Shortly after noon, he was awakened by the clank of tanks quite close by and realized he was too near the main road that runs from Jahra, in Kuwait, due southwest to cross into Saudi Arabia at the Al Salmi customs station. After sundown he waited until almost midnight before setting out. He knew the border could not be more than twelve miles to the south.
His late start enabled him to move between the last Iraqi patrols at about threeA.M. , that hour when human spirits are lowest and sentries tend to doze.
By the light of the moon, he saw the Qaimat Subah police station slip by to one side, and two miles farther on, he knew he had crossed the border. To be on the safe side, he kept going until he cut into the lateral road that runs east-west between Hamatiyyat and Ar-Rugi. There he stopped and assembled his radio dish.
Because the Iraqis to the north had dug in several miles on the Kuwait side of the border, and because General Schwarzkopf’s plan called for the Desert Shield forces also to lie back to ensure that, if attacked, they would know the Iraqis had truly invaded Saudi Arabia, Martin found himself in an empty no-man’s-land. One day, that empty land would become a seething torrent of Saudi and American forces streaming north into Kuwait, but in the predawn darkness of October 24 he had it to himself.
Simon Paxman was awakened by-a junior member of the Century House team who inhabited the villa.
“Black Bear has come on the air, Simon. He’s crossed the border.”
Paxman was out of bed and running into the radio room in his pajamas. A radio operator was on a swivel chair facing a console that ran along one complete wall of what had once been quite an elegant bedroom. Because it was now the twenty-fourth, the codes had changed.
“Corpus Christi to Texas Ranger, where are you? Say again, state your position, please.”
The voice sounded tinny when it came out of the console speaker, but it was perfectly clear.
“South of Qaimat Subah, on the Hamatiyyat-to-Ar-Rugi road.”
The operator turned to glance at Paxman. The SIS man pressed the Send button and said:
“Ranger, stay there. There’s a taxi coming for you. Acknowledge.”
“Understood,” said the voice. “I’ll wait for the black cab.”
It was not actually a black cab. It was an American Blackhawk helicopter that swept down the road two hours later, a loadmaster strapped in the open door beside the pilot, masked with a pair of binoculars, scanning the dusty track that purported to be a road. From two hundred feet, the loadmaster spotted a man beside a camel and was about to fly on when the man waved.
The Blackhawk slowed to a hover and watched the Bedou warily. So far as the pilot was concerned, this was uncomfortably close to the border. Still, the map position he had been given by his squadron intelligence officer was accurate, and there was no one else in sight.
It was Chip Barber who had arranged with the U.S. Army detail at the Riyadh military air base to lend a Blackhawk to pick up a Britisher who was due to come over the border out of Kuwait. The Blackhawk had the range, but no one had told the Army pilot about a Bedouin tribesman with a camel.
As the American Army aviators watched from two hundred feet, the man on the ground arranged a series of stones. When he had finished, he stood back. The loadmaster focused his glasses on the display of stones. They said simply: Hi there.
The loadmaster spoke into his mask.
“Must be the guy. Let’s go get him.”
The pilot nodded, and the Blackhawk curved around and down until it hovered a foot off the ground twenty yards from the man and his beast.
Martin had already taken the panniers and the heavy camel saddle off his animal and dumped them by the roadside. The radio set and his personal sidearm, the Browning 9-mm. thirteen-shot automatic favored by the SAS, were in the tote bag slung over his shoulder.
As the helicopter came down, the camel panicked and cantered off. Martin watched her go. She had served him well, despite her foul temper. She would come to no harm alone in that desert. So far as she was concerned, she was home. She would roam freely, finding her own fodder and water, until some Bedou found her, saw no brand mark, and gleefully took her for his own.
Martin ducked under the whirling blades and ran to the open door. Over the whine of the rotors, the loadmaster shouted:
“Your name, please?”
“Major Martin.”
A hand came out of the aperture to pull Martin into the hull.
