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Copenhagen, May 2009

It is not known exactly who first brought the tulip to Northwestern Europe, but the most widely accepted story is that it was a 16th Century Flemish diplomat, Oghier Ghislain de Busbecq, an ambassador for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, to the court of the great Ottoman Emperor, Suleyman the Magnificent.

Enchanted by the flowers and on hearing that the Ottoman Emperor in turn had received them from an envoy to Libya, Busbecq had brought some over and planted them in his city of birth, Amsterdam. And there they flourished.

After that it didn’t take Europe too long to turn tulip-crazy. Today, The Netherlands and Denmark turn golden, crimson, orange, pink and purple in the early summer, with tulips bursting forth in every garden and every street corner. Millions of tulip tourists travel to Denmark and Holland from all over the world just to take in the sights of undulating rainbow-colored tulip fields.

May, 2009 was no different. Copenhagen was teeming with strange new faces, mainly young European and American students taking a sabbatical from their studies for a bit of fun and frolic. The tulip fields were exploding with colours.

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In the hubbub, no one took particular notice of the man from America who had come here ostensibly on business, but wanted to enjoy some tulip-gazing first.

Even though he was 39 at the time, the robust, boyishly handsome man seemed not a day more than 25. Just as any young tourist would do, he rented a bicycle and began pedaling around the busy streets of Copenhagen, one hand on the handle-bar and the other recording the sights and sounds with his Sony Handycam.

The American freely mingled with the local Danes, especially the girls, who fell for his eyes. He had very distinctive irises in his eyes – one hazel blue and the other deep brown, a condition that is known as heterochromia iridum. Only 1% of the world’s population have it. It made him instantly recognizable to those who had seen him before.

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The American had in fact been playing the part of a tourist. His true intent was to study the layout of the city and to this end he wandered around, recording not only the sights but also his own voice as he narrated into the camera the places that he filmed, including whether some of those places could be considered his ‘Plan-B strategic targets’.

One building in particular caught the American’s fancy, even though it appeared unremarkable. It was a nondescript office building that had the offices of Thai Airways, the Dexia Bank and other commercial firms. He biked by the building multiple times, studying not only the structure but the traffic patterns around it, throughout the day.

The American also noted the presence of one vehicle that seemed to be a permanent fixture of the scenery – a police van, parked across the road from the nondescript office building.

The American knew why there were cops permanently stationed on the scene. Besides the airline and the bank, that building also housed the offices of Morgenavisen Jyllands Posten (The morning Jutland Post), an independent center-right newspaper which supported the Danish Conservative Peoples Party.

Four years prior, the Posten had published twelve cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, lampooning the prophet and that act of sacrilege had outraged the Muslim world, including most moderate Muslims and non-Muslims, yours truly excluded. It is not true that God does not have a sense of humour.

Now he, the American, was going to help take the building down, with every living soul working within its walls, including those working at the bank and the airline.

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His cover was that of an American businessman who needed media coverage for the launch of his products, through advertising and publicity. To this end, he simply walked into the offices of the Posten one day and zeroed in on a comely female staffer. He charmed her pants off, one thing led to another and soon she invited him in, showed him around the layout of the office and even introduced him to her colleagues. She hoped that this was the start of not only a business relationship but also a personal one.

To the American, being recognized as a familiar sight by those who worked at the Posten, was critical to the success of the plan. More importantly, since the building was under constant police surveillance after the publication of those cartoons, letting the police officers see him come and go and thus establishing an ostensibly harmless pattern, was essential.

Later, the female Jyllands Posten staffer who had earlier shown the American around, was shell-shocked when she realized whom she had been friendly with. She testified that he seemed very professional, every bit like the businessman that he had claimed to be.

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The American tourist’s Copenhagen recconaissance mission had been sponsored by a very scary man named Ilyas Kashmiri, who was at the time a member of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle and leader of the Pakistan-based terror group, Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami. Prior to that, Kashmiri had been a decorated officer of the Special Services Group (SSG), the special operations black ops wing of the Pakistani Military.

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Ilyas Kashmiri gained notoriety in the Jihadist community, when he wrote an instruction manual in the art beheading. He would spend time in Pakistan’s terrorist training camps, showing rookie militants how to  carry out a beheading without much fuss and blood. Kashmiri is credited with the beheading of an Indian Army soldier in a raid across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Kashmir, February 2007. He carried the severed head into the Pakistan side and later that afternoon, organized a soccer match with the soldier’s head as the ball.

But here’s the good news – one needn’t worry about this Ilyas Kashimiri prick anymore. He is currently scratching his head, wondering how come those 72 virgins he got look so ugly. Two years after he acted as the American’s handler, Ilyas Kashmiri died a very violent death, when he received an uninvited guest, an American MQ-9 launched Hellfire missile, that went right up his sphincter. The titanium-sheathed projectile tore him apart, just as it was designed to do.

Pity. I would have wanted his demise to be a much slower one.

Ilyas Kashmiri’s transition from army officer to a terrorist with a $ 2 million bounty on his head must have been a seamless one, given the fact that the two (the Pakistani establishment and the Pakistani terrorist brotherhood) are nothing but two arms of the same evil.

There is speculation that Kashmiri had never really left the Pakistani armed forces – he had only been posted (seconded, if you will) to the Al Qaeda.

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While he was still in Copenhagen, the American was having detailed exchanges with Kashmiri on how the plot would go down. Three, maybe four heavily armed militants would gain entry into the premises of the Jyllands Posten, taking advantage of the American’s familiarity there. Once inside, they would lock down and massacre everybody inside.

And to the plan, they would add a twist of lime and soda – they would behead the victims and throw their heads out the front window onto the street below.

The plan was not to end it by killing themselves. Islam does not condone suicide and they saw themselves as devout Muslims. They would simply hunker down and fight off the security personnel to the bitter end, till they were shot to death.

Simple. When you are ready to die, unburdened by the stress of having to keep an escape plan in mind, no plan is too complicated.

At one point, Kashmiri was heard telling the American,”Make sure the hostages are dead before you behead them. Beheading while alive is messy, too much blood spatter. They are not like chicken, you know.” Kashmiri then made the kokro-ko-ko sound of a chicken and the phone line dissolved into raucous laughter.

The beheadings would be symbolic, a powerful message to the world and the American and his cohorts would be feted as heroes (dead heroes) all over the Jihadist brotherhoods of the world.

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Unbeknownst to the American and Ilyas Kashmiri however, every move he made, every step and every bike ride he took, was being monitored and recorded by both, the American and the Danish intelligence services.

The Americans in fact knew all about him. Heck, why wouldn’t they? He had been working for them. He had become an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency, after he was nabbed with a kilo of pure heroin that he had tried to smuggle in, from Pakistan.

The American was a wily survivor. He promptly gave up all his associates and while they got long jail terms, he copped a plea deal and became an informant. Later on, as his work with the DEA chugged along, he would slip off out of sight, time to time for brief periods but to the DEA he was a young rich kid and heck, boys will be boys, right?

To the Americans, he was one of the good guys, albeit rash, immature, prone to doing childish stuff.

What the Americans couldn’t realize was that he was actually, in espionage terms, the equivalent of a double agent. While he made the Americans believe that he was working for them, he had actually gradually radicalized and turned into a deadly instrument, the perfect weapon for his terrorist masters. White-skinned, Caucasian looks, tall and swarthy, fully fluent in American English, he could pass off as a white American Christian male without a problem.

And why not?

David Coleman Headley was born Daood Sayed Gilani, son of prominent Pakistani diplomat and radio host, Sayed Salim Gilani, and Irish-American socialite and heiress, Alice Serill Headley. Fortunately for him, he got most of his mother’s genes and looking at him, it was impossible to tell that he was anything but white.

Denmark was happy with it’s ‘tulip tourist’.

And the Iblis …….. with his velvet glove.

