The Afghan, Page 2

  There have been spats, especially over the rash of British traitors starting with Philby, Burgess and Maclean in 1951. Then the Americans became aware they too had a whole rogues’ gallery of traitors working for Moscow and the inter-agency sniping stopped. The end of the Cold War in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new Cold War, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was having its birth pangs.

  After 9/11 there was no more rivalry and even the traditional horse-trading ended. The rule became: if we have it, you guys had better share it. And vice versa. Contributions to the common struggle come from a patchwork quilt of other foreign agencies but nothing matches the closeness of the Anglosphere information-gatherers.

  Colonel Razak knew both the Heads of Station in his own city. On personal terms he was closer to the SIS man, Brian O’Dowd, and the rogue cellphone was originally a British discovery. So it was O’Dowd he rang with the news when he came down from the roof.

  At that moment Mr Al-Qur went to the bathroom and Abdelahi reached under the cushion for the cellphone to put it back on top of the attaché case where he had found it. With a start of guilt, he realized it was still ‘on’ so he switched it off at once. He was thinking of battery wastage, not interception. Anyway, he was too late by eight seconds. The direction-finder had done its job.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve found it?’ asked O’Dowd. His day had suddenly become Christmas and several birthdays rolled into one.

  ‘No question, Brian. The call came from a top-floor apartment of a five-storey building in the Old Quarter. Two of my undercover people are slipping down there to have a look and work out the approaches.’

  ‘When are you going in?’

  ‘Just after dark. I’d like to make it three a.m., but the risk is too big. They might fly the coop . . .’

  Colonel Razak had been to Camberley Staff College in England on a one-year Commonwealth-sponsored course and was proud of his command of idiom.

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ said the Irishman.

  Razak laughed out loud. He enjoyed the banter.

  ‘As a believer in the one true God I would not know,’ he said. ‘All right. My office at six. But it is mufti. And I mean our mufti.’

  He meant there would not only be no uniforms but no western suits either. In the Old Town, and especially in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar, only the shalwar kameez assembly of loose trousers and long shirt would pass unnoticed. Or the robes and turbans of the mountain clans. And that also applied to O’Dowd.

  The British agent was there just before six, with his black and black-windowed Toyota Land Cruiser. A British Land-Rover might have been more patriotic, but the Toyota was the preferred vehicle of local fundamentalists and would pass unnoticed. He also brought a bottle of the whisky known as Chivas Regal. It was Abdul Razak’s favourite tipple. He had once chided his Pakistani friend on his taste for the alcoholic tincture from Scotland.

  ‘I regard myself as a good Muslim but not an obsessive one,’ said Razak. ‘I do not touch pork, but see no harm in dancing or a good cigar. To ban these is Taliban fanaticism which I do not share. As for the grape, or even the grain, wine was widely drunk during the first four Caliphates and if, one day in Paradise, I am chided by a higher authority than you, then I shall beg the all-merciful Allah for forgiveness. In the meantime, give me a top-up.’

  It was perhaps strange that a tank corps officer should have made such an excellent policeman, but such was Abdul Razak. He was thirty-six, married with two children and educated. He also embodied a capacity for lateral thought, for quiet subtlety and the tactics of the mongoose facing the cobra rather than the charging elephant. He wanted to take the apartment at the top of the block of flats without a raging fire-fight, if he could. Hence his approach was quiet and stealthy.

  Peshawar is a most ancient city and no part is older than the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. Here caravans travelling the Great Trunk Road through the towering and intimidating Khyber Pass into Afghanistan have paused to refresh men and camels for many centuries. And like any good bazaar the Qissa Khawani has always provided for man’s basic needs: blankets, shawls, carpets, brass artefacts, copper bowls, food and drink. It still does.

  It is multi-ethnic and multilingual. The accustomed eye can spot the turbans of Afridis, Waziris, Ghilzai and Pakistanis from nearby, contrasting with the chitral caps from further north and the fur-trimmed winter hats of Tajiks and Uzbeks.

