The Levanter Part 2

Thank you.' I put my gla.s.s down and took out the scratch pad on which I had already made notes of the preliminary questions I would ask-the easy ones. I could feel Ghaled watching me as I thumbed through the pages; he was trying to weigh me up. I took my time looking over the notes and lit a cigarette to extend the silence. If he became impatient so much the better.

It was Miss Hammad who became impatient.

'If you will say something into the microphones to test them, Mr Prescott, we can begin.'

'It is an honour to be received by Mr Ghaled.'

She translated his reply. 'It is gracious of Mr Prescott to say so.'

She played it back on the recorders. They were both working. She pressed the 'record' b.u.t.tons again and said in English and Arabic: 'Interview of the commander and leader of the Palestinian Action Force, Salah Ghaled, by Lewis Prescott, correspondent of the American Post-Tribune news service syndicate, meeting in the Republic of the Lebanon on. . . .' She looked at her watch to check the date before adding it.

It was the fourteenth of May.

Chapter 2.

MICHAEL HOWELL.

May 15 to 16 On the fourteenth of May I was in Italy, and I wish to G.o.d I had stayed there.

Even an airport strike-if it had delayed me for twenty-four hours or so-would have helped. At least my ignorance would have been preserved a little longer. With luck I might even have escaped direct involvement. But no. I went back on the fifteenth and walked straight into trouble.

The fact that the poison had already been in the system then for over five months - ever since the man calling himself Ya.s.sin had come to work for me-was something I did not know. I have been accused of having turned a blind eye until circ.u.mstances forced me to do otherwise. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Unfortunately, those who know me best, business friends for example, have found the fact that I was both ignorant and innocent hard to accept. My admission that never once during those months had I had the slightest inkling of what was going on seems to them no more than a highly unconvincing, but in the circ.u.mstances necessary, claim to incompetence. Well, I can scarcely blame them; but I am sorry. That admission, which I certainly did not enjoy making and of which I am anything but proud, happens to be true.

One thing I would like to be clearly understood. I am not trying to justify myself or my conduct; I am only attempting to repair some of the damage that has been done. It is not my personal reputation that matters now, but that of our company.

The week prior to the fifteenth of May I had spent in Milan on company business. Having completed that business, I flew to Rome, where I picked up two new suits which had been waiting for me at my tailor's. The following day, the fifteenth, I took a Middle East Airlines flight to Damascus.

Damascus this meant that I was met at the foot of the stairway from the plane by a Syrian army corporal in a para-troop jump suit, with a Czech automatic rifle, loaded and at the ready, slung across his stomach. Escorted by him, 1 then went through pa.s.sport control and customs to the waiting air-conditioned Ministry car.

My feelings about being met in this way were, as always, mixed. It was convenient, of course, to be spared the interrogations and searchings to which most of my fellow pa.s.sengers would be subjected. It was also rea.s.suring to know on landing that one was still considered of value to the state, and that no long knives had been out during one's absence: modern Syria must still be considered one of the 'off-with-his-head' countries.

On the other hand, while there was no denying that Damascus airport was at times a dangerous place, I could never quite rid myself of the conviction that should any of the potential dangers-a bomb outrage, say, or a guerilla shoot-out - suddenly become immediate, I as a foreigner, a civilian and an infidel, would be among the first to perish in the crossfire. The corporal, whom I had encountered before, was a friendly oaf who smelt of sweat and gun oil and was very proud of the fact that his firstborn was now attending a village primary school; but to me, his uniform and his loaded rifle seemed as much a threat as a protection. I was always relieved when we reached the car and the porter arrived with the luggage.

My appointment with the Minister was not until four-thirty so I drove first to the villa our company owned in the city-and to Teresa.

The villa was in the old style with a walled courtyard and was part office, part pied-a-terre. Teresa was in charge of both parts of the establishment. With the help of a Syrian clerk she ran the office for me; with that of two servants she took care of our private household.