Summer hath beeeegun. It’s 14°, reason enough ta laze in Pub Cousi, riverside St Anne de Bellevue. That’s Manny, the owner, with the Gazette crossword.

St Anne. That’s one thing about the Quebecoise. Name any name and they have a saint with that name.

I hope ta be St Spunky a century from now. Given the pricks who have achieved sainthood, beatification should be a cinch.

I just have to figure out how ta get a halo.

I bin reading up on it. Here’s the thing about halos. Once you have one, take care not ta move yore head suddenly. Halos are serene, godly. They don’t react so fast ta sudden head movements. There’s a time lag. You might bump into your halo and that’s sacrilege.

Pub Cousi, it’s a typical Quebec pub. Pool table, slot machines with retirees trying ta top up their RRSPs, grizzly bearded master, bonny pink cheeked bar girl. Rows and rows of delicious micro-brewery supplied beers you’ve never heard of. An atmosphere that promotes lazing. Generally genial tipsy atmosphere.

And the pint of Rickard’s Red. The tipsy, boozy feeling. Nary a care in the world.

This is a blessed land. God zeroed in on a tiny arid sliver of land in the Levant. He musta bin drunk. Jesus woulda stood a much better chance in Canada.

I beg yore pardon, my speech is slurred, my spelling atroshus. But…. DILLIGAF?

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DILLIGAF

Original spunkybong word

“Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck?”

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Here’s your daily routine when you come in for work over here. You go to your locker. Punch in the combination (you know it by heart). Step back immediately, because the door springs open and if you’re around 5ft10in, the latch hook will strike you right between the eyes leaving a painful blister. Of the 7 billion people in the world, there must be a sizeable percentage with that bruise on the knocker by now. It’s our badge of honor.

So you’ve just opened your locker door and stuck your head in. Hazardous act. Your steel-toed shoes for the shop floor reside there, along with cotton socks that haven’t been washed since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s niece forgot ta wash hers. 

Now you flap the locker door this way and that, to let the insides of your locker deodorize. The process is slow since the whole locker room stinks and therefore diffusion from higher to lower concentrations is retarded. The best thing to do is beat it from there as fast as possible.

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Soon as you emerge from the locker room, you head for Oasis (the cafeteria) for your morning 100% Columbian Moka and muffin. And a chance to take a closer look down the counter girl, Pierrette’s, T-shirt. And that’s one thing I tell all my male friends. If you start your work day with baobabs in your mind, you’ll breeze through and have everyone eating outa yore hands, I swear.

Propulsion Department, aka ‘Jiggle City’, population 45, 88% female, 12% wimpy male. Female boss, Nurse Ratched she be called. Jaws rectangular and chest flat, like the Sasketchwan. Imagine, they have a boss who looks like a Canadian province.

Propulsion dept is also known as Gossip City – three out of four words you’ll hear there are ‘whatever’, ‘totally (pronounced ‘toatly’)’ and ‘like’ –  

“And I was like, toatly blown last weekend.” 

“Ooooh! Did he, like, finally make a pass?” Excited ripples in voice.

“Toatly. He like went even further…” Giggles.

“Whatever”. Envious, doesn’t want to show awe. 

Propulsion is a good venue for meditative regeneration of brain cells, aided of course by visual stimulus.

But I digress. 

After Pierrette, you walk briskly into your own department. Strolling in is frowned upon. Long purposeful strides if you are male. Dainty, quick, prim steps if you’re female (jiggles, if you’re equipped ta jiggle). High heels going tack tickety tock. Vague, vacant, glassy smiles. You head for your tiny cubicle.

You click on your pc and laptop and survey your tiny table, coffee in hand. Your family photo was on the left of the WO files. Now it’s on the other side. The stickies you left on the monitor appear rearranged.

You’re certain Mitch McPuck has been there sometime during last night.  

No one has ever actually seen or met Mitch McPuck. But we all know he exists. How he got his name is a mystery. The Irish surname may have come because statistics since the early 1960s show that he lets us be and doesn’t finger anything over the St Patrick’s Day weekend, every year. Other days, we’re all fair game. He steals in at night and snoops through people’s drawers.

Mitch pays special attention to female employees’ drawers, it is rumoured…….

Barbara in Critical Parts, says that the thought of Mitch McPuck going through her drawers turns her on and has greatly improved her sex life at home. She has even started calling her husband Sidney, Mitch, while having sex, she says. Sock it ta me, Mitch! Harder! Yes! Yes! Yes!

Stephanie has started leaving panties in her top drawer. They’re gone by the next morning, she claims. Oriana at GasGen is positive Mitch McPuck can fly and that he zooms off to his Timbuktoo warehouse every morning to inspect the night’s worldwide panty haul. The story goes that Mitch is making a giant patchwork quilt out of the panty stash.  

Be that as it may, you settle down, flick on the overhead light and survey the 100 or so emails waiting to be dealt with. There’s the morning contact meeting in a half-hour. You’ve been to zillions till now. They’re nothing but a load of crap. Analyses of last night’s hockey game between the Habs and the Philadelphia Fillies, while 15 pairs of male eyes ogle the stockinged legs and low altitude décolletages around the room. Sighs, yawns, burps and stray farts are punctuation marks as the boss briefs you on all the stuff that’s happening around you. 

After twennie minutes it’s over and you disperse. That’s when the place erupts into action. All hell breaks loose. Phones going off every second. Folks hurrying around, cell phones ringing.

You look at your computer clock. Its 5 minutes to 8am. Got that meditative regeneration thingee coming up.

Venue- Jiggle City. In five minutes. 

The first thing that a guy at my work learns is how to sling a rubber band across the room and hit a designated target. His training is considered complete if he can sling a rubber band right across, from the loading docks to the ladies’ locker room.

Like any large organization, ours is awash with rubber bands. From thick, tight small blue rubber bands to long, thin, stringy beige rubber bands. Rubber bands are used, not only for handling stationery but also for holding together padded envelopes containing small loose engine parts such as screws and washers.

Here’s how you zing. Stretch out your left hand in front of you, index finger pointing out. Hook the rubber band over the thumb, close to its tip and pull it taught.

And then let go. The rubber band will zing away to the target. The velocity and range will depend upon the thickness and circumferential length of the band.

And do remember, zing is a verb, like sing. You can say, “I zang her real good” and I won’t bat an eyelid. The rubber band is the zong.

Zinging zongs is a multi-faceted science. You gotta know projectile motion, parabolic trajectories, integral calculus, do what you have ta do. At work, remember to take a zing break every half hour and zing only those who are likely to zing you back. That way, your rubber band stock level will not be depleted.

Sometimes, rubber bands are slipped into handbags and taken home. Mandy, at warehouse, does that all the time. She steals the tiny thick blue ones and takes them home. She claims that, ever since she started filching that exact size, her husband, Otto, has never had a problem maintaining his erection.

Our in-house Japanese-Canadian, Asahi, has devastating aim and his zingers really bite, so we’ve named him Yammy (after the WW2 Jap C-in-C, Yamamoto). Likewise, László, our resident Hungarian-Canadian is ‘Otto’ (after that Nazi special forces guy, Otto Skorzeny). László can get you right on the earlobes. More than painful, it’s irritating. If you hear a sudden scream “Ouch! László, you m—–f—-n’ SOB!$%*”, it means someone just got his earlobes zung.

Of course ‘zung’ is a word. It’s the past participle, silly.

Sometimes, skirmishes break out during the lunch break. Or when the boss is called away to a meeting. We stage our own little OK Corrals. Sudden Son Tays. Merry Mai Lais. And once in a while, a Guadalcanal. Rubber bands zing all around you like zipping hornets. They sting if they strike open skin. Once Francois hit Sandra over at Manutention and soon their men folk came to exact revenge. They met with a barrage and had to do a Dunkirk. And just like the Germans in ’41, we let them leave.

