The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (13 page)

When we worked on the same shift, girls would often drop by the store to visit.

“Mind the shop,” he would say to me with a wink. Then he and the girl of the day would disappear into the basement, returning in about an hour. Sarri would then slip the girl a trinket from the store and send her on her way. In this way and others, Sarri was robbing Abdel, the shop owner, blind.

He had hinted at all this before getting me the job there. “If you tell Abdel anything,” he told me one day at Sabra, “there will be a day when you do not return from the battlefield.”

I kept my mouth shut, but I was not afraid of Sarri. I knew he was more interested in pleasure than revenge. Besides, he would not dare touch a hair on my head because of Abu Yousef.

Abu Yousef had been understanding of my grief, even tender, after the failed mission into Israel. I had grown to love him like a father—
and if I am admitting the truth, equal to or surpassing my feelings for my real father. I respected and adored Abu Yousef so much that if he had asked me to sacrifice myself in battle, I would have done it instantly.

Even so, I was shocked one day that spring when he called me at the store. He rarely conducted business on the telephone, believing—correctly—that the telephone wires strung across Beirut leaked information like water from a broken bucket.

“There is an emergency meeting,” he said. “Everyone must come. No exceptions. Pass it on.”

He meant Sarri, whose name he would not mention. I told Sarri then ran straight from the store to Abu Ibrahim’s where I changed into my fatigues. Abu Ibrahim paid for a taxi to take me and four other boys across town to Sabra. Usually the taxis will not drive that way, but Abu Ibrahim paid the driver extra. Because of the driver, we did not discuss what Abu Yousef’s “emergency meeting” could be about. But this had never happened before, and I was burning to find out.

Inside Sabra, I could see that Abu Yousef had made calls all over the city. Dozens and dozens of
fedayeen
streamed toward the far side of the camp. But Abu Yousef had told me to come instead to his office, which was tucked discreetly into a squat concrete building that did not look like it contained anything important. Passing the guards, who knew that I was Abu Yousef’s special charge, I wound through a corridor to a small, plain office with pictures of martyred
fedayeen
on the wall.

“Yah ibny!”
Abu Yousef came around from behind the desk and bent to kiss me on both cheeks. In his right hand, he held a crimson beret and a white scarf, both brand new. “We have a special visitor today. I want you to wear these.”

With that, he put the beret on my head, then looped the scarf around my neck, tucking it into my collar aviator style. My uniform was desert camouflage with flecks of red and green. I was thrilled with these new additions and thought they would make me look a cut above the other boys, like a major or even a colonel.

Abu Yousef fussed with the scarf for a moment like a mother hen, and I breathed in the pleasing scent of his cologne. “We are going to hear a special speaker,” he said. “You are going to be very surprised.”

Who could it be for Abu Yousef to call so many men here in the middle of the week?

13

An underground tunnel lit with garish bulbs connected Abu Yousef’s office building with other parts of Sabra. He and I descended a short stairwell to enter it, then tramped along the dirt floor until we emerged outside a camouflage-painted hangar. The hangar was fortified outside with sandbags and, I knew, inside with steel beams and concrete. Hundreds of
fedayeen
were already crowded inside, seated in wide rows facing one of the long walls where a collection of wooden cargo pallets formed a rude platform. Behind the platform stood six men in a loose port-arms stance, their AK–47 muzzles pointed at the floor. They wore complete fatigue uniforms with full
keffiyah
covering their faces. I had never seen them before.

The doors at both ends of the hangar had been thrown open wide, and dust motes danced in the streaming sunlight that played over the murmuring crowd. Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Abu Yousef parted the throng, soldiers leaning left and right to let us pass. As it became clear to me that my mentor was leading me right up to the front row, my heart was just about to explode with pride. I could see that even some of our fiercest fighters were not as privileged as I. We picked our way up to the row directly across from the pallets. Four or five other boys were already seated there, and Abu Yousef motioned for them to make a spot for me dead center. I noticed right away that they too wore their camouflage. But I was secretly delighted that, because of my new scarf and beret, I was more sharply turned out.

I squeezed in and took a seat on the hangar’s cool dirt floor just in time to see the rank of soldiers behind the platform snap to attention and honor Abu Yousef with a unified salute. He returned the gesture and then walked around behind the platform. His back was to me, but I
could see from the soldiers’ relaxed smiles that Abu Yousef knew them all quite well. Still, they clearly deferred to him, and a fresh layer of respect for Abu Yousef formed in my breast. For the first time, I wondered where my mentor had come from before taking me under his wing. Was he more important than I even knew?

