"This is the story of a person who does not claim to be a fighter for patriotic causes, a political leader or diplomat, it is merely a story of an ordinary citizen, who found himself thrust into the midst of events he had no choice but to be a part of — events he could neither evade or distance himself from, as they unfolded. This is just a story of a Yemeni citizen.”— Mohsin Alaini from his book, “ 50 Years in Shifting Sands,” translated by Hassan al-Haifi

In 2003, I landed in Yemen for the first time to surf and study Arabic dialects. I traveled at the invitation of Haitham Alaini, a young entrepreneur who was educated at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He had returned to Yemen to start a construction business that would eventually expand into oil and gas infrastructure, as well as security and I.T. He had a convoy of black Land Cruisers meet me on the tarmac and take me to his family’s home. The ride through downtown Sana’s trash-strewn streets was my first glimpse of a society seriously out of whack. During the next seven years, as I partied with the region’s high rollers and influence peddlers, the gulf between privilege and poverty would only get wider and more surreal.

Alaini’s family home is in the city’s diplomatic quarters. Its walls are hung with pictures of Haitham’s father, Mohsin, posing with J.F.K., with Zhou Enlai, with Nasser and with several other luminaries of the Arab Nationalist Movement of the ’60s and early ’70s. Mohsin Alaini was Yemen’s prime minister five times during that tumultuous period. His son, my host, grew up shuttling between world capitals, as Yemen split and reunited, north and south swept up in the two ideological passions — Arab nationalism and Soviet-style socialism — of the 1960s. By the early ’80s, whatever was left of the Arab Al-Nahda (renaissance) was replaced by a culture of lavish consumerism fueled by oil wealth.

Mohsin Alaini now lives and writes in Cairo, the city where he attended law school in the 1950s. Although most of his writing is political, he published a memoir that’s a snapshot of an Arab world rocked by dissent, much as it is now. He was part of a small group of Yemeni intellectuals who, inspired by the Egyptian revolution of July 1952, returned to Yemen intent on modernizing the country and establishing a republic. This is the ironic heritage of those autocratic regimes that have been upended by popular protests this year.

Alaini generously provided my friends and me with a Land Cruiser, two bodyguards, a satellite phone and a stack of guns. The next morning we left mountainous Sana by road, bound for the provinces. We didn’t return for 12 weeks as we explored every cove and peninsula of Yemen’s rocky Indian Ocean coast. This began my long and happy relationship with the rougher parts of Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

The desert coast of Somalia is another matter. Getting there is difficult. Somalia has little in the way of infrastructure, never mind consistent flight schedules available online. When my friends and I decided to surf there, our first stop en route was Dubai, where several Somali political exiles corralled us into endless meetings over Turkish coffee pleading for us to reinstate them to power. We nodded sympathetically and told them we had no means to help them. They smiled conspiratorially. It seems an American abroad is always thought of as a C.I.A. operative, unless he’s on safari or sketching a French cathedral.

When we eventually made it to Galkacyo, the main city of Somalia’s northern state of Puntland, we were collected from the airstrip by yet another convoy of Land Cruisers bearing smiling men with guns. We would spend the next month driving up and down the coast of Puntland, from Ras Xaafuun down to Eyl, with its angry pirates and bleak sand dunes. Our host was a local businessman who maintained his own private militia, as one does in failed states. Abdirizak Osman was a soft-spoken warlord, a graduate of Brown, with a fondness for golf and summer vacations in the Hamptons. He kept his wife and children at a lavish home in Dubai but spent most of his time nurturing his telecom business: STC Puntland. His business was thriving at that time, partly because his main rival had its assets frozen by the United States after 2001.

Osman ran the business from a sparsely furnished compound where he could take shelter from family members and townspeople who collected outside the gates of his main home, demanding adjudication or electricity, or any of the thousand things that one takes for granted in a state that has a functioning government. Upon leaving, we took tea with him, thanking him for his hospitality and wondering what we could send him from the United States. He chuckled quietly and looked around his house, furnished like an Ethan Allen showroom. He said: “Six months ago, I ordered a container of cigarettes from an Israeli-American. I paid in advance $100,000, and he disappeared with my money. Perhaps you can look into that for me? And secondly, the road between Galkacyo and Garowe is in bad shape. I need it to be paved.”