One rubber band has even made it to China and back. Steve was dueling with Gaetan when he sent one zinger way over all the cubicles and right into Tonya Salerno’s open attaché case. She was packing papers for her trip to Harbin and didn’t notice. When she came back after 15 days, Steve dropped by to pick up his rubber band. He produced evidence that it was actually his. She laughed. They talked. He laughed. They dated. They’re expecting their second child anytime now.

To my young, unattached facebook friends, don’t try zinging any girl over there, just because I said it’s fun, OK? And don’t do it at work either.

Always don’t do the things I do or write about doing.

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Homo Homini Lupus

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Muridke, Punjab

Islamic Republic of Pakistan

October 2000

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’’جہاد میں گزارا ہوا ایک دن بھی سو سال کی عبادت سے افضل ہے۔‘‘

“Even one day spent in jihad is better than a hundred years spent in worship.”

The words, spoken in chaste Urdu, were delivered in a flat monotone, devoid of emotion, the voice soft but slightly high-pitched, almost effeminate. The man who spoke them sat cross-legged by the window, on a red and black striped rug that covered the floor, wall to wall. To support his back, ailing from the after-effects of six high velocity APS rounds he received while planting an IED years back near Kunduz, northern Afghanistan, he leaned against some large cushions. From time to time, he grimaced as he twisted his torso to his right to pick up the cup of heavily scented cardamom tea that he drank in gallons throughout the day.

Yes, he had known and fearlessly courted pain. He had exulted in suffering as no one in the Afghan War ever had. To his faithful, he was known as the Emir. The name on his birth certificate – Hafeez Mohammad Saeed.

Well into his 60s, the man was short, overweight and entirely humorless. His faith, Islam, did not take kindly to any kind of humor. Laughter, jocularity or pranks, these were frivolous, haram.

Pig eyes barely open in slits, the Emir’s eyelids flickered constantly many times a second, the way that the eyes of someone trying on contact lenses for the first time, would do. True to the stereotype of an Islamic fanatic, he had a beard, though it was moderate in length and his hair was long and unkempt, most of it hidden under a pakol, a round-topped Pashtun cap that is made of wool and looks like a round bottomed bag when not worn. The wearer usually rolls up the sides nearly to the top, forming a thick band, which then rests on the head like a beret.

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A heavyset and heavily bearded man sat on the floor in the shadows, by the door. Heck, everyone here was bearded. If you were clean shaven, you stood a good chance of receiving a 7.62mm projectile, exiting the barrel of a Kalashnikov at 715 meters per second, right between your eyes, before you could even begin to explain yourself.

The hulk’s eyes were half closed, appearing to be in the midst of grabbing a shut-eye. He was actually wide awake and extremely alert, the fingers of his right hand only inches away from a 9mm Mauser automatic which lay flat on the rug next to him, it’s safety off.

Known as just Suleman, the mountain of a man was the Luca Brasi to the Emir’s Don Corleone. Like Luca he didn’t say a word, didn’t even nod, but unlike the Godfather heavy, Suleman accompanied the Emir wherever he went, like a shadow, staying with the Emir from dawn every day until he retired for the night.

Suleman’s loyalty to the Emir was total. It is easy to be ready to give your life for a man to whom you owe it. Two decades prior, a Soviet fragmentation grenade shrapnel had removed a part of his brain that powered long-term memory.

Still, there was one day that Suleman would never forget…..

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It was late 1986 and the writing for the Soviet forces was on the proverbial wall. Morale was low and frequently Soviet infantrymen had to be threatened with execution if they didn’t stand and fight the fanatically committed Mujahedeen. But how could you fight a culture that was willing and ready to die? The Soviet economy in shambles, the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, would soon make up his mind to withdraw from an unwinnable war. But that was still months away.

Late one night in November, outside Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan, Suleman was sitting at the wheel of the Toyota Tundra pick-up truck, waiting for the Emir (he was known only as Abu Hafiz then) and six of his Pakistani jihadis, who were putting the finishing touches to the camouflage over an IED on the dirt road that Soviet replenishment convoys frequently took, when entering through Tajikistan. Abu Hafiz was one of the few Pakistanis who were fighting alongside the Ahmed Shah Masood-led Northern Alliance. The Tajik-born Lion of Panjshir had taken to the young Pakistani Mujahid who would one day be known as the Lion of Lahore.

Maybe they were upwind, because they didn’t hear it coming. Suddenly they came under withering fire from a Spetsnaz platoon that had materialized out of nowhere over a knoll just yards away, dropped off by an Mi-24 Hind and the next thing he knew, a fragmentation grenade came crashing through the windshield and skittered around next to his foot.

Suleman dove but unfortunately not far enough. When he came to, he felt himself moving, slung over someone’s shoulders. It was Abu Hafiz and he was staggering under Suleman’s 220lb weight and trying not to lose his footing as he slipped and slid over the rocky terrain. All the others died that night, but not before wiping out the entire Spetsnaz platoon. The Mi-24 had back-tracked in but that was a mistake it would regret – it got blown out of the sky by a CIA-provided infra-red homing Stinger that one of the Mujahid had had ready.

“Leave me here, Abu Hafiz, go while you can. Inshallah, I’ll make my own way back if I can,” said Suleman, his words hoarse with pain, jerky with the bobbing that the Emir’s shoulders did as he ran.

“If I left you here, how would I be any different from those infidel animals, Bhaijan?” panted the Emir.

It was only after they had reached the tiny hamlet of Kamshar, that Abu Hafiz collapsed and let the tribesmen take over and nurse them back to health. No one really can tell how he was able to cover that distance with a 220lb load and six rounds in his back. It was seen as a miracle and the Abu Hafiz was elevated to the Emir, a status a hair-breadth short of Prophet.

Since that day, Suleman has made protecting the Emir his mission in life. If you wanted to take the Emir down, there was no question that you would have to kill Suleman first.

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After  9/11 and the consequent paradigm shift in the security environment of the world, Pakistan’s security establishment could no longer openly patronize terrorist organizations.

But in October 2000, they could and they did. It was the time when the Lashkar-e-Taiba could still operate openly with impunity. It’s minders, the Pakistani Intelligence Agency, ISI, only restrained it from carrying out those operations that might precipitate a full-scale war with India.

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It had all begun 13 years prior, in 1987. The ISI was flush with all the cash that the Americans were throwing at them, no questions asked, in the name of the Afghans’ war against the Soviet Union, a fight for which, the LeT had supplied 1400 trained Mujahedeens. It was a fight that the US had no business being involved in. Communism was crumbling anyway, it’s own self-destruct button already pressed and held down.

But that’s another story. Right then, in 1987, with American and Saudi dollars the ISI had set the Emir and his followers up in a sprawling 1200-acre compound on a picture-perfect countryside just outside Pakistan’s cultural capital, Lahore.

The Lashkar-e-Taiba had a different, far more deceptive, name then – Markaz Daawat Wal Irshad (Center for preaching and guidance). The then Pakistani President, Zia-ul-Haque’s Islamization of Pakistan had laid the groundwork for the channeling of millions of aid dollars to this compound which boasted a state-of-the art security system operated by the ISI. It had schools, farms, factories and all sorts of facilities within it.

The Emir’s aim had been to create a Medinat-al-Tayyiba, a pure city that would reflect life inside Prophet Muhammad’s 7th century Medina – an environment where there would be no music, no pictures, no TV, no movies, nothing – just prayer. The only ‘entertainment’ would be Islamic warrior songs played over loudspeakers and available in music cassettes. Women would be subservient, human but not entirely human. There would be no divorces and no such thing as a sexual abuse complaints. One could easily liken this to an accurate image of what hell really looked like.