Teresa's father had been the Italian consul in Aleppo. He had also been an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. With Teresa's mother and members of the Aleppo Museum staff he was away on an archaeological expedition in the north, when the party was attacked by a gang of bandits, believed to be Kurds. Supposedly the Kurds mistook the party for a Syrian border patrol. Teresa's parents had been among those killed.

She had been nineteen then, convent-educated in the Lebanon, and a good linguist. For a time she worked as secretary-translator in the local office of an American oil company. Then she came to me. Having spent most of her life in the Middle East, she knows the form. She has been and is, in every way, invaluable to me.

I have always had to do a lot of travelling around for our company, and whenever I returned to Damascus from a trip there was a set office routine. Teresa would have ready for me a brief summary report on the state of our local enterprises. This report usually consisted chiefly of figures. She would supplement the report verbally with comment and any interesting items of information that she thought I should have.

On this occasion she told me about the manoeuvrings of a compet.i.tor who was bidding against us on a job in Teheran. That story amused me.

What came next did not amuse me at all.

'I've noticed that the laboratory costs seem to be getting higher and higher,' she said; 'so while you were away I looked into them. The accounts come here for payment, but the invoices showing the details of items purchased go to the factory with the goods. There most of them seem to get lost. So I wrote to the suppliers in Beirut for a duplicate set of last month's invoices.'

'And?'

'I found one recent item that was really very expensive. We also had to pay a lot of duty on it. It was an order for ten rottols of absolute alcohol.'

A rottol, I should explain, is one of those antediluvian weights and measures which are still used in some parts of the Middle East. One rottol equals two okes, one oke weighs just over a kilo and a quarter. So ten rottols would be about twenty-five kilos.

'Issa ordered that?'

'Apparently. I didn't know we used that much alcohol in the laboratory.'

'We shouldn't use any. Did you ask him about it?'

She smiled. 'I thought you might prefer to do that, Michael.'

'Quite right. I'll look forward to it. The little b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' I glanced at my watch; the Minister was a stickler for punctuality. 'We'll talk about it later,' I said.

'Did you get what you wanted in Milan?'

'I think so.' I picked up my briefcase. 'Let's hope His Nibs likes the look of it, too.'

'Good luck,' she said.

I went down aad got back into the Ministry car. The sound of the first warning note was already becoming faint in my mind. I imagined, with reason, that I had more important business to attend to that afternoon.

In view of the libellous and highly damaging statements which have been made about our company and its operations, particularly in certain French and West German 'news' magazines, I feel it necessary at this point to give the essential facts. Slanders, the verbalised bile of jealous compet.i.tors and other commercial opponents, may be contemptuously ignored; but printed vilification cannot be allowed to go unchallenged. True, these published libels are actionable at law and, of course, the necessary steps have been taken to bring those responsible before courts of justice. Unfortunately, since different countries have different laws on the subject of libel, and what is clearly actionable in one place may be only marginally so in another, the paths to justice are long and tortuous. Time pa.s.ses, the lies prosper like weeds and the truth is stifled. That I will not permit. The weed-killer must be applied now.

One of the news magazine reporters to whom I granted an interview described my defence of our company's position as 'a garrulous smokescreen of misinformation'. Mixed metaphors seem to be a characteristic of heavily slanted reporting; but as this sort of charge was fairly typical, I will answer it.

Garrulous? Maybe. In trying to break down his very obvious preconceptions and prejudices I probably did talk too much. Smokescreen? Misinformation? He came with a closed mind and that was its condition when he left. The truth wasn't newsy enough for him. His quality-and that of his editor-was well displayed elsewhere in the piece where it was stated that I wore 'expensive gold cufflinks'. What was that supposed to prove, for G.o.d's sake? Would my credibility have been enhanced if I had secured my shirt cuffs with inexpensive gold links, should such things exist, or plastic b.u.t.tons?

No. I am not saying that all newspaper men are corrupt-Mr Lewis Prescott and Mr Frank Edwards, for instance, have at least tried to tell the truth-but simply that the only way you can win with those who are corrupt is to fight them on their own ground, and discredit them publicly in print.

