I left Istanbul the next morning on the first flight to New York. Khalid had been in a jovial mood over dinner, and we parted on a warm note. He promised to get in touch as soon as he heard from Jamil. The departure lounge—the same one in which I had met Jamil just thirty hours earlier—was humming with travelers, and I felt a childlike satisfaction that none of them knew the secret of my last visit before the flight to Beirut. As I walked down the steps to the bottom floor, I almost expected to be met by Jamil’s piercing green eyes.
I was sipping a coffee when I noticed a discussion playing on a television screen mounted on the wall behind me. The program was a commemoration of the horrific sarin gas attacks in the Ghouta region on the outskirts of Damascus one year earlier, in which, by conservative estimates, more than fourteen hundred people, including four hundred children, had been killed. A group of panelists was debating the historical and political significance of these repeated large-scale deployments of chemical weapons by the Assad regime.
One panelist mused in a detached, clinical tone whether these casualties really constituted a “genocide” or whether they were merely part of an ordinary “civil war.” Another wondered whether jargon such as “mass murder” or “massacre” was really applicable to a conflict that he believed was nothing other than criminal gangs settling scores. This discussion was yet another distressing reminder of how out of touch the rest of the world had become with the depravities repeated every single moment in Syria. The mere fact that these experts felt the need to parse their words so carefully to draw theoretical lines between a genocide, a mass murder, or just your average civil war evidenced a complete loss of empathy. All their chatter about whether this wasn’t just that same old story of primitive, uncivilized tribal societies killing one another barely concealed their disdain for the refugees trying to escape the killing fields or their fleeting discomfort of having to look at the picture of a dead Syrian toddler swept facedown onto a Mediterranean shore.
I was about to get up and look for a spot where I would not have to hear the blaring television when I overheard two men seated near me discuss the TV program in loud German. The first man, a portly German in a sweat-stained shirt, proclaimed that this was just the way wars were—millions would still have to die in Syria, and the war would end only when there was no one left to die. The other person, a slim man in his thirties sporting green horn-rimmed glasses and a tight pink polo shirt that clashed with his bright carrot-red hair, was quick to agree, explaining matter of factly in a thick Swiss-German accent that the universal laws of nature would determine how many more people would still have to die in Syria. He called the war an act of natural selection and population control and stated that there was simply no more room for all those refugees in Europe. The German fellow nodded and mumbled, “Es reicht schon mit diesen Scheissarabern”—enough already with these shitty Arabs—to which the Swiss man added, “Ja wirklich, das Boot ist voll”—yes indeed, the boat is full. As I walked away, I heard them both snicker. Apparently not much had changed in Europe over the past seventy years.
I fell into a deep sleep on the flight home and dreamed of the green house in Beirut and of sweet Aliya and her brother, Sami. In the dream, I was playing a game with them when I suddenly noticed Paul Blocher sitting all by himself in the corner of the room. I tried to invite him to join us in our game, but each time I approached him, he vanished into another corner of the room. Eventually, I gave up and focused on Aliya and Sami. When I looked for Paul a little later, he was gone.
On my way home from the airport, I had to laugh at the terrible state of the roads in New York; the potholes were the size of craters, and it felt like driving in a war zone. In fact, the roads in Beirut, a city that had experienced civil war, occupation, and countless bombings, were in better shape than the ones in New York, the world’s financial center. Once home, I sent Huby a text message with a request to call me at his convenience. My phone rang two seconds later.
“How are you? Do you have any news?” Huby asked, sounding very apprehensive.
“Yes, I do have some information,” I said. “I’d prefer to meet in person rather than talk on the phone. Any chance you can come to New York in the next few days?”
“I am in DC at the moment. I can be there tonight,” Huby replied eagerly.
“Tonight won’t work, I just got back. I’d like to spend the evening at home with Laura and the kids. How about tomorrow morning?”
“Yes, of course. But can you tell me anything? Good news or bad news?” he asked.
“Neither,” I said, remembering Khalid’s brutal putdown of my light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel optimism. “But we have a trail.”
“So that’s good news,” Huby said. “Good enough to let me fall asleep tonight and hope to live another day. Or is it live to hope another day? It doesn’t matter. A trail is good news for me. I’ll take it.”
We agreed to meet at nine in the morning in the thirty-fifth-floor lounge of the Mandarin Oriental hotel. I knew that Huby had a residence there with an incredible skyline view of the city.
Huby was waiting for me the next morning when I stepped out of the elevator.
“You’re late,” he said impatiently.
“Seriously? It’s eight fifty-eight!”
“I know. But you’re not early enough. I’ve been waiting for twenty minutes.”
Huby could tell from my look that he needed to calm down. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’ve been a wreck. I’m terribly anxious to hear what you have to tell me.”
