Spoils of War, page 33
Once he had greeted them at the door of his office the first thing he said was: ‘Have you been given breakfast?’
When they said no, he called in an orderly and gave some brisk instructions. He invited Jack and Dale to sit down and apologized for the spartan nature of the office. It was separate from the main barracks, in a tacky prefabricated building that was meant to be temporary, he said, and so had no heating. That explained the general’s warm clothing but wasn’t helping Jack and Dale to thaw out after the freezing helicopter ride. The main feature of the office was a large-scale map of south-eastern Turkey fixed to one wall, with the meandering borders of Iraq and Iran heavily outlined in purple. The rest was government-issue furniture, the desk piled with papers but also accommodating two surprisingly modern digital key telephones. The window looked out towards the mountains in the south.
Back in his own seat, Delkin joined his fingertips and said: ‘I’m sure you would like to rest, but there are some important things we should clear up first. I gather you’ve been given a look at the problem we have to deal with here, so you’ll understand what pressure I am under.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Dale said sharply, ‘is why you can’t give those people temporary refuge on this side of the border. They’re freezing and starving on those mountains. The help that is reaching them is obviously inadequate.’
‘Miss Griggs, I have every personal sympathy with the Kurds. But politically such a thing is impossible. Temporary arrangements have a way of becoming permanent. Any one of those people who set foot on Turkish soil would gain the status of a political refugee and become our responsibility. Yes, we would get help from the United Nations and from other countries, but in the end we would be left with a million or more people on our hands. Homeless, destitute, discontented people: another Palestinian problem. And, frankly, we have enough trouble with the Kurds who live under our jurisdiction as it is.’
‘You’re letting some of them in,’ Dale said. ‘We saw trucks full of people being allowed across the bridge.’
‘The frontier remains open at its official crossing points,’ Delkin said, ‘and people whose papers are in order are naturally free to enter. Those you saw were probably Kurds with Turkish nationality, of whom there are many in Iraq. They’ve been hiring trucks to bring them out. The ones on the mountainsides are Saddam Hussein’s own citizens, whether they like it or not. But let us talk of more immediate things. Do you have any idea why you were asked to come here?’
‘We weren’t exactly asked,’ Jack couldn’t help pointing out.
‘Ah. No. I must apologize for that as well. It was something of a ploy, frankly. I couldn’t be sure that you would agree to speak to me voluntarily, so I arranged to have you brought here, where you would be . . . less subject to outside pressures, shall we say? But since your interests and mine seem to coincide, perhaps you will forgive my presumption.’
So he’d been right about the Turks trying to keep them under wraps, Jack thought. ‘We wanted to talk to you,’ he said. ‘It was the only reason we came to Turkey.’
‘But things have changed since you arrived. What happened at Yildiz Fort yesterday has given all of us the answers to some questions. You know that those men were trying to kill you, and I . . . well, I know why they were trying.’ The general looked at them significantly. ‘I have a particular interest in this matter, and, of course, I have read transcripts of your interrogations yesterday. From those, and from the questioning of this man Issa Shakir, it is clear that these people think you know more than you actually do. I would like them to go on thinking that.’
‘Why?’
‘Let’s take it one step at a time. Do you have the documents with you that were examined by Captain Yekta? They are probably clearer than the copies that were sent to me.’
Jack opened his briefcase and handed over his sets of papers. Delkin searched quickly through them, removed one page and pushed it back across the desk. It was one of the photocopies Jack had obtained from Zunckel, containing the picture and passport details of one of the six mysterious Iraqi clients for whom he had opened bank accounts. It was the man who went by the name of Sharif Hayawi. Jack recalled that his assets at the Handelsbank Bauer were in the region of two and three-quarter million dollars.
‘You said to Captain Yekta that this name was an alias?’ Delkin asked. ‘And that the man who used it is now dead?’
‘That’s what was reported to me. But why single him out? He was only one of half a dozen, and not the most important one.’
