The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption (17 page)

Gaddafi?
Adrenaline tingled in my bones. In those days, if you were a Muslim and a rebel, Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was your idol. He was obscenely rich, famously generous, and would finance any training, any attack, anywhere, anytime.

“He is paying for everything,” Abu Yousef continued. “Fighters come from all the Arab countries, and students and radical leftists come from Latin America. Even the IRA goes there to train. It would be a great opportunity for you, Kamal, and it is the future of the PLO, the chance for us to establish offices worldwide. If we are able to establish strong ties in Latin America, we can easily reach into America itself.”

All over the world, insurrection was in the air. Communism was encircling the globe: the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, Korea, China, Cuba, Latin America. And terrorism had gone international: In 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a socialist group, blew a Swissair flight out of the sky over Zurich. The same group in 1971 hijacked five airliners in rapid succession, negotiating the release of a captured female hijacker and three PFLP prisoners from the Zurich bombing. Even in America, rebel groups like the Weather Underground and the Black Liberation Army were bombing high-profile targets like the police and the Pentagon.

From Tripoli, Gaddafi cheered on the revolution. It did not matter whether you were a Marxist, a jihadist, or wanted to assassinate the Queen of England. As long as you were a terrorist, Gaddafi loved you. And now he was sponsoring a kind of university of terrorism, inviting rebels from all over the world to “campuses” flung across his vast chunk
of the Sahara desert. For the PLO and the Libyan leader, the arrangement was a win-win. Arafat wanted Gaddafi’s millions; Gaddafi wanted to change the world.

“These revolutionary groups are like ships with no harbor,” Abu Yousef told me. “Today, we will teach them and guide them. Tomorrow, when they take power in their own countries, they will see us as mentors and allies.”

When Abu Yousef asked me if I wanted to be part of it all, I said yes in an instant, and now I was here, rolling through the smoking desert on my way to destiny.

I had flown TunisAir into the country from Lebanon and helicoptered south to a remote base where two Libyan militia and a Palestinian driver named Faisel picked me up in the Jimmy. Two hours later we arrived in a small desert compound bordered on one side by a long fence of barbed wire. I later learned we were close to the border of Chad, near Niger. The fence was a hedge against Chaddian guerrillas who hated Muammar Gaddafi as much as he hated them.

As we walked through the camp, a session in hand-to-hand combat training was underway in a central open area. About fifteen men in fatigues sat in a circle watching as a
fedayeen
trainer dropped a larger man to the sand with a roundhouse kick. I was surprised to see a woman sitting in the circle, too. None of the trainees were Middle Eastern; I guessed them to be from Latin America. Faisel took me to meet the camp leader, Abu Mustafa. When we entered the tent, I recognized him from Abu Yousef’s description: a burly Palestinian with eyes like a falcon.

“Welcome, Kamal,” he said, looking me over sharply. “Abu Yousef has told me you will be a great asset to us here.”

I bowed my head slightly. I knew that Abu Mustafa and my mentor had known each other in Egypt, fought together in Fatah, and remained close friends. “Abu Yousef sends his greetings,” I said. “He told me I can learn much here.”

Abu Mustafa smiled. “We are glad to have you. Now, go with Faisel. He will issue your weapons and show you where you will sleep. Faisel, get our new friend something to eat.”

I turned to leave, but Abu Mustafa spoke again. “Kamal, while you
are here, keep your eyes open for vipers and scorpions—and not only the ones that crawl through the sand.”

4

After Abu Mustafa’s warning, I never went anywhere without an AK–47 strapped to my back—nor did any of the 130 other PLO
fedayeen
and Libyan militia who lived permanently at the camp.

The camp itself was a small village of tents, huts, and a couple of rude cinderblock buildings used to store equipment during the day. The majority of storage lay hidden underground, in a tight labyrinth of lead-lined concrete bunkers camouflaged from above with sand. The bunkers also served to hide us from the prying eyes of western governments. We had two different satellites we dealt with, both American. At night we could sometimes see them passing in the high heavens like fast-moving stars. When the satellite alarm sounded, we scrambled down into the cramped bunkers and sat, packed in like galley slaves, until the eye in the sky had moved on. We knew the Americans knew Gaddafi’s camps existed, but it was critical to hide our numbers. The Americans were devious, the Libyan leaders told us. If they found an especially active camp, they would launch a chopper attack by night and destroy it with rockets.