As guests of a man who keeps a private army of several hundred, it’s tough to say no. We said we would do our best.

I shuttled back and forth to the Mideast until 2008, when I moved to Dubai to start a consulting business, leveraging my experience building overpriced spec homes for gaudy Russians back in Los Angeles. I rented a small one-bedroom apartment for a blistering $6,000 a month because it was the only available flat I could find. Compensation for white-collar expats who worked in Dubai was grossly out of proportion to salaries back home. The streets were dense with Italian luxury two-seaters and blacked-out Range Rovers. The city’s financial firms, eager to lure the investment capital of wealthy and reportedly impulsive Gulf Arabs, competed to have the hottest looking staff. Five-inch stilettos and pencil skirts were de rigueur office attire, and the red lacquered Louboutin sole was ubiquitous. One developer topped the competition by employing sensationally beautiful Romanian twins with bleached blond pixie cuts as his receptionists.

Every night promised a new soiree for some vanity project, from a gallery for abstract Iranian sculpture to an online shopping service where one could order books, iPods, cigarettes, all guaranteed to be delivered in less than an hour.

Kate was one of those luxury-loving expats: a 23-year-old Republican with an insatiable appetite for Missoni. She was the the brand manager for Veuve Clicquot, and she was running two or three parties every night. Every new boutique and new ayurvedic cosmetic line demanded a lavish bash with premium bubbly. The news of the American financial crisis was shrugged off. The Islamic prohibition on alcohol was shrugged off. This was Dubai, after all.

But by early 2009, things started to change, and no one wanted to talk about it. The opportunistic expats quietly bolted, even though Dubai’s oldest families thought it best to proceed as if nothing had changed. Conspicuous consumption began to slacken, and major construction projects went silent. The mass exodus of white-collar workers sent rents plummeting. The long-term parking lot of the airport was full of abandoned Ferraris and Range Rovers, left by fired expats who had no intention of trying out Dubai’s breach-of-contract laws. Bankruptcy laws were still a year away, and debtors’ prison was the rule.

Luckily, that summer, I was awarded a big project in the Yemeni capital. The coastal drive from Dubai to Aden is fantastic at any time of the year, but the summer monsoon is the best. The difference between Yemen and the other states on the peninsula is stark: Yemen has a large and impoverished population, larger than Syria and almost as populous as Iraq. Just across the peninsula in the Gulf States, per capita incomes are in the $40,000 range, while in Yemen it is closer to $1,000. The disparity and proximity make the restlessness in Yemen understandable. The first time I crossed the peninsula, it was on a barely discernible track. This time, it was on a freshly paved highway where armed trucks from police checkpoints pulled in behind me as escorts for each stage of the road.

I rented a single-story house made of stone quarried from the surrounding mountains, in the leafiest part of Sana’s diplomatic quarter. I used the main hall to adapt local 150cc bikes into little cafe racers. The landlady was a Yemeni whose age was impossible to discern behind her hijab. Her English, though, had a flat Midwestern cadence. She arrived once a month to collect the rent and to complain about the foliage in the courtyard. The occupant before me was the Dutch embassy, and they had very nice furniture, she told me. I asked why the garden was such an untamed wilderness when I arrived. She addressed me by my full name, and said that the issue was not Dutch gardening, but her disappointment in me as a tenant; as an American, she expected more.

My new assignment brought me back into contact with Haitham Alaini, who had in the interim years befriended a couple of Afghan businessmen who ran their businesses from the comfort of Dubai. Kabir Arghandiwal, his neighbor in a high-rise called the Capricon Tower, was an affable fellow who loved Ed Hardy shirts and Diesel shoes. His Lebanese wife was a social fixture on Dubai’s art scene who reputedly made Kabir promise in a prenup that he could never take her nor their children to Afghanistan. He and his extended family manage logistics contracts for the ISAF forces in Afghanistan, and he is a partner in a passenger air service, FlyDubai.

Saad Mohseni was the third member of this group of Dubai neighbors who were sometimes called “the axis of evil” by their American friends. As chairman of the Moby Group, which he founded, Saad Mohseni was Afghanistan’s first media mogul. Not only has he pushed programming that provokes religious conservatives and government officials alike, but he has also built his media empire on ad revenue, which is astonishing in a war-ravaged economy. From his first days as a USAID-funded upstart until today, when ex-State Department staff work to expand his media efforts across the globe, he has shown a keen sense of how to balance politics and profitability. A headline in a local paper recently called him “Top Adman,” which is less glamorous than “the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan,” but perhaps more accurate. His success has opened many doors, including a partnership with the real Murdoch for an Iranian TV network based in Dubai.

