The State Department took the passports. There were a stunning eleven of them. Two had never been used but nine showed entry and exit stamps all over Europe and the Middle East. To no one’s surprise six of them were Belgian, all in different names and all completely genuine, except the details inside.
For the global intelligence community Belgium has long been the leaky bucket. Since 1990 a staggering nineteen thousand Belgian ‘blank’ passports have been reported stolen – and that is according to the Belgian government itself. In fact they were simply sold by civil servants on the take. Forty-five were from the Belgian Consulate in Strasbourg, France, and twenty from the Belgian Embassy in The Hague, Holland. The two used by the Moroccan assassins of anti-Taliban resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud were from the latter. So was one of the six used by Al-Qur. The other five were assumed to be from the still-missing 18,935.
The Federal Aviation Administration, using its contacts and huge leverage across the world of international aviation, checked out plane tickets and passenger lists. It was tiresome but entry and exit stamps pretty much pinpointed the flights to be checked.
Slowly but surely it began to come together. Tewfik al-Qur had seemingly been charged to raise large sums of untraceable money to make unexplained purchases. There was no evidence he had made any himself, so the only logical deduction was that he had put others in funds to make the purchases themselves. The US authorities would have given their eye teeth to learn precisely whom he had seen. These names, they guessed, would have rolled up an entire covert network across Europe and the Middle East. The one notable target country the Egyptian had not visited was the USA.
It was at Fort Meade that the train of revelation finally hit the buffer. Seventy-three documents had been downloaded from the Toshiba recovered in the apartment at Peshawar. Some were just airline timetables and the flights listed on them that Al-Qur had actually taken were now known. Some were public-domain financial reports that had seemingly interested the financier so that he had noted them for later perusal. But they gave nothing away.
Most were in English, some in French or German. It was known Al-Qur spoke all three languages fluently, apart from his native Arabic. The captured bodyguards, up in Bagram air base and singing happily, had revealed the man spoke halting Pashto, indicating he must have spent some time in Afghanistan, though the West had no trace of when or where.
It was the Arabic texts that caused the unease. Because Fort Meade is basically a vast army base it comes under the Department of Defense. The commanding officer of the NSA is always a four-star general. It was in the office of this soldier that the chief of the Arabic translation department asked for an interview.
The NSA’s preoccupation with Arabic had been increasing steadily during the nineties as Islamist terrorism, apart from the constant interest evoked by the Israel–Palestine situation, began to grow. It leapt to prominence with the attempt by Ramzi Yousef on the World Trade Center towers with a truck bomb in 1993. But after 9/11 it became a question of: ‘Every single word in that language, we want to know.’ So the Arabic department is huge and involves thousands of translators, most of them Arabs by birth and education with a smattering of non-Arab scholars.
Arabic is not just one language. Apart from the classical Arabic of the Koran and academia, it is spoken by half a billion people but in at least fifty different dialects and accents. If the speech is fast, accented, using local idiom and the quality is bad, it will usually need a translator from the same area as the speaker to be certain of catching every meaning and nuance.
More, it is often a flowery language, using a great deal of imagery, flattery, exaggeration, simile and metaphor. Added to that, it can be very elliptical, with meanings inferred rather than openly stated. It is quite different from one-meaning-only English.
‘We have focused on the two last documents,’ said the head of the Arabic translation department. ‘They seem to be from different hands. We believe one may well be from Ayman al-Zawahiri himself and the other from Al-Qur. The first seems to have the word patterns of Al-Zawahiri as taken from his previous speeches and videos. Of course, with sound we could be positive to one hundred per cent.
‘The reply seems to be from Al-Qur but we have no text on record of how he writes in Arabic. As a banker he mainly spoke and wrote in English.
‘But both documents have repeated references to the Koran and passages therein. They are invoking Allah’s blessing on something. Now, I have many scholars of Arabic, but the language and subtle meanings contained in the Koran are special, written fourteen hundred years ago. I think we should call on the Koran Committee to take a look.’
The commanding general nodded.
‘OK, professor, you got it.’ He glanced up at his ADC. ‘Get hold of our Koran scholars, Harry. Fly them in. No delays, no excuses.’
CHAPTER TWO
There were four men in the Koran committee, three Americans and a British academic. All were professors, none were Arabs but all had spent their lives steeped in the study of the Koran and its thousands of attendant scholarly commentaries.
One was resident at Columbia University, New York, and following the order from Fort Meade a military helicopter was despatched to bring him to the NSA. Two were with the Rand Corporation and the Brookings Institution respectively, both in Washington, DC. Army staff cars were detached to collect them.
The fourth and youngest was Dr Terry Martin, on secondment to Georgetown University, Washington, DC, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Part of London University, SOAS enjoys a worldwide reputation for Arabic scholarship.
In terms of the study of matters Arabic the Englishman had had a head start. He was born and raised in Iraq, the son of an accountant with a major oil company operating there. His father had deliberately not sent him to the Anglo-American school but to a private academy that schooled the sons of the elite of Iraqi society. By the time he was ten he could, linguistically at least, pass for an Arab boy among the others. Only his pink face and tufty ginger hair made sure he could never completely pass for an Arab.