Inside this ‘utopia’, the Markaz would enforce the Ahl-e-Hadith school of thought, a particularly virulent strain of the Saudi Wahhabism, which believed that there was no such thing as love, peace, democracy, secularism, multi-culturism and universal brotherhood. The only form of existence was in armed struggle, until the following were achieved……

Mass conversions to Islam, a gradual ‘purification’ until the whole world was Muslim, with the formation of one nation – the State of Islam. The world would have one single religion and one single system of justice and governance, the Sharia. During the interim period, when the process of the said purification was ongoing, non-Muslims would have to pay a jizya, a ‘protection tax’. There would be no challenges to the establishment of the new Islamic world order and therefore every able-bodied Muslim man and woman would have to undergo compulsory military training.

There was a tiny paradox here, that the Emir might have failed to notice – since only non-Muslims were required to pay the jizya tax, I should think that it would be in the Muslim rulers’ interests to let their non-Muslim subjects remain non-Muslim. The state would no longer be able to collect the jizya tax once they were converted, no?

But heck, to expect militants to make sense is insanity in itself.

The Muridke compound still exists and nothing has changed. It is still a nation within a nation. Like Waziristan, the north-western border region of Pakistan, the normal laws of the land do not apply to the Muridke compound. Unlike Waziristan, it is situated in the heart of Pakistan and wholly sponsored by the Pakistani state. It is like a black hole with a schwarzchild radius that no one who enters ever leaves.

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That evening, the Emir had a visitor, an American, who sat a few yards away and it was to him that he had directed those words about a day in jihad being better than a hundred years in worship.

When the visitor sat down, he did attempt but failed to cross his legs, not being used to sitting on the floor. He sat instead, on his butt, his arms folded over his knees and he listened to the old man, rapt.

Yes, even though he was soft-spoken, the old man commanded total attention when he spoke. Swaying ordinary Pakistanis into putting their faith and their lives into armed struggle and martyrdom, propelling them into a pattern of blind hatred that is incomprehensible to any westerner, required charisma and the Emir had oodles of it. He had demonstrated it in fact, when the American had walked in. He seemed to know everything about him – his marriages, his kids in the US, his drug smuggling escapades, his arrest with the 2kgs of pure heroin at Peshawar, the brief incarceration, the sudden born-again-Muslim awakening and finally, the release by the ISI into the custody and care of the Emir.

The American felt like a child, being told after he had been naughty that it was all right, everything would be fine.

“Islam,” the Emir spoke,” means submission, to the will of Tawhid, the one God and to his sole messenger, Hazrat Muhammad, our Prophet.” His beady, blinking eyes settled on the American. Then, noting the American’s wildly charged-up eagerness, he launched into another diatribe….

“Look at it this way – Even though there are five oceans and as many seas and all have their own currents, there is technically actually one ocean in the world, one body of water. The Pacific may not know that it’s waters might wash up at the shores of the Atlantic. Similarly there is only one religion in the world – Islam. It is just a matter of time before Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Jews and all those others, realize this. They don’t know it now but they were all actually born Muslims. We all belong to one faith and one God and we follow one Prophet – Hazrat Muhammad. Our job, yours and mine, is to accelerate that process of Islamization of the world. We have to work toward the day when there will no longer be any infidels, because every human being will then be a brother of the faith.

With that, the beady eyes opened a bit wider and rested upon the American, the gaze reptilian, devoid of emotion. He was expecting some sign of comprehension.

“Point me, Emir,” stuttered the American, his Urdu not as fine as the Emir’s,” Show me the direction you want me on. I am ready.”

“Stay here tonight. Suleman Bhai will show you to your lodgings. Tomorrow, there will be a man, a fauji (military officer), who will explain what needs to be done. Upto now, we have never attempted anything spectacular, like multi-target, multi-operative, large-scale strikes that stretch over days. Having you with the brothers could change that. Inshallah, you will be one of our greatest jihadis, one whose name will be spoken in awe, for years from now. Allah Hafeez, Bhaijaan.”

The American saw the man called Suleman rise and approach the Emir. As he passed by the American, he paused for an instant, to give him a look that said – I am going to watch you every millisecond, asshole.

Suleman stopped by the Emir, stooped and with a gentleness that would come as a shock to anyone who knew what he was capable of, helped the old man rise and followed him through the door, out of sight.

The American too made to rise but the man named Sajid placed a hand on his shoulder and said, “Please, remain seated for a while – a normal security precaution.”

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Ps:

The Muridke compound still stands, untouched till this day though, thankfully, the Emir’s vision – that one day the whole of Pakistan would emulate the Muridke ‘commune’ – hasn’t yet become reality.

Muridke boasts some very high profile alumni….

Ramzi Yousef – Kuwaiti-born militant responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Status – apprehended in Islamabad, Pakistan and extradited and incarcerated in the US, serving life without the possibility of parole.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad – Pakistan-born 9/11 mastermind. Status – Extradited and incarcerated in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, no way he will ever see freedom again.

Anwar Al Awlaki [American-born Yemeni bomb-maker and terrorist master mind]. Status – blown to bits by a Hellfire missile from an American MQ9-Reaper in 2011, when his convoy stopped for refreshments while driving through the Yemeni desert.

And now, the American I referred to in this post – David Coleman Headley (aka Daood Sayed Gilani), Pakistan-born son of ex-Pakistani diplomat and white Christian American mother, drug trafficker, FBI informant, 2008 Mumbai terrorist strike planner. Status – incarcerated in the US, scheduled to be released in 2048, when he will be 87-years old.

If David Coleman Headley’s crimes had been against the US instead of India, I am certain he would have received at least life without parole.)

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One hopes and prays that some day, there will be an MQ-9 with a Hellfire and the name, “Hafeez Mohammad Saeed” on it. He has flipped the bird for too long.

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“I’ve been here on the ground with my nose in it since the whole thing began. I’ve nurtured every sensation man has been inspired to have! I cared about what he wanted and I never judged him! Why? Because I never rejected him, in spite of all his imperfections.

Who, in their right mind could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

– Al Pacino, as the Satan, in “The Devil’s Advocate”

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In architecture, a frieze is the wide central section of the inner walls of a hall or large chamber, usually a public place, that is decorated in panels, with bas-reliefs or even paintings (frescos). It is situated usually above eye level, way up, just below the cornices.

Friezes were popular with ancient Roman and Greek architects, glorifying the exploits of their rulers and their Gods, the Parthenon Frieze being the most famous and perhaps the most elaborate. Sculpted between 443 and 438BC, it is a high-relief marble sculpture that once adorned the upper part of the Parthenon’s inner walls. About 80% of the Parthenon frieze still survives. Not in Greece – at the British Museum in London.

Yes, if you steal, put your loot on public display in your most prestigious museum (or the crown), charge an entrance fee to anybody who wants to see it and say brazenly to the actual owners, “finders keepers, so fuck you”, then you must be British.

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Another frieze, this one sculpted in 1935, exists around the inner walls of the highest seat of justice in America – The US Supreme Court, the place where all judicial bucks come to rest. The frieze glorifies men who, through history, were known to have formulated laws and advanced the cause of justice as they saw it being relevant in their time.

In case you are a frieze freak, you might like to check out my post on The US Supreme Court frieze

The South Wall Frieze has figures of lawgivers from the ancient world. It includes Menes, Hammurabi, Moses, Solomon, Lycurgus, Solon, Draco, Confucius and Octavian. The North Wall Frieze shows lawgivers from the Middle Ages onward. It includes representations of Justinian, Charlemagne, John of England, Louis IX of France, Hugo Grotius, Sir William Blackstone, John Marshall and Napoleon.

The sculptor of the friezes has attempted to remain as secular as possible. The Moses frieze depicts him holding only six through ten of the Ten Commandments, the ones that are usually considered the more secular commandments.

There is another figure on the North Wall, a bearded man cloaked in a flowing robe, his feet encased in the curved sandals worn by men who inhabit the Middle-East even today. In his left hand he holds the Holy Quran, it’s pages open and in his right hand, he has a long curved scimitar which he is holding, not by the haft, but by the upper blunt part of the blade, next to the hilt, the way a seasoned warrior is expected to hold it.

