It was a discreet club on St. James’s Street, and his hosts were two senior men from the Firm. Also at the table was a Jordanian-born, British-naturalized analyst brought in from GCQH at Cheltenham. His job there was to listen to and analyze eavesdropped radio chatter inside the Arab world. But his role at the lunch table was different.
He conversed with Mike Martin in rapid Arabic, and Martin replied. Finally, he nodded at the two spooks from Century House. “I’ve never heard anything like it,” he remarked. “With that face and voice, he can pass.” With that, the man left the table, clearly having performed his function. “We would be so damnably grateful,” said the senior mandarin, “if you would go into Kuwait and see what is going on there.”
“What about the Army?” asked Martin.
“I think they will see our point of view,” murmured the other. The Army grumbled again but let him go. Weeks later, passing himself as a Bedouin camel drover, Martin slipped over the Saudi border into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. On the plod north to Kuwait City, he passed several Iraqi patrols but they took no notice of the bearded nomad leading two camels to market. The Bedouin are so determinedly nonpolitical that they have for millennia watched the invaders sweep hither and thither through Arabia and never intervened. So the invaders have mostly let them be.
In several weeks inside Kuwait, Martin contacted and assisted the fledgling Kuwaiti resistance, taught them the tricks of the trade, plotted the Iraqi positions, strong points and weaknesses, and then came out again. His second incursion during the Gulf War was into Iraq itself. He went over the Saudi border in the west and simply caught an Iraqi bus heading for Baghdad. His cover was a simple peasant clutching a wicker basket of hens. Back in a city he knew intimately, he took a position as a gardener in a wealthy villa, living in a shack at the end of the garden. His mission was to act as message collector and passer; for this, he had a small, foldable, parabolic dish aerial whose “blitz” messages were un-interceptable by the Iraqi secret police but which could reach Riyadh.
One of the best-kept secrets of that war was that the Firm had a source, an “asset” high in Saddam’s government. Martin never met him; he just picked up the messages at preagreed dead-letter boxes, or “drops,” and sent them to Saudi Arabia, where the American-led Coalition HQ was both appreciative and mystified. Saddam capitulated on 28 February 1991, and Mike Martin came out, only to be Very nearly shot by the French Foreign Legion as he came through the border in the dark.
On the morning of 15 February 1989, General Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviet 40th Army, the army of occupation in Afghanistan, walked alone back across the Friendship Bridge over the Amu Darya River into Soviet Uzbekistan. His entire army had preceded him. The war was over.
The euphoria did not last long. The USSR ’s own Vietnam had ended in disaster. Her restive European satellites were becoming openly mutinous, and her economy was disintegrating. By November, the Berliners had torn down the wall, and the Soviet empire simply fell apart.
In Afghanistan, the Soviets had left behind a government that most analysts predicted would last no time as the victorious warlords formed a stable government and took over. But the pundits were wrong. The government of President Najibullah, the whiskey-appreciating Afghan the Soviets had abandoned in Kabul, hung on for two reasons. One was that the Afghan Army was simply stronger than any other force in the country, backed as it was by the KHAD secret police, and was able to control the cities and thus the bulk of the population.
More to the point, the warlords simply disintegrated into a patchwork quilt of snarling, grabbing, feuding, self-serving opportunists who, far from uniting to form a stable government, did the reverse: They created a civil war. None of this affected Izmat Khan. With his father still head of the family, although stiff and old before his time, and with the help of neighbors, he helped rebuild the hamlet of Maloko-zai. Stone by stone and rock by rock, they cleared the rubble left by the bombs and rockets and remade the family compound next to the mulberry and pomegranate trees.
With his leg fully healed, he had returned to the war and taken command of his father’s lashkar in all but name, and the men had followed him, for he had been blooded. When peace came, his guerrilla group seized a huge cache of weapons the Soviets could not be bothered to carry home.
These they took over the Spin Gahr to Parachinar in Pakistan, a town that is virtually nothing but an arms bazaar. There they traded the Soviet leftovers for cows, goats and sheep to restart the flocks.
If life had been hard before, starting over was even harder, but he enjoyed the labor, and the sense of triumph that Maloko-zai would live again. A man must have roots, and his were here. At twenty, he both uttered the call and led the prayers at the village mosque on a Friday.
The Kuchi nomads passing through brought grim tales from the plains. The Army of the DRA, loyal to Najibullah, still held the cities, but the warlords infested the countryside and they and their men behaved liked brigands. Tolls were arbitrarily set up on main roads, and travelers were stripped of their money and goods or badly beaten.
Pakistan, in the form of its ISI Directorate, was backing Hekmat-yar to become controller of all Afghanistan, and in areas he ruled utter terror existed. All who had formed the Peshawar 7 to fight the Soviets were now at each other’s throats, and the people groaned. From heroes, the muj were now seen as tyrants. Izmat Khan thanked the merciful Allah that he was spared the misery of the plains.
With the end of the war, the Arabs had almost all gone from the mountains and their precious caves. The one who by the end had become their uncrowned leader, the tall Saudi from the cave hospital was also gone. Some five hundred Arabs had stayed behind, but they were not popular, were scattered far and wide and living like beggars.
When he was twenty, Izmat Khan was visiting a neighboring valley when he saw a girl washing the family clothes in the stream. She failed to hear his horse because of the sound of the running water, and before she could draw the end of her hejab across her face he had made eye contact. She fled in alarm and embarrassment. But he had seen that she was beautiful. Izmat did what any young man would have. He consulted his mother. She was delighted, and soon two aunts had joined with her in happy conspiracy to find the girl and persuade Nuri Khan to contact the father to arrange a union. Her name was Maryam, and the wedding took place in the late spring of 1993. Of course, it was in the open air, full of blossoms being blown off the walnut trees. There was a feast, and the bride came from her village on a decorated horse. There was playing of the flutes and attan dancing under the trees, but of course only for the men. With his madrassah training, Izmat protested at the singing and dancing, but his father was rejuvenated and overruled him. So for a day, Izmat rejected his strict Wahhabi training, and he, too, danced in the meadow, and the eyes of his bride followed him everywhere. The delay between the first glimpse by the stream and the marriage was necessary, both to arrange the details of the dowry and to build a new house for the newlyweds inside the Khan compound. It was here that he took his bride when night had fallen and the exhausted villagers returned home, and his mother forty yards away nodded in satisfaction when a single girl’s cry in the night told her that her daughter-in-law had become a woman. Three months later, it was clear she would bear a child in the snows of February. As Maryam carried Izmat’s child, the Arabs came back. The tall Saudi who led them was not among them; he was somewhere far away called Sudan. But he sent much money, and by paying tribute to the warlords was able to set up training camps. Here, at Khalid ibn Walid, Al Farouk, Sadeek, Khaldan, Jihad Wai and Darunta, the thousands of new volunteers from across the Arabic-speaking world came to train for war.