24. Tombstone Rules

24 TOMBSTONE RULES

Shangri-La

November 2000–May 2001

The ride through Shangri-La in the armored sedans that picked us up at the airport and took us to our new homes in a gated, guarded compound was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I’d seen poverty in the developing world throughout my career—South America, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam—but nothing prepared me for Shangri-La.

Trash rotted in the streets. It was everywhere, including in the trees. As we left the airport, I saw the fence surrounding it was peppered with plastic bags, blown there by the hot African winds. “Know what the national flower is here?” one of our escorts asked us when he saw me staring at the fence.

“What?”

“The plastic bag.”

No joke. Every tree seemed to blossom with plastic bags speared on their bare limbs.

The city itself sat in a bowl of brownish haze, a mix of desert dust and pollution that made the atmosphere even more oppressive than the 110-degree heat. There were few traffic lights, few paved roads, many without sidewalks. There was a semblance of a central downtown, but the rest was just a long, sprawling jumble of low-built, drab houses and shacks interspersed with open-air markets rife with swarms of thick, black flies.

Most everyone on the street or in the markets appeared malnourished. Some, shirtless and shoeless, others dressed in traditional African or Muslim clothing. Others, reduced to filthy rags, wore the scars of unending warfare and violence—burns, missing limbs, and other disfiguring injuries. Starvation stalked the side streets and refugee camps that ringed the city. Families here sometimes became so desperate they would leave their children at orphanages as a last hope that they may find steady meals.

Salted into the crowds were soldiers and security types, hefting rusty, poorly maintained weapons. Other armed men stood in front of buildings or guarded compounds from their high concrete walls. Guns and flies were the only things Shangri-La had in abundance. In roughly forty years of independence, this country had only known a few years of peace. The rest of the time, a civil war racked the nation, creating famine and displacing millions while killing at least two million more.

The sense of hopelessness was palpable here, and we hadn’t even gotten out of the cars yet. It was a mixed bag of poverty, third-world despair, and evidence of a state so dysfunctional that it officially discouraged taking photographs of its own capital.

We rolled to our compound, the guards opened the front gate, and we settled into the well-appointed town houses. This place would be our only respite from the realities of this hellhole. We had a basic gym, a swimming pool, and clean homes to live in.

As we drove in, I noticed a small kiosk just outside the gate and across the street. Inside sat a couple of men watching us intently.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there aren’t people after you.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX the few American diplomats here operated out of an old consulate compound whose location was not as publicly known. The embassy XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX still dealt with the occasional walk-in traffic. The very few State Department functionaries would move back and forth between the consulate and the embassy as needed.

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. You could taste the stale air and moldy dust. It gave us an eerie feeling to be inside the place.

How do you pick up pieces like this and start an entire intelligence network? It was an immense challenge for our small team. We set to work figuring it out.

Moving around the city would not be easy. The street maps published on Shangri-La were out of date and inaccurate. There were hardly any street signs or even street names. We would have to rely on rudimentary GPS systems and build our own maps of waypoints and landmarks. For the meantime, we’d have to simply factor in that we would get lost whenever we hit the streets.

Another complication was our light skin. We stood out here in Africa to a degree that made us a curiosity to the locals. Dodging surveillance teams and avoiding terrorist attacks and random street violence would be a lot more complicated as a result of the racial differences between our team members and the people of the city. Fortunately, we brought a solution with us. Some truly clever special-effects types had crafted for us a whole kit of disguises. A couple of minutes in a bathroom could transform me from a graying white guy into a sub-Saharan Black African. The disguises would not hold up at speaking range, but for vehicular operations around the city, they were perfect. We even had long-sleeved gloves that matched the color of our face masks. We could evade easy identification even if a hostile car pulled right alongside us.

While there was plenty of crime and violence in Shangri-La, that would not be the biggest threat we faced. Every major Islamic terror group from Hezbollah to Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda maintained a presence here. The city was almost a throwback to the pirate bays in the Caribbean during the era of the Spanish Armada. They networked and cooperated, shared intel and resources. Some of the most notorious assassins and terror leaders went to ground here to avoid capture.

Overlapping all these groups was the host nation’s security and intelligence services, plus its army. As we studied the situation, it grew obvious to us that there was little difference between these national institutions and the terror groups. They mingled and worked together, shared information, and carried out operations together. Early on, I met an army colonel who exemplified this. To our faces, he was friendly enough, but behind the scenes, he’d orchestrated several operations that had killed Americans. Part of our responsibilities included meeting with liaison types from the government, and he was one of them. I will never forget sitting across from him, wanting only to put a bullet between his eyes as justice for what he’d done to our fellow Americans.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t fly in the real world, only spy novels.