‘Because in his case at least you may have been misinformed. That is to say, as far as his death is concerned. He was alive and well less than forty-eight hours ago.’
Delkin spoke matter-of-factly. Jack stared at him.
‘One of the things we established from the questioning of Issa Shakir was the identity of his superior in London. The man who planned the abduction and murder of Abdel Karim, and who sent Issa and Ali to kill you. They knew him only by the title of Mudeer, an Arabic word meaning “boss” or “director”. However, Issa was, of course, able to recognize him by his photograph.’ Delkin held up the blurred picture. ‘This is him.’
Jack said blankly: ‘He’s in London? But that can’t be! I was told –’
‘I know. You were told that he was killed in Kuwait during Desert Storm at the end of February, along with General Malik and the four other Iraqis who had all that money in Zurich. But by Issa’s account he has been in England since last December. And if Hayawi is still alive . . .?’ Delkin raised his eyebrows rhetorically, like a schoolmaster.
‘Then so are the others?’
‘How can they not be?’
There was a knock on the door and the orderly came in with their breakfast: a pot of coffee and baskets full of croissants and cheese-filled pastries. Jack and Dale began tucking in hungrily while Delkin poured coffee for all three of them and produced a bottle of Scotch from a drawer of his desk.
‘Something to keep out the cold,’ he said, splashing whisky into their cups. He was smiling, still enjoying their surprise. ‘I thought it wise to order Yekta not to tell you any of this. I wanted you here first, safe from the possibility that any leaks might occur.’
‘Are you saying these six Iraqis faked their own deaths? Jack said through a mouthful of croissant.
‘I have no proof of it, but consider the circumstances. They were supposed to have been among a dozen men in a truck that was hit by a phosphorus bomb. Your source in Kuwait confirmed what I had already heard from my own informants, that all the bodies were charred beyond recognition. However, papers identifying them as Malik and the others were conveniently found in the cab. Perhaps your researches have taught you enough to know that these people are able to step in and out of new identities almost whenever they please. I’m sure this particular little group wouldn’t have found it difficult to arrange a thing like that. In fact, I doubt if any of them got close to any real fighting.’
‘But why do it?’
‘Because they were in the process of making a new future for themselves,’ Delkin said. ‘It was something they had been planning for years. Not the kind of future that my friend Ibrahim Jalloul was seeking, and not for the same reasons. They were the secret police, the iron fist of the regime and also its pampered favourites. They had access to luxuries, hard currency, foreign travel, the proceeds of corruption, all the benefits that were denied to ordinary Iraqis. And they knew better than anyone that it couldn’t last. One day Saddam Hussein and his friends would fall from power, and with them would go the Mukhabarat that had propped them up. Hence the foreign bank accounts, the secret investments, the new identities. Poor devoted little fools like those Shakir brothers weren’t working for the cause they imagined they were; they were slaving to line their masters’ pockets.
‘When Saddam invaded Kuwait these people sensed trouble ahead; when the Allies drove him out, his downfall must have seemed imminent. What better time to make their move? And what better opportunity to discard their old selves than to die in the Mother of All Battles?’
‘Except,’ said Jack, ‘that those bank accounts and investments haven’t been touched. Not since before the invasion.’
‘That’s because they’ve been lying low. Because they don’t want to risk losing an even bigger prize.’
Dale paused with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. ‘The gold?’
‘Exactly. The gold. Forty million dollars’ worth of it, more than the value of all their present investments put together. It’s strange how wealth makes people greedy for more. It’s their greed that is going to destroy them, Miss Griggs. I’m going to see to that. It’s what I promised my friend Ibrahim I would do.’
Delkin said this in such a quiet, measured way that its effect was all the more startling. Jack and Dale looked at each other. Jack said: ‘Did you make that promise when he phoned you from Amman? Last August, when he was arranging to get Noura Hamadi out of Kuwait?’