We found a seat by the window with panoramic views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan and ordered coffee. I gave Huby a rundown of what I had learned in Beirut, without revealing any names or the meeting with the Sheikh. When I mentioned the Anas connection to Captagon and other drugs, Huby pricked up his ears and asked me to repeat what I had just said. He had an expression of shock on his face, as if he had just seen a ghost.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“The drug trade,” he started before his voice trailed off. “What was the name of the drug you just mentioned?”
“Captagon.”
“Captagon. Hmm. I have heard that name before,” Huby said.
Huby looked me in the eyes. “How about we get out of here and continue our conversation over a walk in Central Park?”
“Why not, it’s a beautiful morning,” I said, a little surprised at his abrupt suggestion. “Is everything okay?”
“Not sure,” Huby replied. “Let’s talk during our walk. We’ll have more privacy.”
Huby paid for our coffee, and we made our way to the elevators. We did not speak until we had left the building and crossed Broadway toward the entrance to Central Park. The park was pleasantly empty at this time of day, just the occasional jogger and bicyclist.
“That drug you mentioned, Captagon,” Huby said as we strolled across Heckscher Fields toward the expansive Sheep Meadow. The immediate contrast to Manhattan’s congested streets was a big part of Central Park’s magic, and the high-rise buildings framing the park now seemed like a faraway movie set. “I knew I had heard that word before, but it took me a moment to connect the dots. Then the penny dropped. A friend of mine, a former French intelligence officer whom I have known for decades since our days in the Foreign Legion, once mentioned to me that someone Paul knew—a friend or an acquaintance, I’m not sure—was suspected of being involved in the Captagon trade. Apparently this acquaintance and his father used to be close to Rifaat al-Assad, President Assad’s uncle. My secret service friend used to track Rifaat and the Assad family for years, as far back as the late seventies, and for a period of three years he was one of their main handlers in the region.
“So when Rifaat recently moved from London to Paris, the French intelligence service roped my friend back in from retirement because of his familiarity with this particular cast of characters. From what he tells me, Rifaat is not much of a caballero, as our friend Jacques would put it, allegedly involved in all kinds of nasty things, from the Hama massacre to the Hariri assassination to drugs and embezzlement.* But Rifaat al-Assad also has some powerful friends, which I can attest to from my time in Saudi Arabia.”
Huby was speaking at a rapid pace. “I don’t understand,” I interrupted him as I pulled out my notepad to write down the details. “What does Rifaat al-Assad have to do with Paul Blocher? And was this Captagon-dealing friend the reason Paul went to Syria?”
Before Huby could reply, he had to duck to avoid being hit in the head by a Frisbee. It crashed into a tree behind us. I picked it up and threw it back to the boy who had hurled it.
“It does seem bizarre,” Huby said. “Like yet another unlikely case of two or three degrees of separation. But apparently, from what my friend told me, the father of Paul’s acquaintance did something to disrupt the drug trade of Rifaat al-Assad’s associates in Syria, and both father and son paid for it with their lives. The reason I am bringing this up now is that the particular drug in this affair was Captagon—the very same drug you just referred to. I remember it distinctly because I had never heard of this before my friend mentioned it, and I had to educate myself about it.”
I was even more confused. “I still don’t understand. Why did your Foreign Legion buddy—thanks, by the way for dropping that piece of information, I did not know that you had been a mercenary—why did this French intelligence officer mention Paul to begin with? Just like that, out of the blue?”
“Ex–intelligence officer,” Huby corrected me.
We turned into the beautiful tree-lined Mall toward Bethesda Terrace, stopping beside a fountain with a bronze female winged angel statue.
“This angel has healing powers,” Huby said. “It’s the angel from the Gospel of John, blessing the pool of Bethesda. Would be nice if Paul had such an angel, wouldn’t it?”
I nodded, and we continued to walk toward the edge of the terrace, from where we had a frontal view of the Central Park Lake.
I resumed our conversation after a few minutes. “So, again, why did this ex–intelligence officer even bring up Paul in the first place?” My thoughts were buzzing all over the place. Had Huby withheld critical information from me until this point, and was it possible that Paul Blocher himself was a Captagon dealer? I worried that I might have to call Khalid immediately to let him know that we had been working with incomplete information and was already dreading Khalid’s calm but pointed scolding. I urged Huby to fill me in, without leaving out any details. Even though I continued to take notes, I also took the phone out of my pocket and started recording to make sure that no detail would get lost. Huby noticed and nodded.
