Power Play

I walked fast, to clear my head. Plenty of cabs tooted but I let them pass, until I reached the Great House and my bed just after two in the morning, which is around 7 a.m. British time. Just as I was ready to switch off the lights, my secure phone rang. At least by now I was sober. It was Andy Carnwath, the PM’s Communications Director.

‘Alex, we have a problem.’

‘I’m listening.’

‘Several problems.’

One problem that I already knew about was that the Prime Minister was scheduled to fly to Washington for an IMF meeting in a couple of weeks time. London told me that my ‘absolutely top priority’ was to secure a one-on-one with President Carr, and it would be regarded as a humiliation for all of us if I failed. In the current mood of anti-British feeling I had not nailed it down yet. I thought that might be the reason for the call. It was something worse.

‘Our security people say it is very important that we all back off on the Khan case. All of us. Immediately. And especially you, Alex. We don’t want Khan mentioned in any way to the Americans; we don’t want him talked about publicly; we want none of this to cloud the Prime Minister’s visit. Most especially we don’t want any more fucking aggro with the Vice-President.’

Andy Carnwath stopped talking.

‘Delighted as I am to hear your voice Andy, why does this require a two a.m. phone call and not an email?’

‘I don’t know all the details,’ Carnwath said, ‘but I do know that Khan is a dirty little fucker. And his family is. It’s complicated, Alex, but I needed to stress it to you in person. Our people are on top of it.’

‘Manila?’ I started to feel very uneasy.

‘No, thank fuck,’ Carnwath sounded relieved. ‘Something else, something slow burning and, according to our people, something even worse than Manila–if you can believe that.’ I could believe anything. ‘Khan’s relatives are on the Watch List. The PM’s been told that being too robust in the defence of Muhammad Asif Khan will blow back and haunt him. So, back off–but, here’s the thing, under no circumstances must you tell the Americans why you are backing off. You got that, Alex?’

‘Of course.’

The ‘Watch List’ was the Security Service list of people thought close enough to staging a terrorist attack to demand up to twenty-four-hour-a-day surveillance.

‘And one other thing I need to tell you,’ Andy said. ‘Brother Yank has been asking questions about you. You’ll hear it from the embassy security people. Discreet approaches from the US Secret Service to our people to check and make available all your security clearances and background.’

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said. And then, despite myself, I smiled. Maybe Kristina was checking me out. And then I stopped smiling. Maybe someone else was checking us both out.

‘Any reason we should be worried, Alex?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Goodnight then, Alex. Sorry to wake you, but I’m heading to Berlin right now with Fraser for the Euro-fucking-bollocks, and you can see why this would not keep.’

‘Yes, of course. Goodnight, Andy.’

I was completely sober now, and unable to sleep. I lay and looked at the ceiling, thinking about the implications of the Khan case, and about whether Kristina might help me out of a jam by fixing the one-on-one meeting between Davis and Carr that Downing Street so desperately wanted. I finally fell asleep. As I did so I dreamed about Kristina’s hair brushing my face.

As we were eventually to find out following the publicity over the Heathrow conspiracy trials, the British Security Service, MI5, really was on to something with Muhammad Asif Khan. A cousin of his, Hasina Khan Iqbal, had been flagged up as a security risk after she applied for a job at Heathrow Airport. MI5 started looking at Hasina and then at other members of the family, including her older brother, Shawfiq. It turned out that Shawfiq already had a file fat enough to ensure that the whole family was put on the Watch programme. The Iqbals’ father was dead, but the brother and sister, mother and maternal grandmother lived in Hounslow in west London. Shawfiq–and this interested our security people a great deal–chose to go out of his way to attend a mosque in Slough that was well known for the extremism of some of its members. For her part, Hasina, as is obvious from the newspaper pictures during the trial, is a strikingly statuesque woman. At the time I was tipped off by Andy Carnwath about the Khan family, Hasina would have been twenty years old. In the newspaper pictures her face is always set off by a black hejab and abaya. By her own later account to counter-terrorism police officers, it was shortly after the disappearance of Muhammad Asif Khan, and the Carr administration talk about vengeance against the perpetrators of the Manila bombing, that Shawfiq instructed Hasina to get a job at Heathrow Airport, Terminal One. Shawfiq was now head of the family and Hasina did as she was told. She applied to a confectionery and newspaper chain, but was told the only job vacancies were in Terminal Five.

‘Go along for interview anyway,’ Shawfiq instructed. ‘Take the job. You can get a transfer later.’

