woman uttered a short scream. Abu Fouad jerked in his seat.
“Don’t turn round. Let’s just talk,” said the voice from the back seat. In his rearview mirror the Kuwaiti saw the dim outline of a Bedouin keffiyeh and caught the odor of one who lives rough. He let out his breath in a long exhalation.
“You move quietly, Bedou.”
“No need to make a noise, Abu Fouad. It attracts Iraqis. I don’t like that, except when I am ready.”
Abu Fouad’s teeth flashed under his black moustache.
“Very well. Now we have found each other. Let us talk. By the way, why hide in the car?”
“If this meeting had been a trap for me, your first words when you got back into the car would have been different.”
“Self-incriminating—”
“Of course.”
“And then?”
“You would be dead.”
“Understood.”
“Who is your companion? I made no mention of companions.”
“You set up the rendezvous. It was I who had to trust you also. She is a trusted colleague. Asrar Qabandi.”
“Very well. Greetings, Miss Qabandi. What do you want to talk about?”
“Guns, Bedou. Kalashnikov machine pistols, modern hand grenades, Semtex-H. My people could do so much more with that sort of thing.”
“Your people are being caught, Abu Fouad. Ten were surrounded in the same house by an entire company of Iraqi infantry under AMAM leadership. All shot. All youngsters.”
Abu Fouad was silent. It had been a major disaster.
“Nine,” he said at last. “The tenth played dead and crept away later. He is injured, and we are taking care of him. It was he who told us.”
“What?”
“That they were betrayed. If he had died, we would not have known.”
“Ah, betrayal. Always the danger in any resistance movement. And the traitor?”
“We know him, of course. We thought we could trust him.”
“But he is guilty?”
“It seems so.”
“Only seems?”
Abu Fouad sighed.
“The survivor swears that only the eleventh man knew of the meeting, and the address. But it could be there was a leak somewhere else, or one of them was tailed. ...”
“Then he must be tested, this suspect. And if guilty, punished. Miss Qabandi, would you leave us for a while, please.”
The young woman glanced at Abu Fouad, who nodded. She left the car and walked back to the grove of trees. The Bedou told Abu Fouad carefully and in detail what he wanted him to do.
“I will not be leaving the house until seven o’clock,” he finished. “So under no circumstances must you make the phone call until half past seven. Understood?”
The Bedou slipped out of the car and disappeared among the dark alleys running between the houses.
Abu Fouad drove up the street and picked up Miss Qabandi. Together they drove home.
The Bedou never saw the woman again. Before the liberation of Kuwait, Asrar Qabandi was caught by the AMAM, rigorously tortured, gang-raped, shot, and decapitated. Before she died, she never said a thing.
Terry Martin was on the phone to Simon Paxman, who was still inundated with work and could have done without the interruption. It was only because he had taken a liking to the fussy professor of Arabic studies that Paxman took the call.
“I know I’m being a bother, but do you have any contacts at GCHQ?”
“Yes, of course,” said Paxman. “In the Arabic Service, mainly. Know the Director of it, come to that.”
“Could you possibly give him a call and ask if he’d see me?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so. What have you in mind?”
“It’s the stuff coming out of Iraq these days. I??
?ve studied all Saddam’s speeches, of course, and watched the announcements about hostages and human shields and seen their ghastly attempts at PR on the television. But I’d like to see if there’s anything else being picked up, stuff that hasn’t been cleared by their Propaganda Ministry.”
“Well, that’s what GCHQ does,” admitted Paxman. “I don’t see why not. If you’ve been sitting in with the Medusa people, you’ve got the clearance. I’ll give him a call.”
That afternoon, by appointment, Terry Martin drove west to Gloucestershire and presented himself at the well-guarded gate of the sprawl of buildings and antennae that constitute the third main arm of British intelligence alongside MI-6 and MI-5, the Government Communications Headquarters.
