The Last Refuge by Gregory D. Johnsen

Author:Gregory D. Johnsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

III

THE NEXT GENERATION

14

The Great Escape

2006

The day after Hitar’s rehabilitation program died on the front page of the newspaper, al-Qaeda’s prison network got a second chance. Nasir al-Wihayshi and the rest of the leaders had served their time in solitary and were now back in the two-room communal cell. That night after prayers, the men revived their original plan to tunnel to the mosque they could see from their window in the annex along the prison’s southern wall. As the men talked that evening, Fawaz al-Rabi‘i, the charismatic cell leader whom bin Laden had dispatched back to Yemen prior to 9/11 and who was now entering his second year in prison, moved into the interior room and started prying up tiles. It was December 11, 2005.

Falling back on security precautions many of the men had learned at the camps in Afghanistan, they pledged to keep a low profile. No one outside of the cell could know about the plan. After they pulled up the floor tiles, the men found a layer of dirt that they scraped at with the spoons and metal plates they had bent into modified hand shovels. The cell’s interior door blocked the view of the guards in the hallway while in the larger, outer room the prisoners who weren’t digging took turns reciting the Quran in an effort to mask the sounds from inside the cell. “We tried to be as loud as possible,” Wihayshi said.

Digging started every morning after the dawn call to prayer and ended only when the prisoners heard the fifth and final call of the day crackle through the loudspeakers. Initially it was slow going. After a few inches of dirt the men hit a layer of poorly mixed concrete. Sharpening their plates on the uprooted floor tiles, the men fashioned them into crude picks that they used to chip through the concrete. In three weeks of work, they progressed only a foot. After they made it through the concrete, they were back up against their most persistent problem: what to do with the dirt? At one point, some of the prisoners tried pouring it down the drain, but the cheap pipes clogged and flooded the bathroom just off the cell. One of the men then suggested using the squat toilets. Little more than a ceramic basin with footrests around a hole in the ground, squat toilets are common in Yemen; the man thought they could mix the dirt with water and pour it down the hole. That worked for a while, but in time the toilet backed up as well. Next they tried hiding the dirt under their prison-issue mattresses that sat on the floor along the walls. Eventually the men started packing the dirt in the cheap plastic bags that often came with their food and storing it in the bathroom, out of sight of the passing guards.

In early January 2006, as Yemen continued to struggle with prison overcrowding, the PSO transferred five more inmates into the cell. There were now twenty-three men in two tiny rooms.

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