Fisher-King crossed to his broad, uncluttered desk and paused for a moment with his hand resting on his high-backed chair. ‘Afghanistan has been through a whirlwind of intrigue and deception in the years since the Soviets left, and during that time your friend Nor has offered us an unparalleled insight into Pakistani meddling.’
‘And I think he still could,’ Jonah said.
Fisher-King sat and leant back in his chair with his fingers clasped behind his head. ‘We hung on in longer than most, Jonah. Long after the Americans had lost interest. You can’t say fairer than that, can you?’
‘No,’ Jonah conceded.
‘Now it’s time to move on, to invest in new areas. The Pakistanis have put the Taliban in power in Kabul and on reflection we think that’s a good thing. In fact it’s good news across the region. We gave Saddam a bloody nose in ’91 and now he’s contained. In Tehran, President Rafsanjani has taken the mullahs in hand. He’s a moderate, a thoroughly good chap. And Arafat’s returned to the West Bank. You couldn’t have predicted that. I think we’ll look back in a few years time and say 1996 was the turning point for Middle East peace. You played a part in that and, of course, we’re bloody grateful. We know what you’ve been through. Both of you.’
Fisher-King smiled broadly.
‘That’s it?’ Jonah demanded.
‘We can’t be expected to shoulder your costs indefinitely,’ Fisher-King protested. ‘After all, you’re not really one of us, Jonah.’
Fisher-King had always treated the collection of misfits at the Department at best as poor relations, at worst as rank amateurs. He was of the opinion that military intelligence was a contradiction in terms and Jonah was forced to admit that for the most part he agreed.
‘How is Monteith?’ Fisher-King asked. ‘Is he still growing roses?’
Monteith was Jonah’s boss, a fiery terrier of a man who ran the Department out of the gloomy basement beneath the Old War Office in Whitehall.
‘I have serious doubts about the Taliban,’ Jonah told him.
Fisher-King sighed. ‘Of course you do, Jonah, and so do we, but it’s a trade-off. It’s always a trade-off, in this case between peace and security on the one hand and human rights on the other. Right now Afghanistan needs peace more than anything. The Taliban could play a central role in restoring centralised government in Afghanistan. The Americans agree. They are going to run a thousand miles of pipeline straight through the middle of it and pump a million barrels of oil a day. The oil companies are opening offices in Kandahar.’
‘And the missing Stingers …?’ Jonah asked. ‘Shouldn’t we be trying to get them back?’
The CIA had given away more than two thousand of the easy-to-use, shoulder-fired missiles during the war against the Soviets. The Stinger automated heat-seeking guidance system was uncannily accurate, and they had brought down scores of helicopters and transport aircraft, sowing fear among Soviet pilots and troops alike. Jonah had seen recent intelligence that suggested that six hundred Stingers were still at large.
Fisher-King dismissed the idea with a wave of the hand. ‘The Americans are even as we speak negotiating with Mullah Omar to buy them back. They’re offering a hundred thousand dollars for each one. There’s nothing we can bring to that particular table. We don’t have the resources. You’ll tell Nor, won’t you? It’s best coming from you. He’s your joe …’
‘Tell him what exactly?’
‘What I’ve just told you: job well done. Thanks very much.’
‘And what do you expect him to do?’
‘Same as he does now.’ Fisher-King smiled winningly and sprang to his feet. ‘I’m sure the Pakistanis will keep him busy.’ He removed his double-breasted suit jacket from a rack and put it on, sweeping together the silk-lined flaps and buttoning it up. ‘Got to go,’ he said. ‘Top Floor is waiting. You know your way out.’
Jonah found Monteith sitting on a plastic chair in front of the Afghan ops board in one of the largest of his basement rooms. As was his daily custom, he was wearing a hand-stitched tweed suit and polished brogues. It was difficult to tell whether the suit was forty years old or simply looked it.
‘They want me to pack it up in boxes and stick it in an archive,’ Monteith muttered angrily, staring intently at the board. ‘Fisher-King says it should be in a museum. I was thinking of donating it to my old school.’