  In this maze of narrow streets and lanes where a man can lose any pursuer are the shops and food stalls of the clock bazaar, basket bazaar, money-changers, bird market and the bazaar of the storytellers. In imperial days the British called Peshawar the Piccadilly of Central Asia.

  The apartment identified by the D/F sweeper as the source of the phone call was in one of those tall, narrow buildings with intricately carved balconies and shutters; it was four floors above a carpet warehouse in a lane wide enough for only one car. Because of the heat in summer, all these buildings have flat roofs where tenants may catch a breath of cool night air, and open stairwells leading up from the street below. Colonel Razak led his team quietly and on foot.

  He sent four men, all in tribal clothes, up to the roof of a building four houses down the street from the target. They emerged on to the roof and calmly walked from roof to roof until they reached the final building. Here they waited for their signal. The colonel led six men up the stairs from the street. All had machine pistols under their robes save the point man, a heavily muscled Punjabi who bore the rammer.

  When they were all lined up in the stairwell the colonel nodded to the point man who drew back the rammer and shattered the lock. The door sprang inwards and the team went inside at the run. Three of the men on the roof came straight down the access stairs; the fourth remained aloft in case anyone tried to escape upwards.

  When Brian O’Dowd tried to recall it later, it all appeared extremely fast and blurred. That was the impression the occupants received as well.

  The attack squad had no idea how many men would be inside or what they would find. It could have been a small army; it could have been a family sipping tiffin. They did not even know the layout of the apartment; architects’ plans may be filed in London or New York, but not in the Qissa Khawani Bazaar. All they knew was that a call had been made from a red-flagged cellphone.

  In fact they found four young men watching TV. For two seconds the attack group feared they might have raided a perfectly innocent household. Then they registered that all the young men were heavily bearded, all were mountain men and one, the fastest to react, was reaching beneath his robes for a gun. His name was Abdelahi and he died with four bullets from a Heckler & Koch MP5 through the chest. The other three were smothered and held down before they could fight. Colonel Razak had been very clear; he wanted them alive if possible.

  The presence of the fifth man was announced by a crash from the bedroom. The Punjabi had dropped his rammer but his shoulder was enough. The door came down and two CTC hard men went in, followed by Colonel Razak. In the middle of the room they found a middle-aged Arab, his eyes wide and round with fear or hatred. He stooped to try to gather up the laptop computer he had hurled to the terracotta tiles in an effort to destroy it; then he realized there was no time, turned and ran for the window which was wide open. Colonel Razak screamed: ‘Grab him,’ but the Pakistani missed his grip. The Egyptian had been caught naked to the waist because of the heat, and his skin was slick with sweat. He did not even pause for the balustrade but went straight over and crashed to the cobbles forty feet below. Bystanders gathered round the body within seconds but the AQ financier gurgled twice and died.

  The building and street had become a chaos of shouting and running figures. Using his mobile phone the colonel called up the fifty uniformed soldiers he had positioned in the black-windowed vans
four streets away. They came racing down the alley to restore order, if that is what even more chaos can be called. But they served their purpose; they sealed the apartment block. In time Abdul Razak would want to interview every neighbour and above all the landlord, the carpet-seller at street level.

  The corpse on the street was surrounded by the army and blanketed. A stretcher would appear. The dead man would be carried away to the morgue of Peshawar General Hospital. Still no one had the faintest idea who he was. All that was clear was that he had preferred death to the tender attention of the Americans at Bagram camp up in Afghanistan where he would surely have been horse-traded by Islamabad with the CIA Station Chief in Pakistan.

  Colonel Razak turned back from the balcony. The three prisoners were handcuffed and hooded. There would have to be an armed escort to get them out of here; this was ‘fundo’ territory. The tribal street would not be on his side. With the prisoners and the body gone, he would spend hours scouring the flat for every last clue about the man with the red-flagged cellphone.

