Since 9/11 there has been a huge shake-up. There are now the six principals to whom everything has to be revealed at an early stage. Four are politicians: the President, Vice-President and the Secretaries of Defense and State. One of the two professionals is chairman of the National Security Committee, Steve Hadley, who oversees the Department of Homeland Security and the nineteen agencies. But the other is the top of the pile: the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte.
The CIA is still the primary outside-the-USA intel-gathering body but the Director of Central Intelligence is no longer the lone ranger he used to be. Everyone reports upwards and the three watchwords are: collate, collate, collate. Among the giants the National Security Agency at Fort Meade is still the biggest, in budget and personnel, and the most secret. It alone retains no links to the public or media. It works in darkness but it listens to everything, decrypts everything, translates everything and analyses everything. But so impenetrable is some of the stuff overheard, recorded, downloaded, translated and studied that it also uses an ‘out of house’ committee of experts. One of these is the Koran committee.
As the treasure from Peshawar came in, electronically or physically, other agencies also went to work. Identification of the dead man was vital and the task went to the FBI. Within twenty-four hours the Bureau reported it was certain. The man who went over the Peshawar balcony was indeed the principal finance-gatherer for Al-Qaeda and one of the rare intimates of OBL himself. The connection had been through Ayman al-Zawahiri, his fellow-Egyptian. It was he who had spotted and headhunted the fanatical banker.
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.