The Director of the Arabic Service was Sean Plummer, under whom worked that same Mr. Al-Khouri who had tested Mike Martin’s Arabic in the Chelsea restaurant eleven weeks earlier, though neither Terry Martin nor Plummer knew that.
The Director had agreed to see Martin in the midst of a busy day because, as a fellow Arabist, he had heard of the young scholar of the SOAS and admired his original research on the Abassid Caliphate.
“Now, what can I do for you?” he asked when they were both seated with a glass of mint tea, a luxury Plummer permitted himself to escape the miseries of institution coffee. Martin explained that he was surprised at the paucity of the intercepts he had been shown corning out of Iraq. Plummer’s eyes lit up.
“You’re right, of course. As you know, our Arab friends lend to chatter like magpies on open circuits.
The last couple of years, the interceptable traffic has slumped. Now, either the whole national character has changed, or—”
“Buried cables,” said Martin.
“Precisely. Apparently Saddam and his boys have buried over forty-five thousand miles of fiber-optic communication cables. That’s what they’re talking on. For me, it’s an absolute bastard. How can I keep giving the spooks in London another round of Baghdad weather reports and Mother Hussein’s bloody laundry lists?”
It was his manner of speaking, Martin realized. Plummer’s service delivered a lot more than that.
“They still talk of course—ministers, civil servants, generals—right down to chitchat between tank commanders on the Saudi border. But the serious, top-secret phone calls are off the air. Never used to be. What do you want to see?”
For the next four hours, Terry Martin ran his eye over a range of intercepts. Radio broadcasts were too obvious; he was looking for something in an inadvertent phone call, a slip of the tongue, a mistake. Finally he closed the files of digests.
“Would you,” he asked, “just keep an eye open for anything really odd, anything that just doesn’t make sense?”
Mike Martin was beginning to think he should one day write a tourist’s guide to the flat roofs of Kuwait City. He seemed to have spent an impressive amount of time lying on one of them surveying the area beneath him. On the other hand, they did make superb places for LUPs, or lying-up positions.
He had been on this particular one for almost two days, surveying the house whose address he had given to Abu Fouad. It was one of the six he had been lent by Ahmed Al-Khalifa, and one he would now never use again.
Although it was two days since he had given the address to Abu Fouad and nothing was supposed to happen until tonight, October 9, he had still watched, night and day, living off a handful of bread and fruit.
If Iraqi soldiers arrived before seven-thirty on the evening of the ninth, he would know who had betrayed him—Abu Fouad himself. He glanced at his watch. Seven-thirty. The Kuwaiti colonel should be making his call about now, as instructed.
Across the city, Abu Fouad was indeed lifting the phone. He dialed a number, which was answered on the third ring.
“Salah?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“We have never met, but I have heard many good things about you—that you are loyal and brave, one of us. People know me as Abu Fouad.”
There was a gasp at the end of the phone.
“I need your help, Salah. Can we, the movement, count on you?”
“Oh, yes, Abu Fouad. Please tell me what it is you want.”
“Not I personally, but a friend. He is wounded and sick. I know you are a pharmacist. You must at once take medications to him—bandages, antibiotics, pain-killers. Have you heard of the one they call the Bedou?”
“Yes, of course. But do you mean to say you know him?”
“Never mind, but we have been working together for weeks. He is hugely important to us.”
“I will go downstairs to the shop right now and select the things he needs, and take them to him. Where do I find him?”
“He is holed up in a house in Shuwaikh and cannot move. Take pencil and paper.”
Abu Fouad dictated the address he had been given. At the other end of the phone it was noted.
“I will drive over at once, Abu Fouad. You can trust me,” said Salah the pharmacist.
“You are a good man. You will be rewarded.”
Abu Fouad hung up. The Bedou had said he would phone at dawn if nothing happened, and the pharmacist would be in the clear.
Mike Martin saw, rather than heard, the first truck just before half past eight. It was rolling on its own momentum, the engine off to make no sound, and it trundled past the intersection of the street before coming to a halt a few yards farther on and just out of sight. Martin nodded in approval.
