Purpose of Evasion Read online

  “I got"—Sami almost slipped up but caught himself before he revealed that he had complete access to Karim’s phone. Nothing had come from it yet, but if there was anything, he wanted ownership of the information and the ability to massage the sourcing before he gave it to Andy. “I met him, Coach. We had dinner. There’s nothing.”

  “Work him harder because he’s connected to Hasan Khalifa. The truck proves it. And Khalifa is dirty.” Andy took a step closer before continuing. “If I didn’t make this clear enough at the outset, this is a whole new ballgame, Dost. For all of us, but especially you. You’re not bird-dogging PIRs that may lead to a UAV mission, OK. This is a domestic attack. Imminent. People in the U.S. will die.”

  “Then the FBI— “

  “We’ve had this conversation.”

  “I understand, but we don’t have a domestic intelligence service in this country, OK? We don’t do secret police. There’s no Lubyanka. I can’t grab people off the street. I listen. I watch. I gather evidence. I build a case.”

  “Then what? You tell us who blew up the buildings after they killed innocent people – and themselves – in an attack? No! That’s the fucking FBI’s job! Not good enough! We’re talking about counterterrorism. With these stakes, there’s only one way to do it. Given the players, there’s only one person who can do it. You need to step out from behind the keyboard. It’s not a shroud that separates you and your job from the spies and theirs. There’s nobody waiting for the intel. No one will read a report and decide to launch the drone strike.”

  Andy gestured with his shoulders and Sami followed him down the sidewalk. “We will not get caught standing around like the Europeans. London. Paris. Berlin. The fucking continent is gone. And we’ll never be a police state like Israel, you understand? As long as Congress has their thumbs up their asses, those of us in the field need to chart the middle ground. To protect America and American values. We will act before we are attacked. I don’t care what the history with Karim Sulemani is, or whatever reason you have for the kid gloves treatment. You can’t run an operation with your team in the dark.”

  “What am I supposed to say? Tell them that one of our targets was my best friend growing up. And my college roommate! I lose credibility. Nobody in their right mind would work with me on the job.”

  “Throw out the rule book! I know that’s not your strength, but— “

  “You know that! Then why put me on the job?”

  “I told you why!” Rizzo grabbed Sami by the elbow and turned toward him, almost nose to nose as pedestrians passed on Duke Street. “Masjid Almanny!” Andy let the words linger. He was good at what he did. He knew that letting Sami marinate in the name of the mosque would work on Sami’s memory. His grandfather built the mosque from the ground up. Abu Muhammad was shorthand for Masjid Almanny. In the U.S., and especially the D.C. area, the mosque and the man were interchangeable.

  “It doesn’t stop with Sulemani.” Rizzo’s words hung in the air between them a moment, before a fresh breeze seemed to blow them away. Rizzo’s implication crowded the space between them, and they both took a step back.

  “What’s going on here, Coach? You’re talking in riddles. From the beginning, this operation has been a cluster. The whole thing has been closed book. OK, fine, I haven’t told the team about my relationship with Karim, but we’re in the dark on more than that. It’s not OPSEC. You are keeping something. And now,” Sami hesitated before continuing, “We’ve done this a million times, and his name has never come up before.”

  “It’s not normal. I agree. But there is nothing I have that you don’t have. The Incumbent is shitting bricks. It’s local Muslims and it’s not an exercise. They’re fucking scared, Dost. You are great at your job. The best I have. But you’re not exactly entrenched with local Muslims.”

  Local Muslims aren’t my job! Sami wanted to yell. But he had made his point and Andy didn’t slow for a moment.

  “Estrangement from your grandfather is estrangement from the whole community. The threat was never here before. Never at home, in D.C., in our own backyard. In his community. If Abu Muhammad can help us, then you need to talk to him. Same as Karim.”

  Long ago, Andy told Sami they had to trust each other because they could not afford to trust anyone else. Long after this operation concluded, Sami would still wonder what Andy Rizzo knew and when he knew it. Why had he told Sami to treat his grandfather the same as Karim? Karim was a suspect.