About ten meters to the left of the platform, a door opened. My breath caught in my chest as I expected the important visitor to reveal himself. A half dozen men filed in, scanned the crowd, then filed out again, leaving two men posted on either side of the door. I did not look away. Now a man wearing khaki fatigues entered, his head completely covered in a black
abbayah
, the Moroccan headpiece that covers the face from eyes to chin, then covers the head with a hood.

The boy next to me elbowed my side. “There he is!” he whispered fiercely. “Who
is
it?”

“Shhh!” I hissed, not wanting to behave in any way that might dishonor Abu Yousef in front of his important guest.

Flanked by four rough-looking men, the mysterious visitor walked toward the platform, prompting the soldiers standing behind it to snap to attention and raise their weapons, eyes dangerous, barrels pointed toward the crowd. I felt at that moment that if any one of us had moved toward the hooded guest, those men would have cut him down.

The guest climbed the platform and stood still as one of his bodyguards stepped forward and removed the
abbayah
. The air left the room as the assembled
fedayeen
sucked it all in in a single gasp.

The man beneath the hood was Yasser Arafat.

14

The hangar exploded into ringing cheers that echoed off the metal walls, the noise so loud I could not hear my own voice as I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Joy! Astonishment! Delight! Reverence! I can scarcely describe the
elixir of emotions that charged through my body. It was not at all like a rock star had shown up at Sabra that day. It was as if a
god
had appeared.

Every one of my senses lit up as though I had been transported suddenly into the presence of the Prophet himself. The boys to my left and right were equally giddy, shouting and hooting and dancing about, unable to contain their zeal.

Arafat wore a khaki shirt, thick, black-rimmed glasses and a
keffiyeh
, though it was not of the checkered pattern that would later become his trademark. He had a stubble beard and a thick moustache that rode above his lips, which seemed nearly as thick. In the roaring din, the Leader smiled and nodded, while the men aligned behind him continued scanning the hangar for assassins.

Abu Yousef stepped up on the platform and raised his hands to hush us. “Brothers of the movement, I present to you Yasser Arafat,
qa’ad swoara al Palestinia
.”

The leader of the Palestinian movement.

The hangar exploded again. This was not forced applause. No one was under threat of not cheering enough, as I later learned was the case in the Soviet Union. No, this was pure ecstasy.

A Palestinian anthem now blared from a bullhorn speaker mounted somewhere in the rafters. After what seemed like five full minutes of screaming, Arafat raised both arms, nodding graciously, and the
fedayeen
settled to a low murmur, then silence. I sat back down directly across from the platform, not fifteen feet away.

Then the great Leader began to speak. “Jerusalem is our target,” Arafat said solemnly. “Allah has given us that land. It belongs to us. The Jews took it with the help of the English. We must take it back, through the power of Allah.”

Many think the PLO was a secular group. It was not. Arafat then read to us from the Koran, although I do not remember from which
sura
. He also spoke of the Palestinian movement, the justice of the cause, and the deplorable conditions in which his people were forced to live. It would be through soldiers like us, he said, brave and committed fighters, that his people would be liberated and restored to the Palestinian homeland now occupied by the filthy Jews.

“We will achieve victory through fighters like
you
,” Arafat proclaimed, and I was astonished to see that he was pointing his finger directly at me.

My heart leapt in my chest. I stole wild glances at the boys to my left and my right to see if I was dreaming, that they might elbow me awake. But those boys were staring goggle-eyed at Arafat, who now stepped down off the platform and, in four steps, planted his boots directly in front of me and reached down with his right hand.

I looked up into Arafat’s face and saw that he was smiling. His thick glasses magnified his eyes so that they seemed huge, floating just below the lenses. I put my hand in his and he pulled me to my feet, turned me to face the crowded hangar, tucking me under his right arm. I could smell his sweat, the product of the warm spring day.

“It is young men like Kamal who will be our great liberators!” he declared grandly.

My head spun.
Yasser Arafat knows my name!

Then Arafat turned, put one hand on each of my shoulders and kissed my forehead, his breath bearing tales of garlic and onion. The crowd screamed and clapped. Arafat released me and I, dazed and soaring with joy, sat back down, the boys around me slapping me on the back.

