While the Kaibiles trained the men and women, Mohammed watched over the entire operation, but he spent most of the daylight hours on his satellite phone and on his laptop. The trainers decided he either already knew how to fight or didn’t need to know.
The Guatemalans never asked.
At night the Guatemalans retired to their tents next to a stream a few hundred meters from the barracks, but sometimes they could hear the students and Mohammed talking well past midnight. They had the impression he was indoctrinating them on their mission, perhaps teaching them specific knowledge they would need over there in Yemen, but again, they did not really care.
Though the Guatemalans would never know it, Mohammed’s real name was Musa al-Matari. He was thirty-nine years old, born to a Yemeni Army officer father and a British aid-worker mother who had converted to Islam. He’d lived both in Yemen and in London growing up.
Al-Matari had served as a lieutenant in the Yemeni Army, an infantry officer, but he left his country to fight with the jihadists in Iraq, because helping to build a true Islamic State was a realization of the dream he didn’t dare express to anyone until the day the black flags began moving across the land.
He’d fought for Al-Qaeda, and then in Syria and Iraq for ISIS, and his specialty became recruiting and training cells of martyrs to operate behind enemy lines. He grew so skilled, his fighters so successful, that he was sent to Libya to train operatives there when the caliphate grew into Northern Africa.
His trainees in Libya did well, and soon it was decided by the Foreign Intelligence Bureau that al-Matari could do more outside the war zone than he could inside. He proposed recruiting and training foreigners in tactics that they could take back to their home countries, to move the fight to the enemy’s doorstep. His plan was approved, and soon he had a group of recruiters working for him at an office in Mosul. They used the Internet to seek out men and women living in the West, finding them on message boards and in responses to Facebook and Twitter posts.
Those selected would be brought to Syria for training, and then sent back out to the West to kill on behalf of the Islamic State.
His recruits conducted operations in Turkey and Egypt, then in Tunisia and Algeria. Then Belgium and France and Austria.
Al-Matari’s successes were rewarded by his leadership. His plans became more adventurous, more ambitious. He had no time for those who wanted to come to Syria and fight. He had time only for men and women with the intelligence, fervency, and documentation that would make them good raw materials for operatives of ISIS serving abroad.
Soon he decided to reach for the golden ring. He wanted to import American-based recruits, train them in operations, and then export ISIS fighters to America.
He did this, trained up his force right to the moment to release them back into America, and then his plan was thwarted.
After his first operation ended in disaster with the air strikes on his training camp and the arrest of those few fighters he did manage to get on planes back to the United States, he found himself without a force, and without a plan.
But not for long.
It was the leadership of the Foreign Intelligence Bureau who told him to go to Kosovo, where he was to meet with a man in a safe house there. His orders were to take his time and listen to the man’s ideas, and then to return and tell ISIS leadership what he thought of it all.
Al-Matari was a skeptic. It kept him alive in his work, but he also followed orders, because this had even more to do with his survival.
He was smuggled into Turkey, and from there he flew to Kosovo.
The meeting in Kosovo took place in a green and lush courtyard, completely surrounded by a three-story building that itself was surrounded by ISIS fighters.
Al-Matari did not know the identity of his contact, but when he stepped into the courtyard, he saw a man in robes sitting alone at a simple table with a tea service in front of him.
As soon as al-Matari sat down, the other man poured tea for his guest, and he said, “This will be the only time we meet face-to-face.”
Al-Matari reached for his tea. He had learned to be suspicious of everyone, Muslim robes and good hospitality notwithstanding. “I do not even know what this meeting is about. I was ordered here.”
The man nodded slowly. He was older — fifty, perhaps — and seemed extremely confident. “I know what happened in your last operation.”
“I am not revealing anything to you. If you think you know something, maybe you heard it from important people. Maybe you heard it from fools. I don’t know. Nevertheless, I am not going to say anything that—”
“I applaud what you did; I respect the tactical thinking that went into it. You are brave, smart, and you have big ideas.” The man smiled. “I am no tactician, but I am a strategist. And that is where you need help. I can assist you on your next effort, increase the chances it is successful, and increase the chances that it has a larger impact than you can imagine.”
Al-Matari looked up at the architecture of the old building surrounding him while he sipped his tea. “Your accent. You are Saudi.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t like Saudis.”
The man shrugged. “I don’t blame you. Saudi Arabia has oil and wealth. Yemen has camels and camel shit.”
Al-Matari squeezed his teacup almost to the point of breaking it.
The Saudi continued. “I don’t really care. Unlike you, I do not believe in bigotry against other Sunnis. I think we all should be united against infidels and Shiites. But I do believe in first impressions, and I do not like you so much. Let’s agree we are not here to make friends, and get on with this conversation.”
Al-Matari gave a little sarcastic bow.
The older man was all business. “If you can assemble another group of American mujahideen, and do it quickly, I can provide you with a safe place to train them, and top-level instructors. I can provide you with weapons, ammunition, explosives. I can provide you with the security of keeping these Americans out of lands known to be involved with the jihad, so there will be no alarm by the American intelligence community.
“Most importantly, when you get your well-trained soldiers back into the United States, I can give you targets you cannot possibly dream of getting on your own.”
Al-Matari sniffed. “Targets? Targets are not my problem. All of the USA is a target. My fighters can drive down the street and shoot people at random and I will achieve my objectives.”
The Saudi shook his head vehemently. “This is where strategy is important, not just tactics. Killing American civilians is a waste of time. A futile act. Your soldiers would be hunted down and destroyed, for what? Garbagemen, bus drivers, grocers? I am talking about giving you targets that will hurt America’s ability to fight.”
“In what way?”
“I have access to the addresses of men and women in the CIA. I know the schools where Air Force pilots who fly over your head in Raqqa send their children. A bar where, on any night, you can find American commandos, on leave, without weapons, drunk and helpless. I can tell you the license plate numbers of the cars they drive, where the wives of spies and soldiers work.”
Al-Matari was at once skeptical and stunned. “How is it you have access to such information?”
“How doesn’t matter. It will be difficult for me, and it will be difficult for you. But ask yourself this, brother. Do you want to work so hard to shoot kids in a mall, or do you want to work so hard to destroy a large segment of America’s ability to wage war on us from afar? I say we fight them there, so we force them to come here, in our land, where we destroy them.”