The general nodded in confirmation. ‘You’ll gather that this is a personal thing for me. We had been close friends for ten years, ever since we met at Camberley. We trusted each other totally. That was the last time we spoke, and he told me about the deal he was making with Hamadi. And more. He told me how the gold might cost him his life; and how, if it did, I should use it to avenge his death. The time for that may now be approaching. And I want you to help me.’
This was getting more bizarre by the minute. ‘You’re saying you actually know that Jalloul is dead?’ Jack asked.
‘I have positive proof of it,’ said Delkin calmly. ‘And you have provided it. More exactly, you have, Miss Griggs.’
‘Me? I didn’t know a damn thing about this until Jack –’
The general silenced her with a look. ‘One thing Jalloul did not tell me was the alias he would use, or even that he would have an alias, when he took Noura Hamadi out of Kuwait. It was the simple fact that you overheard that name, Mohamed Ghani, that made all the difference. Until last night I had never heard the name. When I received the transcripts of your interrogations I initiated a search of all the Iraqi public documents that our intelligence services had been gathering since the invasion of Kuwait. They came up with just one thing.’
He tugged a slip of paper out of the pile on his desk. ‘A single sentence on an inside page of the government newspaper, Al-Jumhuriyah, dated the eighth of September last year. Buried among a lot of official announcements about price controls and import regulations. Since you do not read Arabic, I will translate: “The Revolutionary Command Council announces that the economic traitor Mohamed Ghani was executed on the fourth of September”.’
Delkin pushed the paper aside. ‘No details of where, how, why: just another piece of business news. No trial is mentioned, which means it was a summary execution by the Mukhabarat. Take note that the name Ghani is used, not Jalloul, and that he is described as an “economic traitor”. That explains a lot in itself.’
‘You didn’t know until last night,’ Jack said, ‘but you suspected? Is that what you were trying to tell Nadine Schuster when you visited her in March?’
‘For as long as the Gulf crisis lasted, I thought there was some slender hope that Jalloul might have been imprisoned rather than killed. Once the war was over and there was still no word of him, I was fairly sure that he was dead. I tried to prepare poor Nadine for it without actually giving her any facts. I let her think the idea was her own. Now I will have to break the news to her, but only once all this is over.’
‘And what exactly is all this?’ Dale asked.
‘Between what I know and you have learned, we have almost the whole picture now. You need to understand that the Mukhabarat not only distrusted people like Jalloul, they also feared them. Men like him, honest and honourable men who refuse to accept the cult of Saddam Hussein, will one day gather the strength to overthrow him. The secret police do everything they can to discredit such people, but they must also move cautiously. Hence the spies in his office, the constant search for evidence of his disloyalty.
‘When your Dr Hamadi approached Dr Zunckel, the lawyer in Zurich, asking him to find Jalloul, Zunckel naturally went to the best contact he had in Iraq: the businessman Mohamed Ghani, who also happened to be General Malik. And Malik jumped at the chance to perform this favour. Neither of these foreigners could know that he saw it as an opportunity to destroy Jalloul.
‘He had a particular reason for wanting to do so just at that time. A few days earlier, immediately after the invasion of Kuwait, when they were beginning to have serious worries about their futures, Malik and his group had stolen some of the gold they had removed from the Central Bank. I suppose it was just irresistible. They had hidden it and were making plans to remove it to somewhere safer, but they knew that Jalloul suspected them of the theft. He had been involved in the transport arrangements and he might even have some documentary evidence of what they had done. He had turned the tables on them; perhaps he could send them before a firing squad. This wasn’t just a case of a petty kickback, it was stealing assets directly from the state.
‘But now there was a chance to redeem the situation. Malik and his people knew nothing about this job that Jalloul was to carry out. But they did have ways of keeping track of him, working out roughly what was involved and turning it to their own advantage.
‘As Abdel Karim told you, there is a sort of pool of false identities available to members of all the Iraqi intelligence services but the Mukhabarat has ultimate control of it. A touch of irony here: from what you have learned it is obvious that Malik arranged for Jalloul to be given the papers of the fictitious businessman named Mohamed Ghani, an alias that Malik had already used for himself. Why? Because that way he could, almost literally, kill two birds with one stone. Once Jalloul was eliminated, unable to speak for himself, the evidence of his crimes could be revealed to those in power in Baghdad. That economic treachery that Malik himself had committed under the name of Ghani. Including the theft of the gold.’