  Years ago, Sami explained his grandfather to Andy. Andy knew Sami’s sexuality was not the seed of their estrangement, just the final straw. Once it had broken the camel’s back, Sami flogged the beast by joining the U.S. military to fight in the War on Terror.

  Iraq. Afghanistan.

  It wasn’t the whole story, but there was enough red meat there for Sami to satisfy Andy and pass a poly. No one knew the truth.

  NINE

  KARACHI, PAKISTAN 1941 – 1962

  LOUDON COUNTY, VIRGINIA 1962 – 1993

  Abu Muhammad was Made in America, an identity adopted by Tahir Lakhani, born in 1941 on the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan. Then populated by fewer than 500,000, by the time Tahir left for the U.S., his childhood home was at the center of a metropolis that had grown to over 2 million souls. Other cities in Pakistan grew during this period because rural people moved to cities as the country’s population exploded. But, more than any other city, Karachi bore the brunt of the religious-political upheaval of India’s immediate post-independence period.

  With the split of the British Indian Empire into two independent countries that have been enemies ever since, Muslim Muhajirs were driven from secular India. They settled in Karachi by the millions. Muhajirs eventually outnumbered native Sindhis and the city became the center of Pakistani Sufism. A land that was unchanged for millennia, and then experienced the violent influence of the British Raj over the course of 100 years, suddenly experienced kaleidoscopic urbanization, modernization, and globalization in a single generation.

  Tahir’s family were not spared. His parents were subsistence farmers under the Raj but spent Tahir’s childhood working in factories. Neither occupation invested them with much aptitude for educating their son to live in a modern world they barely understood themselves. So, they turned him over to the most well-funded school in their area, a Hanafi madrassa.

  By twenty years old, Tahir was a promising scholar of Islam. His marriage to the daughter of the madrassa’s founder was a testament to his ascendancy. He studied in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. With his wife and young son Muhammad in tow, his first experience with the U.S. came in the throes of the turbulent 1960s. Studying in a U.S. exchange program near Washington, within six months of arriving in the country he witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Power struggles were being fought in the streets. History was being made by assassin’s bullets. The U.S. never seemed more like a Middle Eastern kingdom. But for one difference. Islam.

  In the mid-1960s, the religion was known among Americans for the strain proselytized by Malcolm X, who was shot and killed after his own power struggle with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. With the passage of the same 1965 immigration act that permitted Hasan Khalifa’s parents to enter, immigration from majority Muslim countries grew exponentially. Tahir thought the time was right to build a meaningful home in the U.S. for traditional, Middle Eastern Islam. He raised money from local communicants and contributors around the world, and while the mosque that was completed in the early 1970s would pale by comparison to the Masjid Almaany project completed in the 1980s, it was during this time that Tahir adopted a name worthy of his ambition. Abu Muhammad. Father of Muhammad.

  The son, Muhammad Lakhani, grew up at his father’s knee. The mosque was central to his life and not just as a place of worship. The construction projects defined his father’s life for decades, and young Muhammad traveled with his father to far-flung places in search of support. It was during his early twenties that a former general named Muhamma
d Zia-ul-Haq rose to power in Pakistan. The rise was contemporaneous with Reagan’s in the U.S., and the two governments collaborated with mujahideen to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Abu Muhammad was uniquely situated to support communication and the strengthening of relations between two nations allied against the Communists, each for their own reasons. He not only raised funds for his mosque, but he raised his profile. And became a political player.

  Aided by the CIA and Pakistani ISI, the mujahideen garnered valuable combat materiel during this period and learned the insurgent tactics necessary for a small, disjointed group of tribal forces to defeat a military superpower. Some said the CIA also taught them how to scale production and distribution of heroin. The residue of war with the Soviets also included the displacement of millions, many of whom settled into refugee camps in northwestern Pakistan. Muhammad and his father visited these camps during the mid-1980s.

