The Operators by Michael Hastings

Author:Michael Hastings [Hastings, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

Hi, this is Michael. Arrived.

Got it. Our guy is on the other side of security.

I placed my bag through an X-ray machine and walked out into the airport lobby. I’d made it inside the country. I looked around and spotted a young Afghan man wearing a knit tuque, cargo pants, and hiking boots. He looked like the guy. I made eye contact and he nodded. He introduced himself as Raheem. He grabbed my black wheeled luggage and we headed outside.

The security company relied on Afghans to operate within the airport. Raheem was hooked in to the scene—every third person we passed on the sidewalk in front of the airport, he knew. I had a question I’d been wanting to ask. There were always stories about the airports, how money and drugs were regularly flown out of the country on a daily basis. Yet there were always four or five security checkpoints. I asked Raheem how they did it.

“I mean, how do you smuggle bags of cash or drugs or whatever out of here?”

He laughed, as if I’d asked one of the more obvious and apparent questions.

“Baksheesh,” he said. “Bribes. You just give one of these guys cash, and they escort you around all the security.”

I nodded. Made sense.

We passed a green guardhouse. On the other side was the parking lot. Rickety trolleys, wheels missing and banged up, littered the lot. Men selling Afghan currency from cigar boxes had small stands up to sell money to the new arrivals. I lit a cigarette.

“Mike?”

A British guard dressed in tan fatigues extended his hand. We shook.

“Thanks for picking me up,” I said.

“Jimmy,” he said.

We got into a beat-up white SUV. In the backseat there were two bottles of water, a medical kit, and a set of body armor. It was Kabul, not Baghdad, so there was no need to wear the armor, or even have armed guards. Still, out of habit, I sat in the backseat, slouching down.

Jimmy was talkative, and as we rolled out of the airport, he gave me the rundown on the latest security developments. In most countries, you ask about the weather; in Afghanistan, it was the latest kidnapping or roadside bomb. There were reports that a Canadian journalist had been snatched in Kabul. The city had been quiet the last week, though there were persistent reports that five car bombs had snuck into the city.

“Sunny with a chance of shrapnel,” Jimmy said.

Jimmy was former Special Forces. He was now hustling a couple of contracts. Besides occasionally freelancing for the media company, he’d done high-profile personal security details for A-list Hollywood celebrities while they traveled in the Middle East. He had another contract to help the Americans train Afghan security forces at a base not far from Kabul.

I told Jimmy I’d been hanging out with McChrystal—that they’d been telling me about the progress the new strategy was making.

He turned around in his seat, looking at me, eyebrows raised.

“It’s all pretty fucking hopeless,” he said. “You need a thousand McChrystals. I don’t have the heart to tell the Americans that.

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