That is what I am doing now, and if any of those spry paladins of the gutter press feels that anything I have said about him is libellous and actionable, his legal advisers will tell him where to apply. Our company retains excellent lawyers in all the capitals from which we operate.

Agence Commerciale et Maritime Howell, along with its a.s.sociated trading companies, has always been very much a family concern. The original societe a responsabilite limitee was registered by my grandfather, Robert Howell, in the early nineteen-twenties. Before that, since the turn of the century in fact, he had grown liquorice and tobacco on big stretches of land held under a firman of the Turkish Sultan, Abdul, in what used to be called The Levant.

The land, in the vilayet of Latakia, was granted to him as a reward for political services rendered to the Ottoman court. The exact nature of the services rendered I have never been able to determine. My father once told me, vaguely, that 'they had something to do with a government bond issue', but he was unable, or unwilling, to amplify that statement. The original land grant described grandfather's occupation as that of 'entrepreneur-negotiator', which in Imperial Turkey could have meant many different things. I do know that he was always very well in with Constantinople, an.d that even during World War I, when as an Englishman he was interned by the Turks, his internment amounted to little more than house arrest. Moreover, the land remained in his name; as, too, did the businesses there - a tannery and a flour mill - which he had acquired before the war. 'Johnny Turk is a gentleman", he used to say.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the French mandate over the areas now known as Syria and the Lebanon, some changes had to be made. Although his tenure of the lands he had previously held was eventually confirmed by the new regime, his experience under the French colonial administrators - less gentlemanly than Johnny Turk by all accounts - had taught him a sharp lesson. Personal ownership of a business made one vulnerable. He made arrangements to acquire a corporate ident.i.ty in Syria and to transfer gradually most of his subsidiary businesses, chiefly those which did not depend directly on land-holding, to Cyprus.

Grandfather died in nineteen thirty-three and my father, John Howell, took control. He had been in charge of the Cyprus office in Famagusta which had been established originally to find cargoes for the fleet of coasters which the parent company owned and operated out of Latakia.

As his Cyprus office had grown in importance my father's interest in the mainland of Asia Minor had waned. He had married in Cyprus. My sisters and I were born in Famagusta and baptised in the Greek Orthodox faith. My name, Michael Howell, may look and sound Anglo-Saxon, but, with a Lebanese Armenian grandmother and a Cypriot mother, I am no more than fractionally English. There are lots of families like ours, rich and poor, in the Middle East. Ethnically, I suppose, my sisters and I could reasonably be described as 'Eastern Mediterranean'. Personally I prefer the simpler though usually pejorative term, 'Levantine mongrel'. Mongrels are sometimes more intelligent than their respectable cousins; they also tend to adapt more readily to strange environments; and in conditions of extreme adversity, they are among those most likely to survive.

The World War II years were difficult ones for our Syrian interests. Those in Cyprus gave little trouble. The coasters, prudently re-registered in Famagusta before the war, were all on charter to the British. They lost three of them off Crete, but their government war-risk insurance covered us nicely; I think we even made money on the deal. In Syria though it was a different story. The fighting between the Allies and the Vichy French brought business virtually to a standstill. The demand for liquorice root and Latakia tobacco at that time was, to put it mildly, minimal. In 1942, when the Allies started driving the enemy out of North Africa, father moved our head office to Alexandria and registered a new holding company, Howell General Trading Ltd. The Syrian and Cypriot businesses became subsidiaries. In that year, too, I was sent round the Cape to purgatory in England. Had I been consulted I would have chosen to stay at the English school in Alex, or, failing that, go to the one in Istanbul where there were family friends; but my mother wouldn't have Istanbul - unlike grandfather Howell she is very anti-Turk-and anyway my father's mind was made up. War or no war, I had to go through the same prep and public school mills as he and his father had.