It is the figure of the Prophet Mohammad.

He is seen sandwiched between the Eastern Byzantine Emperor, Justinian, to his left and the Western Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, to his right. The frieze is positioned in the US Supreme Court Chamber depicted above. It is one of the two friezes on the sides that are not clearly visible.

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In 1997, six decades after the frieze panels had been carved, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked for the frieze of the Prophet to be removed from the façade.

While appreciating that Muhammad was included in the court’s pantheon of 18 prominent lawgivers of history, CAIR argued that Islam discourages depictions of the prophet in any artistic form. CAIR also took exception to the fact that Mohammad was shown holding a sword, which they thought reinforced long-held stereotypes of Muslims as intolerant conquerors.

This is notwithstanding the fact that the Prophet was known to have his scimitar by his side at all times, he and the faith he propagated being essentially a warlike culture. The Salafists, Wahabis and the Deobandhis actually believe that there is no such thing as peace and tranquility, forgiveness and mercy. To them, these concepts themselves mean giving in, submitting to something other than Islam – the very name a word which suggests ‘submission, to the one and only God and his Prophet, Mohammad’.

A prominent US-based Islamic Law scholar then stepped up and declared that the sculpture was in fact a great honor bestowed by non-Muslims and should be appreciated. Subsequently, Chief Justice William Rehnquist rejected the request to sandblast Mohammad, saying the artwork “was intended only to recognize him, among many other lawgivers, as an important figure in the history of making of laws. It is not intended as a form of idol worship”.

The court later added a footnote to the image on its tourist brochures, calling it “a well-intentioned attempt by the sculptor to honor the Prophet Mohammad”.

After that one 1997 blip, nothing more has been heard from either the CAIR or Muslims worldwide, fanatical or moderate, about Mohammad’s presence on the US Supreme Court frieze.

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(Phew!)

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The dispute shows how opinions of Muslims on images of the prophet can get real petty and monolithic. The view that all representations of Muhammad are banned, not just those deemed blasphemous, obscures a more nuanced past, before the rise of those militant strains of Islam that ultimately influenced a group of desperados into trying to bring down the Jyllands Posten and the gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo magazine.

In comparison to the US Supreme Court frieze, I have to admit that the Jyllands Posten lampoons of the Prophet were in poor taste, though that still didn’t justify a fatwa and wholesale murder.

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A few years after the Jyllands Posten controversy, a 26-year old cyber security whiz named Edward Joseph Snowden settled down to work as a contractor for the computer giant, Dell, which managed computer systems that handled highly sensitive data for multiple government agencies in the US.

In March 2012, Dell assigned Snowden to the NSA’s Hawaii office which focuses on the electronic monitoring of China and North Korea. Then, for some reason, just three months before he fled to Hong Kong, he joined the security consulting firm, Booz Allen Hamiltom, where his job was to break into the internet and telephone traffic around the world for the NSA.

It was around the time that Snowden was settling himself into life in Hawaii that one evening, he happened to switch on the TV and heard the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, blatantly lying under oath to the US Congress that the NSA was not tapping the phone calls and internet traffic of ordinary Americans illegally, without a warrant.

Snowden claims that that was when something snapped inside him and he decided to reveal everything. In May 2013, he took a leave of absence, telling his supervisors he was returning to the mainland for some medical treatment. Instead, Snowden caught a fight to Hong Kong, where he met with two reporters from the British newspaper, The Guardian.

In all, Snowden revealed the contents of 1.7 million classified documents, 160,000 email and text messages and 11000 classified online accounts, that he had managed to download while at Hawaii.

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Some of the Snowden cache revealed a new, previously hidden layer in the saga of the 2008 terrorists attacks, carried out on Mumbai by militants from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) militant group. It showed that, months before the massacre, the British counterpart of the NSA, the GCHQ (General Communications Headquarters), had managed to hack into the laptop of a guy named Zarrar Shah, who turned out to be the technology chief of the LeT and one of the key plotters of the Mumbai attacks.

Soon, the British engineered trojan, that had inserted itself into the Shah’s laptop, spread like wildfire into all the other computers that it communicated with, inside the LAN network that the Pakistani ISI had set up for the LeT, in an apartment that was situated in a quiet neighborhood of the Pakistani port city of Karachi.

Now, every comma and semicolon, every image and video, every communication between the Pakistani establishment, the LeT leadership, the ISI and the Karachi terror cell, was laid bare to the British in real time.

In the early days of the intelligence coup, the GCHQ learnt that Shah was looking for someone, a man who could pass himself off as a western businessman/tourist without raising any suspicion. He would have western citizenship and a passport whose authenticity would be unquestioned, since it would be completely genuine. He would get out there on the ground and conduct extensive reconnaissance of India’s financial capital, for the planning of the logistical aspects of a possible strike on Mumbai.

The scout would try to ascertain which was the best way for a group of militants to enter Mumbai, whether by land through Nepal (a long risk-frought over-land route) or by sea, direct to a deserted beach at Mumbai. There were hundreds of beaches available. Mumbai had a 60km long coastline. He would acquire maps, GPS coordinates – information that could lead even a blind man into Mumbai.

And of course, the scout’s main mandate would be to help identify a list of possible targets that would convey the maximum symbolism to the world. He had to record directions, traffic patterns, available transportation, etc, anything that would help the team get from A to B and then to C in a swift, seamless manner, expending as little time as possible.

The scout would also be mandated to figure out the best possible escape route after the mayhem but that was not a priority since the LeT didn’t expect the militants to survive and make it back to Pakistan.

Here comes the innate hypocrisy – while the LeT did not believe in suicide terrorism, deeming suicides as anti-Islamic, dying in a hail of bullets was perfectly acceptable and the LeT fully expected it’s killers to ensure they gave their lives away in that manner.

Meanwhile, unknown to Shah, the LeT had already found such a scout – an American with a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Christian mother. Fortunately for him, he had inherited almost all his mother’s genes and was therefore indistinguishable from other white folks.

That man went by the name of David Coleman Headley, son of Sayed Salem Gilani and Alice Serill Headley. Deceptive by birth, he had chosen to have his mother’s surname.

(Watch this space for Part-2)

Domodedovo International Airport

Moscow, Russia

Autumn 2005

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The A380’s 20-wheel main landing gear touched down first, followed in ten seconds by the nose wheels, as the jet that resembled a beluga whale settled it’s 600-ton bulk on the tarmac, still hurtling on at a nippy 220 knots.

Almost immediately, the reverse thrusters on the two in-board engines came on, muffling the diminishing whine of the two out-board turbines that had shut down. The sudden drag brought the large airliner to a halt, 50 metres short of the white stenciled outer markers at the end of the four km long runway.

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52yr old Captain Tuz Strassner, ‘Ace’ to his crew, is in command of the giant jet tonight. Ace also happens to be the direct translation in English, of the Russian word ‘Tuz’. Why the Russian reference? Because Tuz was born in the medical hut of a Soviet strategic bomber base in an obscure town called Dnipro in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

There are still a good two hours to go before Tuz can have his hot shower and martini. An hour of briefing to the relief crew who will be taking over for the remaining leg – Moscow to Hong Kong. Another hour because his employers, Lufthansa, had messaged that the Airbus Service Rep at the Domodedovo would like a quick inspection of the on-board systems and fuel status and ask him questions on the overall flight performance, a procedure not uncommon for aircraft that are still within five years of introduction.

Strassner will have to turn in as soon as he checks into the Ramada Domodedovo. He has a fair amount of domestic travel scheduled for the next four days, which Lufthansa hadn’t hesitated to sanction, given the prestige involved.

More precisely, it will begin with a dawn flight in a Russian Air Force IL-76 to the eastern Ukrainian town of Dnipro, 900kms to the south. As a courtesy that is shown to a fellow pilot – and in this specific case, a show of respect – Strassner will be traveling in the cockpit jump seat.