“Welcome aboard, Major.”
At that point the engine noise drowned out further talk, the loadmaster handed Martin a pair of ear-defenders to muffle the roar, and they settled back for the run to Riyadh.
Approaching the city, the pilot was diverted to a villa on the outskirts of the city. Next to it was a patch of waste ground where someone had laid out three rows of bright orange seat-cushions in the form of an H. As the Blackhawk hovered, the man in Arab robes jumped the three feet to the ground, turned to wave his thanks to the crew, and strode toward the house as the helicopter lifted away. Two house servants began to gather up the cushions.
Martin walked through the arched doorway in the villa wall and found himself in a flagged courtyard.
Two men were emerging from the door of the house. One he recognized from the SAS headquarters in West London all those weeks ago.
“Simon Paxman,” said the younger man, holding out his hand. “Bloody good to have you back. This is Chip Barber, one of our cousins from Langley.”
Barber shook hands and took in the figure before him: a stained, off-white robe from chin to floor, a striped blanket folded and hung over one shoulder, a red-and-white-checked keffiyeh with two black cords to hold it in place, a lean, hard, dark-eyed, black-stubbled face.
“Good to know you, Major. Heard a lot about you.” His nose twitched. “Guess you could use a hot tub, eh?”
“Oh, yes, I’ll get that sorted out at once,” said Paxman.
Martin nodded, said “Thanks,” and walked into the cool of the villa. Paxman and Barber came in behind him. Barber was privately elated.
“Damn,” he thought to himself. “I do believe this bastard could even do it.”
It took three consecutive baths in the marble tub of the villa, obtained for the British by Prince Khaled bin Sultan, for Martin to scrape off the dirt and sweat of weeks. He sat with a towel around his waist while a barber summoned for the purpose gave his matted hair a cut, then he shaved with Simon Paxman’s wash-kit.
His keffiyeh , blanket, robes, and sandals had been taken away to the garden, where a Saudi servant had turned them into a satisfactory bonfire. Two hours later, in a pair of Paxman’s light cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, Mike Martin sat at the dining table and contemplated a five-course lunch.
“Would you mind telling me,” he asked, “why you pulled me out?”
It was Chip Barber who answered.
“Good question, Major. Damn good question. Deserves a damn good answer. Right? Fact is, we’d like you to go into Baghdad. Next week. Salad or fish?”
Chapter 10
Both the CIA and the SIS were in a hurry. Although little mention was made of it then or since, by late October there had been established in Riyadh a very large CIA presence and operation.
Before too long, the CIA presence was at loggerheads with the military chieftaincy a mile away in the warren of planning rooms beneath the Saudi Defense Ministry. The mood, certainly of the air generals, was one of conviction that with the skillful use of the amazing array of technical wizardry at their disposal, they could ascertain all they needed to know about Iraq’s defenses and preparations.
And an amazing array it was. Apart from the satellites in space supplying their constant stream of pictures of the land of Saddam Hussein; apart from the Aurora and the U-2 doing the same but at closer range, there were other machines of daunting complexity dedicated to providing airborne information.
Another breed of satellite, in geosynchronous position, hovering over the Middle East, was ded
icated to listening to what the Iraqis said, and these satellites caught every word uttered on an open line. They could not catch the planning conferences held on those 45,000 miles of buried fiber-optic cables.
Among the airplanes, chief was the Airborne Warning and Control System, known as AWACS. These were Boeing 707 airliners, carrying a huge radar dome mounted on their backs. Turning in slow circles over the northern Gulf, on twenty-four-hour rotating shifts, the AWACS could inform Riyadh within seconds of any air movement over Iraq. Hardly an Iraqi plane could move or mission take off but Riyadh knew its number, heading, course speed, and altitude.