Not all my father's ideas were so fixed, however. After the move to Alexandria the whole character and direction of our business began to change. This was father's doing and he was quite deliberate about it. He had sensed the future. Some things remained - the coasters and the bigger ships that later replaced them had nearly always been profitable -but from 1945 on, when the war in Europe ended, the whole emphasis on the trading side of our business shifted from bulk commodities to manufactured goods. During those post-war years we became selling agents throughout the Middle East (after 1948, Israel always excepted) for a number of European and, later, some American manufacturers.

This change had a direct effect on my life. The first of these agencies of ours was that of a firm in Glasgow which made a range of rotary pumps. It was my father's realisation that it is difficult to sell engineering products effectively when the buyer knows more than you do about them that made him decide on a technical education for me. So instead of going from school in England to Cairo University, a transition to which I had been looking forward, I found myself committed to a red-brick polytechnic in one of the grimier parts of London.

At the time, I am afraid, my acceptance of this change of plan was more sullen than dutiful. Bora in Cyprus when it was a British colonial possession, I held a British colonial pa.s.sport. By the simple process of threatening me-quite baselessly, I later discovered - with the prospect of National Service conscription into the British army unless I enrolled as a student in London, my father had his way. It wasn't, I know, a nice trick for a loving father to play on a son; but I can admit now that, as a businessman, I have had no reason to regret that he played it.

One way and another, then, I learned a lot from my father. He died in 1962, of a heart ailment, eighteen months after we moved our head office to Beirut in the Lebanon, and registered our second holding company in Vaduz.

The testing time for me, as the new head of our business, came the following year when I had to make my first major policy decision.

It was that decision, made almost nine years ago, that started me on the road which has proved in the end to be so very dangerous.

Our Syrian troubles had started in the early 'fifties when Soviet penetration of the Middle East began. In Syria it was particularly successful. Friendship with the Soviet Union grew with the rise to power of the Syrian Arab Socialist, Renaissance movement, later to be known as the Ba'ath Party. They were not communists; as Sunnite Muslims they could not be; they were, however, Arab nationalists committed to socialism and strongly anti-West. The Ba'ath pro- gramme called for union with Egypt, and other Arab states, and rapid socialisation of the Syrian economy.

In 1958 they got both union with Egypt and, at the same time, the first of their socialisation measures, 'agrarian reform'. In that year an expropriation law was pa.s.sed which stripped the Agence Howell of all but eighty hectares of its irrigated land. We had held over a thousand hectares. As a foreign-owned company we received 'compensation'; but since the compensation was paid into a blocked account in the state-owned Central Bank, it didn't do us much good. We were not permitted to transfer the money out of the country, we could not buy foreign currency or valuta, and we were not even allowed to re-invest or spend the money inside the country without permission from the Central Bank. It was in limbo.

They let us keep the tannery and the flour mill for the time being. Nationalisation of industry was to come later.

In 1959 my father formally applied for the release of the blocked funds for reinvestment purposes. He planned to buy a 2000-ton cargo vessel that was up for sale in Latakia, and use it in the Aegean. It was a way of exporting some of the capital that he thought he might just get away with. But that was a bad year in Syria. There was a prolonged drought and the harvests were so poor that Syria had to import cereals instead of exporting as usual. The Central Bank, which clearly saw through the ship-purchase idea, regretted that, owning to the current shortage of foreign exchange resulting from the adverse trade situation, the application for release must be refused.

In 1960, when he applied again, the bank did not even reply to his letters.

In 1961 there was a military coup d'etat aimed at dissolving the union with Egypt, restoring Syria's position as a sovereign state and setting up a new const.i.tutional regime. It succeeded, and for a while things looked better for us. Property rights were to be guaranteed. Free enterprise was to be encouraged. The Central Bank was giving our latest request its sympathetic consideration. If the squabbling politicians could have agreed to compose their differences, even temporarily, and allowed the situation to become stable, all might have been well; but they couldn't. Within six months, the army, tired of the 'self-seeking' civilians, had moved in again with yet another coup.

Then, in 1963, there was a revolution.