During the next three days, Tuz Strassner will witness the exhuming of the remains of a woman at the Kraznopil’s’ke Cemetery in Dnipro and its transportation for re-interment at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. She will be the only woman ever to receive such an honor. The re-interment will be preceded by a lavish medal ceremony, right next to the grave itself, where the woman will be bestowed posthumously, the nation’s highest military honor, Hero of the Russian Federation, by the hands of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, himself. Later that evening, at a banquet in her memory, Capt. Tuz Strassner will be the guest of honor, seated at the same table as President Putin.

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Tuz Strassner has never really met the woman being honored, having been prematurely extricated from her womb in the waning moments of her life. To be precise, an hour after she had belly landed her Tupolev-16 Badger, one bone-chilling May afternoon in 1960. The woman had been test-flying a newer version, the Tu-16KSR-2, a high-altitude launch platform for future strategic warheads. The TU-16 usually has a crew of six, but that day, there were only two.

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Unbeknownst to the woman, approximately an hour prior, another aircraft had taken to the skies, this one from the US Air Force base at Badaber, outside Peshawar, in Pakistan.

Painted jet black with a non-reflective varnish, with no windows or markings to distinguish it, the grotesquely long and ungainly plane resembled a reluctant albatross with a very long wingspan. The plane climbed rapidly and within twenty minutes, it had crossed into Soviet air space at an altitude of 65000ft.

The Badger meanwhile completed it’s test parameters and was returning to base, a remote hub for strategic bombers in Soviet Ukrainian town of Dnipro, when it was directed to intercept the pencil-like sliver of an aircraft that was traversing Soviet airspace at 65000 ft and to bring it down with the Tupolev’s onboard KSR-2 missiles or it’s 23mm cannons.

However, when it became known that the Tu-16 was on a test flight and was not carrying any ordnance, she was directed to try and ram the intruder which she, after a quick tête-à-tête with her co-pilot, proceeded to do, knowing full well that they wouldn’t survive the collision. The Tu-16’s newly extended service ceiling was just about 65000 ft, but that afternoon the woman couldn’t get it up beyond 59000ft.

As the Tu-16 began its tortured climb, word came over the radio that the intruding aircraft had been brought down, by a barrage of newly developed ground based Dvina missiles and the world woke up to the news that the pilot, a 31yr old American by the name of Francis Gary Powers, had bailed out and was captured alive. Later, after 2 years in a Soviet prison, Powers was exchanged for Rudolf Abel, a British-born Russian KGB agent, incarcerated in the US for being involved in the “Hollow nickel case”. Abel had been nabbed with a hollowed out ‘nickel’ (5c coin) with a tiny coded message inside.

The plane Powers had been flying was a U-2, an unarmed, high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, developed by the American defense contractor, Lockheed. It was owned and operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency. The plane was not designed for combat and carried no munitions, because at that time the Americans believed that no Soviet aircraft or ordnance was capable of intercepting it at 65000 ft.

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As to the Badger, the stresses generated by the effort to attain the intercept altitude nearly tore it apart. The window on the far side of the young co-pilot, Leutnant Yuri Gorshkov, exploded from the pressure differential. Next, his seat belt tore off from the pull as he got squeezed and sucked through the jagged opening like a sausage, his screams choked by the -65degree celsius whiplash of the wind. All the hydraulics systems failed simultaneously thereafter, literally shutting down rudder and landing gear control. Fortunately the elevators still had mechanical override.

The woman, her temperament cooler than the icy environs of the cockpit, single handedly managed to bring the massive bomber down from the edge of the stratosphere and coasted it in, gently setting it down on it’s belly at Dnipro air base. She remained strapped in her seat while the plane hurtled down the tunnel of runway lights, out of control, slipping and sliding over the ice-slick tarmac. Swirls of stinging ice pellets whipped up from the tarmac, whistled in through the blown window and swished around the cockpit. The big jet plowed through a radar shack and came to rest just feet away from a massive canal, it’s surface frozen but unstable from the spring thaw.

The woman sat slumped forward, motionless, as if peering down at something on the floor between her feet. It was her helmet, split in two. A small lead lined unit, situated just behind her seat, containing flight test-related instrumentation, had come loose in the impact and telescoped into her helmet with such force that the helmet had cracked open like a walnut and the lead lining of the box had smashed into her medula oblongata, crushing the back of her skull, the jolt breaking her neck at the same time.

That evening, the base hospital records showed the birth by Caesarian section of a sickly underweight boy. The baby was immediately stuffed into an incubator. The mother, who had by then succumbed to her injuries, was well known around the base.

The base personnel draped her ribbons and medals on top of her casket and there they lay, almost completely covering the lid, so extensive had been her accomplishments. Of these, the Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Red Star, Order of the Patriotic War were clearly visible. As a mark of respect, the base personnel began calling the baby, “Tuz”.

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During a brief period of three and a half years, between 1942 and 1945, the woman had been known in the skies above the Eastern Front, by her call sign – ‘Belaya Roza’.

I thought that the Final Part was too abrupt. Y’see, I am not a trained writer and my mind scatters, like neutrons from an initiator.

Don’t know what an initiator is? I understand. You cannot be expected to know everything I know. 😋

An initiator kick-starts a nuclear chain reaction by emitting a blizzard of neutrons which then hit a soccer ball sized lump of Uranium-235, inside an atom bomb. You know what happens then of course.

I decided to insert another part between Part-2 and the Final Part, in order to make more sense.

So here it is…….

Ilushin-76 Transport

Russian Air Forces

2005

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It was the easy camaraderie inside the cockpit of the giant IL-76 transport that struck the American. Two aviators who, till a little over a decade ago, wouldn’t be caught dead in a ditch together, now sitting inside an aircraft, one escorting the other to a ceremony. Time changes everything.

The emotion of the moment rushed at Tuz Strassner, ex-Colonel, US Strategic Air Command, ex-Commander-B2 (Spirit) Stealth Strategic Bomber. Legion of Merit, Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Force Distinguished Service Medal. Active service in Kosovo, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan.

And currently – off-duty Lufthansa Captain. Commander – A380.

The Ilushin had climbed steadily up to 39000ft and leveled off. Brigadier Arkady Prokopiev, in command, sitting ahead to Tuz’s left, cleared his throat and flicked the talk button,”Migalovo Center, India Lima Seven Six Tango, approaching Luhansk center. Request permission to descend to flight level one nine zero.”

“India Lulu Seven Six Tango, descend to flight level one nine zero, report and hold. You will have Luhansk center from here in a minute, at five seven two point one, repeat, five seven two point one. Have a nice flight. Over.”

“Khorosho”. The huge transport imperceptibly dipped it’s nose till it leveled off at 19000ft.

Clear of static, the short communication was a practiced and casual drawl, while remaining at the same time, clear and very specific. Between two highly trained, alert men in uniform, one on the ground at the 6955th Aviation Base at Migalovo, 50kms north of Moscow and the other, 8 miles above Ukraine hurtling south at Mach .80. To Strassner listening in, such ebb and flow of radio traffic was familiar, barring the accents of course.

The whistle of the four massive PS-90 turbofans was muffled and Tuz had tuned them out of his hearing pretty soon. The air was turbulence-free. Early mornings, the surface of the earth is cool and so are the layers of the atmosphere touching it. Cooler air has less turbulence. This is something a regular flier experiences. Take an early morning flight and you can be sure it will be a calm ride. Do the same thing in the afternoon and it’ll be bumpier.

Tuz gazed out the window. Here and there a few lily white wisps of cloud floated by, further above. Far to the east, the land was a barren white expanse, as far as the eye could see. Otherwise the sky was clear blue, visibility unlimited. All seemed right with the world.

Prokopiev pushed his seat back and accepted the mug of coffee that was passed to him by the young payload specialist, Gorky. The Commander gave Strassner a sideways glance, watching him bring his own mug up to his lips.