Monteith’s Afghan ops board was a legend across the intelligence services. It was known as the Khyber Collage. It was a mishmash of satellite photos, mugshots, maps, waybills, freight certificates, Post-it notes, bills of lading, company accounts and bank records, transcripts of phone intercepts, letters and newspaper cuttings. Things were crossed out and new bits superimposed and glued on. It was maddeningly complex, like an alchemistic experiment. When Jonah had joined the Department it covered a single wall, now it was two. Only Monteith professed to see all the links. Only Monteith could claim to have been following the growth of the broad and diverse movement that was radical Islamic militancy, going back decades, to its roots in the jihad against the Soviets, when the Americans and the Saudis, without any thought for the consequences, funnelled money to a diverse range of Afghan fighters. Funds that went to tens of thousands of people, some operating as individuals, others as mujahedin groups – groups that had over time dissolved or gruesomely mutated.
At the centre of the board, there was a photograph cut from a newspaper of a donnish-looking man with a high forehead and bifocals perched on his nose. It was Monteith’s arch-nemesis, Brigadier Javid Aslam Khan, known to the Department as ‘The Hidden Hand’. Khan was head of the Afghan Bureau of the ISI, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s shadowy and all-powerful intelligence agency. Monteith maintained that it was Khan who was responsible for channelling Saudi and American funds to the most unsavoury and extremist elements of the mujahedin during the Soviet occupation. It was Khan who was directly responsible for the brutal civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal when the mujahedin groups turned on each other and fought over the rubble. And it was Khan who created and nurtured the Taliban for a purpose that was yet to be fully revealed, but which kept Monteith awake at night.
Khan was also Nor’s ISI handler. Nor was one of the roving sets of eyes and ears that Khan maintained in the shifting jihadi groups that he subsidised in Afghanistan. Nor fed information to Khan and Nor fed information to Monteith. He was the Department’s best Afghan source, and Jonah suspected that there was nothing that Monteith hated more than the sense that Khan had finally prevailed.
‘We stride boldly away from the twentieth century with too much confidence and too little reflection. We wrap ourselves in self-serving half-truths and comic-book tag-lines: the triumph of the West, the end of history.’ He snorted. ‘The unipolar American moment. It’s ridiculously naive.’
‘What do you want me to tell Nor?’ Jonah asked.
Monteith glared at him. ‘Tell him that he can expect no further assistance from us, either financial or legal. Tell him that if he shows his face here we will deny that we ever had anything to do with him.’
‘How do you think he’s going to react to that?’
‘I don’t expect him to react well. What do you think?’
‘I think he’s going to throw a fit.’
‘Thank you for your insight. You’d better head off if you’re going to catch your plane.’
On his way out, Jonah saw that some wag had written ‘only connect’ on the back of the door.
A week later, in the final days of the
‘hundred-and-twenty-day wind’, when the Afghan plains were lashed with dust storms and the sky was the colour of a bruise, Jonah slipped silently into Kandahar.
Tradecraft dictated that they meet in the privacy of the cemetery behind the Chawk Madad, among the tattered green martyrs’ flags and upright shards of stone. Nor strode back and forth, his thoughts and words running into each other, gesticulating with his hands as tears rolled down his cheeks. Nor had always been emotionally extravagant: he swerved from one extreme to the other, from unblinking stillness to this staccato jumble of speech.
‘You must be fucking joking,’ Nor said. ‘I’m not hearing this.’
Jonah had just told Nor that he must learn to live without him.
‘They pulled the funding,’ Jonah explained.
‘So what am I supposed to do now?’ demanded Nor. ‘Stand by and watch while this country rolls back into the Dark Ages? Because that’s what’s going to happen, Jonah, they’re going to wind the clock all the way back to zero. They’re going to break the fucking springs.’
‘They’re delivering peace,’ Jonah said, lamely.
Nor stopped and stared. His accusing silence, as always, was worse than his mania.
‘Afghanistan has a chance that it hasn’t had in a generation,’ Jonah told him. ‘The Americans are going to run a pipeline through it.’
Nor sat down and buried his head in his hands.
‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he said.
And Jonah couldn’t believe that he was saying it.
‘What’s happened to you?’ asked Nor suddenly.
Jonah wondered whether to tell him: I have bought a dilapidated farmhouse on an island on the west coast of Scotland, somewhere as far away from Afghanistan as it is possible to get, and I’m going to repair it and live in it; I am to become the father of a baby girl and I have a marriage that I want to make right again, and that is all I care about.
‘The Department is downsizing,’ Jonah told him instead. ‘The Afghan Guides have been consigned to history. I’m retiring.’
‘What the fuck are you talking about? How can you retire? You’re not even thirty years old.’
‘I’m done.’
‘I’ll never forgive you for this.’