We didn’t have many friends in Shangri-La, either. XXXXXX had a presence, but they were supremely arrogant (no surprise there, it is a national trait) and played their cards close to the vest. They essentially refused to work with us, though their home nation was ostensibly one of our closest post–World War II allies.

In contrast, we received significant assistance from a surprising source. They turned out to be our closest allies in the city. They provided us with leads, information, and support whenever they could.

While they were not of any intelligence value, there was a small presence in country, and they welcomed us warmly. In a desolate place like Shangri-La, they gave us access to some much-needed socializing. Most of the time, when not on the job, we were stuck behind the walls of our compound, limited to whatever entertainment we could find. Usually, that meant recycling our VHS movie collection.

On the advice of the XXXXXX, we hired a local chef they recommended—XXXXXX Normally, part of an overseas tour includes cultural immersion. We eat the local food, we visit bars and go see shows in our off-hours time. That wasn’t possible in Shangri-La. There were few restaurants and fewer hotels. Eating the local food could be dangerous to us, and patronizing those restaurants served as choke points, just like it had been back in my Contra days when the Sandinistas orchestrated that hit I was lucky to avoid.

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX For the next six months, we ate almost all our meals within the compound.

Meanwhile, the men in the kiosk kept a careful eye on us. We watched them back, sometimes sending a surveillance team to the roof to see what they were doing. Watching the watchers watching us became a routine part of life in Shangri-La.

To discover others observing us, we used XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX teams who deployed to Shangri-La for a few weeks at a time. They’d come and go so the locals wouldn’t see familiar faces on the streets. These guys were exceptional at their job.

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Beyond the government-directed static watchers at the city’s unavoidable choke points (areas in any given city that we have to routinely cross), we also soon established the surveillance patterns of several local government types following us. This was actually fairly easy, as they had limited resources, with very clumsy and blatant surveillance tactics. In short order, we had identified and memorized the vehicles they frequented, along with their preferred staging areas. We’d leave our compound, drive through the city, and sure enough, the usual suspects’ car would tag along, a couple of goons inside.

We pretended we didn’t notice them, then played a little game. They ran their operations on a shoestring and didn’t have much money for gas. So we’d lead them on wild-goose chases until their tanks ran low and they aborted the tail.

Those were the government guys. The terror groups had eyes everywhere, too. We could sometimes deduce the official surveillance from the jihadists, but not always. Everyone watched everyone else in Shangri-La.

Of course, the watchers could turn violent at any moment. I told my guys over and over to stay at Yellow and be ready to move to Orange in a heartbeat. The fact was, to avoid being prey, you gotta look like a carnivore. We made sure we postured aggressively to discourage any surprise attacks.

One day, as we returned to our compound in two armored vehicles, we picked up a tail. We watched the two cars behind us as we approached our gate. One suddenly broke off and looped around ahead of us through some side streets. As we stopped at our compound gates and radioed our guards the security password, one of the surveillance cars suddenly reappeared and came speeding toward us from the right. Simultaneously, the second car sped toward us from the left. Both were driving well beyond the reasonable speed for that terrain in an aggressive, focused manner that suggested we were about to be attacked. Or probed.

They were in for a surprise. All bite, no bark. That was my team.

“Guns up, everyone out!” I ordered. All six passenger doors of our two vehicles suddenly flung open as we bailed out, fanned out, dropped to a knee, and leveled our long guns at the approaching cars. The “attackers” inside had no stomach for that. Both surveillance vehicles pulled tire-squealing one-eighties and bolted out of sight.

Message delivered: We are not the victim type. The watchers never tried that again. At the next meeting with our “local counterparts,” we reported the incident in great detail. They of course acted indignant and promised to look into the incident, and even offered us protection. My deputy (one of our few Arabic speakers), smiled and said, “It’s okay, we can take care of ourselves.”

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Often, our missions entailed confirming some piece of SIGINT we’d received. A fragment of a conversation heard over a cell phone or radio might indicate a particular place was being used by a terrorist cell as a safe house. We’d go and case the target location, noting license plates and taking photos. We would add the geolocation to our files XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Very slowly, we began to build files on the local bad guys, their homes, vehicles, and so on. Still, it was fragmentary intel at best.

Of course, simultaneously, our officers were developing local sources. Not an easy task in this environment, but we indeed succeeded in resuscitating some former contacts and even recruiting some new sources. Some were volunteers, others were classical, full-cycle recruitments. For obvious reasons, I can’t discuss this any further.

We needed people inside these organizations, local government and terrorist organizations alike, to gain a real understanding of them. Jihadist groups are the hardest to penetrate because they are true believers. They know each other intimately. They’re insulated and insular. Outsiders aren’t trusted, and insiders are almost always loyal to the death, so penetrating them is exceptionally difficult.