I have used the word 'revolution' because the Ba'athist coup of that year, though once again mainly the work of army officers, was more than a mere transfer of power from one nationalist faction to another; it brought about basic political changes. Syria became a one-party state and, while rejoining the UAR, managed to do so without resurrendering its sovereign independence. The programme of socialisation was resumed. In May of 'sixty-three all the banks were nationalised.

It was at that time that I came to my decision.

I knew a good deal about the Ba'ath people. Many of them were naive reformers, doomed to eventual disillusionment, and they had their windbags who could do no more than parrot ritual calls for social justice; but among the Party leaders there were able and determined men. When they said that they meant to nationalise all industry, I believed them. Later, no doubt, there would be some pragmatic compromises and grey areas of collaboration between public and private sectors would appear; but in the main, I thought, they meant what they said. What was more, I believed that they were there to stay.

How best, then, to safeguard the interests of the Agence Howell?

I had, I considered, three options open to me. I could side with the resisters. I could temporise. Or, I could explore the grey areas of future compromise and see what sort of a deal I could make.

Siding with the resisters meant, in effect, taking to the political woods and conspiring with those who would attempt to overthrow the new government. For a foreigner contemplating suicide this course might have had its attractions. For this foreigner it had none.

The temporisers, of whom there were many among my business acquaintances, seemed to me to have misjudged the new situation. Having observed with mounting weariness the political antics of the past decade they tended to dismiss the nationalisation of industry threat, with smiles and shrugs, as mere post-coup rhetoric. The banks? Well, the British and French banks had been sequestrated for years, hadn't they? Nationalising what was left had been an easy gesture to make. No, Michael, the thing to do now is sit tight and wait for the next counter-coup. Meanwhile, of course, we'll have to keep our eyes open. When all this dust begins to settle a bit some of your new men will be coming out of it with their palms beginning to itch. They'll be the ones to talk to about nationalisation of industry. How can we pay them if they nationalise us, eh? Watch and wait, my boy, watch and wait. It's the only way.

The temporisers, I thought, might be in for some surprises. I went my own way, exploring.

Obviously, yet another application to the Central Bank for the release of our blocked funds would fail unless I could apply some sort of leverage. Just as obviously, the only kind of lever that would work with the Central Bank would be one operated by its masters in the government. What I needed then was an endors.e.m.e.nt of my application by a government department. It would have to be a high-level endors.e.m.e.nt, too, preferably Ministerial. What did I have to offer in exchange for such a thing?

At that point, the catchphrase, 'If you can't lick 'em join 'em', came to mind. After that, once I had accepted the fact that I might do better working with the Government people than by attempting artfully to outwit them, I made progress. The problem was then simplified. How could I join them in a way which would ultimately benefit us both?

I did a lot of thinking, some intensive market research and formulated the plan.

In 'sixty-three I was not as used to negotiating with government officials as I am now. If I had been, I would not have given the proposition I was out to sell them even a fifty-fifty chance of success. Perhaps the fact that I was only thirty-two at the time, and consumed by the need to prove myself, helped. I was very aggressive in those days, too; and, I am afraid, given to finger-wagging exhortation when opposed.

My first encounter with the decision making machinery in Damascus was a meeting with two bureaucrats, one from the Ministry of Finance, where the meeting took place, and one from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Commerce. They listened to me in silence, accepted copies of an aide-memoire which summarised my proposals in veiled, but what I believed to be intriguing, terms and indicated politely that they had other appointments.

A month went by before I was summoned by letter to a meeting at the Ministry of Social Affairs and Commerce. This meeting was in the office of a senior official to whom I had once been introduced at a Greek Emba.s.sy picnic. Also present were the two bureaucrats who had interviewed me before and a younger man who was introduced as representing the recently created Department of Industrial Development. After the usual preliminary politenesses had been exchanged the senior officials invited this younger man to question me on the subject of my proposals. His name was Hawa - Dr Hawa.