Huby seemed to be weighing his words carefully. “You asked me whether I believe Paul had gone to Syria to look for this missing friend or acquaintance. Here’s what happened: About three months ago, I had asked my intelligence contact to run some discreet background checks on Paul’s acquaintance. This was just under four weeks before Paul went to Syria. Paul had called me late one evening sounding very upset, almost panicked. We didn’t really speak that often, so I was surprised to hear from him. The same way you are confused now, it also took me a while to understand what he was talking about. He told me about some friend who had gone missing in Syria. Paul was distressed, very emotional as he spoke. He kept mentioning how this friend had told him that he and his father planned to get out of the drug business after this one last, big deal. After this strange call from Paul, I asked my Foreign Legion pal to look into the matter. I didn’t care about Paul’s friend. It was Paul I worried about. His concern for this friend troubled me.”
“Do you think Paul was in any way involved in this drug trade?” I asked.
Huby shook his head. “I don’t think so. Paul was a naturalist, a vegetarian, even a vegan, I think. He didn’t smoke, didn’t drink. I cannot imagine any drugs in his life. He was so connected to nature. Sorry, he is so connected to nature.”
“So are drugs,” I said, then quickly added, “though I suppose the synthetic, counterfeit Captagon they manufacture in those Syrian labs has very little to do with nature.”
“My secret service friend told me that they are troubled by how easily Syrian-made Captagon is making its way into France and being used as an amphetamine by some of the disaffected youths in the banlieues—the cesspool of homemade Jihadists. Apparently the amount of Captagon in circulation is staggering, and when customs officials manage to make a bust, they sometimes catch hundreds of thousands of pills. So just imagine how many more pills actually find their way into the country! One of the insidious things the dealers in France do is package the pills in blister packs of ten, which gives users the false sense that they are taking medication rather than a dangerous and highly addictive drug. But compared to how this drug has spread in the Middle East and the Gulf, the problems in France are small fry. If it’s a health problem in France and some other countries in Europe, then it’s a full-blown pandemic in Saudi Arabia. And from what my friend tells me, it has also become everyone’s favorite drug in the Syrian war.”
“Because it is used as an amphetamine by fighters?” I asked, remembering my conversation about Captagon with Bassel and Jamil two days earlier in Beirut. Everything Huby was telling me jibed with the information I had about this pernicious drug.
“Yes, and also because it is a big part of the war economy,” Huby explained. “So many ways to make money off it—manufacturing and trading, or taxing and policing the manufacturing and trading. It has the same value chain as a mafia operation, and it’s the most effective way to fight unemployment in Syria. Thousands are involved directly and indirectly in the Captagon business, and it’s much too profitable to be curtailed, let alone shut down.”**
We turned right and found a bench near the boathouse, where we sat down. A group of children nearby were playing hide-and-seek, and their joyful shrieks and giggles belied the heaviness of our moods.
“I really hope the Captagon connection with this Anas fellow is purely coincidental,” Huby said. “Though the older I get, the less I believe in coincidences.”
I smiled. “As Jacques once put it, a coincidence is just the Creator’s way of leaving you with the illusion that he is not involved.”
“Bravo!” Huby exclaimed. “The Creator and Jacques both have a sense of humor.”
A couple sat down on the bench next to ours. I got the distinct impression that the woman was trying to eavesdrop on our conversation. Huby also seemed to pick up on that, because he got up and suggested we keep walking.
“So what’s next?” he asked after we were at a safe distance from the couple.
“I’m waiting to hear back from a contact who is trying to locate this Anas. It’s our only semi-hot trail. The Kurdish fellow in their party, Alan, has not been heard from since the same time Paul disappeared.”
“A contact?” Huby asked in a mocking tone. “Does your contact have a name?”
“Sure he does,” I said.
“Care to share?” Huby asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “Remember, up until half an hour ago I didn’t even know that you had served in the Foreign Legion. You’ve chosen not to tell me your intelligence pal’s name, and now you are expecting me to reveal my contact’s identity?”
“Okay, okay, Captain Secrecy!”
“I’m just learning from the best,” I said. “In any event, as soon as I hear from him, I’ll go back to the region to find this Anas person.”
“Thank you, Daniel. I am really grateful for this. I would feel much better if you allowed me to compensate you for your efforts. At least let me pay for your flights.”
Once again, I explained to Huby why I couldn’t accept any payment from him or Paul Blocher’s family. I assured him that I would never fail to follow up on a lead because of the expense involved and promised to let him know if financial constraints did become an impediment to helping him, which I did not foresee. Besides, as I told him again, I had to travel to the Middle East anyway for my work. When Huby looked at me skeptically, I reminded him of the rude manner in which that official had threatened him with prosecution if any money ever changed hands as part of a ransom payment. Only then did Huby finally relent and drop the issue. I promised to get in touch as soon as I had new information, and we shook hands.
Huby set out for the Metropolitan Museum in order to distract himself, and I headed in the opposite direction to Manhattan’s West Side. The conversation with Huby left me with a lot to chew on, and Paul’s seemingly random connection to drug traders in Syria was troubling. I sent Khalid a text message, asking him for a Skype call when he had a moment. He replied an hour later, suggesting we talk the next morning.
