“That would make sense,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Ari tells me you two really got into it this morning.”
“I’m afraid so, sir.”
“Gave him quite an earful.”
“Yes, sir. I was pressing him to put you on a call with President Mahfouz as quickly as possible.”
“About?”
“Look, sir,” I said. “I’m only doing this for one reason. I don’t want money. I don’t want attention. I don’t even want vengeance. I want justice. I want to see the man who murdered my family stopped before he can hurt anyone else. I want this monster who’s committing genocide stopped once and for all. That’s why I dropped everything and came to you guys. I thought I could help. I thought I had something unique to contribute. Ari agreed. And he put me in the field. And I came back to him with a lead. A big lead. A serious one. But it requires your team coming clean with President Mahfouz, and apparently you’re the only one who can authorize that. But Ari is dead set against you doing anything of the kind, and that’s pretty much where things derailed.”
“So now what?”
“That’s up to you, sir,” I said. “I’m going home.”
“Unless I do what?”
“Pardon?”
“You heard me,” the prime minister said. “Just say it plainly. What is it you want?”
I paused for a moment, caught off guard by the question. “Didn’t Ari tell you?” I finally asked.
“I want to hear it directly from you,” Eitan said.
I thought about that. It was a fair request. Surprising, but fair.
“Very well, Mr. Prime Minister,” I said. “You need to call Mahfouz directly—and immediately. You need to tell him how and why I’m connected to you. You need to be clear, and you need to be precise. I came to you. You didn’t recruit me. I don’t work for you. I don’t answer to you. But I want the same thing you want, the same thing he wants, and you’re calling to offer to work together with him and his people to take down Abu Khalif before he does any more damage. You understand he’s got information that could lead to the capture of the Baqouba brothers. And you understand he’s offered to provide that information so long as he knows how it’s going to be used. Then assure him there are no measures you’re not willing to employ to see this job through to the end.”
“That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” I said.
“That’s a pretty high-risk proposition, Mr. Collins, given Cairo’s stiff-arm toward us since the Amman attacks,” Eitan said.
“No, sir,” I countered. “With all due respect, the high-risk scenario is letting this moment pass. President Mahfouz was clear with me. You are not Egypt’s problem. Israel doesn’t threaten Egypt’s way of life. Abu Khalif does. The ayatollahs do. He believes the next Arab capital that ISIS and Iran are coming after is Cairo. That’s what Mahfouz told me. He told the same thing to Washington. He’s been trying to reach out to the White House. He’s even used the New York Times in recent days to send the message right to the top. But the White House isn’t listening. President Taylor’s convinced he’s done all he needs to do. He doesn’t want to take any more risks. He certainly isn’t going into Syria to find Abu Khalif and take him down. He doesn’t think the reward justifies the risks.”
“And you think this creates a unique moment for us?” Eitan asked.
“I do, sir,” I said. “Do what President Taylor won’t. Make the first move. Reach out to Mahfouz. Show him you respect him. Show him you want to be his partner. Offer to work together on a major operation that will make both your countries safer. And do it right now—before the window closes.”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
I was tempted to keep talking, to push him, to try to seal the deal through the force of my reasoning, but something held me back. So I kept quiet. I just waited. And waited. And finally the prime minister spoke.
“All right, Mr. Collins, I’ll make the call on one condition,” he said.
“What’s that, sir?” I asked.
“That you stay in the game and see it through to the end.”
78
“So what do you think?” I asked Yael when I’d briefed her on the call.
“Why ask me?” she said as we finished taxiing and came to a complete stop.
“I value your opinion.”
“You certainly seem to have no trouble giving your opinion,” she said, getting up the moment the seat belt light was turned off and pulling her suitcase out from under her seat.
I just looked at her. “The job with the PM’s office?”
“What about it?” she asked curtly.
“You asked me what to do,” I replied. “I told you I thought you should take it. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing. Get your things. We need to go.”
“Yael, come on, what in the world is going on here?”
“This isn’t the time, J. B.”
“You brought it up.”
“My mistake.”
At that moment the cockpit door opened. The pilots introduced themselves, and I was surprised to learn that our plane had been piloted by the station chief and deputy station chief of the Mossad’s Dubai office. They had orders to help us get through security and to our hotel and then link up with the head of UAE intelligence. To do that, we needed to change clothes, change IDs, and follow their lead.
Ten minutes later, the four of us exited the plane to blue skies and white wispy clouds. I was now dressed in a five-thousand-dollar Zegna suit, a gold Rolex, beautiful Italian handcrafted leather shoes, and sunglasses I suspected cost more than my first car. The cover they’d given me was that I was an Arab—a Sunni—and a highly successful CEO of a British hotel chain. I was coming to the Gulf to visit friends. The whole thing seemed implausible on the face of it and I nearly laughed in their faces when they first explained it to me. But the station chief—going by the pseudonym Ali—insisted we needed a reason I was flying into the UAE on a Learjet, and this was it. Once we made it through passport control and customs, he said, we could change our image and our cover for the rest of our stay. But for now I was an Arab businessman and Yael was my wife.
