The Afghan

Inshallah.”

Then he was gone. He always parked his hired car several hundred yards away and round two corners. Outside the villa gates, she crouched, as always, adjusting a shoe and glancing up and down the road. There was nothing but some chit of a girl two hundred yards up, trying to start a scooter that refused to fire. But she was local, in jilbab, covering the hair and half the face. Still, it offended him that a woman would have any motorized vehicle at all. He turned and walked away toward his car. The girl with the spluttering engine leaned forward and spoke into something inside the basket above the front mudguard. Her clipped English spoke of Cheltenham Ladies’ College. “Mongoose I, on the move,” she said.

ANYONE WHO has ever been involved in what Kipling called “the Great Game,” and what James Jesus Angleton of the CIA referred to as the “wilderness of mirrors,” will surely agree the greatest enemy is the UCU. The Unforeseen Cock-Up has probably wrecked more covert missions than treachery or brilliant counterintelligence by the other side. It almost put an end to Operation Crowbar. And it all started because everyone consumed by the new atmosphere of cooperation was trying to be helpful. The pictures from the two Predators that were “spelling” each other over the UAE and the Arabian Sea were going back from Thumrait to Edzell air base, which knew exactly why and American Army CENTCOM at Tampa, Florida, which thought the British had simply asked for some routine aerial surveillance. Martin had insisted that no more than twelve should ever know he was out in the cold, and the number was still only at ten. And they were not in Tampa. Whenever the Predators were over the Emirates, their images contained a teeming mass of Arabs, non-Arabs, cars, cabs, docks and houses. There were far too many to begin checking out every one. But the dhow called the Rasha, and her elderly master, were known about. So when she was docked, anyone visiting her was also of possible interest.

But there were scores. She had to be loaded and unloaded, refueled and reprovisioned. The Omani crewman scrubbing her down exchanged pleasantries with passersby on the quayside. Tourists wandered by to gawk at a real trading dhow of traditional teak. Her skipper was visited onboard by his local agents and personal friends. When a single, clean-shaven young Gulf Arab in white dishdasha and white, filigreed thub skullcap conferred with Faisal bin Selim, he was just one of many.

Edzell operations room had a menu of a thousand faces of confirmed and suspected AQ members and sympathizers, and every image from the Predators was electronically compared. Dr. al-Khattab did not trigger red flags because he was not known. So Edzell missed him. These things happen. The slim young Arab visiting the Rasha rang no bells in Tampa either, but the Army sent the images as a courtesy to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, and the National Reco

Then came the computer. Software was prepared that reduced the human face to over six hundred tiny measurements and stored them. It seems every human face in the world can be broken down into measurements. It may be the exact distance to the micron between the pupils of the eyes, the width of the nose at seven points between eyebrows and tip, twenty-two measurements for the lips alone, and the ears…

Ah, the ears. Face analysts love the ears. Every crease and furrow, wrinkle and curve, fold and lobe, is different. They are like fingerprints. Even the ones on the left and right side of the head are not quite the same. Plastic surgeons ignore them, but give a skilled face-watcher both ears in good definition and he will get his “match.”

The computer software had a memory bank fare bigger than a thousand faces stored at Edzell. It had convicted criminals of apparently no political persuasion at all, because even they can work for terrorists if the price is right. It had immigrants, legal and illegal, and not necessarily Muslim converts. It had thousands and thousands of faces taken from demonstrations, as the protesters rolled by the hidden cameras, waving their placards and chanting their slogans. And it did not confine its database to the United Kingdom. In short, it had over three million human faces from all over the world. The computer broke down the face talking to the master of the Rasha, compensated for the oblique angle of the shot by picking the single image where the man raised his head to look at a jet taking off from Abu Dhabi airport, secured its six hundred measurements and began to compare. It could even adjust for added or shaved facial hair.

Fast though it was, the computer still took an hour to do its work. But it found him.

He was a face in a crowd outside a mosque just after 9/11 cheering enthusiastically whatever the orator was saying. This orator was known as Abu Qatada, fanatical Al Qaeda supporter in Britain, and the crowd he was addressing that late September day of 2001 was from al-Muhajiroun, a jihad-supporting extremist group.

Abstracting the face of the student from the file, the probationer took it to his superior. From there, it went up to the formidable lady ru

For sure, he had apparently never been anywhere near extremists since that day outside the mosque. But a fully reformed foolish boy is not spotted conferring with the captain of the Rasha in Abu Dhabi port. So… he was in the first category: an AQ sleeper, until proven otherwise. Further discreet checks revealed he was back in Britain, resuming his laboratory work at Aston. The question was: Arrest him or watch him? The problem was, a single aerial photograph that could not be revealed would not secure a conviction. It was decided to put the academic under surveillance, costly though it was.

The quandary was solved a week later when Dr. al-Khattab booked a flight back to the Arabian Gulf. That was when the SRR was brought in. Britain has for years possessed one of the best “tracker” units in the world. It was known as the 14th Intelligence Company, or the Detachment, or, more simply, the Det. And it was extremely covert. Unlike the SAS and the SBS, it was not designed as a unit of ultra-hard fighters. Its talents were extreme stealth and skill at planting bugs, taking long-range photos, eavesdropping and tracking. It was particularly effective against the IRA in Northern Ireland. In several cases, it was the information provided by the Det that enabled the SAS to set an ambush for a terrorist attack unit and wipe them out. Unlike the hard units, the Det used women extensively. As trackers, they were more likely to pass as harmless and not to be feared. The information they were able to bring back was indeed very much to be feared.