“So, what’s it like being a commercial pilot, Capt. Strassner?” The Brigadier wanted a conversation going.

“Call me Tuz, please. Flying an airliner? Well, here’s the truth. You don’t have as much time off as your neighbors think you have. You don’t make as much money as your relatives think you make and you don’t have as many girlfriends as your wife thinks you have. Still, I can’t believe they pay me to do this,” Strassner smiled.

Prokopiev let out a short bark of a laugh,” Pretty much the same with us. Except for the girlfriends.” The Russian winked and his slavic features spread in a wide grin. Start a Russian on women and he’ll go on and on, getting more vulgar by the second, even if he happens to be a Brigadier in the Air Force.

“But seriously,” Strassner picked up once again,” I’m constantly under pressure to carry less fuel than I’m comfortable with. Airlines are always looking at the bottom line and you burn fuel while carrying fuel. You hit a storm front and have to detour and suddenly you’re running out of gas and you have to divert to an alternate destination.” Prokopiev had turned in his seat and was listening intently.

Tuz Strassner continued, “The truth is, we’re exhausted. Our work rules mandate us to be on duty 16 hours without a break. That’s many more hours than a truck driver. And unlike a truck driver, who can pull over at the next truck stop, we can’t pull over at the next cloud.”

Prokopiev smiled at that and said, “Please, I am Arkady to you”. Then his expression turning grave, the Russian went on,” It is an honor to be here, to be a part of what is about to happen in the next two days”. The Russian was referring to the re-interment of Tuz Strassner’s mother from the Dnipro cemetery to the Kremlin Necropolis, followed by the awarding of the Hero of the Russian Federation medal to her, fifty two years after she was killed trying to land her crippled Tu-16 Badger in a desolate airfield in Dnipro.

“Thank you and I have to admit that these are my proudest days. I wish Dad was here to see this.”

The Brigadier had of course been briefed by the FSB about Strassner’s father. After the war, Luftwaffe Oberst Kurt Strassner had been captured by the Soviet forces but had managed to escape to the west before they’d had a chance to start pulling out his nails. He crossed the Baltic Sea in a freighter, disguised as a deckhand. Returning home to Konigsberg was not an option. The city had by then been depopulated in a brutal and swift ethnic cleansing drive by Stalin, the German citizenry either slaughtered or shipped off to Siberia, while Russians settled in and renamed the city ‘Kaliningrad’.

Once in West Germany, Strassner Senior wasted no time joining the nascent West German Air Force, the Luftwaffe Bundeswehr. In 1958, by then a decorated Brigadegeneral, Kurt Strassner was absorbed into the higher echelons of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND in short, the West German external intelligence agency that had been formed three years earlier. Then, in the spring of 1959, fate took Strassner to Moscow, to be posted in the West German High Commission as the senior military attaché.

It was at the 1959 May Day celebrations and the gala that evening at the Kremlin grounds that fate stepped in once again. Usually military attachés of foreign embassies were nearly always residents of their intelligence agencies and had KGB minders sticking real close and discreetly following their every move.

Brigadegeneral Kurt Strassner too had a KGB tag, Yuri Dudayev, who was his chauffeur and constant companion. KGB through and through, Yuri was still very likeable, a huge bear of a man with twinkling blue eyes, always ready with amusingly disparaging anecdotes about life inside communist Soviet Union. Strassner returned the easy amicability but knew enough to maintain a safe distance from the KGB staffer.

That evening Strassner had looked smashing in his full dress uniform. Pity he couldn’t put on his Second World War medals and gold sash, though he did not miss them at all. Jojo Strassner had never hankered after recognition.

And then fate stepped in, sweeping aside the Soviet paranoia. Even KGB agents gotta go when they gotta go. At the very moment that Yuri excused himself to go do a mocha (Russian for taking a pee), Strassner turned and bumped accidentally into a Soviet Air Force Colonel, a petite woman, immensely pretty even at 39, her uniform tunic bristling with decorations. Many of them, he immediately recognized as medals won during the Second World War, like the Order of the Red Banner, the Order of the Patriotic War, the Order of the Red Star and some others that he did not fully recognize.

There was something else about her, a defiance, from the way her nose turned up just a wee bit.

She was not one of the guests. She had been summoned to a meeting just prior and had been asked to remain for the gala. Her commanding officer, General Alexei Petrovich, must have decided in the last minute that she was entitled to some fun, given that she had just received transfer orders to the Strategic Long Range Bomber base at Dnipro, Ukraine. She would be leaving to take up her new assignment, flight testing the new Tu-16A (Badger), in a week.

Fate dealt another hand when Yuri, drunk, excused himself and went home and before the evening was over, Strassner would come to know Colonel Raisa Komarova more intimately than he had ever known another woman. Calling it a one-night stand would not be appropriate but it had to be that way, given that she was about to go off on her new posting, in an area which was out-of-bounds to all foreign nationals.

Kurt Strassner did not know it yet but it had taken seventeen years for him to finally come face to face with the pilot of the Yak-1 that had so terrorized the Luftwaffe over the Eastern Front – the ace who at the time went by the call sign…Belaya Roza.

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Jagdgeschwader52 (Luftwaffe Fighter Wing52),

Somewhere near Кривий Ріг (Kryvyi Rih),

Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic,

1942-43

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By 1943, the Nazis began to realize that they no longer had the world by it’s hoden. In the east, Operation Barbarossa was turning into a disaster and in the west, the Hitler-Mussolini axis had lost control over North Africa and the Mediterranean. All over Europe partisans, trained by the Allies, were wreaking havoc on German railroads and bridges, turning logistics into a nightmare.

The Luftwaffe however would still remain for a short while a formidable force in the skies over Europe. Newer and faster airplanes were being developed and tested at a frenetic pace, using technologies that were way ahead of anything that the Allies had. At the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (BFW – Bavarian Aircraft Works), the development of souped-up versions of the Messerschmitt bf 109 fighter, was advancing rapidly, under it’s brilliant designer, Nazi sympathizer Wilhelm ‘Willy’ Messerschmitt.

German technological ingenuity was the engine and slave labor, the wheels.

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In those days, there was no separate category called ‘test pilots’ and no test pilot schools. The operational pilots were flying hundreds of sorties every day, buzzing around at speeds as slow as 100mph to dive speeds exceeding 500mph, along with ten to fifteen other aircraft, friend and foe, missing each other by inches, inside an air space the size of just two city blocks.

The test conditions were right there and the fighters got tested in real time. Every pilot was a test pilot and flight data collection was just the pilot’s word of mouth. It would be a decade before the first flight data recorder was installed in an aircraft.

At the JG52, a forward German air base 900kms west of Stalingrad, the number of Messerschmitt engineers and technicians almost equalled air force personnel. In the early days of Operation Barbarossa, they were regular attendees at pilot debriefings, especially the day Oberst Kurt Strassner inadvertantly performed the Stall und Tauchen, a dangerous, gravity-defying maneuver, aimed at getting from front to behind an enemy fighter in a dog fight.

Decades later, Strassner’s aerobatics would become well known among jet fighter pilots as the Pugachev Cobra, named after Soviet test pilot, Victoria Pugachev.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves…..

The period between 1914 and 1950 was the age of ‘dogfights’, skirmishes in the air between enemy fighters. If you were in a dogfight and you had a hun on your tail, you would want to have him in front of you instead, so that you could drill him full of holes with your wing mounted 23mm canons.

There were two ways to get behind an enemy fighter….

A. If you were unimaginative, you’d make a tight 360-degree turn to try to come up behind him, but the hun was not going to be sitting there twiddling his thumbs while you turned around. He was going to stick with you real close and the chances are that the 360-degree turn was only going to get you dizzy and not behind him.

B. But if you thought outside the box you’d do the Pugachev Cobra. To understand this one needs to first understand the Soviet ethos……..

