ISIS was floundering at the moment. They had not achieved a major battlefield success in a year and a half, much of the oil revenue they’d been generating by smuggling Iraqi oil into Turkey and Jordan had been cut off by Western-coalition air strikes, and more air strikes had helped Iraqi Army and Kurdish forces take back territory. There was nothing ISIS needed more than a huge win against the West, and this shadowy group of Gulf benefactors looked like they had the right plan to make that happen.
Islamic State leadership arranged a meeting between bin Rashid and one of their top operatives.
The location of the face-to-face meeting was set up for Podujevo, Kosovo, a town of over 90,000 in the northeastern portion of the nation. Both the Saudis and ISIS had a foothold in the town, and it was seen as a safe location for both a Saudi operative—even though bin Rashid was actually an employee of a regional organization—and an ISIS operative, one Abu Musa al-Matari.
Sami bin Rashid’s intelligence contacts told him all about al-Matari. The Yemeni had recently worked his own plan to train American ISIS devotees in Syria, and then send them home to America to wreak havoc on the nation.
Bin Rashid found this plan bold, more or less intelligently crafted, and certainly the right idea, but it was lacking in many respects.
Not the least of which was that it had failed miserably.
The United States detected the training ground in Syria, the CIA and the FBI determined who was there, and then, by a cynical and arguably illegal order of President of the United States Jack Ryan, wave after wave of unmanned aerial vehicles turned the training camp to smoldering ash.
Al-Matari had already left the camp when it was hit, as had several of his U.S. passport holders. But when al-Matari returned to Raqqa, the surviving would-be ISIS jihadists were rounded up at airports in Europe and the United States, and al-Matari’s plan came to naught.
Then Sami bin Rashid met Abu Musa al-Matari in Kosovo, and months after that, al-Matari found himself in Central America, days away from beginning the operation against the West that he was certain would uproot the world order and bring forth a ten-thousand-year caliphate.
9
From El Salvador’s crowded capital of San Salvador, it is a straight shot south down the highway to the Pacific coast. It’s a good road by El Salvador standards, and the beaches at La Libertad are among the most desirable in Central America for surfers, who come from all over the world.
But no surfers end up in the village of San Rafael in La Libertad state, because it’s several miles north of the coast and a few miles west of the highway. And certainly few, if any, foreign travelers have ever ventured higher in the hills northeast of the village, following a rocky and winding track that is wholly inaccessible during the rainy season.
But if they did go there, they would see, right in the middle of the jungle, a locked iron gate at the front of a large parcel of private land.
The ownership of the property is confusing to the locals, since no one in the area lays claim to it. Most here assume a drug cartel from Mexico or Guatemala owns the property. It is fenced everywhere the thick foliage, sheer rock walls, or deep gullies don’t provide natural barriers, and no one in the town of San Rafael has ever been inside. There are no permanent caretakers, but it is said the municipal police keep an eye out to ensure nobody travels close enough to get a look.
The property had been abandoned for more than a generation, until one strange day six weeks ago.
That Sunday afternoon three large rental SUVs with no plates rumbled through San Rafael and continued up the hill without stopping. The locals who witnessed the unusual event confirmed the drivers and passengers were all Latinos, but they wore hats and shades and beards. The police didn’t harass them, but this just indicated to the locals that the police knew they were coming and had been paid to leave them alone.
Over the next few days half a dozen Latino men—those who heard them speak said they were Guatemalan—came into the village and bought enough supplies to sustain dozens of people for a month or more. The villagers of San Rafael knew better than to ask questions, they just wondered how long these narcos would stay, and if they would spend a lot more money in the town while they were here.
Two weeks later small convoys of four-wheel-drive SUVs, all clearly rentals from San Salvador, rolled through San Rafael, and soon after that, the sounds of soft and distant gunfire, sporadic and uncoordinated at first, and then tighter, faster, more organized, rolled down the hills and into the village.
Small explosions could be heard as well.
This went on for weeks and the locals figured the narcos couldn’t possibly be fighting each other for so long, so they must have been conducting some sort of training.
—
Beyond the gate to the property no one in San Rafael ever visited, a row of rusty corrugated metal buildings stood under the hot sun. They had been erected by the Salvadoran Army during the civil war of the 1980s, barracks with a small airstrip used by the American CIA, but the airstrip was invisible in the jungle now, and the current occupants of the property had nothing to do with America, the eighties, or that war.
The villagers had been wrong about the new visitors; the Guatemalans were not narcos, they were instructors. The six men had come to this disused property in the El Salvador back country to set up a temporary school and train a force in small-arms combat.
The six were former members of the Kaibiles, the Guatemalan military’s infamous Special Forces unit. They were all in their fifties, and during the 1980s they had been young men fighting a brutal war just north of here in Guatemala. Since then they’d worked as mercenaries, fighting or training others throughout Latin America.
The six men had taken two weeks readying the property: setting up generators, establishing the Internet, checking over their guns and ammunition, and even building a rainwater-collection station to augment the water they’d trucked in.
