Don wasn’t the only one watching their backs now.
Lana settled into researching Tahir. She had Maureen combing through the posts of Steel Fist’s fans, Galina trying to penetrate the NSA’s military-grade encryption, and Jeff Jensen back to his primary role of insuring CF’s own cyberdefense, a constant struggle.
Lana found it easy enough to check on Tahir’s record in the U.S. It was in all the papers he’d submitted for political asylum, along with his background in Sudan. He’d run an import/export business there, as he had since coming to the States. He’d done well enough by Sudanese standards to have been considered a successful entrepreneur in sub-Saharan Africa. He now had a small shop in a mini-mall on the outskirts of Bethesda, where he sold African artifacts, carpets, and hand-carved furniture. Not bad for a man whose home country’s chief exports were little more than peanuts and impoverished people.
He was Nubian from Khartoum in the north, Sudan proper, as opposed to South Sudan, which had been established after two civil wars had torn the country apart. Khartoum was the city to which Tahir had threatened to return with Sufyan. Lana didn’t believe he’d actually do that. He was clearly devoted to the boy’s future, and Sudan was plagued by the same problems afflicting much of the sub-Sahara: poverty, drought, hunger, war, inadequate medical care. Misery appeared to penetrate every realm of Sudanese life.
As she looked at Tahir’s history, she was reminded immediately that Osama bin Laden and the core of Al Qaeda’s leadership had headquartered in Sudan from 1991 to 1996. Bin Laden himself had been instrumental in seeing to the construction of two hundred miles of highway in the largely roadless land.
But what really grabbed Lana’s interest was when she read that in addition to a construction company and massive farms, Al Qaeda had helped support itself by setting up an import/export business. How many people in Sudan could have been involved in that line of work back then? There were also news reports that in the pre-9/11 era, Al Qaeda had used the cover of legitimate businesses to smuggle weapons. She would have been surprised if they hadn’t. But had Tahir been involved with that? An even more critical question concerned Tahir’s import/export business now. Carpets, cabinets, and chests could be used to move bomb-making materials, including weapons of mass destruction.
But surely the CIA and FBI had vetted him for any kind of nefarious activity. Which had Lana asking herself whether she really wanted to re-invent that particular wheel by doing research that likely had been done by others. If the NSA knew about any of that, she should have been informed of it. She also knew that if she penetrated the NSA defenses right now, she would have some cover: Holmes himself wanted to see how porous the agency’s cyber perimeter had become.
But that was for domestic surveillance files.
Correct, but she knew that a lot about Tahir could fit under that rubric.
She chose to share none of this with Galina, undertaking her own efforts in her quiet cubicle just feet from the industrious Russian émigrée.
Using codes she had been privy to in the past, Lana accessed the NSA system with ease. This was no violation of the spirit or letter of the law. As a prime contractor she was well within her purview. What she found in the next hour was ample official attention on Tahir, which came as no surprise. What she couldn’t grasp was why — if he warranted so much focus — he’d even been permitted into the U.S. But as Lana worked, each step along the cyber highway became slower and more difficult to take. She did manage to unveil pertinent data repositories, which led her to a surprising keyhole. She hesitated only briefly before entering it.
More like a black hole. For Lana was swept in a nanosecond into the CIA network. But there she faced dense encryption.
“Aha,” she said to herself softly when she realized the formidable security was a variation of code she’d written under contract for the NSA. A smile widened her face.
Adjusting quickly, she navigated for another twenty minutes before unearthing Tahir’s CIA files. The revelations proved stunning.
In situ agents and their intrepid informants had linked Tahir to Al Qaeda in Khartoum in the two years preceding bin Laden’s arrival. Tahir, in fact, appeared instrumental in setting up the terrorist group’s import/export business, exactly as she’d suspected at first glance. He’d even rolled his own firm into what became Al Qaeda’s.
But what chilled Lana to her fingertips and left her staring dumbfounded at her screen was learning that in 1996, when bin Laden and his two hundred closest supporters fled Sudan for Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Tahir and his brother went with them—and stayed with Al Qaeda as the group established itself as the guests of the Taliban.
It was from that base of operations that Al Qaeda had launched its September 11 attacks five years later. Both Tahir and Sufyan’s father were full-fledged members of America’s sworn enemies. American bombs then killed the brother when the U.S. struck back at the Afghan militants who’d provided safe haven to those who had organized, trained, and dispatched the box-cutter brigade. So, in fact, his brother hadn’t been killed in their home village but by U.S. warplanes. Ample cause for anger.
But the rabbit hole Lana had plunged into then took an even more unexpected twist. In the month after his brother perished at American hands, Tahir became a CIA asset, providing information to an agent whose name was not revealed in the file.
Tahir had switched sides.
Or had he? People who changed their loyalties worried Lana. How pliable were their beliefs? Most jihadists who’d lost loved ones became more determined than ever to defeat their kuffar enemies. But according to these documents, Tahir had embraced the U.S. Did he do it because he felt deep responsibility for his brother’s son and wife, which was certainly part of his Muslim and Nubian traditions? Or was Tahir playing a longer game?
Whatever the reason, the U.S. had soon paid a huge price to protect him, Lana learned when she began to read a file earmarked “Top Secret.” It reported that Tahir had been among the Al Qaeda members, led by bin Laden, that had been run to ground by U.S. military forces at Tora Bora near the northwestern Pakistan border. The failure to deploy an adequate force of U.S. troops to tear the raggedy remains of the terrorist group from those mountain caves had long been the subject of great criticism and speculation. While two hundred jihadis were listed as killed, bin Laden and his key lieutenants, including Tahir, had escaped into Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.
Scores of commentators in the U.S. and abroad had wondered openly why the U.S. could possibly have let the reviled terrorists slip away. Lana now stared at the answer: to protect Tahir Hijazi, a spy for the U.S. in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism.
According to the top-secret report, Tahir had been prominent among bin Laden’s advisors in urging the retreat to Tora Bora and, therefore, had come under deadly suspicion by his fellow jihadis when their forces were attacked at the infamous cave complex. Tahir saved his own life, and the lives of his nephew and sister-in-law, by contacting an agency operative and hammering out a deal — quickly approved by the highest U.S. military command — to let the shredded Al Qaeda leadership escape to Pakistan. That deal protected not only Sufyan and the boy’s mother, but preserved Tahir’s invaluable role.
In exchange, though, he also had to agree to the devilishly tricky role of becoming a lifelong double agent under deep cover, a commitment to the agency that had saved the three of them. In the years that followed, Tahir’s loyalty turned him into the most important spy in the U.S. War on Terror. It also placed Tahir firmly in CIA hands. He could never waver from his assignment without risking the lives of those he loved most.