Born in 1965, he was in his eleventh year when Mr Martin senior decided to leave Iraq and return to the safety of the UK. The Ba’ath Party was back in power, but that power truly resided not with President Bakr but with his Vice-President, who was carrying out a ruthless pogrom of his political enemies, real and imagined.
The Martins had already lived through tumultuous times since the balmy days of the fifties when the boy King Feisal was on the throne. They had seen the massacre of the young King and his pro-western premier Nuri Said, the equally gory murder on camera in the TV studio of his successor General Kassem and the first arrival of the brutal Ba’ath Party. That in turn had been toppled, then returned to power in 1968. For seven years Martin senior watched the growing power of the psychotic Vice-President Saddam Hussein and in 1975 decided it was time to leave.
He had obtained a good post with Burmah Oil in London thanks to a kind word from a certain Denis Thatcher whose wife Margaret had just become leader of the Conservative Party. His elder son, Mike, was thirteen and ready for a British boarding school. All four of them, the father, Mrs Martin, Mike and Terry, were back in the UK by Christmas.
Terry’s brilliant brain had already been noted. He walked through exams for boys two and even three years his senior as a knife through butter. It was presumed, as it turned out almost rightly, that a series of scholarships and bursaries would carry him through senior school and Oxford or Cambridge. But he wanted to continue with Arabic studies. While still at school he had applied to SOAS, attending the spring interview in 1983, joining as an undergraduate that same autumn, studying History of the Middle East.
He walked through a first class degree in three years and then put in three more for his doctorate, specializing in the Koran and the first four Caliphates. He took a sabbatical year to continue Koranic studies at the famed Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo and on his return was offered a lectureship at th
e young age of twenty-five, a signal honour because when it comes to matters Arabic SOAS is one of the toughest schools in the world. He was promoted to a readership at the age of thirty-four, earmarked for a professorship by forty. He was forty-one the afternoon the NSA came seeking his advice, spending a year as a visiting professor at Georgetown because that same spring of 2006 his life had fallen apart.
The emissary from Fort Meade found him in a lecture hall concluding a talk on the teachings of the Koran as relevant to the contemporary age.
It was plain from the wings of the stage that his students liked him. The hall was packed. He made his lectures feel like a long and civilized conversation between equals, seldom referring to notes, jacket off, pacing up and down, his short, plump body radiating enthusiasm to impart and share scholarship, to give serious attention to any point raised from the floor, never putting a student down for lack of knowledge, talking in layman’s language, keeping the body of the lecture short with plenty of time for student questions. He had reached that point when the spook from Fort Meade appeared in the wings.
A red plaid shirt in the fifth row raised a hand.
‘You said you disagreed with the use of the term “fundamentalist” to refer to the philosophy of the terrorists. Why?’
Given the blizzard of publicity concerning matters Arabic, Islamic and Koranic that had swept across America since 9/11, every question session swerved quickly from theoretical learning to the onslaught on the West that had occupied so much of the previous ten years.
‘Because it is a misnomer,’ said the professor. ‘The very word implies “back to basics”. But the planters of bombs in trains, malls and buses are not going back to the basics of Islam. They are writing their own new script, then arguing retroactively, seeking to find Koranic passages that justify their war.
‘There are fundamentalists in all religions. Christian monks in a closed order, sworn to poverty, self-denial, chastity, obedience – these are fundamentalists. Ascetics exist in all religions but they do not advocate indiscriminate mass murder of men, women and children. That is the key phrase. Judge all religions and all sects within those religions by that phrase and you will see that to wish to return to the basic teachings is not terrorism, for in no religion, including Islam, do the basic teachings advocate mass murder.’
In the wings the man from Fort Meade tried to attract Dr Martin’s attention. The professor glanced sideways and noted the young man with the short-barbered hair, button-down shirt and dark suit. He had ‘government’ written all over him. He tapped the watch on his wrist. Martin nodded.
‘Then what would you call the terrorists of today? Jihadists?’
It was an earnest young woman further back. From her face Dr Martin judged her parents must have come from the Middle East: India, Pakistan, Iran perhaps. But she did not wear the hejab scarf over the head to indicate strict Muslim.
‘Even jihad is the wrong word. Of course jihad exists, but it has rules. Either it is a personal struggle within oneself to become a better Muslim, but in that case it is completely non-aggressive. Or it means true holy war, armed struggle in the defence of Islam. That’s what the terrorists claim they are about. But they choose to airbrush the rules out of the text.
‘For one thing true jihad can only be declared by a legitimate Koranic authority of proven and accepted repute. Bin Laden and his acolytes are notorious for their lack of scholarship. Even if the West had indeed attacked, hurt, damaged, humiliated and demeaned Islam and thus all Muslims, there are still rules and the Koran is absolutely specific on these.
‘It is forbidden to attack and kill those who have offered no offence and done nothing to hurt you. It is forbidden to kill women and children. It is forbidden to take hostages and it is forbidden to mistreat, torture or kill prisoners. The AQ terrorists and their followers do all four on a daily basis. And let us not forget that they have killed far more fellow-Muslims than Christians or Jews.’