Backing up the AWACS was another Boeing 707 conversion, the E8-A, known as J-STAR, which did for movements on the ground what AWACS did for movements in the air. With its big Norden radar scanning downward and sideways, so that it could cover Iraq without ever entering Iraqi airspace, the J-STAR could pick up almost any piece of metal that began to move.
The combination of these and many more technical miracles on which Washington had spent billions and billions of dollars convinced the generals that if it was said, they could hear it, if it moved, they could see it, and if they knew about it, they could destroy it. They could do it, moreover, come rain or fog, night or day. Never again would the enemy be able to shelter under a canopy of jungle trees and escape detection. The eyes-in-the-sky would see it all.
The intelligence officers from Langley were skeptical, and it showed. Doubts were for civilians. In the face of this the military became irritable. It had a tough job to do, it was going to do it, and cold water it did not need.
On the British side the situation was different. The SIS operation in the Gulf Theater was nothing like that of the CIA, but it was still a large operation by the standards of Century House, and in the manner of Century it was lower profile and more secretive.
Moreover, the British had appointed as commander of all U.K. forces in the Gulf, and second-in-command to General Schwarzkopf, an unusual soldier of uncommon background.
Norman Schwarzkopf was a big, burly man of considerable military prowess and very much a soldier’s soldier. Known either as Stormin’ Norman or “the Bear,” his mood could vary from genial bonhomie to explosions of temper, always short-lived, which his staff referred to as the general going ballistic. His British counterpart could not have been more different.
Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billière, who had arrived in early October to take command of the Brits, was a deceptively slight, lean, wiry man of diffident manner and reluctant speech. The big American extrovert and the slim British introvert made an odd partnership, which succeeded only because each knew enough of the other to recognize what lay behind the up-front presentation.
Sir Peter, known to the troops as P.B., was the most decorated soldier in the British Army, a matter of which he would never speak under any circumstances. Only those who had been with him in his various campaigns would occasionally mutter into their beer glasses of the icy cool under fire that had caused all those “gongs” to be pinned to his tunic. He had also once been commanding officer of the SAS, a background that gave him a most useful knowledge of the Gulf, of Arabic, and of covert operations.
Because the British commander had worked before with the SIS, the Century House team found in him a more accustomed ear to listen to their reservations than in the CIA group.
The SAS already had a good presence in the Gulf Theater, holed up in their own secluded camp in the corner of a larger military base outside Riyadh. As a former commander of these men, General P.B. was concerned that their remarkable talents should not be wasted on workaday tasks that infantry or paratroopers could do. These men were specialists in deep penetration and hostage-recovery.
Sitting in that villa outside Riyadh during the last week of October, the CIA and SIS team came up with an operation that was very much within the scope of the SAS. The operation was put to the local SAS
commander, and he went to work on his planning.
The entire afternoon of Mike Martin’s first day at the villa was spent in explaining to him the discovery by the Anglo-American Allies of the existence of the renegade in Baghdad who had been code-named Jericho. They told him he still had the right to refuse and to rejoin the regiment. During the evening he thought it over. Then he told the CIA-SIS briefing officers:
“I’ll go in. But I have my conditions, and I want them met.”
The main problem, they all acknowledged, would be his cover story. This was not a quick in-and-out mission, depending on speed and daring to outwit the counterintelligence net. Nor could he count on covert support and assistance such as he had met in Kuwait. Nor could he wander the desert outside Baghdad as an errant Bedou tribesman. All Iraq was by then a great armed camp. Even areas that on the map seemed desolate and empty were crisscrossed with army patrols. Inside Baghdad, Army and AMAM check-squads were everywhere, the Military Police looking for deserters and the AMAM for anyone at all who might be suspicious.
The fear in which the AMAM was held was well known to everyone at the villa. Reports from businessmen and journalists, and from British and American diplomats before their expulsion, amply testified to the omnipresence of the Secret Police, who kept Iraq’s citizens in dread and trembling.
