They were Libyans.
Some thirty former employees of the intelligence agencies of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s government lived and worked within the walls of Maadi Land and Sea. To a man they were not in the country illegally. On the contrary, each and every one of these former spies and internal security officers had obtained travel documents out of Libya and into Egypt. These documents, however, were not obtained via proper consular channels. No, they had been purchased with bribes and extortion and even violence, because all of these men were wanted criminals, both at home and abroad.
Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd., was a front company whose true purpose was to serve as a conduit moving equipment and matériel between Egypt and Libya in a clandestine fashion. It had been set up years earlier by Libya’s spy service, the Haiat amn al Jamahiriya, the Jamahiriya Security Organization (or JSO), when Libya began exporting weapons to revolutions it supported and terrorists it bankrolled. But shortly after the revolution in Libya and the fall of Colonel Gaddafi, the company had been converted by surviving former members of the JSO into a for-profit enterprise. Maadi Land and Sea Freight, Ltd., opened as a turnkey operation so that the ring of ex-JSO operatives could stay in the business of the smuggling and sale of weapons from Libya, now lining their own personal coffers with the money earned from these transactions.
The leader of the entire criminal enterprise was a silver-haired but fit fifty-eight-year-old Libyan named Aref Saleh. Saleh had been one of Gaddafi’s top spies for three decades before the fall of Tripoli, and much of his time outside of his home country had been spent in Egypt as the director of the Cairo branch of the Foreign Liaison Office of the JSO. In this role he ran a large group of agents in Egypt as well as in other nations around North Africa and the Middle East.
These contacts from his past provided him with business partners as well as a natural market for the weapons now for sale.
Saleh had organized the men under him, former members of the JSO, much like a real corporation. He had a marketing department that found clients for the Libyan arms, a shipping and logistics department that transported the Libyan arms to the end users, and a matériel procurement department that found the missing equipment and bought it from middlemen or else took it outright. He also had a robust corporate security office. While all of the thirty men working with him knew their way around a firearm, having all served in the military, ten of his employees were dedicated solely to security matters.
Aref Saleh and his company were always under threat, so they were always on guard. They lived on the property of Maadi Land and Sea, turning many of the offices into apartments and converting the building’s previously only adequate security system into a virtual fortress with armed guards, security cameras, and motion detectors.
While Aref and his minions had had great success selling rifles and machine guns and ammunition and land mines, their highest-priced item was the surface-to-air missile. They had already sold SAMs in small quantities to several groups around the Middle East and Asia. On today’s agenda, however, they would be meeting with two men who had traveled to Cairo from Yemen—senior leadership from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. AQAP were some of the biggest players on the block, because they had deep pockets, thanks to their benefactors in the Gulf States, and they outfitted fighters and operatives in several countries. Saleh’s sales department’s preliminary meetings with personnel from this organization gave them hope that today’s meeting with these principals from Yemen would prove fruitful.
The secure nature of the Libyans’ business meant that all meetings with potential clients were conducted off-site in any one of a number of safe houses throughout Cairo. Today’s meeting with the men from Yemen was to be held in a private two-story home a kilometer from the Maadi Land and Sea compound, close to the Maadi Yacht and Sports Club. Four of Saleh’s security men had gone early to the location to set up for the meeting. Four more would then fan out into the neighborhood to keep an eye out on the streets for any surveillance. And then, shortly before the AQ principals arrived, Saleh and his upper management team would themselves make the trip to the safe house in their armored and tinted Mercedes S600, a vehicle once owned by former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak himself.
Normally Saleh arrived late to his sales meetings, as he did not care about keeping his clients waiting a few minutes. Mostly his customers were Third World rebels and the like, men well accustomed to inconvenience. An hour or two sitting in the safe house kitchen at a table drinking tea was hardly any real annoyance for men who lived in this world of discomfort. But today’s prospective buyers were serious men fighting a serious cause and the several preliminary meetings with other members of their organization had shown Saleh and his people just how serious the Yemenis were about striking a deal. A potentially big deal.
