The Secret Soldier

AHMAD BAKR HATED ISRAEL as much as Hezbollah did. Even so, Bakr did not enjoy coming to the Bekaa. Bakr was Saudi, and like most Saudis, he was a Sunni Muslim. Hezbollah’s members were Shia, followers of the other major branch of Islam.

Both types of Muslims agreed that the Quran was the word of Allah. But unlike the Sunni, the Shia revered early Muslim rulers as “imams,” nearly godlike figures. They eagerly awaited the return of the twelfth imam, whose arrival would herald the End of Days. To conservative Sunnis like Bakr, the Shia belief in the twelfth imam amounted to idol worship — a serious offense against Islam.

But when he was in Lebanon, Bakr kept his views to himself. He was simply being practical. In the Bekaa, Hezbollah served as judge, jury, and executioner. And Bakr ran a jihadi training camp in the Bekaa that needed the group’s approval to exist.

To get that approval, Bakr had met nine months earlier with a Hezbollah general at a farm near Baalbek, the dusty town that served as the group’s headquarters. A friendly Saudi intelligence agent arranged the meeting. “I can guarantee you safe passage,” the agent said. “After that, it’s up to you.”

The next day, Bakr flew to Beirut. As he’d been instructed, he rented a car and attached a red strip of tape to the trunk. He drove to Baalbek and parked in the lot beside the Roman ruins that loomed over the town. The site included the remnants of the Temple of Jupiter, a giant Roman shrine. The temple’s columns stood seventy feet tall and were mounted on one-thousand-ton stone blocks. But the ruins left Bakr cold. To him, they were just another site for idol worship, like the golden-domed shrines in Iraq where the Shia buried their martyrs. He would have been happier if they were all blown to rubble.

A few minutes after he parked, a black Toyota 4Runner stopped beside him. A man in a long-sleeved black shirt and black pants knocked on his window. The man frisked him and waved him into the 4Runner. Bakr wondered if he’d be blindfolded, but no one seemed overly concerned. These men didn’t need to protect themselves, not here. Attacking Hezbollah in the Bekaa was a fool’s errand. The Israelis had tried in 2006. Even with their planes and missiles, they hadn’t touched the group’s leaders. Hezbollah had come away from that war stronger than ever.

The Toyota headed north. A few minutes later, it turned east onto a rough dirt road with vineyards on both sides. The road dead-ended at a concrete wall that protected a massive beige house, three stories high, with balconies and turrets and a green Hezbollah flag flapping from a pole. A golden-domed mosque, a miniature version of the shrines in Iraq, stood beside the building. The 4Runner stopped at a black gate guarded by two militiamen. They saluted as the gate swung open.

THE HEZBOLLAH GENERAL WAS a small man with deep-set brown eyes. In his cream-colored shirt and gray slacks, he could have passed for a Beirut businessman, except for the long white scar that hooked around his neck. He had nearly died in a 1996 car bombing that had been blamed on both the Israelis and the Syrians. He sat on the house’s back balcony, looking out over the garden, where an old man tended to scraggly tomato plants and a half- dozen lemon trees. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

The general poured them both cups. The sun had disappeared, and the balcony was pleasantly warm. Aside from the scrape of the gardener’s shovel on the soil, the house was silent.

“You’ve come a long way,” the general said.

“Not so far. Thank you for seeing me.” For the next few minutes, Bakr explained what he wanted. When he was finished, the general put a hand on Bakr’s shoulder.

“Where will these men operate?”

“Not Iran or Lebanon.”

“Of course not. And not Israel, either. Any action against Israel comes on our own terms.”

“Not Israel. Iraq.” By the time Hezbollah found out he had lied, it wouldn’t matter. “We have the same enemy there.”

“Yes. Still, what you want, it’s very expensive.”

“Tell me.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars.”

Bakr had expected a much higher price. “That’s fine.”

“Every month.”

These Shia thieves, Bakr thought. Two hundred thousand dollars a month for a broken-down farmhouse and land too rocky even to grow hashish? But he didn’t have a choice. He planned to house as many as forty men, and he wanted room for practice with small arms and explosives, and maybe even more important, the high-powered rocket-propelled grenades that could defeat armored vehicles. In all, he figured he had to have at least two thousand acres with an absolute guarantee that he wouldn’t be disturbed, which meant he needed government or quasi-government protection. The only other options were the Sudan or maybe the Algerian desert. Lonely, inhospitable places. The Bekaa would serve him far better, and Lebanon and the Kingdom were connected by highways and nonstop flights.

“I can’t afford that.”

“How much, then?”

“A hundred thousand.”

They compromised on one hundred fifty thousand dollars, and both sides kept the bargain. Bakr transferred the money faithfully each month, one numbered Swiss account to another. In turn, the militia never bothered his men and ensured that the handful of Lebanese police and army units in the Bekaa also stayed away.

The camp had taken three months to build. It included a one-story concrete barracks and dirt-covered berms where Bakr’s men could practice wiring and blowing bombs without disturbing the neighbors. It lay in the barren northern end of the valley, on the western side, in the foothills of the Qornet as-Sawda, the highest mountain in Lebanon, more than ten thousand feet. At first glance, it didn’t look like much, a couple buildings, a couple trailers. But with Al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan long since obliterated, it was the largest and most sophisticated training center for jihad anywhere in the world.

AHMAD BAKR STOOD AN inch short of six feet. Serving in the National Guard for eight years had given him a soldier’s broad shoulders. He was relatively dark for a Saudi, more brown than tan. He’d grown up in Tathlith, a speck of a town in southwestern Saudi Arabia. Even within the Kingdom, the area was known for its religious fervor. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on September 11 were Saudi. Of those, eleven had come from the southwestern corner of the Kingdom.

The eldest son of a tribal chief, Bakr had been known for his religious fervor, even as a child. He had memorized the entire Quran before he turned twelve. He woke at dawn to pray and fasted each Ramadan without complaint.

The incident that sealed his belief came just before his seventeenth birthday. A few months before, his father had given him a Toyota Land Cruiser, a monstrous old beast with twenty-inch wheels and a raised chassis. He spent his days rumbling through the desert northeast of Tathlith. Nuri, his cousin and best friend, trailed behind him in a pickup. Bakr raced up the dunes, his wide tires kicking up clouds of sand, the Land Cruiser’s engine growling. As he grew more experienced, he changed the Land Cruiser’s gearing so he’d have even more torque at low speeds. He sought out the steepest dunes, ones that other boys avoided.

And then, in empty desert one hundred fifty kilometers from Tathlith, Bakr came upon the biggest dune he had ever seen, more than one hundred meters high. It soared out of the desert, its sand glistening. It changed color as Bakr rolled closer, darkening from neon white to a cooler clay. Bakr gunned his engine and rolled up the sandy ridge that formed the side of the dune. Halfway up, he stopped. Beyond this point, the ridge turned too steep to attack directly. To reach the top he would need to cut across the center of the dune, zigzagging across its face. Nuri pulled up beside him, jumped out of the pickup.

“It’s too steep, cousin. And too soft. You’ll get stuck.”

“Then you’ll drag me out.”

“Don’t—”

Bakr gunned the engine, ignoring his cousin’s pleas, and plunged across the dune.

He’d gone less than one hundred meters when he realized that Nuri was right. The dune was too tall and steep, its sand too fine. Even with the Land Cruiser’s massive tires, he lost his grip. The truck slowed, kicking up