Clandestine

Chapter 19 - Redemption

Most people tend to overestimate their place in history. We look carefully at micro eras such as the Baby Boom, the sixties, the Cold War or the Industrial Revolution, analysing their implications until we are dizzy. It’s not that I mean to diminish the consequences of these times or their impact on human history. Yet seldom do we elevate ourselves to a perch high enough for valid self-reflection. One could argue that the prevailing conflicts in the world today are simply continuing a fight for global conquest that has been going on since the middle of the last millennium and the fall of the Roman Empire. Rome itself did not exactly fall, as it still exists today, but the idea of Rome, a vision and a way of life that ruled 25% of the world’s population, came to an end on an autumn day in 476 A.D. when a bloodthirsty Germanic soldier named Flavius Odoacer thrust a sword through the heart of the final Roman King, Romulus Augustulus. For the next 1500 years the world was divided into two camps: one, the Christian-inspired and Viking-influenced European states, and the other, the Persian Empire, an impeccably civilized, educated, and cultured group of nations powered by the loving ideas of Islam. Those that keep score will quibble about the wins and losses in the ensuing 1500 year period, but the ebb of the European city-states and the flow of the Middle Eastern tribes have marked the history of our time. When the last Muslim nation, the Ottoman empire, was defeated at the end of the World War 1, the tension that held the world together for 15 centuries suddenly began to wane and in its absence the European states and their associated imperial conquests set about settling old scores and acquiring resources with an eye to becoming the next Rome. Unfortunately for Britain, Germany, and the rest, no one nation emerged victorious and so I was thrust into a world where a new power, the United States, and an intriguing ideologue, the Soviet Union, kept the world in a state of balance for a time. But a funny thing happened on the way to equilibrium. In 1908, at the very end of a seven-year money-losing enterprise, an Englishman by the name of George Reynolds decided to spend a little more of William D’Arcy’s cash by drilling a final hole in the Iranian desert in a last ditch attempt to find oil. If you haven’t heard, the gambit paid off and the quest for oil under Persian sand was underway. In 75 years the discovery, procurement, and eventual nationalisation of this black sludge has brought the Muslim world back to prominence. Once a marginalised empire, the Islamic world has been revived and, like most oppressed people, they are a little bitter over the treatment they received from their imperialist conquerors. This is the context that I tried to convey to Bill Clinton before and during his presidency.

When an American president makes a visit on foreign soil the amount of preparation is dizzying. In early 1996 I was informed that Bill Clinton was to make an appearance at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Conference in November in the Philippines. An advance team would be entering the country a few months prior to the event; however, I decided I would take a two-month hiatus from my increasingly part- time duties with the Australian navy to get the lay of the land. As I had no official ties to the United States government I decided to enter Manilla as a British historian writing a novel about the post-war period in Southeast Asia. Using this cover I was able to meet a number of the underground figures that had found their way to the Philippine capital. Of particular interest to me was the fact that the now-convicted bomber of the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef, had lived in Manilla in the early 1990s. Yousef was arrested in Pakistan in 1995 and his name has been implicated in a great many terrorist attacks around the world, all with the aim of destabilising the Western world. As my preliminary survey of the Philippines ended in August of 1996, I was convinced that Manilla was a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorist activities. Among its regular visitors and part-time residents was Osama Bin Laden, the freedom fighter from Afghanistan who had successfully beaten back the Soviet Union and who, ever since the Gulf War, had turned his steely glare onto the U.S.

Professional terrorists rarely step outside for a walk; they live in gated communities with accompanying infrastructure and houseguests. They are not the kind of men that stroll into the local grocery store and start picking out melons. Instead their food is raised on site. Look for a healthy-sized garden and a few grazing goats alongside an impressive telecommunications satellite and you probably aren’t far off. These emperors live in humble surroundings but also happen to be some of the richest and most well-funded humans in the world, so in order to take in the pleasures of the outside world…they order in! In conclusion, to find a terrorist one should look for a humble fortress with a self-sustaining garden at a location with a receiving door for deliveries. I decided not to scour the countryside looking for walled installations; instead I simply tracked the delivery men who brought the greatest number of delicacies to unspecified addresses every other day. Within two weeks I had infiltrated the network of delivery vehicles and was convinced that Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, was alive and had a residence in Manilla. I did not go as far as pursuing his address but I made my suspicions known to the U.S. government upon my return to Melbourne.