Delkin sat back with satisfaction. Astonished, Jack said: ‘That was what it was all about? Pinning the blame on Jalloul for the disappearance of the gold?’
‘Pinning it on a man called Ghani, and proving that Ghani was really Jalloul. They knew that sooner or later, once the discrepancies in the figures were found, somebody would have to take the blame; why not the very man who might expose them as the culprits? That way they could throw in a string of past crimes as well, and a conspiracy involving the daughter of a rich Kuwaiti businessman. Dictators love to believe in conspiracies, to see traitors unmasked, and they don’t look too hard at the facts; their secret police feed them a steady diet of such things. In his official report, Malik no doubt explained how he had traced the theft of the gold to Jalloul, how his vigilant men had stopped the criminal as he was about to leave Kuwait, and how he tried to resist arrest and was shot. Regrettably, they had been just too late to prevent the disappearance of the gold itself. This was an embarrassing detail. Hence, no triumphant headlines, just that one sentence in Al-Jumhuriyah.
‘I can’t tell you exactly what happened that night, but I can make a reasonable guess. On the phone from Amman, Jalloul told me he thought Malik might have learned of his plans to bring a plane in from Baghdad to fly Noura Hamadi out. It would make sense to stop him at the airport; it would add conviction to the story about his trying to flee. Any witnesses to what actually took place could conveniently be eliminated there and then. In view of something else I found out, it seems likely that Malik and his men used that same plane to remove the gold from Kuwait.’
General Delkin stood up and walked to the map on the wall. ‘You will recall,’ he said, ‘that we and our American allies were engaged in intensive aerial, satellite and electronic surveillance of Iraq and Kuwait at that time. I requested the intelligence reports for the morning of the fourth of September, and I learned that an SR-Seventy-One spy plane flying from the American base at Incirlik here in Turkey had picked up the radar and radio signals from an aircraft that took off from Kuwait City at about two-thirty. It flew north-north-west for eight hundred kilometres, landing at around daybreak near a place called Zibar, in Iraqi Kurdistan.’ He pointed to a spot in the bottom right-hand corner of the map, a short way below the purple line marking the Iraqi frontier. ‘It’s a place of no significance, but it was once the base of a German company with a contract for constructing hydro-electric dams on the Great Zab River, and they built an airstrip there.
‘The plane stayed on the ground for two hours. Aerial photographs taken in daylight identified it as a small commercial jet, a Piaggio capable of carrying a payload of, would you believe, just over three thousand kilos? A further sequence of pictures from a number of overflights showed its cargo being offloaded into a truck, which was then driven north along this track into the mountains.’
Delkin’s finger followed a tracery of tiny red dots that wandered among densely packed contour lines. ‘All this was routinely recorded, along with hundreds of other ground and air movements. Since these ones obviously had no military significance the Americans weren’t interested in them. But of course I was. We in the Jandarma have mapped that area very carefully because of its potential use as a refuge for Kurdish terrorists. That track was built by the German company as well, and it leads nowhere except to an old construction camp, abandoned for many years and quite cut off from the world.’ He turned and looked out of the window. ‘It’s only ten kilometres from the border. You could almost see it from here if it weren’t for a few peaks in between.’
‘And that’s where you think the gold is?’ Jack asked.’
‘Unless they have shifted it since. But my feeling is that they planned to leave it there, buried perhaps, and no doubt discreetly guarded, until the time came to move it into Turkey. The end of the Gulf War would have been the right moment, but then came the Kurdish insurrection, turning that area into hostile territory for members of the Mukhabarat.’ Deklin paused. ‘When you spoke to Zakarios, the old smuggler, he suggested a route that these people might take. Along the old Silk Road to the Mediterranean coast?’