January 1999
It was in early 1999, just over two years after he was deemed to be surplus to requirements in the new Taliban era, that Nor got back in touch with the Department. The message that he conveyed was simple –
the mullah wants to parley
.
By that stage it was already clear to anyone who was a student of Afghan affairs that the Taliban, under the command of Mullah Omar, were not the pliable yokels that it had been assumed they were. In August 1998, the Clinton administration had launched a cruise missile attack on terrorist training camps near Khost in retaliation for the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam truck bombings, and the US oil giant Lodestone and its rival Unocal, the Taliban’s only corporate friends, had suspended work and closed their Kandahar offices. In November 1998 the Manhattan Federal Court had issued an indictment chronicling 238 separate charges against Osama Bin Laden, from participating in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and funding Islamist groups in New Jersey to conspiring with Sudan, Iran and Iraq to attack US installations. And the following month, the UN Security Council had passed a motion of censure on the Taliban for its failure to conclude a ceasefire with the Northern Alliance, the slaughter of thousands of ethnic Hazaras in Mazari Sharif, profiting from the lucrative heroin trade and harbouring terrorists.
Jonah was living on the Hebridean island of Islay, with his wife Sarah and Esme, his baby daughter. He remembered the sense of relief when the call came and the sense of palpable excitement in the Department when he arrived. He also recognised, with the clarity of hindsight, the significance of Sarah’s parting question, delivered across the kitchen table: ‘Is that what you’re going to do? You’re going to keep leaving us?’
What could he say?
He had come to his own conclusion. As miserable as it was, his job was what he was. It was his calling. He was nothing without it.
Monteith called them together before the Khyber Collage. He had clearly ignored the directive to dismantle and send it to a museum. It had grown larger in size in the last two years, spilling over to fill half of another wall of the briefing room with more newspaper clippings, photographs of fire-breathing imams, and frame grabs of jihadist websites and satellite channels. Strings of ribbon showed an intricate web of alliances among Sunni extremists worldwide, including Chechen rebel groups, Palestinian radicals, Kashmiri militants, the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. It was Monteith’s assertion that it had only been since 1996, when the Taliban swarmed into Kabul and Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan after half a decade in Sudan – at about the same time as the Afghan Guides were disbanded, Monteith liked to point out – that al-Qaeda had taken on its current incarnation as a worldwide revolutionary vanguard operating in more than sixty countries from a secure base in the Hindu Kush. A base provided by the Taliban and their Pakistani masters. Monteith called them an army of occupation, Pakistani proxies ruling a client state, and he hated them with a passion.
The Taliban sat at the centre of the Collage, fed by three distinct streams: the first, weapons and money from Saudi Arabia via the ISI; the second, a ready source of fanatical foot-soldiers from the Pakistani madrasas; and the third, revenue from the opium trade, with Helmand province as the centre of production. And in each case the hand of the ISI’s chief of Afghan intelligence, Brigadier Javid Khan, Monteith’s arch-nemesis, was detected and highlighted for all to see.
For the sceptics at the Foreign Office and within MI6 who regarded Afghanistan as a backward hellhole and posed the question of why the Pakistanis or for that matter the Saudis should bother with it, Monteith liked to describe the Taliban regime as an ideological picket fence, a buffer zone built by the Pakistanis against the Soviets, and those who came after – the Russians and the Central Asians – to block their access to the Indian Ocean. As for the Saudis, he said that they would always need somewhere to dump their delinquent sons.
The team was five strong, including Monteith. He said that any more would be a crowd given the liaison difficulties at the other end, but Jonah suspected that they were the only ones who were not dead or had not refused to come out of retirement. They sat on white plastic chairs facing the collage: Jonah, Beech, Lennard and Alex.
Monteith liked to call them his waifs and strays. They were the British Afghans – the Afghan Guides. Between them they spoke Mandarin, Dari, Pashtun, Russian, Armenian and Arabic. They spanned fifteen years of war and civil war in Afghanistan. ‘Chinese’ Lennard, the oldest, the son of a Lancastrian construction engineer and a Chinese merchant’s daughter from Singapore, had carried Blowpipe missiles manufactured by Short’s in Belfast to Abdol Haq’s mujahedin group Hezbe Islami, and showed him how to use them to knock out the Soviets’ Sukhoi bombers. He was a graduate of St Martin’s School of Art, and carried a wooden paintbox in his pack. He painted watercolours, capturing the Afghan fighters’ grizzled, battle-scarred features, their jutting chins and enormous hands.