The Afghan

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 co

The Federal Aviation Administration, using its contracts 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 U.S. authorities would have given their eyeteeth 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 finally at Fort Meade that the trail of revelation hit the buffer. Seventy-three documents had been downloaded from the Toshiba recovered in the apartment at Peshawar. Some were mere 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 Camp 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 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 absorption of NSA with Arabic had been increasing steadily over 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 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 relied on to catch every meaning and nuance. More, it is often a flowery language, using much imagery, flattery, exaggeration, simile and metaphor. Add to that, it can be very elliptical, with meanings inferred rather than openly said. It is quite different from one-meaning-only English.

“We are down to two last documents,” said the head of Arabic translation. “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 percent. “The reply seems to be from al-Qur, but we have no text on record of what he writes like 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.

“Okay, 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 2

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 dispatched to bring him to the NSA. Two were respectively with the RAND Corporation and the Brookings Institution, both in Washington. Army staff cars were detached to collect them. The fourth and youngest was Dr. Terry Martin, on secondment to Georgetown University, Washington, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Part of the University of London, SOAS manages to enjoy a worldwide reputation for Arabic scholarship.

In terms of the study of matters Arabic, the Englishman had had a head start. He had been 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 plain that 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 the 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 equally 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.

His elder son, Mike, was thirteen and ready for a British boarding school. Martin Senior 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. All four of them-the father, Mrs. Martin, Mike and Terry-were back in the UK by Christmas.