At my camp, we had no shortage of students. Marxist-Leninist groups, Islamic groups, upstart Sandinista rebels from Nicaragua and, just as Abu Yousef had said, the IRA. Every day was like a graduate school in terrorism, in which we helped anywhere from ten to eighty hard-eyed revolutionaries sharpen their killing skills. Hand-to-hand combat and martial arts training always took place in the open center of the camp, where I had first seen the Latin Americans. In a designated area on the camp’s western border, we practiced marksmanship and sniper techniques. Regularly, we loaded up in vehicles and rumbled far into the desert to practice with TNT, RPGs, and Katyusha rockets,
blowing up old Jeeps and target structures built for the purpose. Month by month, we consumed enough explosives and ammunition to fight a small war. Gaddafi cheerfully paid for it all.

But we also expended an equally valuable explosive that cost Gaddafi nothing and made him love the PLO all the more: propaganda. Every terrorist we trained hated America. That was a given and, in fact, the only price of admission. But before each revolutionary left the camp, we made sure they also hated Israel. The
fedayeen
told them the Jews were animals and showed them gory pictures of murdered women and children to prove it. In truth, we did not know where the pictures came from or even whose crimes they depicted. But they served their purpose.

Meanwhile, whatever grievance a rebel faction had against its government or another group, we embraced it as if it was our own.

“Yes!” we told the Communists. “You must subdue the imperialists and bring freedom to your people!”

“Yes!” we told the Sandinistas. “You must kill your corrupt president and bring justice to your people!”

What did it matter to us? Unless they were Muslim, both the foreign factions and their targets were all infidels worthy of death. So, according to
al-toqiah,
we made fellowship with them all, lying to the fighters and puffing them up in order to wedge Islam into future revolutionary governments and advance our faith across the world.

I remember two fighters in particular who lapped up our flattery like cats enjoying cream: Bobby and Patrick, they called themselves, two soldiers with the IRA. Both in their twenties, they were young, restless, muscular fighters with six-pack bellies and mouths that yap-yap-yapped like windup toy dogs. Bobby, a blue-eyed man with dark, spiky hair, loved to bark in his brogue about “killing the English bastards!” Blond-haired Patrick bragged so constantly about his fighting skills that when I finally went one-on-one with him in the combat circle, I nearly broke his wrist just to hear him scream instead of talk.

Gaddafi, of course, did not have to put up with such annoying daily details. He sponsored dozens of camps across his sprawling desert, often visiting them personally to observe training and cheer on the insurrection. At our camp, his people had built an observation tower on a
hill, like a covered lifeguard stand. The Libyan president would come and watch us train through a huge pair of military binoculars, sometimes for the whole day. In the evening, he would sit with us and tell us how impressed he was. Gaddafi was handsome and charming and loved to pour on the praise.

Even in front of his own Libyan militia, he would say to the PLO
fedayeen
, “My own people are lazy. They do not have the heart you have.”

Gaddafi loved Abu Mustafa because he had personally organized three successful attacks on the hated Chaddians. Once after such an incursion, Gaddafi came to visit and handed each of us an envelope stuffed with money.

“For your service to my country,” he told me as he placed a fat packet in my hand. When I looked inside, I was astonished to find a thousand dollars. It was more money than I had ever held in my life.

5

The camp wasn’t all terror all the time. Sometimes for fun, we let the air out of the Jeep tires and went four-wheeling, flying over knife-edge dunes, the powdery sand spraying out behind us like water. Several times, we made excursions to an ancient castle on the Chaddian border. Inside, the yawning rooms were in ruins, but outside the castle was completely intact, rising from the barren desert like a strange, medieval mirage.

Often, in the evening, I would commandeer a Jeep or a Jimmy and drive far off into the dunes to be alone. Far enough to leave behind all manmade light and sound, to a place where the pale sand sea glowed in the moon’s alabaster light, where the silence was so complete that if I sat still enough, I could hear the stealthy shoosh of a viper’s belly crossing the sand.

Sometimes, I would lie atop the hood and talk with Allah, the desert sky arcing over me like a giant tent, the stars breathtaking in their clarity. Often, clusters of shooting stars burst across the velvet sky, medleys of light in silver and fiery gold.

“Glory to you, Allah!” I prayed one night after I had been in the camp nearly eighteen months. “Finally, I am making a difference!”

Libyan and PLO intelligence filtered back good news from our brothers in arms. Since 1971, terror attacks had increased around the world, and we knew some of the revolutionaries involved had trained with us.