  The father saw more evidence than ever of the need for Zia-ul-Haq’s campaign of sharization or Islamization in Pakistan.

  The son saw something else. Frequent trips with his father, the construction of the first D.C. mosque in the 1970s, even the ambitious second and grander mosque in the 1980s, could not remit Muhammad of the influences of his American childhood. Seeing the millions starving, sitting at the seat of power as meetings to address the issue were held, Muhammad Lakhani did not think the solution was Islam. It was politics.

  Global cooperation was routing the Soviets. The wealth of the West brought to bear not for military conquest but to feed the starving. Foreign Aid. Economic Development. With his father’s growing political contacts, it was not difficult to get a foreign aid appointment. Thanks to his own intellect, ambition, and experience, he rose swiftly. Along the way, he met a woman who shared his commitment to the work. In 1982, their son Samir was born.

  Abu Muhammad was not considered radical in the mid-1990s, as Sami entered his second decade of life. He was a Muslim, but an Americanized one. He was connected to the Reagan and Bush White Houses. His overt religiosity left him at arms-length from Clinton, but he was still relevant, given his prominence as an interlocutor during the Afghan war against the Soviets. Clinton valued the imam’s political ties to both American Muslims and to the region of his birth.

  But rapidly, more rapidly than anyone realized, Abu Muhammad and his adherents were finding fault with Muhammad and his benefactors. The simple geopolitics of the Cold War - the enemy of my enemy is my friend – had allied them against the shared threat of Soviet Socialism. But as the last decade of the 20th Century dawned, the mujahideen turned their ire on the formerly allied Americans with quickness and completeness that affirmed they had learned more from the Cold War than how to take down Russian Mils helicopters.

  The withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan created space in a failed state. Disgruntled ex-holy warriors radicalized, and radicalized others. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the decision by Arab states to allow America to ride to the rescue, solidifying its role as regional strongman, shocked the consciences and stoked the grievances of militant Islamist groups. A group of innovators saw the potential to scale fragmented, regional operations that they had directed against Soviet Communism into a global war against capitalism, colonialism, and secularism. By the middle of Bill Clinton’s first term, Usama bin Laden was a name well known to U.S. intelligence.

  The U.S. was living in its post-Cold War fantasy. The lone superpower, it was exalted in the decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. The nation that had bled the Soviets dry had not yet been bloodied at the nose by fewer than two dozen twentysomethings. The environment in embassies and foreign service posts was incomparable to the security footing of what would become the “post-9/11” world.

  Sami was 11. He was at home in Northern Virginia. At his grandfather’s home. As Sami reached school age, his parents’ steady rotation of foreign postings were anathema to his consistent scholastic and social development. His mother and father were due back by mid-summer, in time to enjoy extra time with him while school was out. Calls were infrequent, but there was a letter or two a week.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table of his grandfather’s home. Abu Muhammad, the fearless, had brought over a friend’s mother to help deliver the news. She was a close friend of his mother’s. The virtuous imam left the room, leaving her to the task.

  “Sami, there has been a horrible tragedy…”

  TEN

  ANNAPOLIS

  The highlight of Hasan’s week was the time he spent with the Islamic Center’s burgeoning Youth Council. The Council was composed of boys aged 13 to 18, all of whom reminded him of his own teenage years. Each of them were devout and striving in their faith, but they were distracted. As much as they sought to know the truth, they were tested. They were tempted by sex and the objectification of the female form. Alcohol was ever present in their suburban high schools and they were challenged by a culture that encouraged experimentation. If they pushed the boundaries and succumbed to these temptations as a normal part of life, America had so much more on offer. They were not children of Allah, but children of America, and it had poisoned their minds.

  He hoped that someday there would be a girls’ council, but it would not do for him to minister to girls. When he started the Center, he dreamed that he would meet the woman who could. Perhaps she would even be his wife. A devout, Muslim woman, committed to Allah and to him, with whom he could build his community. As time went on, the fantasy became harder to maintain. The activities that had become the primary purpose of the Center would not allow him time to create a girls’ council. And he would never have a wife. At least, not here.