  Brian O’Dowd had been asked to wait on the stairs during the raid. He was now in the bedroom holding the damaged Toshiba laptop. Both knew this would almost certainly be the crown jewel. All the passports, all the cellphones, any scrap of paper however insignificant, all the prisoners and all the neighbours – the lot would be taken to a safe place and wrung dry for anything they could yield. But first the laptop . . .

  The dead Egyptian had been optimistic if he thought denting the frame of the Toshiba would destroy its golden harvest. Even seeking to erase the files within it would not work. There were wizards over in Britain and the USA who would painstakingly strip out the hard disk and peel away the surface chatter to uncover every word the Toshiba had ever ingested.

  ‘Pity about Whoever-he-was,’ said the SIS agent.

  Razak grunted. The choice he had made was logical. Hang on for days and the man could have disappeared. Spend hours snooping around the building and his agents would have been spotted; the bird would still have flown. So he had gone in hard and fast and for five extra seconds he would have had the mysterious suicide in handcuffs. He would prepare a statement for the public that an unknown criminal had died in a fall while resisting arrest. Until the corpse was identified. If he turned out to be an AQ high-up the Americans would insist on an all-singing, all-dancing press conference to claim the triumph. He still had no idea how high up Tewfik al-Qur had really been.

  ‘You’ll be pinned down here for a while,’ said O’Dowd. ‘Can I do you the favour of seeing the laptop safely back to your HQ?’

  Fortunately Abdul Razak possessed a wry humour. In his work it was a saving grace. In the covert world only humour keeps a man sane. It was the word ‘safely’ that he enjoyed.

  ‘That would be most kind of you,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a four-man escort back to your vehicle. Just in case. When this is all over we must share the immoral bottle you brought over this evening.’

  Clutching the precious cargo to his chest, flanked fore and aft, and on each side, by Pakistani soldiers, the SIS man was brought back to his Land Cruiser. The technology he needed was already in the back and at the wheel, protecting machinery and vehicle, was his driver, a fiercely loyal Sikh.

  They drove to a spot outside Peshawar where O’Dowd hooked up the Toshiba to his own bigger and more powerful Tecra; and the Tecra opened a line in cyberspace to the British Government Communication Headquarters at Cheltenham, deep in the Cotswold hills of England.

  O’Dowd knew how to work it, but he was still hazy about the sheer magic (to a layman) of cyber-technology. Within a few seconds, across thousands of miles of space, Cheltenham had acquired the entire contents of the Toshiba’s hard disk. It had gutted the laptop as efficiently as a spider drains the juices of a captured fly.

  The Head of Station drove the laptop to CTC headquarters and delivered it into safe hands. Before he reached the CTC office block Cheltenham had shared the treasure with America’s National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was pitch black in Peshawar, dusk in the Cotswolds and mid-afternoon in Maryland. It mattered not. Inside GCHQ and NSA the sun never shines; there is no night and no day.

  In both sprawling complexes of buildings set in rustic countryside the listening goes on from pole to pole and all points between. The trillions of words spoken by the human race every day in five hundred languages and more than a thousand dialects are heard, culled, winnowed, sorted, rejected, retained and, if interesting, studied and traced.

  Even that is just the start. Both agencies encode and decrypt in hundreds of codes and each has special divisions dedicated to file recovery and the unearthing of cyber-crime. As the planet rolled on into another day and another night, the two agencies began to strip down the measures Al-Qur thought had obliterated his private files. The experts found the limbo files and exposed the slack spaces.

  The process has been compared to the work of a skilled restorer of paintings. With immense care the outer layers of grime or later paint are eased off the original canvas to reveal the hidden work beneath. Mr Al-Qur’s Toshiba began to reveal document after document that he thought had been wiped away or overpainted.

  Brian O’Dowd had of course alerted his own colleague and superior, the Head of Station in Islamabad, before even accompanying Colonel Razak on the raid. The senior SIS man had informed his ‘cousin’ the CIA Station Chief. Both men were waiting avidly for news. In Peshawar there would be no sleeping.