My subsequent dealings with Dr Hawa have been the subject of much misrepresentation. He himself has lately seen fit to a.s.sume the role of innocent betrayed, and to accuse me publicly of every crime from malfeasance to murder on the high seas. Under the circ.u.mstances it may be thought that no account I give of our relationship can be wholly objective.

I disagree. I have every intention of remaining objective. As far as I am concerned the only effect of his diatribes has been to relieve me of any lingering disposition to pull my punches.

Dr Hawa is a thin, hard-faced man with tight lips and dark, angry eyes; obviously a tough customer, and particularly formidable when met for the first time. I remember that it was something of a relief to find that he was a chain-smoker; I knew then that he wasn't as formidable as he appeared. Though we later became better acquainted I never discovered the academic discipline to which his doctorate belonged. I do know that he had a degree in law from the University of Damascus and that he later spent a year or two in the United States under some post-graduate student exchange arrangement. There, I gather, he managed to pick up a PhD from an easy-going academic inst.i.tution in the Middle West. His English is fluent, with North American intonations. However, that first conversation was conducted mainly in Arabic with only occasional lapses into French and English.

'Mr Howell, tell me about your company,' he began.

The tone was patronising. I had noticed that he had a copy of my aide-memoire on the table in front of him, so I nodded towards it. 'It is all there, Doctor Hawa.'

'No, Mr Howell, it is not all there.' He flicked the papers disdainfully. 'What is described there is a gambit, an opening move in which a small piece is sacrificed to secure a later advantage. We would like to know what game it is that we are being invited to play.'

I knew then that I would have to be careful with him. Chain-smoker he might be, but he was certainly no fool. If he had been English he would probably have described my aide-memoire as a sprat to catch a mackerel, but gambit was also a pretty accurate description - too accurate for my liking. I looked at the senior official.

'What I had hoped for here, sir,' I said sternly, 'was a serious discussion of serious proposals. I have no intention of playing any sort of game.'

'Dr Hawa was speaking figuratively, of course.'

Hawa had a thin smile. 'As Mr Howell appears to be so sensitive I will put the matter another way.' He looked at me again. 'You ask, Mr Howell, for ministerial endors.e.m.e.nt of an application for the release of blocked funds in order that they may be reinvested here. In return you undertake to confer on the state' a number of economic blessings, the nature of which you hint at, but the value of which you leave to the imagination. More specifically however, you offer to relinquish control of your remaining enterprises here, including a tannery and a flour mill, so that they may become cooperatives working under government auspices. Naturally we are curious about the spirit and temper of this strange gift horse, and about the business philosophy of the giver, the man who is seeking funds for reinvestment. So, I ask you to satisfy our curiosity.'

I shrugged. 'As you probably know our company here has. .h.i.therto been a family affair. My grandfather and my father before me have done business in this country for many years. I think it fair to say that it has been useful business.'

'Useful? Don't you mean profitable?'

Tor me that is a distinction without a difference, Dr Hawa. Useful and profitable of course. Is there any other kind of business worth doing?' I thought I had his measure now. In a moment he was going to start talking about ownership of the means of production. I was wrong.

'But useful to whom, profitable to whom?"

'Useful to all those of your people to whom our company pays good wages and salaries - here, I may remind you, we employ only Syrian nationals. Profitable certainly to our company's shareholders, but profitable also to the successive governments, Turkish, French and Syrian, which have taxed us. Dividends have not always been certain, but wages and taxes have always been promptly paid.' And, I might have added, so had the bribes, petty and not so petty, which were part of any Levantine overhead; but I was still trying to handle him tactfully.

'Then why, Mr Howell, are you so eager to relinquish control of these useful and profitable businesses?'

'Eager?' I gave him a blank stare. 'I a.s.sure you, Dr Hawa, that I am not in the least eager. My impression is that ultimately I will have no choice in the matter.'

'Ultimately, perhaps, but why this premature generosity? Understandably, I think, we find it puzzling, and a little suspect.'

'Only because you are not looking at my proposals as a whole. I think I am being realistic.'

'Realistic? How?'