In Shangri-La, though, money talked. The true believers in each jihad group were sustained by a network of locals, who sometimes came to us with tidbits of information they were willing to share in return for some cash. These are called walk-ins—people who would come to the embassy gate and wanted to talk and bargain.

Walk-ins are like panning for gold. You can sift and sift day after day to find nothing but sand. But every once in a while, a nugget turns up in your pan.

All the operational members of the team spent many hours over at the embassy talking to these walk-ins. It was never a fun process. Most were grifters with nothing to offer, looking to spin a good story for a quick bit of cash. We’d bring them inside, search them very thoroughly, then sit them down and listen to their tale.

We cross-checked their stories with questions we already knew the answers to. Sometimes, we showed them photos of alleged members of the group they were reporting on to see if they could identify some real targets or guess and pick fictitious characters we included in the photo piles. Most failed these tests, and we knew they were full of shit.

We did have a couple of nuggets come through the embassy gate. Most had one or two pieces of the puzzle they traded for quick cash. Transaction complete, they’d be on their way and we never saw them again. However, a select and valued few looked like they could be promising longer-term assets. In their case, being seen around our embassy could get them killed.

For these, we had to implement “high-threat meeting” protocols. These sensitive operations were based on complex tradecraft disciplines and not easy to carry out under the usual surveillance to which we were subjected.

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In a place like Shangri-La, a twenty-first-century outlaw kingdom like our Tombstone once was, you trusted others at your own peril. We made a point of never trusting anyone. Our assets could have been compromised and turned, their families threatened if they did not work against us. They could have become embittered because we weren’t paying them what they thought they were worth. They could have been playing us all along, waiting for a moment to detonate a suicide vest or lead us into an ambush. We took no chances. Every asset was searched down to the spot under his ball sack before he ever got into a vehicle with one of our team.

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It was a thorough, time-consuming, and exhausting process just to get a nugget or two of information, but it had to be done. Meeting assets in a high-threat environment is an exceptionally dangerous thing. Keeping them alive required detailed planning and thorough execution. Our team became quite adept at it. There were times we had to abort one of these operations after we detected surveillance. In such moments, caution was the order of the day because our asset’s life was at stake. Our own, too, potentially.

At times, we had walk-ins who came in and seemed to be probing us to see what we were interested in and what we might know. Terrorists know all about the walk-in process and use it to their advantage at times. It didn’t usually work with us. We were careful about what we did and did not reveal, but the mere fact these groups were probing us demonstrated a level of sophistication that surprised us.

Gradually, thanks to the nuggets from a few of the walk-ins and the SIGINT tips that led us to safe houses, we developed a few threads we could pull. We started detecting individuals and vehicles connected with different organizations. XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX Occasionally, a sympathetic local would dime them out. We put eyes on them whenever we could to see what they were up to, passing whatever we discovered up the chain of command.

These operations underscored the importance of having people on the ground able to get close to these terrorists. Satellite imagery, SIGINT, and drone coverage can only go so far. But once you mesh all the electronics and techno-wizardry with actual eyeballs in the street, then you have something. In Shangri-La, we meshed all those aspects of intelligence gathering together to find more threads to pull.

Of course, with Shangri-La being so wild and underdeveloped, it was never easy to do this. We’d sometimes get word that a known terrorist’s car had been spotted at a particular house. The overhead surveillance couldn’t give us an address, of course, just a roof color and a GPS coordinate. We’d have to drive into the neighborhood at night in full disguise, looking for the house with the right roof color. Once we finally found it, we’d take photos, note cars and license plates in the immediate area, and leave undetected. Setting up surveillance in these areas was out of the question; we would not survive the almost immediate compromise. Inevitably, a strange car in the neighborhood attracted unwanted attention.

“The average person in Shangri-La is sitting around waiting to die,” somebody had told us. There is little work. Little entertainment. At night, it is so hot, everyone sleeps on their rooftops out in the open. So a car cruising down the street below made enough noise to be heard. Heads would pop up over the parapets to see who we were and what we were doing. Sometimes, they’d even approach our cars.

Another threat came from the complexities of driving in the city. No matter how familiar we became with it, we always got lost on these ops. That alone could be a dangerous thing.

Shangri-La had a curfew at night. The government would set up snap checkpoints all over the city to enforce it. More than once, we stumbled into one of them. Sometimes, we’d be far enough away down the street from them that we could just turn around and get out of Dodge, but other times, we’d just have to go through. This meant quickly shucking off our disguises, hiding our weapons, and busting out our papers.