To her they gave a black silk abaya, the traditional floor-length dress worn by devout women in the Gulf, and a black niqab, a veil that covered her head and face completely except for a small slit she could see through. This was the only option, they insisted. Yael’s facial scars, and the fact that her arm was in a cast, would raise too many questions unless we went this route. Yael had no problem with it. I did. But it was clear we didn’t have a choice. So down the stairs and onto the tarmac we went.
The pilots handled all our paperwork with the local officials. My job was to keep checking my watch, look annoyed, and pay no attention to my wife, who was always several steps behind me.
Ali was right. It worked like a charm.
The moment we were cleared into the country, we were met by a silver Rolls-Royce and a black Toyota Land Cruiser. Out of the SUV jumped several aides who took care of our luggage and our personal effects. The driver of our Rolls opened the back door for me and Yael while the pilots got into the chase car. The whole process took less than fifteen minutes, and soon we were off to the Burj Al Arab Jumeirah, the most beautiful hotel I’d ever seen, much less stayed in, anywhere in the world.
Located on an artificial island in the Persian Gulf, the hotel—the third tallest in the world—was designed to look like the sail of a ship. Our rooms were on the twenty-fifth double-story floor, looking out over the city of Dubai. But we had no time to savor the place or explore the amenities. The moment I’d gotten off the phone with the prime minister, I’d sent an e-mail to the private account of His Royal Highness, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the chief of intelligence for the United Arab Emirates and the third name on Khachigian’s list. As I’d done with Walid Hussam, I briefly explained my connection to the former CIA director and described the letter he’d le
ft me upon his death.
By the time we checked in to the Burj Al Arab, I’d already received a message back to meet His Highness for a nine o’clock dinner at Al Muntaha, a restaurant located on the twenty-seventh floor of the hotel. That gave us a little over four hours to prepare, and we did our best to use the time wisely.
The first thing I did was send a text to Paul Pritchard’s phone number. Pritchard, a former CIA operative, was the top name on Khachigian’s list. He was also supposedly dead, as far as anyone knew. But I didn’t buy it. Khachigian wasn’t sending me to a corpse but to a trusted confidant. The man was alive. The only question was whether he’d respond to my message at all, much less come out of hiding and actually meet with me.
Yael handed me her laptop and instructed me to read a forty-three-page encrypted dossier she’d just received on the Islamic State. It had been developed by her team back at Ramat David, specifically authored by Trotsky, and updated overnight. The first section contained info on attacks perpetrated by ISIS over the past three days:
Three car bombings in Baghdad—129 dead, 53 wounded
An attack on a petrochemical plant in Egypt—more than 600 dead, more than 1,000 wounded, and some 10,000 people evacuated
A suicide bombing at a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt—46 dead, 78 wounded
A suicide bombing in a Catholic school in Luxor, Egypt—21 dead, 35 wounded
Two suicide bombings in two Coptic churches in Cairo—64 dead, 212 wounded
Two truck bombs at two different hospitals in Yemen—113 dead, 301 wounded
And now, of course, the RPG attack near the presidential palace in Heliopolis—6 dead (including the two men driving the Audi)
What struck me immediately was that the pace of the attacks was accelerating. The second section of the dossier included a chart noting the number of ISIS attacks month by month for the last year. In the previous February, there had “only” been sixty ISIS attacks outside of Syria and Iraq, killing a total of 416 people and wounding 704. Yet as this February had come to a close, the chart noted there had been more than two hundred ISIS attacks—including those in the United States—for a total of more than nine thousand people dead and more than fifteen thousand wounded. Clearly the tempo was increasing, and so was the urgency of stopping these monsters.
The good news came in the third section of the report. This provided a summary of ISIS fighters killed and captured in the month of February, country by country.
Iraq—3,102 jihadists dead, 26 captured (reflecting the ongoing allied operations to liberate northern Iraq)
Syria—119 jihadists dead, 0 captured (reflecting limited allied bombing runs along the Syrian border with Iraq, and the lack of allied ground operations in the Syrian theater)
Yemen—403 jihadists dead, 33 captured (reflecting the Saudi offensive there)
Egypt—104 jihadists dead, 23 captured (primarily reflecting the Egyptian campaign against ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as raids against ISIS sleeper cells in several major Egyptian cities)
Libya—63 jihadists dead, 2 captured
Jordan—25 jihadists dead, 0 captured
The Jordanian figures appeared shockingly low until I sifted through the data more carefully and saw that in December and January, the Jordanian security forces had killed more than five thousand ISIS fighters and captured well over three hundred. By the beginning of February, the battle to retake Jordan was essentially over. So the low number reflected the stunning and rapid success of the king’s campaign to secure his country, not his failure.
The remainder of the report provided summaries of the latest intel gleaned from interviews with ISIS detainees, material pulled off their phones and computers, and a review of their “pocket litter”—material taken from the jihadists upon their capture, ranging from airline boarding passes and used bus tickets to meal and purchase receipts to handwritten notes to or from their colleagues. The material was a treasure trove, but the amount of information—some valuable, some irrelevant—was overwhelming. Forty-three pages from just the past three days, and this was only a summary. Back on the Ramat David air base were hard drives full of thousands of hours of interrogation tapes, tens of thousands of transcript pages, audio recordings of intercepted phone calls, intercepted e-mails, intercepted text messages, reports by human agents and sources, satellite photos, drone footage, and on and on it went. All of it had to be carefully processed and collated and tagged and reviewed and analyzed and then stored in a way it could be readily found and searched and cross-referenced with other material. And more was coming in by the hour.