On a warm quiet Friday morning in 2008, I joined Mohseni and Alaini outside a Starbucks in the financial center. Mohseni was wearing the weekend uniform of Dubai’s ascending power broker: cotton walking shorts belted a bit high, sockless loafers and an expression of haughty indifference. His wife, Sarah Takesh, was dressed in cotton hippie-chic of her own design, made by her company in Kabul. She was reading “The Dirt,” the Mötley Crüe story. Saad made polite conversation; Sarah made a point of being engrossed in the history of rock. They bickered over the details of their coming vacation in the Maldives. They fussed about shipping damage to their custom-made furniture, in transit from workshops in Kabul.

Mohseni and Alaini had been brought together by an interesting and universally admired character in Middle Eastern politics: Tom Freston, who has been tireless in his efforts to connect Mohseni to media players and politicians in the United States. He brokered Mohseni’s partnership with Murdoch, and has been in many ways his mentor. It may seem curious that the man who was head of Viacom should be trolling war zones for protégés, but Freston is a man of many interests. While balancing his involvement in Oprah’s new network with Bono collaborations, he maintains an unusual itinerary. In 2009, before Yemen topped America’s National Security priority list, he came to Dubai, to discuss a TV station in Yemen with Mohseni, among other things.

As of last year the TV station was still a work in progress. Mohseni met me for brunch at Baker & Spice in Dubai. While Sarah chatted about spending the rest of her pregnancy in the south of France, I asked Saad how long it would take for a TV venture like his to be profitable. He said one year. Clearly, he wasn’t counting on hustling airtime to local businesses at the going rate in Yemen (about $5 a second).

Later that summer, I traveled to Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, which by most estimates is among the poorest countries in the world, despite vast natural resources. I was a guest at the home of Rudy Ilumbe, a 26-year-old entrepreneur who grew up in Helsinki. Ilumbe is a big man who speaks quietly and listens intently. His English is smooth and polished, but he is more comfortable in French. His house is a sprawling Palm Springs-style ranch filled with Vitra furniture and an empty swimming pool. When I asked if he ever has pool parties, he said simply, “Swimming is for white people,” and then laughed. Other than the stock white Land Cruisers that his security detail rolls in, there was a Range Rover, a Bentley and an Audi S5 in the carport, each slammed and rimmed to match one another. We took the S5 out onto Kinshasa’s rutted dirt streets to the place where Ilumbe had recently booked 50 Cent. Over the first of many bottles of Perrier that his entourage racked up, Ilumbe toasted me and said: “I was always taught that nothing comes without hard work. In Finland I believed it and I worked hard, but I have to tell you; in Congo, making money is too easy.”

Ilumbe is tight with the president of Congo. He has secured gold, diamond and petroleum concessions for his European clients, and his consulting firm is booming.

Later that evening, Denis Christel Sassou-Nguesso stepped up to the table, hat low over his eyes, swigging from his own bottle of Perrier. As is customary from Kinshasa to Beirut to Mumbai, each magnum of Champagne is brought to the table with lit sparklers and a shout-out from the D.J. The name of Sassou became irritatingly repetitive as the night wore on and the bottles stacked up. Denis Christel is the son of the dictator of Congo-Brazzaville, Congo’s neighbor. He has been accused of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of the country’s oil revenues for shopping sprees in Paris, Dubai and Hong Kong. I excused myself from the table and moved through the packed club toward the restroom. Suddenly three guys materialized out of the crowd, escorting me through, and clearing the bathroom before I entered.

Somewhere toward the end of 2010, this story comes to an end with a bang, not a whimper. The day the cartridge bombs were discovered on planes in England and Dubai, I made some ill-timed inquiries to the offices of FedEx Yemen. The Yemeni military sealed the office, and because of my questions, I was told that I was no longer welcome in their country. Which is how I found myself exiled to East L.A. in late December, while across town at Soho House, Tom Freston convened a meeting with the owner of Yemen FedEx and other Mideast elite for a weeklong strategy session.