‘Then what do you call their campaign?’
The man in the wings was becoming agitated. A full general had given him an order. He did not wish to be the last to report back.
‘I would term them the New Jihadis, because they have invented an unholy war outside the laws of Holy Koran and thus of true Islam. True jihad is not savage, but what they practise is. Last question, I am afraid.’
There was a gathering of books and notes. A hand shot up at the front. Freckles, white T-shirt advertising a student rock group.
‘All the bombers claim to be martyrs. How do they justify this?’
‘Badly,’ said Dr Martin, ‘because they have been duped, well educated though some of them are. It is perfectly feasible to die a shahid, or martyr, fighting for Islam in a truly declared jihad. But again there are rules and these are quite specific in the Koran. The warrior must not die by his own hand even though he has volunteered for a no-return mission. He must not know the time and place of his own death.
‘Suicides do exactly that. Yet suicide is specifically forbidden. In his lifetime Muhammad absolutely refused to bless the body of a suicide even though the man had ended his own life to avoid the crippling agony of his disease. Those who commit mass murder of innocents and commit suicide are destined for hell, not paradise. The false preachers and imams who trick them down this road will join them there. And now, I fear, we must rejoin the world of Georgetown and hamburgers. Thank you for your attention.’
They gave him a standing ovation and, pink with embarrassment, he took his jacket and walked into the wings.
‘Sorry to interrupt, professor,’ said the man from Fort Meade, ‘but the brass need the Koran Committee back at the Fort. The car is outside.’
‘In a hurry?’
‘Yesterday, sir. There’s a flap on.’
‘Any ideas?’ asked Martin.
‘No, sir.’
Of course. Need to know. The unshakeable rule. If you do not need to know, to do your job, they are not going to tell you. Martin’s curiosity would have to wait. The car was the usual dark sedan with the telltale aerial on the roof. It needed to be in touch with base all the time. The driver was a corporal, but even though Fort Meade is an army base the man was in plain clothes, not uniform. No need to advertise either.
Dr Martin climbed into the back while the driver held the door open. His escort took the front passenger seat and they began to drive through the early evening traffic out to the Baltimore highway.
Far to the east the man converting his own barn into a retirement home stretched out by the camp fire in the orchard. He was perfectly happy like that. If he could sleep in rocks and snow drifts he could certainly sleep on the soft grass beneath the apple trees.
Camp-fire fuel was absolutely no problem. He had enough rotten old planks to last a lifetime. His billycan sizzled above the red embers and he prepared a welcome mug of steaming tea. Fancy drinks are fine in their way but after a hard day’s work a soldier’s reward is a mug of piping hot tea.
He had in fact taken the afternoon off from his lofty task up on the roof and walked into Meonstoke to visit the general store and buy provisions for the weekend.
It was clear everyone knew that he had bought the barn and was trying to restore it himself. That went down well. Rich Londoners with a cheque book to flash and a lust to play the squire were greeted with politeness up front but a shrug behind their back. But the dark-haired single man who lived in a tent in his own orchard while he did the manual work himself was, so ran the growing belief in the village, a good sort.
According to the postman he seemed to receive little mail save a few official-looking buff envelopes, and even these he asked to be delivered to the Buck’s Head public house to save the postman the haul up the long, muddy track; a gesture appreciated by the postman. The letters were addressed to ‘Colonel’ but he never mentioned that when he bought a drink at the bar or a newspaper or food at the store. Just smiled and was very polite. The locals’ growing appreciation of the man was, however, tinged wit
h curiosity. So many ‘incomers’ were brash and forward. Who was he, and where had he come from, and why had he chosen to settle in Meonstoke?
That afternoon, on his ramble through the village, he had visited the ancient church of St Andrew, and met and fallen into conversation with the Rector, Reverend Jim Foley.
The ex-soldier was beginning to think he would enjoy life where he had decided to settle. He could pedal his rugged mountain bike down to Droxford on the Southampton road to buy straight-from-the-garden food in the produce market. He could explore the myriad lanes he could see from his roof and sample ale in the old beamed pubs they would reveal.
But in two days he would attend Sunday matins at St Andrew’s and, in the quiet gloom of the ancient stone, he would pray, as he often did.
He would ask for forgiveness of the God in whom he devoutly believed for all the men he had killed and for the rest of their immortal souls. He would ask for eternal rest for all the comrades he had seen die beside him; he would give thanks that he had never killed women or children nor any who came in peace, and he would pray that one day he too could expiate his sins and enter into the Kingdom.
Then he would come back to the hillside and resume his labours. There were only another thousand tiles to go.
Vast as is the National Security Agency’s complex of buildings, it is only a tiny fraction of Fort Meade, one of the largest military bases in the USA. Situated four miles east of the Interstate 95 and halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the base is home to around ten thousand military staff and twenty-five thousand civilian employees. It is a city in itself and has all the habitual facilities of a small city. The ‘spook’ part is tucked away in one corner inside a rigidly guarded security zone that Dr Martin had never visited before.