As soon as they returned from their prayer session in the hallway, I took the offensive. I wanted to know why Yemen-which the United Nations had recently ranked as 148th out of 174 nations in terms of economic development-did not throw out President Saleh after twenty-five years in power. I wanted to know what it suggested about Yemen's supposed free press that journalists who impugned the president or Islam were summarily hauled off to underground prisons by the PSO. As the qat buzz shivered through me like an electric eel, I concluded my discourse with a rousing, "The government's not going to hand you more rights-you've got to fight for them!"
The journalists nodded listlessly. Then one of them asked, "Do you think it's right that the CIA launches Predator drone missiles into Yemen and murders suspected terrorists extrajudicially, the way the Israeli army does?"
So it went for hours, a congenial impasse, until the best we could do was rhapsodize about qat, the opiate of the Yemeni masses- how it spurred a man to perform like a gladiator in the bedroom, weep for the absence of his mother, or produce seamless poetry on deadline. What qat could not do was make a Yemeni and an American see the world in remotely the same way.
No, no, no, I was constantly assured by both United States and Yemeni officials, there has been much progress. Things are changing. Al Qaeda is on the run here and cannot regroup. Jailed extremists are renouncing jihad in exchange for probation. The Imams are toning down their oratory. American aid is trickling in. And so why focus on the prison? Bring it up and everyone gets nasty again. Like interior minister Rashad al-Alimi, Yemen's top law-enforcement official. "It's our negligence," he said, "but the Americans have their fingerprints on this, too. We wanted to put [the ten suspects] through the legal system. Try them in the courts and then move them from the interrogation center to a maximum-security prison. But who was delaying this? The Americans. They said no, leave them there, leave them there."
To which an official at the U.S. embassy replied, "Frankly, we weren't aware they'd been transferred there to begin with."
And so we arrive where we began, blown back into the Gulf of Aden, staring out at the little white boat. To trust or not to trust? So the PSO chief in Aden and all the prison's guards were sacked immediately following the jailbreak. So the taxi driver who drove the ten men away was interrogated. So a government commission was assembled to straighten the whole mess out. Where were the indictments? Why had the entire matter become classified? And why had none of the fugitives been apprehended?
"We have sources saying they're at a certain location," the interior minister assured me. "My people are on the ground, and they're trailing them."
That was in July. Sound familiar? To Clint Guenther, the FBI's logistical coordinator for the USS Cole investigation, the jailbreak episode "didn't surprise me one bit, considering that the cooperation we'd always gotten from the Yemen government was shoddy at best. I truly believe that they didn't want us to know everything."
And that was the way it was going to be. Just as America would see bin Laden's ghost behind every beard, just as it would browbeat with its Predator bombings and extort with its foreign-aid budget, so too would Yemen insist that its extremists are a dying breed, and chafe at the slightest accusation to the contrary. Better, then, to stand together for the cameras, grin our grins-enemies kept closer, terrorized into friendship-and say nothing, absolutely nothing, about the prison.
Except that I wanted to visit it. And so one evening I flew from Sanaa with my translator, Khaled al-Hammadi, to the port town of Aden.
The flight attendant's mascara began to drip the moment she stepped onto the runway. At eight in the evening, the temperature exceeded ninety, and the air leeched itself to our pores. Khaled haggled with a cabdriver before we stepped into his vehicle-which, like most Yemeni taxis, resembled an oil spill. I hung my head out the window, pretending there was a cool breeze and that I was in my swimsuit, prostrate before the waves.
When we checked into our beachside hotel, the clerk politely explained that, as a foreigner, I would be assessed a higher room rate than would Khaled. (This informal "visitor's tax" in Yemen applies not only to hotels but also to plane tickets and restaurant meals. It's the country's small contribution to global-wealth redistribution.) Having endured an alcohol-free week in conservative Sanaa, I made for the hotel bar, where I drank Heineken from a can and watched an episode of Arabic-subtitled Friends in the company of several Jordanian businessmen.
When I knocked on Khaled's hotel door later that evening, I found another man in the room. He introduced himself as Haydar and showed me his PSO identification card. Haydar was short, with a trim mustache and intense eyes-a sort of Arabian Errol Flynn, except that he was pronouncedly duck-footed and had sweated completely through his olive silk shirt. He explained that foreign journalists were not to be wandering around Aden without a "minder" from the Ministry of Information. I suggested that this was ridiculous, that I had been interviewing cabinet officials unfettered all week long in Sanaa and that President Saleh's aides had given me their blessings to travel to Aden. Did I have documentation of this, Haydar wanted to know. No, I confessed, I did not, but he was free to call them. Haydar told us not to leave the hotel grounds that evening, shook our hands, and said good night.
The next morning, Haydar was already making himself comfortable in the lobby when I showed up for breakfast. "Hello, Robert!" he called out in English and sprang to his feet to shake my hand. I had people to see that morning, and Haydar informed me that he would escort me in his pickup truck. The interview subject, a powerful newspaper publisher, was not daunted by Haydar. He closed the door on the PSO agent's nose. When I finished my interview, Haydar was dutifully standing outside, having sweated through his natty blue long-sleeve shirt. He was waiting to hear from the new Aden PSO chief about my visiting the prison. In the meantime, he offered with a shrug, would I like a tour of Aden?
We killed time by driving through the old market in Crater, bumping along the old British-built boulevards past sagging and blistered storefronts and then finally around an immense cistern that had been dug perhaps two thousand years ago and now was dry. At one point, Haydar's pickup truck broke down, and he fretted over the carburetor in the 110-degree heat while Khaled and I tried to control our laughter. He was actually a decent sort, not one of the PSO's musclemen, and though he said he was from the mountains in the north and ill-suited to Aden's stifling humidity, he maintained a kind of futile dignity in his neatly trimmed mustache and his fine sweat-stained clothes.
There wasn't much to see in the raggedy old coastal city, so Hay-dar ferried us back to the hotel. We sat in deck chairs at the water's edge, watching a procession of young Yemeni women stride slowly through the waves in their head-to-toe sharshafs like ebony apparitions. At last Haydar's cell phone rang. He strode off for some privacy, kicking up sand and mopping his brow.
When he returned, I could tell by his face that the news was not good. Khaled translated: The new Aden chief was irate at Haydar. What was this American journalist doing in Aden anyway? And you took him on a tour? No, he cannot see the prison. Do not let him leave the hotel grounds. Escort him to the airport tomorrow morning.
"I am sorry, Robert," Haydar said. Then he bent down, reached for my neck, and kissed me on both cheeks with his sweaty lips.
The next morning, a few minutes after the mascara-stained Yemen Airways flight attendant welcomed me aboard, I lay my forehead against the aircraft window-a portrait of stupefaction, gaping at the dunes, which swirled like caramel question marks in the almighty nothingness below. Thinking: The prison is not a prison. The little white boat is not just a little white boat. The alliance is not an alliance. Then the plane thrust heavenward, and the question marks melted under the Arabian sun.