There was just one glaring problem. As potentially helpful as all of it was, none of it gave us a single actionable clue to where the Baqouba brothers or Abu Khalif were hiding.
79
The view from the twenty-seventh floor was exquisite.
I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early but did not need to wait. The maître d’ immediately led me to a private room in the back. Seated outside were two plainclothes security men. They patted me down and checked my ID, then radioed to more agents inside the room who opened the door and let me in.
The room was all glass from floor to ceiling, except for the wall I’d just entered through, and the twinkling lights of Dubai were dazzling to behold.
Wearing crisp white linen robes and a white headdress bound by a thick black cord, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed quickly rose from the table and greeted me warmly. But he was not the only person in the room. A tall, fit man stood right beside him. I wondered if he was a bodyguard—until he introduced himself.
“Paul Pritchard,” he said, extending his hand.
To say I was startled would have been an understatement. Not only was Paul Pritchard alive, but he and the prince had come to this meeting together. They were friends. Probably allies. Very likely business partners. This was going to be quite an evening.
As I sat down, I adjusted my glasses. They were not my usual pair. Before I’d headed to dinner, Yael had asked—again—that I wear a wire. I’d refused. But Yael had insisted that the situation was far too sensitive for her team to simply depend on my memory. She said they needed to hear, record, transcribe, and analyze the entire conversation, beginning to end. I pushed back just as hard that the risk of being detected was far too high. Prince bin Zayed was no amateur. This guy was the top spy in the Gulf region. He was going to have bodyguards. They were going to search me. They were, therefore, going to find the wire, and we’d be shut down before we even got started. What was the point?
In the end, however, the local station chief had proposed a compromise. Out of his briefcase he had produced a pair of eyeglasses that looked exactly like mine. Embedded into the frames was a highly sensitive microphone with a small transmitter that could broadcast the audio via an encrypted signal up to a half mile away. The lenses themselves, it turned out, weren’t exactly my prescription, he’d conceded, but when I put them on, they were pretty close. I was impressed with his creativity and forethought, and in the end I agreed to wear them, ending the showdown.
Though younger than Paul Pritchard by a good decade, Prince Mohammed bin Zayed nevertheless dominated the room not simply by virtue of his office but by the sheer force of his personality. He did not strike me as arrogant, but he definitely had a commanding way about him. When he asked you to sit, you sat. When he asked you questions, you answered. When he gave you an answer, you believed him. He just had an air of authority without swagger or showiness that I actually found reassuring.
Like me, the prince was in his early forties. Unlike me, he was a billionaire several times over. He was a member of a royal family that was sitting on an ocean of oil. Even when prices fell, he was still wealthier than I could even imagine, a high-ranking member of the Forbes 400 list though he’d never worked a day in the private sector.
That said, I detected nothing in his manner that seemed consumed with material things. Admittedly, we were sitting in the most expensive restaurant at one o
f the most expensive hotels on the planet, but he didn’t strike me as pompous or distant. Rather, he had a firm handshake and sharp, quick eyes that flashed with an intelligence that both impressed and somewhat intimidated me. When a young waiter approached, the prince ordered a Coke Zero with lots of ice, not a fancy bottle of wine, champagne, or liquor. When it was time for dinner, he ordered a simple garden salad. Pritchard, on the other hand, ordered the king crab and ratatouille ravioli accompanied by the 200 gram Wagyu fillet, cooked medium and served with a glass of the house cabernet sauvignon. I split the difference, ordering a salad and a bowl of lobster bisque.
For his part, despite the lavish dinner order, Pritchard wasn’t playing the role of a flashy, jet-setting businessman. He wasn’t wearing Zegna or Armani or some other designer suit. Instead, he wore a crisp new light-blue dress shirt under a navy-blue blazer, cotton Dockers, and loafers without socks. Graying at the temples and clean-shaven, he was lean and looked like he could handle himself with a weapon or in hand-to-hand combat. I had questions for him. So many questions. But for now those would have to wait.
The prince offered his condolences on the deaths of my mother and nephew. Then he asked about Khachigian—details about his death, how we’d known each other, and how I thought ISIS had discovered his efforts to expose their acquisition of Syrian chemical weapons. I answered all his questions as best I could while Pritchard listened. It was a professional yet relaxed conversation and I was grateful for their interest.
At the same time, I knew the prince was testing everything I said to see if I was being truthful and candid, and I suddenly felt self-conscious about having used an alias to enter his country. Surely as the head of UAE intelligence, he knew, but if it bothered him, he didn’t let on.
Our meals came, but only Pritchard seemed interested in the food. The prince and I mostly just kept talking. He barely touched his salad. I barely touched my soup. In time, I apparently passed his test.