The Afghan

Up on the surface, stumbling over the broken stone blocks that had once been the south face, the last eighty-six rebels found themselves facing a forest of pointed guns and rockets. In the daylight of Saturday dawn, they looked like scarecrows from a horror film. Filthy, stinking, black from cordite soot, ragged, matted, bearded and hypothermic, they tottered and some fell. One of these was Izmat Khan.

Coming down a rock pile, he slipped, reached out to steady himself and grabbed a rock. A chunk came away in his hand. Thinking he was being attacked, a nervous young Uzbek fired his RPG.

The fiery grenade went past the Afghan’s ear into a boulder behind him. The stone splintered, and a piece the size of a baseball hit him with devastating force in the back of the head.

He was wearing no turban. It had been used to bind his hands six days earlier and never recovered. The rock would have pulped the skull if it had hit at ninety degrees. But it ricocheted off, slicing the scalp and knocking him into a near coma. He fell in the rubble, blood gushing from the gash. The rest were marched away to trucks waiting outside.

An hour later, the seven British soldiers were moving through the compound, taking notes. Mike Martin, as senior officer, although technically the unit interpreter, would have a long report to make. He was counting the dead, though he knew there were scores-maybe up to two hundred-still underground. One body interested him. It was still bleeding. Corpses don’t bleed. He turned the scarecrow over. The clothing was wrong. This was Pashtun dress. There were not supposed to be any Pashtun present. He took his shebagh from his head and wiped the grime-smeared face. Something vaguely familiar. When he took out his Ka-bar, a watching Uzbek gri

“This man is alive but injured,” he said. “He has a bad head wound.”

Duty done, he boarded the SBS Land Rover for the drive back to Bagram. The American trawl team found the Afghan in Mazar Hospital three days later and claimed him for interrogation. They trucked him to Bagram, but to their own side of this vast air base, and there he came to two days after that, slowly and groggily on the floor of a makeshift cell, cold and shackled but just alive. On the fourteenth of January 2002, the first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from Kandahar. They were blindfolded, shackled, hungry, thirsty and soiled. Izmat Khan was one of them.

Colonel Mike Martin returned to London in the spring of 2002 to spend three years as deputy chief of staff, HQ_Directorate of Special Forces, Duke of York Barracks, Chelsea. He retired in December 2005 after a party at which a group of friends including Jonathan Shaw, Mark Carleton-Smith, Jim Davidson and Mike Jackson tried and failed-to drink him under the table. In January 2006, he bought a listed barn in the Meon Valley, Hampshire, and started in the late summer to restore it into a country home.

United Nations records later showed that 514 Al Qaeda fanatics died at Qala-i-Jangi and eighty-six survived, all injured. All went to Guantanamo Bay. Sixty Uzbek guards also died. General Rashid Dostum became defense minister in the new Afghan government.

PART THREE. CROWBAR

CHAPTER 8

Operation Crowbar’s first task was to choose its cover story so that even those working inside it would not know anything about Mike Martin or even the concept of infiltrating a ring inside Al Qaeda.

The “legend” chosen was that it would be an Anglo-American joint venture against a steadily growing opium threat coming out of the poppies of Afghanistan, to the refinery kitchens of the Middle East. Thence, the refined heroin was infiltrating the West, destroying lives and generating funds for further terrorism.

The “script” continued to the effect that Western efforts to shut off terrorism’s supply of funds at the level of the world’s banks had driven the fanatics to lean to drugs-a cash-only crime method. And finally, even though the West already had powerful agencies like the U.S. DEA and British customs engaged in the fight against narcotics, Crowbar had been agreed upon by both governments to be a specific, one-target operation prepared to use covert forces outside the niceties of diplomatic courtesy to raid and destroy any factories found in any foreign country turning a blind eye to the trade.

The modus operandi. Crowbar staff would be told as they were reassigned, involved using the highest tech known to man, both to listen and to watch, in order to identify high-ranking criminals, routes, storage facilities, refineries, ships and aircraft that might be involved. As it happened, none of the new staff doubted a word of it.

This was just the cover story, and it would remain in place until there was simply no further use for it, whenever that would be. But after the Fort Meade conference, there was no way Western intelligence was going to place all its eggs in the Crowbar basket. Frantic, though ultradiscreet, efforts would continue elsewhere to discover what al-Isra could possibly refer to. But the intelligence agencies were in a quandary. Between them, they had scores of informants inside the world of Islamic fundamentalism, some willing, some under duress.

The question was: How far can we go before the real leaders realize that we know about al-Isra? There were clear advantages to letting Al Qaeda believe that nothing had been harvested from the laptop of the dead banker at Peshawar. This was confirmed when the first mentions of the phrase in general conversation with Koranic scholars known to be sympathetic to extremism drew only courteous but blank responses.

Whoever knew about the real significance of the phrase, AQ had kept that circle extremely tight, and it was quickly clear it did not include any Western informants. So the decision was taken to match secrecy with secrecy. The West’s countermeasure would be Crowbar-and only Crowbar. The project’s second chore was to find and establish a new and remote headquarters. Both Marek Gumie

After analysis of what would be needed in terms of size, lodgings, space and access, the consensus came down firmly on the side of a decommissioned air base. Such places are usually well away from cities, contain mess halls, canteens, kitchens, and accommodation aplenty. Add to that hangars for storage and a runway for the landing and departure of covert visitors. Unless the decommissioning had been too long ago, refurbishment back to operational requirements could be quickly accomplished by the property-maintenance division of one of the armed services-in this case, the Royal Air Force. When it came to which base, the choice fell on a former American base, which the Cold War had planted several dozen of on British soil. Fifteen were listed and examined, including Chick-sands, Alconbury, Lakenheath, Fairford, Molesworth, Bentwaters, Upper Heyford and Greenham Common. All were vetoed. Some were operational, and service perso