The company that hired them was a shell out of Panama. None of the Guatemalans looked into the shell, but still they were curious as to whom they would be training. All six of the former Kaibiles spoke English, a tip-off to them about their students, but English was a common international language, so when a Middle Eastern man who spoke fluent English arrived at the property, no one was terribly surprised. He called himself Mohammed and explained that he was training a unit to learn the combat arts so they could go into Yemen and fight the government there.
The Guatemalans did not know much about Yemen, and they cared even less. The pay was good, the work would be easy, and the Middle Easterner promised that if this contract went well this could turn into a recurring gig.
The students arrived over a two-day period. Twenty-seven in all. The Guatemalans were surprised to see among the expected Middle Easterners, there were gringos, blacks, and other Latinos as well. They also had not expected women, yet four in the class were female. One was black, one was Hispanic, the other two were olive-complexioned women of Middle Eastern heritage.
Whatever, the Guatemalans decided. They didn’t care where the men and women came from. If some bruja mexicana or some gringo pendejo wanted to go get his or her ass shot off in the Middle East, that was their problem.
While the Kaibiles trained the men and women, Mohammed watched over the entire operation, but he spent most of the daylight hours on his satellite phone and on his laptop. The trainers decided he either already knew how to fight or didn’t need to know.
The Guatemalans never asked.
At night the Guatemalans retired to their tents next to a stream a few hundred meters from the barracks, but sometimes they could hear the students and Mohammed talking well past midnight. They had the impression he was indoctrinating them on their mission, perhaps teaching them specific knowledge they would need over there in Yemen, but again, they did not really care.
—
Though the Guatemalans would nev
er know it, Mohammed’s real name was Musa al-Matari. He was thirty-nine years old, born to a Yemeni Army officer father and a British aid-worker mother who had converted to Islam. He’d lived both in Yemen and in London growing up.
Al-Matari had served as a lieutenant in the Yemeni Army, an infantry officer, but he left his country to fight with the jihadists in Iraq, because helping to build a true Islamic State was a realization of the dream he didn’t dare express to anyone until the day the black flags began moving across the land.
He’d fought for Al-Qaeda, and then in Syria and Iraq for ISIS, and his specialty became recruiting and training cells of martyrs to operate behind enemy lines. He grew so skilled, his fighters so successful, that he was sent to Libya to train operatives there when the caliphate grew into Northern Africa.
His trainees in Libya did well, and soon it was decided by the Foreign Intelligence Bureau that al-Matari could do more outside the war zone than he could inside. He proposed recruiting and training foreigners in tactics that they could take back to their home countries, to move the fight to the enemy’s doorstep. His plan was approved, and soon he had a group of recruiters working for him at an office in Mosul. They used the Internet to seek out men and women living in the West, finding them on message boards and in responses to Facebook and Twitter posts.
Those selected would be brought to Syria for training, and then sent back out to the West to kill on behalf of the Islamic State.
His recruits conducted operations in Turkey and Egypt, then in Tunisia and Algeria. Then Belgium and France and Austria.
Al-Matari’s successes were rewarded by his leadership. His plans became more adventurous, more ambitious. He had no time for those who wanted to come to Syria and fight. He had time only for men and women with the intelligence, fervency, and documentation that would make them good raw materials for operatives of ISIS serving abroad.
Soon he decided to reach for the golden ring. He wanted to import American-based recruits, train them in operations, and then export ISIS fighters to America.
He did this, trained up his force right to the moment to release them back into America, and then his plan was thwarted.
After his first operation ended in disaster with the air strikes on his training camp and the arrest of those few fighters he did manage to get on planes back to the United States, he found himself without a force, and without a plan.
But not for long.
It was the leadership of the Foreign Intelligence Bureau who told him to go to Kosovo, where he was to meet with a man in a safe house there. His orders were to take his time and listen to the man’s ideas, and then to return and tell ISIS leadership what he thought of it all.
Al-Matari was a skeptic. It kept him alive in his work, but he also followed orders, because this had even more to do with his survival.
He was smuggled into Turkey, and from there he flew to Kosovo.
—
The meeting in Kosovo took place in a green and lush courtyard, completely surrounded by a three-story building that itself was surrounded by ISIS fighters.
Al-Matari did not know the identity of his contact, but when he stepped into the courtyard, he saw a man in robes sitting alone at a simple table with a tea service in front of him.
As soon as al-Matari sat down, the other man poured tea for his guest, and he said, “This will be the only time we meet face-to-face.”
Al-Matari reached for his tea. He had learned to be suspicious of everyone, Muslim robes and good hospitality notwithstanding. “I do not even know what this meeting is about. I was ordered here.”
The man nodded slowly. He was older—fifty, perhaps—and seemed extremely confident. “I know what happened in your last operation.”