If Yasser Arafat said I would be a great liberator, maybe I was not a coward after all. Maybe Mohammed’s death was not my fault. The moment was a turning point, a rebirth. For months, I had wanted to drown myself or crawl into a hole and die. But now my zeal returned. My spirit for
jihad
was renewed.

It would be many years before I understood that, using only a red beret and white scarf, Abu Yousef had set me up.

After I began speaking out against radical Islam, a number of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies reached out to me. They wanted to hear about the Islamist mindset and tactics from the viewpoint of someone who had fought on that side of the terror war. The FBI, in particular, wanted to hear about communication tactics. For example, agents had noticed that participants in certain Internet chat rooms seemed to quote certain
sura
on a regular basis. Was this devotional in nature or some kind of code?

Very likely code, I told them, pointing out a mission to Afghanistan in which my
fedayeen
unit attacked a Russian bomber using SAM-7 rockets. From troop movement to the moment we fired, our every action was prompted by the recitation of certain
sura
over handheld radios.

Shortly after the imam confronted me in Seattle with the message that Islamists would “seed” American women and “have this nation,” I traveled to North Carolina for a series of speaking engagements, so I happened to be away when four Pakistani men came to my hometown to hunt me down.

On the Monday morning after I returned from North Carolina, I was sitting in my office at work when Lily, my secretary, patched
through a call from Mike, the head of security at the nonprofit where I worked.

“Kamal, we’ve had a series of incidents you need to know about,” he said.

Mike told me that while I was out of town, a group of Pakistani men driving cars with Washington State plates cruised into town. They did not find my place of business, but went to similar organizations asking if anyone knew the whereabouts of a Kamal Saleem. What was Kamal Saleem’s profession? Where did the Saleem family live?

“The people the Pakistanis came into contact with said they appeared nervous and somewhat hostile,” Mike said.

Because they had asked about my family, the news unnerved me. But it did not surprise me.
There was a time when I would have done the same thing
, I thought.

“The Pakistanis also went to two other locations in town, including the bank you use,” Mike said. “They sat out in the parking lot for an hour working on a laptop computer. Finally, security guards asked them to leave.”

I thanked Mike, and as he left the office, I dialed my wife, Victoria.

“Call the FBI,” I said.

The next day, we visited at an FBI field office with an agent who didn’t look much like an agent in his jeans and pale yellow polo shirt.

“What do you make of this?” the agent asked. “Why are they looking for you?”

I told him about the incident in Seattle outside the mosque. I also told him about another verbal confrontation in Seattle near the Space Needle with a Pakistani activist from the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that claims to be educational, but in 2007 was named an “unindicted co-conspirator” in a federal case linking an Islamic “charity” with the terrorist group Hamas. The activist and I had gone nearly nose to nose in a debate over the threat of radical Islam.

The agent agreed with Victoria and me that the Seattle incidents and the appearance three days later of Pakistanis hunting me on my home turf was more than coincidence.

Now the agent had some other news. “We interviewed people who
came in contact with the Pakistanis. One of them fits the description of a Muslim engineer the Bureau has been tracking for months.”

Beside me, I felt my wife tense.

“This individual is brilliant,” the agent continued. “He’s also nuts. If you haven’t done it already, you need to beef up security at your home. Cameras, alarms, everything. Better yet, move. At least to a gated community.”

The agent’s words echoed Walid’s warning about security in Aspen in July. Now we got serious about it. Not only did we install a professionally monitored electronic security and surveillance system in our house, we also warned our close friends and colleagues about the potential threat.

Three weeks after the FBI visit, my secretary, Lily, answered another phone call at my office.

“Hello, I am looking for Kamal Saleem,” said a man with a thick Middle Eastern accent.

“Your name, sir?”

“My name is Bill,” the caller said. “I am an old friend of Kamal Saleem’s. I used to have his cell phone number, but I have lost it. You know how it goes.”

The man chuckled, and Lily thought she heard a hard, false brightness in the laugh. And she had never met a man with such a thick foreign accent who went by the name of Bill.

“Is Kamal Saleem there?” the caller pressed. “If he is not there, I will just leave a message.”

“I’m sorry,” my secretary said. “We don’t have anybody here named Kamal Saleem.”