In 1974, I was in Abu Mustafa’s tent when he received a strange call from Libyan military intelligence: A pair of Irishmen had arrived at the airport in Tripoli on a flight from Italy. They fit the description of two IRA soldiers who had trained at the camp: Bobby and Patrick.

“These men are seeking refuge,” I heard a Libyan agent say over the radio.

It was common for Muslim fighters to do a mission and then, like the hijackers of the Austrian train, seek sanctuary in Gaddafi’s desert camps. But such a request was unusual for fighters from non-Muslim groups.

Abu Mustafa paused and looked up at the tent ceiling for a moment. Then he keyed the radio and said, “Let them come.”

While Bobby and Patrick made the chopper flight to our midrange base, Abu Mustafa learned more details of their mission from Libyan intelligence: A bombing in England. Civilians killed, including women and children. Scotland Yard and British intelligence on the rampage. Already, foreign pressure had been increasing on Gaddafi to stop supporting the IRA. Now these two Irish buffoons had left a trail from England through Italy that ended in Libya, endangering us all.

Abu Mustafa radioed a report to Gaddafi and, later that morning, relayed the results to me: “These people don’t belong with us,” he said, referring to the Irishmen. “Gaddafi tells me we are to send them back where they came from. But we need to quiet them first.”

I nodded my understanding.

That afternoon, I made the two-hour Jimmy trip to the helicopter base with Faisel and two PLO
fedayeen,
Majid and Omar. We picked up Bobby and Patrick, who bragged all the way to the camp about their miraculous escape from the British authorities. The Irishmen rode in the middle bench seat, with Omar and Majid behind them. I rode in the front, but turned around to encourage their storytelling with breathless admiration.

“Really?”

“That’s amazing!”

“What did you do next?”

By the time we reported to Abu Mustafa’s tent, I was able to confirm to him with a nod that Patrick and Bobby were connected with the England bombing.

Abu Mustafa chatted briefly with them, then said, “Kamal, Omar, these men must be tired from their long trip. Show them where they will sleep.”

When we stepped back outside, the sun shimmered low on the horizon, painting the sand pink and crimson.

“It’s the tent at the end,” I told our guests.

Bobby and Patrick walked ahead of Omar and me, chattering like women as they had since the moment we had picked them up.

We reached the far edge of the camp.

Omar and I cycled our AK–47s.

The Irishmen whirled at the sound, but did not even have time to register their shock before we cut them down.

I cannot say for certain, but the rumor in the camp was that Gaddafi ordered Bobby and Patrick shipped back to England in body bags.

A week after the Pakistanis came looking for me, I was sifting e-mail in my loft office at home when I noticed a message from an unfamiliar address. Since launching a website that published the truth about radical Islam, I had received a lot of mail from people I did not know. I had installed powerful antivirus software to enable me to interact with interested people without worrying about a computer meltdown. This subject line said “No subject.” I clicked on it and was instantly glad my wife and children were not at home.

In the first of six color photographs, an angry-looking Middle Eastern man was dragging another man down a street by his jacket collar. In his right hand, the angry man held a 9 mm pistol. In the second photo, the man in the jacket sat cringing on the pavement as the man with the gun prepared to shoot him in the head.

The third picture showed a raging crowd of Middle Eastern men stomping another man to death. In the fourth photograph, a crowd that included a boy of about seven surrounded the body of a barefoot dead man hung upside down from some kind of steel tower, his blood-splotched white T-shirt protruding oddly where his tormentors had broken his ribs. A swatch of rope held the man aloft by his left ankle and his right leg was splayed radically backward so that his whole body arched in a strange arabesque of death.

The final two photos turned my stomach. Both showed crowds of men, dressed in ordinary street clothes, chanting victoriously and holding up wet human entrails and internal organs. In one picture, a man seemed to yell directly into the camera. His right hand, raised palm forward, was painted in blood; a scarlet rope of intestines dangled from his left. In the final photograph, a crowd of men, their mouths open to the sky, pumped fists in the air while one man gazed rapturously at the prize he held in his hand—a freshly extracted human heart.

A cascade of memories washed over me as I remembered seeing
fedayeen
commit the same horrors in the late 1970s, during the Lebanese civil war. Returning to the e-mail, I saw that besides the pictures, the message contained only three lines of text. It was the same nine words of broken English written three times in the colors of the Pakistani flag:

“THIS WHAT WE ARE GOING TO DO TO YOU.”