With the advent of the jet age, fighter to fighter mid-air engagements (ie:dogfights) became passé, due to the high speeds and the heat seeking/laser guided smart ordnance that no longer needed sighting on cross-hairs. While the Americans understood this, somehow the Soviets never did and they kept building fighters with extremely high maneuverability.

Remember the guy I mentioned earlier – Viktor Pugachev, pioneer of the Pugachev Cobra? He first performed the stunt at the Paris Air Show in 1989 in a Sukhoi-27 Flanker.

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Imagine that the Cold War is at its height and you are a Russian test pilot, putting A Sukhoi-27 through its paces. You are in complete radio silence with base, crossing into American air space somewhere over the Bering Strait.

The Aleutians West island chain swings into view over the horizon and suddenly you have company. Two F18 Hornets have appeared as if by magic, on either side. They had launched off the 92600-ton, Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, that was patrolling the northern waters, shepherding a sizable part of the US Pacific fleet, like a mother hen and her chicks.

The Hornet to your left lets loose around 250 rounds in a short burst from its nose-mounted 6-barrel 20mm rotary canon as a warning, followed by the standard “You are violating sovereign American airspace, please turn around, etc,etc.” You are unfazed and do not break silence.

To your right, in the distance you can just manage to make out a gaggle of F-14 Tomcats, also from the Carl Vinson, keeping pace, making no move to get closer, confident that their cousins – the Hornets – will take care of you.

You don’t panic and yell to base. You continue to maintain radio silence. Your orders are pretty much carte blanche. It’s your play.

Next, the Hornet on your right sidles up close so you can see the pilot’s eyeballs. He waggles his wings. That’s the same as saying,” You don’t belong here, get the fuck out.”

You had expected the attention. Your incursion into US air space was not accidental and your mission was very specific – to test the Su-27’s super-maneuverability against a real adversary.

The Aleutians are now clearly discernible. You decide to give the two Americans some goose bumps. You dive from 39000ft, your altimeter rapidly unspooling, your pressure suit keeping you from losing consciousness, till you level off at 1000ft. At this height the Pacific seems a lighter blue and it’s expanse, endless. The Aleutians are no longer visible over the horizon.

The dive has taken you over the speed of sound so when you level off, you throttle back to around 300knots. Meanwhile, the F18s are still on your tail, their AIM-7 Sparrow missiles now armed and waiting to relish what they think will be a turkey shoot. You don’t panic.

There you are now, level at 1000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. At that height the surface of the Pacific is a blur. Since such encounters never ever develop into hostilities, the Americans are simply tagging along, not fully prepared for what is about to happen.

All of a sudden, you break to 200knots. This is a necessary requirement that prevents your bird from breaking apart when you do the Cobra. Unprepared, the Yanks on either side rush up toward you, relative speeds closing the gap. You bring your elevators up full and pull up the nose sharply until your angle of attack has gone beyond even 90°, to about 110°. Momentum forces the Sukhoi to continue flying straight, it’s afterburners now slightly ahead of it’s nose. You hold this position for just a few seconds.

Before they can mouth the words ‘what the fuck..’ the two F18s whiz past and drive themselves into the sea, but not before the pilots have managed to bail out. No worries, they have homing devices and will be picked up.

Meanwhile, your airspeed has been dropping, so you quickly level your elevators and throttle up, avoiding a stall. The nose falls back and the Sukhoi continues on it’s level flight, picking up speed and altitude as it goes. You turned around in a tight arc and get the hell out of US air space.

You switch on your radio, a chuckle now playing on your lips, the chuckle turning into a full-blown guffaw for the benefit of the seething Americans back on the Carl Vinson.

Barely able to contain your laughter, you shout into your mouthpiece,” U vas khoroshay den?” (Did you have a nice day?)

——————————————–

Getting back to my story, dogfights were not always about speed and bravado. They were about guile and nerve. And those, Luftwaffe Oberst Kurt Strassner had oodles of.

In the age of aerial dogfights with piston-engined fighters, pilots were warned to recognize by sight, the aces of other side, by the call signs that were painted across their fuselages. If you happened to spot an ace in the pack, you had two choices. Cut and run for the cover or face the ace if you were an ace yourself. Strassner had never run, even in the early days, when he hadn’t been an ace.

The Russian driving the Mig2 that had strayed into Strassner’s path however, was no ace. He was a 19 year old rookie, Igor Kinsky of the 73rd Air Force Guards Regiment. Given the inferior training and aircraft design of the Soviets in those early days of the war, young Igor had been told to not be a hero and beat it if he ever came across a German ace and in doing so, to live and fight another day. This he strove to do, soon as he recognized the Cobra under Strassner’s canopy.

Wearing a skull cap with shades developed by Messerschmitt, that were supposed to cut off glare from the sun completely, Strassner chased the young Igor’s Mig2 out over the Inhulets river. When he realized that the Cobra was glued to his tail, the kid panicked. The Mig2 suddenly began a reckless dive from 18000ft, straight down at the blue waters below and Strassner gave immediate chase.

As the altimeter needle whirred down, Strassner realized he wasn’t alone. Neat staccato stitches suddenly appeared just above his right wing tip and the Me109 shuddered. A quick glance back up told him that he’d suddenly been joined by two Yak-1bs who had dropped out of the sun and were closing in on him. The so-called glare-proof goggles hadn’t helped after all. He hadn’t seen them, with the glare of the sun in the background.

When they had taken off earlier in the afternoon, the German wolf pack had four ‘schwarms’ of two ‘rotten’ each, sixteen planes in all. The Mig2 had drawn him way out and away from the main battle. Was he the patsy? Was it a trap, he wondered, but decided to go through with the chase anyway. At some point, he began wondering where his wingman, Dieter was, when the Yak that was following right behind, suddenly disintegrated in a spectacular blast leaving zero possibility of a bail-out.

Strassner hoped the second Yak would be destroyed by the debris, since it had been following close behind, but that was not to be. The second Yak was nimble and it had been so close behind that the ball of flame and splinters hadn’t had time to expand. A quick practised tug on the stick by the Soviet pilot and the second Yak had passed the explosion unscathed.

Dieter however didn’t survive the kill. His Messerschmitt had been behind the second Yak but not too close. It ran straight into the expanding debris cloud and blew itself apart, peppered by the lethal shrapnel from the first Yak, the ball of flame just growing bigger in size and blending into the bigger one left behind by the blown-up Yak.

Strassner was on his own now. Except for the nimble second Yak of course, which was keeping pace five hundred  yards directly behind and above. He knew he was moments away from being chewed into bits by the Russian’s 23mm Shvak canons and he had to think of something quick. The blue waters of the Inhulets were rushing up at him at 400knots and he had to bottom out at 1000ft.

The Yak, still hanging on, got ready to blast the Me109, now that both were flying level. It’s right cannon had just started to speak, when the Messershmitt did something strange. It lifted it’s nose up, so suddenly that the fighter was pointed almost vertically and maybe even a bit on the other side, on it’s back. It’s speed broke sharply as it almost flipped over, while continuing to fly level.

The Yak had just a second to dodge the suddenly slowed German. It flashed past and zoomed on ahead, pretty sure that the Me109 would stall and probably crash. The Yak kept going and did a curving loop, shooting up straight, but this time it had the Messershmitt on it’s tail and now the German looked like he was stuck on the Yak with glue.

A vast approaching cloud bank and a look at his fuel gauge made Strassner abandon the chase, drop down and skim across the waters back to base. He saw no further sign of the Yak but something told him that it was not the last he’d seen of Russian. The doggedness, the nimble dodging, the tight loop, these were all hallmarks of an ace.

But there had been something else. Something that had caught his eye as the Russian fighter had hurtled past him, not even 50 yards to his right.

Nestled within a large painted white rose, emblazoned against the Soviet-grey of fuselage just below the canopy, were the words ‘белая роза’ (‘Belaya Roza’)

In Russian, it meant “White Rose”.

[Part-3, final part, coming up]