“I am not revealing anything to you. If you think you know something, maybe you heard it from important people. Maybe you heard it from fools. I don’t know. Nevertheless, I am not going to say anything that—”
“I applaud what you did; I respect the tactical thinking that went into it. You are brave, smart, and you have big ideas.” The man smiled. “I am no tactician, but I am a strategist. And that is where you need help. I can assist you on your next effort, increase the chances it is successful, and increase the chances that it has a larger impact than you can imagine.”
Al-Matari looked up at the architecture of the old building surrounding him while he sipped his tea. “Your accent. You are Saudi.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t like Saudis.”
The man shrugged. “I don’t blame you. Saudi Arabia has oil and wealth. Yemen has camels and camel shit.”
Al-Matari squeezed his teacup almost to the point of breaking it.
The Saudi continued. “I don’t really care. Unlike you, I do not believe in bigotry against other Sunnis. I think we all should be united against infidels and Shiites. But I do believe in first impressions, and I do not like you so much. Let’s agree we are not here to make friends, and get on with this conversation.”
Al-Matari gave a little sarcastic bow.
The older man was all business. “If you can assemble another group of American mujahideen, and do it quickly, I can provide you with a safe place to train them, and top-level instructors. I can provide you with weapons, ammunition, explosives. I can provide you with the security of keeping these Americans out of lands known to be involved with the jihad, so there will be no alarm by the American intelligence community.
“Most importantly, when you get your well-trained soldiers back into the United States, I can give you targets you cannot possibly dream of getting on your own.”
Al-Matari sniffed. “Targets? Targets are not my problem. All of the USA is a target. My fighters can drive down the street and shoot people at random and I will achieve my objectives.”
The Saudi shook his head vehemently. “This is where strategy is important, not just tactics. Killing American civilians is a waste of time. A futile act. Your soldiers would be hunted down and destroyed, for what? Garbagemen, bus drivers, grocers? I am talking about giving you targets that will hurt America’s ability to fight.”
“In what way?”
“I have access to the addresses of men and women in the CIA. I know the schools where Air Force pilots who fly over your head in Raqqa send their children. A bar where, on any night, you can find American commandos, on leave, without weapons, drunk and helpless. I can tell you the license plate numbers of the cars they drive, where the wives of spies and soldiers work.”
Al-Matari was at once skeptical and stunned. “How is it you have access to such information?”
“How doesn’t matter. It will be difficult for me, and it will be difficult for you. But ask yourself this, brother. Do you want to work so hard to shoot kids in a mall, or do you want to work so hard to destroy a large segment of America’s ability to wage war on us from afar? I say we fight them there, so we force them to come here, in our land, where we destroy them.”
Al-Matari said, “What do you mean, our land? If America comes, the fighting will not be in Saudi Arabia. Your country has a cozy relationship with the infidels.”
But it was clear the Saudi didn’t care about what the Yemeni said, because bin Rashid saw the gleam in al-Matari’s eye. What bin Rashid was selling was exactly what al-Matari was buying. Al-Matari recognized the value of destroying military and intelligence targets in America every bit as much as the man across the table did.
The Saudi said, “Everyone in the Islamic State wants one reaction out of the West.”
Al-Matari nodded. “Of course. We want the Americans to invade in numbers. We are fighting the Kurds and the Iraqis and the Syrians when we could be fighting the West. Yes, the West flies high overhead, scared to stand and battle us on the ground. But if America puts troops in the cities of Iraq, like they did ten years ago, then the uprisings would grow larger, the brothers from
as far away as Morocco and Indonesia will flood back in, America will be destroyed and sent home in disgrace.” Al-Matari couldn’t hide a little smile. “The caliphate would then grow into these other countries when they take the fight to their own homelands throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.”
The Saudi nodded vehemently. “Exactly, brother! President Jack Ryan was himself a spy and a soldier. How do you think he will react when one of your operatives shoots and kills his spies in their bathrobes in front of their homes? How do you think he will react when we kill his soldiers while they eat their lunch? He will react. America will react. They will all react by coming here to fight.”
The older man smiled now. “And just think of the remote radicals who will grow like flowers in America once you and your instruments of justice begin the real fight inside America. Right now you have many young men and women who would join your struggle, if your struggle were showing some real signs of success. Remember the first two years of the existence of the Islamic State? Foreign brothers and even sisters flooded into the new caliphate. It could be that, again, but not foolish boys running into the meat grinder in Syria. But men and women right there in America, in the heart of the enemy, given good instruction and direction and sent out into their neighborhoods, the lands they know and understand, understand better than you and me, my brother. They can make a difference in our fight in the Middle East. These men and women could be our foreign legion for the caliphate.”
Before the Yemeni could speak, the Saudi added one more thing. “And you, you my brother. You can start this off. In the next few years you can be the one to turn it all around.”
Al-Matari clearly thought this all too good to be true. “I can get operatives into America. I have developed another group of contacts already in the U.S. They will die for the jihad. But I need them to know how to kill for the jihad. This training location. Where is it?”
The Saudi sipped tea and grinned. “When the time is right, that will be revealed. You show me you have the operatives, men and women with U.S. passports, student visas for the U.S., or work visas. I will make sure they are trained.”