Once, I rolled up to one of these checkpoints, and an emaciated teenage soldier appeared at my window. When I showed him my XXXXXXXX identification, he stared at it uncomprehendingly. He couldn’t read. It took several minutes of me using the few words of the local language I knew to convey to him who I was and why I was allowed to be out after curfew. After several tense moments, he waved us through. This happened to almost everyone on the team several times during our tenure there. Those were some of our hairiest moments in country.

There were other checkpoints established by armed men around the city at night as well. Most consisted of a vehicle parked to partially block the road, a couple of guys with AKs out in front. As a car rolled up, they’d shake the occupants down for some cash or goods. After running into several of these on ops at night, we started carrying cartons of cigarettes with us. Smokes were currency in Shangri-La.

Leaving the city was forbidden by the government, unless we had express permission. Several times, we received missions that required us to go out into the countryside. We gained permission to go sightsee some historic location, then used our time outside the city to carry out the operational act. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

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XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX We went out deep into the desert to scout locations—dry lake beds being the best—and took lots of photos and measurements to satisfy the headquarters’ taskings.

Those were interesting trips, like traveling back in time. We slept in our cars near some historic site and rose at dawn to see caravans of camels traveling across the desert in the distance. It felt a little like being in the movie Lawrence of Arabia. Again, I had to pinch myself as to my luck: the Cuban-born kid from Hialeah, looking for clandestine landing zones in a hostile desert for my beloved CIA. Hooyah!

There were few opportunities to see the country’s history like that, or even get out and see any other part of it, for that matter. We used to joke, “How bad is Shangri-La? It’s so bad you have to go to Chad for R&R.”

A few of us were fortunate to get a chance to go SCUBA diving in the Red Sea, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. The area was far off the tourist beaten path, so the reefs and sea life were absolutely stunning and pristine. Between dives, though, it was all business. We took note of all the ships coming and going from the port, the type of facilities, security postures, military readiness, and any other little detail Langley might have found useful.

In the six plus months I was there, I returned home to the family only once for a very short visit. I could see my absence was affecting Carmen badly, and I grew to regret taking the assignment because of the burden it placed on her. Still, this was the sort of place we all felt we were born to be in, a full-contact, free-for-all city filled with shadowy figures and menacing terror groups. Unraveling their secrets to keep other families safe was the path we had chosen and were meant to travel.

Those six months were some of the toughest of my career, both on my family and on me in the field. Yet we did good work. We achieved what Cofer Black wanted: a presence on the ground to keep eyes on the terrorist menagerie operating out of Shangri-La. We’d developed a couple of good assets, we’d scored some good nuggets of intelligence, and we successfully stood up the station on an aggressive footing. We’d shown the local security types that we could play the game a lot better than they could. We also delivered the message that we were not prey! If they messed with us, there would be consequences. Additionally, we’d developed new tactics and nuances to carrying out asset meetings in a high-threat environment that were later incorporated throughout the Agency.

Still, at the end of those months, I left Shangri-La with no remorse. The city and country were a case study of failed government, failed institutions riddled with corruption, and the desperate poverty that results from both. I’ve never seen a more hopeless place. I never want to see one like that again.

I remember there was a family living in a shipping container near the street entrance to our compound. Three kids, a husband, and a wife existed inside that metal box in 110-degree heat, day after day while we were there. After our team watched the kids playing with a plastic bag and a rusted spring in the street by our compound, I wrote to Carmen and asked her to make a trip to Toys “R” Us and send us some goodies. Ranger, John, and the others did the same. We ended up with a stockpile of treats, toys, and goodies for this family, and each time we passed their shipping container home, we stopped and gave them some token gifts. Sometimes, we included a little bit of cash and often dropped off a bag of fruit and vegetables.

It seemed like throwing bricks in the Grand Canyon. There were so many hopeless, lost souls in that city with no means to survive the war, famine, and disease racking the nation. But here was tangible help to five people we saw every day. The goodwill that grew between us touched all of us and left an indelible impression in my heart. Practically, it also made sense to do this because if we were in danger, they’d be more likely to tell us since they benefited from our presence. But that isn’t why we started helping them. Americans have always done this. From giving candy to French kids during World War II to adopting orphans during the Vietnam War, we are a people who care, and we give to those less fortunate.

In Shangri-La, I think it was just a way to hold on to our humanity in the face of such overwhelming human misery.

I’ll never forget the last time I saw them and bid them farewell. The kids were playing with toys my own kids would have played with at their age. One sat in the street, coloring in a coloring book with markers my thoughtful wife had purchased back in Virginia. Not so different, yet from circumstance chasms apart.

I came home more grateful than ever to be an American.