Without the use of visual aids, he described how a month previously a British Airways flight arriving at Bogota International Airport from London Heathrow had been shot at from the ground. There was no doubt that the attack had happened while the aircraft was on its final approach to the Colombian capital. It could never have happened while taking off from Heathrow. And certainly not during its flight across the Atlantic and the eastern edge of the South American continent. There wasn’t a rifle made that could fire a bullet vertically for seven miles. And it had been a single bullet fired into the underbelly of the aircraft. The bullet had been recovered – a 5.56mm which was common enough and suggested a military issue rifle. As to the make, that was impossible to determine. The incident had initially been labelled as nothing more than vandalism. People loosed off shots at commercial aircraft all the time, particularly in poorer, more unstable parts of the world. But when the same thing happened a week later to a French commercial airliner on its final approach to Nairobi, ears pricked within the Western intelligence community.
Yet it wasn’t until several fine threads of intelligence were weaved together from various sources that the two attacks began to take on the form of something more significant.
Stratton sat quietly absorbing every detail. The MI6 man spoke methodically without pausing to take questions. Stratton would observe the usual protocol, which was that all queries be left until the briefer had completed his task.
The MI6 man kept talking. They had seen a spike over the previous twelve months in the interest among certain known terrorist arms providers in ground-to-air missiles. This interest had gradually become refined to the hand-held, man-portable variety of the weapon. That was always enough to set alarms ringing. But it was nothing new. The threat had been there ever since the Americans handed the Afghans large numbers of Stinger missiles during the USSR’s invasion of their country. The mujahideen had used them against Soviet aircraft with great success.
A subsequent sting operation conducted by the CIA netted a handful of potential buyers of ground-to-air missiles but the trail to the ultimate end-users was never uncovered to any satisfaction.
A few months ago the interest in the deadly weapons seemed to dry up, said the MI6 man. This was significant and had happened for three possible reasons. One, the end-users had failed to acquire the weapons and given up the effort, perhaps redirected their energies into a different scheme. Or two, they had just changed their minds about whatever they were planning to use the weapons for and no longer needed them. Or three, they had managed to find a reliable source for the deadly weapons.
The intelligence community had been speculating that the third option might be the case and that Islamic terrorists had managed to acquire portable ground-to-air missiles. Whereas it was always wise to prepare for the worst, it was also dangerous to assume anything. What they needed was some ‘A1’ category evidence – A1 being hard evidence witnessed by an intelligence organisation’s own personnel. The source of the weapons couldn’t be identified but there was still talk of them going round. For a time the rumour was thought to be the result of a collating phenomenon. Like Chinese whispers. One intelligence organisation asks another if they know anything about a given topic, such as the purchase of man-portable ground-to-air missiles by a terror organisation. The question gets passed on to another intelligence agency, which passes it to another. On its journey the question gets distorted, perhaps thanks to an inaccurate translation here and there, and, without any evidence to support it one way or another, it comes back to its point of origin in the form of an answer. Experienced analysts have an eye for such a result. And a warning for any analyst irresist -ibly attracted to a particular theory for whatever reason: ‘If you look for something hard enough, you’ll find evidence of it, even if it doesn’t exist.’
Whatever was the case, the rumour was treated as highly plausible. Pretty much every Western government intelligence organisation began a search for the buyers and, most importantly, the weapons. The spiral-like patterns of the intelligence gathering system took a series of acute turns when someone working in the depths of the MI6 building on the Thames in London postulated that the shootings of the aircraft could well have been rehearsals. For something else. The theory had analysts sitting up all over the place.
A week before Stratton’s visit to Washington DC a name surfaced, through British sources in Yemen. Someone had identified a possible missile provider. The name was Tajar Sabarak, a Saudi Arabian businessman. A name previously unknown to Western intelligence organisations. Sabarak was known to the Yemeni and Saudi authorities but as a petty smuggler who had so far eluded both countries’ authorities. He made his income out of the legitimate transportation of khat leaf from Yemen to Somalia. And he was suspected of using his international network to traffic, on occasion, in blood diamonds.
The breakthrough came when MI6 sources in Yemen reported that Sabarak had met with representatives of people who a year earlier had shown up as being interested in purchasing ground-to-air missiles. Shortly afterwards, Sabarak began flying around the world, several of those trips to Hong Kong and Indonesia, nowhere that had anything to do with the buying and selling of the amphetamine khat leaf or blood diamonds. But when it came to places like Indonesia, plausibly everything to do with Muslim extremism. A sting operation was planned to try and entrap the Saudi into selling his missiles. And even though it failed, what it revealed, on secret recordings of meetings, was a man clearly obsessed with global jihad.
It was enough to trigger a reaction stronger than just the need for more clandestine information gathering, said the MI6 man. The SIS decided to bring Sabarak in for questioning. The decision was based on the feeling that it would be better to have Sabarak in custody than put him under surveillance in the hope of finding the weapons and then risk losing him. It was believed that whatever the jihadists were planning, it had in some way already begun.
While Stratton was landing in DC, Sabarak was flagged arriving by air from Saudi Arabia into Sana’a, Yemen’s capital. From there he took a domestic flight to Riyan on the south coast. Before leaving Sana’a, Sabarak placed a call to a Somali in Riyan, a man named Mustafa Jerab, a man with strong ties to Al-Shabaab, an Islamic terrorist group. Stratton knew all about Al-Shabaab. Based in Somalia. No small-time organisation. In just a few years it had grown from a little-known gang of fanatics into a membership of tens of thousands and control of almost half the country.
Sabarak’s phone conversation was recorded and sent to MI6 by a British spy operating within the Yemeni Secret Service. Sabarak and Jerab talked like business associates. They said nothing specific but the inference was quite clear to the British intelligence translator. Sabarak wanted to discuss the shipment of something highly sensitive.
Stratton’s task was straightforward enough, the MI6 man said. He was to go to Riyan with one other operative and two Gurkha special forces support staff, snatch Sabarak and take him to the Oman border seven hours away by road, where British intelligence staff, with the nod from the Omani authorities, would take the Saudi away for a long rest and some very intensive interviews.
The MI6 man stopped talking. He picked up a phone and made an internal call. He needed a car out front right away.
Stratton’s ride took him back to his hotel to pick up his belongings. From there it took him over the Anacostia river to Bolling Air Force Base, where he was met by a senior US Air Force officer whose job it was to escort him through the camp’s bureaucracy and take him to a waiting aircraft.