If Martin went in at all, he would have to stay in. Running an agent like Jericho would not be easy for him. First, the man would have to be traced through the dead-letter boxes and realerted that he was back in operation. The boxes might already be compromised and under surveillance. Jericho might have been caught and forced to confess all.
More, Martin would have to establish a place to live, a base where he could send and receive messages.
He would have to prowl the city, servicing the drops if Jericho’s stream of inside information resumed, although it would now be destined for new masters.
Finally, and worst of all, there could be no diplomatic cover, no protective shield to spare him the horrors that would follow capture and exposure. For such a man, the interrogation cells of Abu Ghraib would be ready.
“What—er, exactly did you have in mind?” asked Paxman when Martin had made his demand.
“If I can’t be a diplomat, I want to be attached to a diplomatic household.”
“That’s not easy, old boy. Embassies are watched.”
“I didn’t say embassy. I said diplomatic household.”
“A kind of a chauffeur?” asked Barber.
“No. Too obvious. The driver has to stay at the wheel of the car. He drives the diplomat around and is watched like the diplomat.”
“What, then?”
“Unless things have changed radically, many of the senior diplomats live outside the embassy building, and if the rank is senior enough, they will have a villa in its own walled garden. In the old days such houses always rated a gardener-handyman.”
“A gardener?” queried Barber. “For chrissake, that’s a manual laborer. You’d be picked up and recruited into the Army.”
“No. The gardener-handyman does everything outside the house. He keeps the garden, goes shopping on his bicycle for fish at the fish market, fruit and vegetables, bread and oil. He lives in a shack at the bottom of the garden.”
“So what’s the point, Mike?” asked Paxman.
“The point is, he’s invisible. He’s so ordinary, no one notices him. If he’s stopped, his ID card is in order and he carries a letter on embassy paper, in Arabic, explaining that he works for the diplomat and is exempt from service, and would the authorities please let him go about his business. Unless he is doing something wrong, any policeman who makes trouble for him is up against a formal complaint from the embassy.”
The intelligence officers thought it over.
“It might work,” admitted Barber. “Ordinary, invisible. What do you think, Simon?”
“Well,” said Paxman, “the diplomat would have to be in on it.”
“Only partly,” said Martin. “He would simply have to have a flat order from his governm
ent to receive and employ the man who will present himself, then face the other way and get on with his job. What he suspects is his own affair. He’ll keep his mouth shut if he wants to keep his job and his career. That’s if the order comes from high enough.”
“The British embassy’s out,” said Paxman. “The Iraqis would go out of their way to offend our people.”
“Same with us,” said Barber. “Who do you have in mind, Mike?”
When Martin told them, they stared at him in disbelief.
“You cannot be serious,” said the American.
“But I am,” said Martin calmly.
“Hell, Mike, a request like that would have to go up to—well, the Prime Minister.”
“And the President,” said Barber.
“Well, we’re all supposed to be such pals nowadays, why not? I mean, if Jericho’s product ends up saving Allied lives, is a phone call too much to ask?”
Chip Barber glanced at his watch. The time in Washington was still seven hours earlier than that in the Gulf. Langley would be finishing its lunch. In London it was only two hours earlier, but senior officers might still be at their desks.
Barber went hotfoot back to the U.S. embassy and sent a blitz message in code to the Deputy Director (Operations), Bill Stewart, who, when he had read it, took it to the Director, William Webster. He in turn called the White House and asked for a meeting with his President.
Simon Paxman was lucky. His encrypted phone call caught Steve Laing at his desk at Century House, and after listening, the head of Ops for Mid-East called the Chief at his home.
Sir Colin thought it over and placed a call to the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Robin Butler.
It is accepted that the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service has a right, in cases he deems to be an emergency, to ask for and secure a personal meeting with his Prime Minister, and Margaret Thatcher had always been notable for her accessibility to the men who ran the intelligence services and the Special Forces. She agreed to meet the Chief in her private office in 10 Downing Street the following morning at eight.