On the day of the interview, a Saturday, the watchers recorded that Hasina Khan Iqbal appeared to have dressed with special care. She had put on her dark kohl eyeliner and a hint of make-up, repeatedly making sure that not a single stray hair emerged from her tight-fitting black headscarf. Shawfiq was filmed by the watchers as he drove her from the family home in Hounslow to Hatton Cross Tube station. Hasina caught the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow. The newspaper store manager offered Hasina a job in Terminal Five immediately. The police reports showed that later he claimed he had had one minor reservation. Looking at her CV it was obvious that Hasina Khan Iqbal was overqualified for the position of shop assistant.

‘You could go to university,’ the store manager had said.

Hasina had replied that her family did not want her to study any more and that they needed the money. Shift work was ideal, she said, because it enabled her to look after her elderly grandmother. She might go to university ‘sometime’, she said, if the family agreed. It did not seem much of a big deal.

After he dropped Hasina at the Tube station, the watchers followed Shawfiq Iqbal to Twickenham. He was filmed parking his dark blue Subaru near Harlequins rugby ground, known as ‘The Stoop’, a place he was to return to repeatedly over the next year or so as the Heathrow Airport bomb plot developed. The Stoop lies about half a mile from Twickenham. Shawfiq walked with the crowds streaming along the pavement towards the big game, the Heineken Cup Final, the biggest club rugby event in Europe. Shawfiq had bought a ticket to see London Wasps play Toulouse. In his martyrdom video, Shawfiq explained that he felt weird in the rugby ground, completely foreign. He was uninterested in sport, had never seen a rugby game before, and the ticket for the West Stand was expensive, which he resented.

‘Rugby’, Shawfiq declared aggressively, waving his hands in the martyrdom video, ‘is not a game played by people like me or for people like me.’

He quoted something he had read in a book, a quote attributed to the historian Philip Toynbee. Toynbee was supposed to have said that blowing up the West Stand at Twickenham would set back the cause of English fascism by decades. Shawfiq laughed on the martyrdom video as he jabbed his fingers towards the camera in accusation.

‘When you mess with the Muslims,’ he said, bouncing jauntily at the camera, ‘the Muslims come and mess with you.’

On that day of the Heineken Cup Final, Shawfiq Iqbal was recorded on surveillance cameras and by the watchers walking around inside the ground, taking photographs on a digital camera. Crowds in their tens of thousands streamed towards their seats. The pictures show that Shawfiq photographed the fans drinking beer. He walked around at various levels inside the stadium, photographing the underside of the West Stand and the reinforced concrete pillars on which it stood. At one point he filmed a short movie. He asked a couple of Wasps fans in their yellow-and-black hooped shirts how many people were inside Twickenham at maximum capacity. One fan, with a pint of Guinness in his hand, mugged for the camera as he said it was ‘about eighty thousand.’

‘Eighteen thousand?’

‘No, EIGHTY thousand,’ the fan repeated. ‘Eight-zero.’

‘Wow,’ Shawfiq said, genuinely impressed. He had no idea what was normal for an international rugby match, but, as he said in his emails to Waheed, Umar, and the other conspirators: Eighty thousand is twenty-five times as many as died on 11 September.

‘Eighty thousand,’ you can hear Shawfiq repeat on the camera footage, as if he cannot quite believe it. ‘Wow.’

Shawfiq shot pictures of the bars, souvenir, and programme stands, the hamburger and pie stalls. He confessed in the emails to Waheed and Umar that he had never seen anything like it. When the teams ran out just before kick off he was in his seat. He noted in one email that there were more non-white people among the thirty players on the pitch than among the 80,000 people in the ground. It was all-ticket, all-white; no Asian fans that he could see, anywhere.

‘Where are the Muslims?’ he asked in the email. ‘Where are the Muslims? Muslim Free Zone!’

Shawfiq watched only part of the game. He found the play confusing, brutal, incomprehensible, typical of the worst of Western culture. On that I agree with Shawfiq. Rugby is organized violence broken up with committee meetings. The security cameras and the watchers recorded that he left the ground during the first half after around thirty minutes of play.

Before he did so he was filmed looking up to the sky and watching the long, slow descent of a passenger aircraft towards Heathrow Airport, a few miles away to the west. It was, he wrote in an email to Waheed, an extraordinary sight. Three hundred tons of metal, flying at 250 miles an hour, hanging as if suspended in the air. The possibilities, he decided, were incredible. Shawfiq left the ground and returned to his Subaru near The Stoop. The vehicle by that time had been fitted with listening devices and cameras, and so was the family home. The watchers at first used a white van that they moved near the house; later they rented a small apartment nearby for the months of surveillance that followed as the conspiracy unfolded.