The second truck did the same a few moments later. From each vehicle, twenty men descended quietly, Green Berets who knew what they were doing. The men moved in a column up the street, headed by an officer who grasped a civilian. The man’s white dish-dash glimmered in the half-darkness. With all the street names ripped down, the soldiers had needed a civilian guide to find this road. But the house numbers were still up.
The civilian stopped at a house, studied the number plate, and pointed. The captain in charge had a hurried, whispered conversation with his sergeant, who took fifteen men down a side alley to cover the back.
Followed by the remaining soldiers, the captain tried the steel door to the small garden. It opened. The men surged through.
Inside the garden the captain could see that a low light burned in an upstairs room. Much of the ground floor was taken up by the garage, which was empty. At the front door all pretense of stealth vanished.
The captain tried the handle, found it was locked, and gestured to a soldier behind him. The man fired a brief burst from his automatic rifle at the lock in the wooden setting, and the door swung open.
With the captain leading, the Green Berets rushed in. Some went for the darkened ground-floor rooms; the captain and the rest went straight up for the master bedroom.
From the landing the captain could see the interior of the low-lit bedroom, the armchair with its back to the door, and the checkered keffiyeh peeping out over the top. He did not fire. Colonel Sabaawi of the AMAM had been specific: This one he wanted alive for questioning. As he rushed forward, the young officer did not feel the snag of the nylon fishing line against his shins.
He heard his own men bursting in through the back and others pounding up the stairs. He saw the slumped form in the soiled white robe, filled out by cushions, and the big watermelon wrapped in the keffiyeh . His face contorted with anger, and he had the time to snarl an insult at the trembling pharmacist who stood in the doorway.
Five pounds of Semtex-H may not sound like much, and it does not look very large. The houses of that neighborhood are built of stone and concrete, which was what saved the surrounding residences, some of which were occupied by Kuwaitis, from more than superficial damage. But the house in which the soldiers stood virtually disappeared. Tiles from its roof were later found several hundred yards away.
The Bedou had not waited around to watch his handiwork. He was already two streets away, shuffling along, minding his own business, when he heard the muffled boom, like a door being slammed, then the one-second hollow silence
, then the crash of masonry.
Three things happened the following day, all after dark. In Kuwait, the Bedou had his second meeting with Abu Fouad. This time, the Kuwaiti came alone to the rendezvous, in the shadow of a deep arched doorway only two hundred yards from the Sheraton, which had been taken over by dozens of senior Iraqi officers.
“You heard, Abu Fouad?”
“Of course. The whole city is buzzing. They lost over twenty men and the rest injured.” He sighed.
“There will be more random reprisals.”
“You wish to stop now?”
“No. We cannot. But how much longer must we suffer?”
“The Americans and the British will come. One day.”
“Allah make it soon. Was Salah with them?”
“He brought them. There was only one civilian. You told no one else?”
“No, just him. It must have been him. He has the lives of nine young men on his head. He will not see Paradise.”
“So. What more do you want of me?”
“I do not ask who you are or where you come from. As a trained Army officer, I know you cannot be just a simple Bedou camel-drover from the desert. You have supplies of explosives, guns, ammunition, grenades. My people could also do much with these things.”
“And your offer?”
“Join with us and bring your supplies. Or stay on your own but share your supplies. I am not here to threaten, only to ask. But if you want to help our resistance, this is the way to do it.”
Mike Martin thought for a while. After eight weeks he had half his supplies left, still buried in the desert or scattered through the two villas he used not for living but for storage. Of his other four houses, one was destroyed and the other, where he had met with his pupils, compromised. He could hand over his stores and ask for more by night drop—risky but feasible, so long as his messages to Riyadh were not being intercepted, which he could not know. Or he could make another camel trip across the border and return with two more panniers. Even that would not be easy—there were now sixteen divisions of Iraqis ranged along that border, three times the number when he had entered.