  As Hasan considered this, his phone chirped a unique, new tone. It was an incoming message on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. Without looking, he knew it would be the man who called himself Zechariah. Whatever Hasan had once imagined for the Center, everything was directed to Zechariah’s purposes now.

  Hasan excused himself from the boys and closed the door to his private office. It took a moment to acquaint himself with the app. It was one he had never used before. When Zechariah communicated, it was always by a new, encrypted channel he used one time only. He was a wise man. And a man who agreed that America was a poisonous place. A place without piety. Taqwa.

  Without his time in Egypt, Hasan never would have found the purity that cemented his own faith, and which opened the world to him. His purity made him an imam, allowed him the opportunity to lead his own congregation, and recommended him for Zechariah’s mission. Hasan would not sit idle in the face of doubts about whether the boys in his Council would ever find a culture of purity in which to develop and practice Islam. Zechariah had given him an opportunity to act. The American culture of sin was the basis of their partnership, in fact.

  Where Zechariah’s purity was found, Hasan did not know. Sometimes he permitted himself to imagine. His fancy settled on great scenes of the Muslim world. Zechariah in a gleaming thobe, stood on a balcony outside Masjid al-Haram as a throng crowded Mecca and genuflected to the Kaaba in searing heat. Zechariah in the dusty streets outside of Masjid Al-Aqsa, answering the call to prayer in the Holy City’s Muslim Quarter, even as Jews and Christians turned their covetous stares toward the four minarets that mark the holiest place in all Abrahamic faith. And because Hasan was born into a time when Muslims worldwide were called to jihad, he had visions of Zechariah the mujahid.

  In their ignorance, Americans called those who brought holy war jihadis. This was nonsense. A child’s word. Mujahid were the warriors. Hasan imagined Zechariah shouldering a rocket launcher in Beirut, even as Hasan was only a child. Or Zechariah kneeling in prayer next to Sheikh Usama himself, outside the mouth of a mountain cave in the Spin Ghar. The visions of Zechariah the soldier were the most vivid because this was their shared mission. Or, Zechariah’s mission. He was the holy warrior. Hasan was but a weapon.

  If Hasan was certain of this, he was also sure that Zechariah ha
d been routed somewhere in the service of Allah and forced to come to America. Zechariah was devout, he was righteous, he was experienced, he was ingenious; but he was also American. Hasan knew this. He had picked up on cues even in their limited communication. At first, this had thrown Hasan. Unnerved him. But their mutual friend had vouched for Zechariah. Hasan had never asked for details. And then the time for asking had passed.

  The instructions came. Hasan formed the Council of Muhammad. Hasan handled the money as instructed. He bought the pickups. He provided information on the members of the mosque who now drove the trucks. He bought new phones, he changed sim cards, and he downloaded apps. All as he was told.

  And now he looked down at a message he had been awaiting with anticipation. It was the message that signaled a start to Zechariah’s plan.

  Hasan returned to pray with the boys in the Youth Council, for now, they might be saved.

  ELEVEN

  ALEXANDRIA

  If Home Game were on the books, Sami would have had a variety of resources at his disposal. Metadata on the targets’ phones would lead to clear connections that could be investigated more closely. Corresponding warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court would have permitted surveillance of the targets’ telephonic and electronic communications, and those of their close, frequent or suspicious contacts.

  If Sami were on the books, he would surveil Hasan’s home and office. They would make surreptitious entry to implant listening devices and cameras. Technical Services (“OTS”) could install wireless cameras and microphones in an amazing variety of household objects.

  Various and sundry case officers and technical support staff would have rotated through shifts, on fixed and mobile surveillance. The objective would have been to gather intelligence that allowed for disruption of any mission or objective of the cell before an attack. If the time came when Hasan’s cell was poised to act, and disruption was inadequate, paramilitary officers from Special Operations Group (“SOG”) would be summoned.