For this reason, Aref Saleh would not keep them waiting. He would arrive first to show them respect.
The Al Qaeda men were in the market for Russian-made Igla-S shoulder-fired rockets, the most expensive item in the catalogue of the illegal Libyan arms organization.
Between himself and his staff, Saleh hoped he could sell as many as fifteen of the Igla-S’s to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and they had even arranged for that number to be ready to ship from a secret warehouse in Tripoli to Benghazi, a Libyan port, in advance of this meeting. At $450,000 each, a sale of this magnitude would garner his operation upwards of $7 million, as well as pave the way for more sales in the future to AQAP.
Shortly before noon a small car pulled up in front of the safe house on Street Fourteen around the corner from the Maadi Yacht and Sports Club. Two men climbed out of the vehicle, and then the driver rolled off to find parking on the tree-lined road. The men were watched by no fewer than a half dozen sets of eyes from many angles up and down the street. The guests were both young, in their thirties, and they both wore simple Western clothing and prayer caps. Their beards were dark and midlength, and they both looked like fit and healthy young men, perhaps individuals who worked in some trade that required manual labor.
They walked up to the front door of the safe house and it opened as soon as they stepped onto the stoop.
In the foyer of the home, the two men from Yemen were met with smiles by four men in business suits. Aref Saleh and three of his armed guards then greeted their prospective clients with handshakes and gestures of blessings, and then the two men were politely but carefully frisked for weapons or listening devices by waving a detection wand over their bodies. Within moments they were taken into a Western-style sitting room, and tea was poured for Saleh and his guests while the guards spread out into the corners of the room.
Saleh sat on a sofa across from the two men, who had seated themselves in armchairs. The shorter of the two young al Qaeda men said, “We were told to call you Idriss.”
Saleh nodded with a smile. “That is correct. And I am told you are Miguel. Interesting choice for a name.”
Miguel only said, “And this is my superior. You may call him Haroom.”
Aref Saleh turned to Haroom and said, “I look forward to doing business with you, my friend.”
The other man nodded, indicating he understood, but he did not speak.
“Will you remain silent, friend?”
Haroom did not answer, but Miguel answered for him. “You can do your business with me directly.”
Saleh nodded politely. And with a smile he said, “Very well, then. How may I help you two brothers?” The Libyan was not fazed in the least that one of the men would remain silent for the meeting. Saleh had dealt with men like this for a quarter century, and a necessary part of dealing with terrorists and revolutionaries was their odd organizational structures and their often overly dramatic personalities.
Miguel began explaining how his organization had a need for several of the Igla-S missiles that the Libyans claimed to possess, and he hoped that they could begin a long business relationship with this organization located here in Cairo.
* * *
While his subordinate spoke, Haroom remained silent. He would speak if he had to, but it would reveal more about him than he would like the Libyans to know. Because even though Haroom spoke Yemeni Arabic quite well, and he understood the dialect the Libyan was speaking, he was not himself a native speaker of Arabic, not of any dialect of the language at all. He was, instead, a native speaker of English, and he spoke it with a northern California dialect.
Haroom’s real name was David Wade Doyle, but he was more commonly known within the upper echelon of AQAP by the name Daoud al-Amriki, or “David the American.”
David had been a member of al Qaeda for over ten years, and a senior operational commander for the past four years. His last operation, in western Pakistan the previous autumn, had led to the deaths of several American military and CIA personnel, but in the end David’s mission had failed.
He was determined that his new mission, for which he would need the missiles on offer by the Libyan in front of him, would
not
fail.
Thirty-year-old David Doyle was born in Kelseyville, California, one hundred miles north of San Francisco. His parents were farmers and trappers, and Doyle grew up outdoors. His parents were also atheist, so David had had no connection with religion until the family moved to San Francisco when he was sixteen in order for his mother to begin treatment for breast cancer.