As he drove away from The Stoop, Shawfiq called Hasina on her mobile phone. I suppose he must have been wondering how she had got on in her job interview, but Hasina’s mobile was switched off. Then he switched on the radio to the Five Live commentary which called the Wasps-Toulouse Twickenham game a ‘real thriller’. After a few minutes he turned the radio off and played a CD of a man singing verses–sura–from the Koran. When he arrived home in Hounslow half an hour later, Shawfiq Iqbal spent that evening sending JPEGs of the pictures he had taken to a number of email addresses in different parts of the United Kingdom, with a few annotations and a brief commentary. He prayed. He checked his maps of Heathrow and Twickenham, and then smoked half a dozen cigarettes, lost in thought. Some time later that night his mother told him that Hasina had indeed got the job. She would start work at Heathrow Terminal Five the following week.

That night Hasina took off her make-up and sat by the mirror in her bedroom, brushing her long black hair. In her later statements to police she said that she tried to read a book while lying on her bed, but could not settle. When police raided the house just over a year later they found the book still by her bedside. The novel, White Teeth by Zadie Smith, a story about race relations in multicultural England, was still unfinished. Hasina said from the moment she got the job at Heathrow she could not concentrate on reading, and instead kept wondering why the manager in the shop where she was to work had asked her about her plans for the future and university. At that time, Hasina told the police, she did not know exactly what her brother was planning, but she knew enough to recognize that the future was like a foreign country, which she was not planning to visit. She too prayed before she went to bed.

SEVEN (#ulink_b8488d7c-ab69-551c-8ade-7980c934d2f5)

Details of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ were not leaked, as Kristina and I had feared. They were publicly announced, boasted about by Bobby Black at a news conference two days before the Prime Minister’s visit to Washington. It was as if he had taken a brick and thrown it into a calm pond. I sat at my desk in the embassy watching the Spartacus news conference–as it came to be called–on television, open-mouthed. It began normally, as the regular daily White House press briefing, introduced by the Communications Director Sandy McAuley, who said the Vice-President had a short statement to make. There would be a press handout and the Vice-President would then take questions. An aide passed around a two-page document which turned out to be an executive summary of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ pamphlet that Bobby Black had given me in confidence at the start of the Carr administration.

The news conference led all the TV and radio bulletins, and would ensure that Bobby Black made the cover of Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, Der Spiegel, and the front pages of the main European and American newspapers. He delivered a short statement on the need to meet terror with ‘appropriate severity’, and then called for questions. The BBC’s White House correspondent asked whether–in the light of the Vice-President’s comments about Spartacus–it was pointless the Prime Minister raising the issue of the alleged torture of Muhammad Asif Khan on his visit to the American capital. Bobby Black offered a lopsided grin.

‘My good friend the Prime Minister of Great Britain is welcome to raise any issue with us,’ he said. ‘Any issue at all. That is what friends do. Doesn’t mean to say we are going to agree.’ Then he started to repeat the kind of things he had told Fraser Davis at that disastrous meeting at Chequers the previous year. He went through his ‘Neutrality Is Immoral’ speech, coupled with the instruction that America’s allies were all expected to help win the ‘War on Terror’.

‘Be clear: if you are in the business of harming American citizens, or of helping those who do, you will pay a price and the price could be your life.’

The declassified version of ‘The Spartacus Solution’ that was handed round to White House journalists argued that the United States could never completely defeat all its enemies in the War on Terror, but it did not have to. What America had to do, General Shultz argued in his essay, was to punish to the utmost those terrorists it could catch, without mercy, even at the risk of being thought cruel and imperialist.

The handout included what I thought was the essay’s most controversial conclusion, in full.

The Romans in the Roman Republic and later in the Empire knew they could never be sure to deter a slave rebellion. There was always the chance that somewhere, someone would rise up violently against his master. But when it happened on a grand scale under Spartacus, each of the captured rebellious slaves was crucified on the roads around Rome, their bodies left to rot and be feasted upon by vermin. In the twenty-first century, Roman methods are inappropriate, but Roman psychology is useful. There will always be rebellions, always troublemakers, always potential suicide bombers. The Spartacus Solution will ensure that terrorists are kept alive long enough to confess, to betray their comrades, and pay the full penalty. The United States in the twenty-first century must be a good friend. We must also be a ruthless and implacable enemy.

One other conclusion was also made public:

The more hostile media we receive for perceived human-rights abuses, the more discriminate our deterrence and the more potent the Spartacus Solution. Hostile media works for us. It is an effective communications tool. The Romans understood it best: Fear works.