the CTC office block Cheltenham had shared the treasure with America ’s National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland. It was pitch-black in Peshawar, dusk in the Cotswolds and midafternoon in Maryland. It mattered not. Inside GCHQ and NSA, the sun never shines; there is no night and no day.
In both sprawling complexes of buildings set in rustic countryside, the listening goes on from pole to pole and all points between. The trillions of words spoken by the human race every day, in five hundred languages and more than a thousand dialects, are heard, culled, winnowed, sorted, rejected, retained and, if interesting, studied and traced. Even that is just the start. Both agencies encode and decrypt in hundreds of codes, and each has special divisions dedicated to file recovery and the unearthing of cybercrime. As the planet rolled through another day and another night, two agencies began to strip down the measures al-Qur thought had obliterated his private files. The experts found the limbo files and exposed the slack spaces.
The process has been compared to the work of a skilled restorer of paintings. With immense care, the outer layers of grime or later paint are eased off the original canvas to reveal the hidden work beneath. Mr. al-Qur’s Toshiba began to reveal document after document that he thought had been wiped away or overpainted.
Brian O’Dowd had of course alerted his own colleague and superior, the head of station in Islamabad, even before accompanying Colonel Razak on the raid. The senior SIS man had informed his “cousin,” the CIA station chief. Both men were avidly waiting for news. In Peshawar, there would be no sleep. Colonel Razak returned from the bazaar at midnight with his treasure trove in several bags. The three surviving bodyguards were lodged in cells in the basement of his own building. He would certainly not entrust them to the common jail. Escape or assisted suicide would be almost a formality. Islamabad now had their names and was no doubt haggling with the U.S. Embassy, which contained the CIA station. The colonel suspected they would end up in Bagram for months of interrogation, even though he suspected they did not even know the name of the man they were guarding.
The telltale cell phone from Leeds, England, had been found and identified. It was slowly becoming clear the foolish Abdelahi had only borrowed it without permission. He was on a slab in the morgue with four bullets in the chest but an untouched face. The man next door had a smashed head, but the city’s best facial surgeon was trying to put it back together. When he had done his best, a photo was taken. An hour later. Colonel Razak rang O’Dowd with ill-concealed excitement. Like all counterterrorist agencies collaborating on the struggle against Islamist terror groups, the CTC of Pakistan has a huge gallery of photos of suspects.
Simply because Pakistan is a long way from Morocco means nothing. AQ terrorists stem from at least forty nationalities and double that number of ethnic groups. And they travel. Razak had spent the night flashing his gallery of faces from his computer to a big plasma screen in his office, and he kept coming back to one face.
It was already plain from the captured passports-eleven of them, all forged and all of superb quality-that the Egyptian had been traveling, and for this he had clearly changed his appearance. And yet the face of the man who could pass unnoticed in a bank’s boardroom in the West, and who was yet consumed by hatred for everything and everyone not of his own twisted faith, seemed to have something in common with the shattered head on the marble slab. He caught O’Dowd over breakfast, which he was sharing with his American CIA colleague in Peshawar. Both men left their scrambled eggs and raced over to CTC headquarters. They too stared at the face and compared it with the photo from the morgue. If only it could be true… And both men had one priority: to tell Head Office about the stunning discovery, that the body on the slab was none other than Tewfik al-Qur, Al Qaeda’s senior banker himself. Midmorning, a Pakistani Army helicopter came to take it all away. The prisoners, shackled and hooded; two dead bodies; and the boxes of evidence recovered from the apartment. Thanks were profuse, but Peshawar is an outstation; the center of gravity was moving, and moving fast. In fact, it had already arrived in Maryland.
In the aftermath of the disaster now known simply as 9/11, one thing became clear, and no one seriously denied it. The evidence not simply that something was going on, but pretty much that what was going on had been there all the time. It was there as intelligence is almost always there; not in one beautiful, gift-wrapped package, but in dribs and drabs, scattered all over. Seven or eight of the USA ’s nineteen primary intel-gathering or law enforcement agencies had their bits. But they never talked to each other. Since 9/11, there has been a huge shake-up. There are now the six principals to whom everything has to be revealed at an early stage. Four are politicians: the president, vice president and the secretaries for defense and state. The two professionals are the National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley overseeing the Department of Homeland Security and the nineteen agencies-and, on top of the pile, the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte. The CIA is still the primary outside-the-USA intel-gathering body, but the director of central intelligence is no longer the lone ranger he used to be. Everyone reports upward, and the three watchwords are: collate, collate, collate. Among the giants, the National Security Agency at Fort Meade is still the biggest, in budget and personnel, and the most secret. It alone retains no links to the public or media. It works in darkness, but it listens to everything, decrypts everything, translates everything and analyzes everything. Yet so impenetrable is some of the stuff overheard, recorded, downloaded, translated and studied that it also uses “out-of-house” committees of experts. One of these is the Koran Committee.
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 connection had been through Ayman al-Zawahiri, his fellow Egyptian. It was he who had spotted and headhunted the fanatical banker. The State Department took the passports. There were a stunning eleven of them. Two had never been used but now showed entry and exit stamps all over Europe and the Middle East. To no one’s surprise, six of them were Belgian, all in different names and all completely genuine, except the details inside. For the global intelligence community, Belgium has long been the leaky bucket. Since 1990, a staggering nineteen thousand Belgian “blank” passports have been reported stolen-and that is according to the Belgian government itself. In fact, they were simply sold by civil servants on the take. Forty-five were from the Belgian consulate in Strasbourg, France, and twenty from the Belgian Embassy at The Hague, Holland. The two used by the Moroccan assassins of anti-Taliban resistance fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud were from the latter. So was one of the six used by al-Qur. The other five were assumed to be from the still-missing 18,935.
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