They moved into an apartment building and young David began hanging out with the three boys who lived next door, the children of immigrants from Yemen. Soon enough he even began venturing into the mosque with the men of the family. He was taken in by the culture and the faith and the kinship he felt with those there, so when his mother died and his father decided to head back north, the seventeen-year-old Californian dropped out of high school and traveled with the immigrant family back home to Yemen on vacation.
The family returned home to California, but David Doyle never did.
He converted to Islam when he was seventeen, and he spent years learning Arabic and studying the Koran. The mosque he attended in Sana’a was among the most radical in the country, and he himself became radicalized by the teachings of the imam.
When the USS
Cole
was attacked in port in nearby Aden, Doyle felt nothing but happiness at the deaths of seventeen American sailors, and he wanted to take part in his own act against the nation of his birth.
He began training in al Qaeda camps in the interior of the country and it was here, on September 11, 2001, where he learned about 9/11, referred to among al Qaeda personnel as the Planes Operation. He and the other young men in training cheered and prayed, and then they headed toward Afghanistan to help with the resistance.
Doyle was in Peshawar, Pakistan, when Afghanistan fell, recovering from shrapnel wounds to the stomach he received in Jalalabad. He returned to Yemen soon after to continue his recovery. Here he returned to his mosque, and spent the balance of his time either in training or in teahouses watching the news.
He killed his first American in Iraq, not Afghanistan. He’d come after the initial invasion and, at a distance of forty yards, he put a burst from his RPK into the helmet of a Marine, a fresh-faced lance corporal no older than Doyle himself. He felt no repulsion for his act, he only wanted to be certain that his comrades saw him do it.
He then spent years in and out of Iraq and in and out of Afghanistan, in combat, on recon missions, and planting bombs. Eventually his knowledge of English made him a valuable al Qaeda asset and they moved him away from the danger of the combat zones, sending him to camps in Pakistan to help train the Taliban. Soon he was taken in by AQ leadership to be cultivated as an operational commander.
It was his own plan that he’d acted out the previous year in Pakistan at the black-site prison the Americans operated there. His failure in the Khyber Pass could well have resulted in his execution by the leadership of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but instead he’d been given a chance to redeem himself through jihad and martyrdom on a new, bold mission.
And this time he would not fail.
And now, as he sat in his comfortable armchair in this beautiful home in Maadi, David Doyle was very aware that, in a perfect world, he would get his fucking missiles and he would kill this fucking Libyan bastard in front of him.
It was a necessary evil that Doyle found himself working with ex–Libyan intelligence officers. He had no respect for these greedy and evil men.
Muammar Gaddafi had been no friend to the cause for which Doyle had devoted his life. Libya had even accepted al Qaeda prisoners from the United States in 2004 for rendition and torture. All so the United States could get intelligence against AQ, and all so Gaddafi could garner favor from the powerful and angry Americans.
No, Doyle had no respect for JSO men, they may have been Muslims but that meant nothing to him in and of itself. They were not devout, and they would not stick their necks out for the cause. They had served their master until his death and they had served themselves in the year since.
They were no better than the many infidels Doyle had killed—these Libyan fuckers would probably not even give him a discount for his purchases.
Doyle saw that the charismatic smile of the silver-haired man in the business suit had faded while Miguel talked. Idriss did not look at Miguel; no, he looked at Doyle. Looking him over, Doyle thought he could detect evidence of recent surgery on the man’s feline-like face. Perhaps the former JSO leader had had some facial reconstructive surgery to help hide his true identity from the authorities.
The American al Qaeda commander knew more about Idriss than he was letting on. Doyle would not have traveled to Cairo with only one confederate and put himself at the mercy of this man’s organization with nothing more than hope that he would get his missiles. No, Doyle knew all about this man and his enterprise. The former spy and enemy of Islam was a bastard, and David Doyle was disgusted to be in his presence.