  Colonel Razak returned from the bazaar at midnight with his treasure trove in several bags. The three surviving bodyguards were lodged in cells in the basement of his own building. He would certainly not entrust them to the common jail. Escape or assisted suicide would be almost a formality. Islamabad now had their names and was no doubt haggling with the US Embassy, which contained the CIA station. The colonel suspected they would end up in Bagram for months of interrogation even though he suspected they did not even know the name of the man they had been guarding.

  The telltale cellphone from Leeds, England, had been found and identified. It was slowly becoming clear the foolish Abdelahi had only borrowed it without permission. He was on a slab in the morgue with four bullets in the chest but an untouched face. The man who had been next door had a smashed head but the city’s best facial surgeon was trying to put it back together. When he had done his best a photo was taken. An hour later Colonel Razak rang O’Dowd with ill-concealed excitement. Like all counter-terrorist agencies collaborating in the struggle against Islamist terror groups, the CTC of Pakistan has a huge gallery of photos of suspects.

  It means nothing that Pakistan is a long way from Egypt. AQ terrorists stem from at least forty nationalities and double that number of ethnic groups. And they travel. Razak had spent the night flashing his gallery of faces from his computer to a big plasma screen in his office and he kept coming back to one face.

  It was already plain from the captured passports, eleven of them, all forged and all of superb quality, that the Egyptian had been travelling and for this he had clearly changed his appearance. And yet this one face – that of a man who could pass unnoticed in a bank’s boardroom in the West, but who was consumed by hatred for everything and everyone not of his own twisted faith – seemed to have something in common with the shattered head on the marble slab.

  Razak caught O’Dowd over breakfast, which he was sharing with his American CIA colleague in Peshawar. Both men left their scrambled eggs and raced over to CTC headquarters. They too stared at the face and compared it with the photo from the morgue. If only it could be true . . . And both men had one priority: to tell Head Office about the stunning discovery they had made. The body on the slab was none other than Tewfik al-Qur, the senior banker of Al-Qaeda himself.

  In mid-morning a Pakistani army helicopter came to take it all away. The prisoners, shackled and hooded, went. Two dead bodies and the boxes of evidence recovered from the apartment. Thanks were profuse but Peshawar is an outstation; the centre of gravi
ty was moving, and moving fast. In fact it had already arrived in Maryland.

  In the aftermath of the disaster now known simply as 9/11 one thing became clear and no one seriously denied it. The evidence not simply that something was going on, but pretty much what was going on, was there all the time. It was there as intelligence is almost always there; not in one beautiful gift-wrapped package but in dribs and drabs, scattered all over. Seven or eight of the USA’s nineteen primary intel-gathering or law-enforcement agencies had the bits. But they never talked to each other.

  Since 9/11 there has been a huge shake-up. There are now the six principals to whom everything has to be revealed at an early stage. Four are politicians: the President, Vice-President and the Secretaries of Defense and State. One of the two professionals is chairman of the National Security Committee, Steve Hadley, who oversees the Department of Homeland Security and the nineteen agencies. But the other is the top of the pile: the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.

  The CIA is still the primary outside-the-USA intel-gathering body but the Director of Central Intelligence is no longer the lone ranger he used to be. Everyone reports upwards and the three watchwords are: collate, collate, collate. Among the giants the National Security Agency at Fort Meade is still the biggest, in budget and personnel, and the most secret. It alone retains no links to the public or media. It works in darkness but it listens to everything, decrypts everything, translates everything and analyses everything. But so impenetrable is some of the stuff overheard, recorded, downloaded, translated and studied that it also uses an ‘out of house’ committee of experts. One of these is the Koran committee.

  As the treasure from Peshawar came in, electronically or physically, other agencies also went to work. Identification of the dead man was vital and the task went to the FBI. Within twenty-four hours the Bureau reported it was certain. The man who went over the Peshawar balcony was indeed the principal finance-gatherer for Al-Qaeda and one of the rare intimates of OBL himself. The connection had been through Ayman al-Zawahiri, his fellow-Egyptian. It was he who had spotted and headhunted the fanatical banker.