Khalid was not his usual jovial self when he picked up. Immediately, I envisioned some bad news regarding Paul, and my heart sank. This roller coaster of emotions every time I got involved in the search for a missing person in Syria was draining—from the hopeful high whenever I received encouraging information to the pit in my stomach each time those hopes were dashed.
“Is everything okay?” I asked. “You sound discouraged.”
“I am discouraged,” Khalid replied. “But it has nothing to do with Paul Blocher.”
“Glad to hear that,” I said, instantly abashed at my sense of relief. “Sorry, that came out the wrong way. I’m sorry you are having a rough day.”
“It’s all right, Daniel,” Khalid said in a slightly acerbic tone. “What can I do for you?”
I told Khalid about my conversation with Huby and about the strange connection to Captagon and Rifaat al-Assad. Khalid listened intently without saying a word.
“Are you still there?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, any thoughts?”
“If nothing else, it shows that there might be more to the Anas connection than meets the eye,” Khalid said.
“Have you spoken to Jamil?” I asked.
“Yes, but not on our matter.”
I hesitated to push Khalid. His answers were monosyllabic, which was his way of asking me to tread lightly. “Is there any chance you could urge him to speed this up?” I asked, stupidly ignoring my gut feeling that it might be better to keep my mouth shut. “A life is on the line.”
“I am aware of that, Daniel,” Khalid shot back. “Many lives are on the line, and most of them don’t have any voice. They are helpless, too. This war is not just about Paul Blocher.”
Again, I was ashamed, this time for having pressed Khalid. He had done so much already, as always, without asking for anything in return. I deserved this dressing down.
“You’re right, I’m really sorry,” I said. “Forgive me, I was being selfish.”
Khalid was gracious. “It’s okay, don’t worry. You’re just trying to help another person, as am I. But don’t forget: Jamil is a Ray, and Rays are not like us. They may look like us, but they belong to a different species. Compassion is not what drives them, so it is something else we have to appeal to.”
“I understand. But if not out of compassion, why does Jamil help us?”
“Leverage, habibi, leverage. Collecting chips, to be cashed in at the right time,” Khalid said. “I will owe him a favor or two for this. Got it?”
I remembered how tender and affectionate Jamil had been with Aliya and Sami in the green house and wondered whether perhaps my friend pegged him wrong. But my behavior on this call had already been so abysmal that I decided against challenging Khalid on this point. Still, his words raised a different question, one I’d been wanting to ask him for a long time.
“Then why are you doing this?”
Khalid laughed. “That’s a conversation for another day. Besides, what makes you so sure it’s not all about leverage for me, too?”
“I’m no longer sure about anything,” I said, not certain whether he meant leverage against me or Huby or someone else.
“Relax,” Khalid said, as if he had read my thoughts. “Jamil is clever enough to collect chips and still frame the whole thing to his advantage. Collecting chips at both ends, or cashing a chip while collecting it, to be more precise. He is a virtuoso illusionist when it comes to using up a favor while giving the impression that he is the one doing the favor. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll have some news on our matter in the coming days. Jamil mentioned that he was going to Damascus tomorrow night. I’ll be in touch.”***
* In June 2020, a French court sentenced Rifaat al-Assad to four years in prison after convicting him of money laundering and the misappropriation (looting) of Syrian public funds. The court also ordered the confiscation of his assets and properties in France and Britain. Following this court ruling, the nongovernmental organization Sherpa called on French president Emmanuel Macron to strip Rifaat al-Assad of his Légion d’honneur that was awarded to him by President François Mitterrand in 1986, four years after the Hama massacre.
** The profitability of the Captagon business also extends to the safekeeping of its enormous cash profits in special warehouses in the Middle East and Southeast Asia through military-grade operations, and the reinsertion of this cash into the interbank market with the help of disreputable individuals within some of the most reputable global banks. Huby confirmed what Khalid had insinuated independently—that the same tight-knit group involved in laundering these Captagon profits in the banking system had also been providing these services to autocrats and their families for decades, starting with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in the 1980s, Sani Abacha in Nigeria, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq in the 1990s, and José Eduardo dos Santos in Angola from the late 1980s through the 2000s. One name that keeps popping up in this context is Bashir Saleh Bashir, a former aide to Muammar Gaddafi and head of the Libyan African Portfolio, a sovereign wealth fund that invested Libya’s oil wealth internationally. He has been referred to as “Gaddafi’s moneyman.”
*** I remembered that Khalid had told me in Istanbul after my return from Beirut that the Sheikh had sent Hussein to Damascus rather than Jamil. Based on how Khalid had described it at the time, I was under the impression that this was the way the tasks between Hussein and Jamil were generally divided and that Jamil was too valuable to the Sheikh to be sent off to Syria. Even though this contradicted Khalid’s statement on our call, I decided not to probe.