Murray picked up a remote control off the conference table and pushed a button. “The most immediate—and arguably most likely—scenario is that Iran will never get the Bomb.” All eyes were riveted to the digital display. “Instead, the Israelis, hoping against hope that they can neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat before the ayatollahs are truly able to destroy their country, will launch a massive preemptive strike.” On the screen, missiles were suddenly flying in every direction throughout the Middle East as Israel struck first followed by the retaliation of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
Not a single country in the region remained unaffected. The simulated Iranian response to Israel’s first strike showed Persian missile strikes against every major Israeli city, but also against oil fields, refineries, and shipping facilities throughout Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Arab emirates in the Gulf. At the same time, Iranian missiles were hitting cities and military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel, meanwhile, was not simply being hit by hundreds of Iranian missiles, but also by tens of thousands of missiles, rockets, and mortars from Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza. With Israeli missiles and fighter jets firing back, it was clear the entire region was going to be set on fire.
Murray hit another button, enlarging the scope of the digital map, and David saw flashes in cities throughout Europe as well as the Middle East. These, the deputy director for operations explained, represented suicide bombers being unleashed en masse. Then David noticed a series of digital counters in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, estimating casualties from the entire conflict. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians would die, David realized—Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Millions more would be wounded or left homeless by the devastation. And not only would the Middle East and Europe be affected, the United States would be as well. It was almost impossible to imagine sleeper cells not being activated, hitting Americans and Canadians with a blizzard of terrorist attacks.
While David was still focused on the casualty projections, Zalinsky evidently decided it was time to broaden the young man’s perspective. “As bad as the human toll would be, it would not be limited to death and injury,” he explained. “The economic analysts over in the directorate of intelligence tell me they would expect oil prices to skyrocket in this scenario.”
“How high?” David asked.
“No one really knows—two hundred dollars a barrel? three hundred dollars a barrel? Maybe more.”
Such a dramatic spike in oil prices—overnight but also sustained for months and possibly years on end—could sink an already-fragile global economy. Soaring energy prices could quickly trigger hyperinflation, David surmised. Skyrocketing prices would send the cost of many goods beyond the reach of the poor and lower middle class. Millions would be pushed into poverty. People would stop spending on almost anything but food and basic staples, triggering massive business failures. Tens of millions of people would soon be out of work. As the dominoes fell, a global depression could ensue. And this, of course, was assuming the conflict was simply a conventional war, not one that actually went nuclear. David wasn’t sure that was a safe assumption, but the point wasn’t lost on him.
He glanced at Eva. At the moment, she was looking down, jotting notes, but she clearly wasn’t reacting to all this with much emotion. Assuming she was a thinking, feeling, rational person, that could mean only one thing: she had heard this information before. She had already run the various scenarios and processed them at length.
Then another thought dawned on him. He wasn’t going into Iran alone; Eva was going with him. She wasn’t an Agency analyst. She was a NOC operative. Zalinsky said she had helped construct some of David’s cover stories in the past, but if she were simply helping design his new assignment going forward, why would Murray and Zalinsky have her in the room? There was no other reason than for the two of them to become acquainted prior to embarking on a mission that might cost both of them their lives.
David looked back at the images flickering on the display and knew in that instant that his dream of killing Osama bin Laden and avenging the death of Marseille Harper’s mom was evaporating in front of his eyes. But to his surprise, he wasn’t angry or depressed. Rather, he found himself unexpectedly exhilarated. His country needed him. He was one of the few Persian Americans in the CIA’s clandestine services. He spoke Farsi like a native. He would have an airtight cover story. He didn’t yet know exactly how Murray was going to use him, but he’d learn soon enough. The bottom line was clear. He was heading into Iran. His mission was to stop the ayatollahs before they got their hands on the Bomb. Before the Israelis took matters into their own hands. Before Armageddon. Better yet, he was going with a beautiful, intelligent girl he looked forward to getting to know. All that, and he was leaving in seventy-two hours.
The phone rang.
The DDO answered it, then turned to the others and said, “Another massacre in Yemen—I need to take this. Jack, I trust you and Eva can proceed from here.”
Zalinsky nodded and quietly signaled David and Eva to gather their papers and follow him back downstairs to the Near East Division.
31
Back on the sixth floor, they signed out a conference room.
Zalinsky ordered some Chinese food from the commissary, and the three of them locked themselves away for the rest of the day. Only then did Zalinsky hand David and Eva a thick briefing book on the mission ahead of them.
“Memorize it, both of you,” Zalinsky said when they had finally settled in. “I’m sure you’ve already figured this out, David, but Eva is going in too. Her cover will be the MDS project manager. In reality, she’ll also be running the Agency’s operation on the ground and reporting back directly to me. Her code name is Themis.”
The Greek goddess of divine law and order? She was going to be insufferable, David concluded.
Zalinsky, however, didn’t give David time to ponder the implications. He cut straight to the bottom line. “Time is of the essence. I can’t stress this enough. I’ve talked to all of the Agency’s best Iran analysts in the intelligence directorate. Most believe Tehran could have functional nuclear weapons in two to three years. Some say it will take them longer. But the problem is, the Israelis don’t trust our analysis. They’re worried we’re making another catastrophic error of judgment.”
“You mean 1998—India and Pakistan,” David said.
Zalinsky nodded. “We knew both countries had been racing to build the Bomb for decades, but we were caught completely off guard when they both tested nukes within days of each other. We had no idea they had crossed the nuclear finish line and built dozens of nuclear weapons until it was too late to do anything about it. And that’s just one example. The Agency had no idea the Soviets were so close to testing their first nuclear weapon in 1949 until the test actually occurred. And don’t forget Saddam Hussein in 1981; we didn’t realize just how close he was to building nuclear weapons until the Israelis took out the Osirak nuclear reactor just before it went hot.”
“And then there’s Iraq again in 2003,” Eva chimed in.
No kidding, David thought. Arguably the Agency’s most disastrous mistake to date was having convinced President George W. Bush that Iraq had large and dangerous stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction—and that the case for proving it to the international community was, in the now-infamous turn of phrase by the director of central intelligence at the time, “a slam dunk.” To be sure, some WMDs were found in Iraq after the liberation of the country by U.S. and coalition forces. But the weapons that were discovered were neither the types nor quantities of WMDs the U.S. and the world had expected to find. Nor were they the types and quantities the CIA had warned about. As a result, the credibility of the CIA and her sister agencies throughout the American government had been so badly damaged that they still had not fully recovered.
“So the problem,” Zalinsky concluded, “is that we now have to be very careful about assessing the WMD capabilities of enemy nations, Iran included. The analysts in the CIA�
��s intelligence directorate are terrified of making mistakes and of being accused of overstating what they know. So they hedge their written and oral assessments. No one wants to sound too concerned about Iran getting the Bomb for fear of looking like they’re goading the president into another war.”
“So let me get this straight,” David said. “The Israelis think we blew the call in the past by not realizing just how close Saddam and India and Pakistan and others were to getting the Bomb. And the Israelis think we blew the call a few years ago by thinking Saddam was closer to building the Bomb and stockpiling WMDs than he really was. So when our best analysts say Iran is still several years away from getting the Bomb, the Israelis think we’re smoking crack?”
“Let’s just say they’re not brimming with confidence,” Zalinsky said. “But it’s even worse than that.”
“How so?”
“A few weeks ago while you were in Karachi, David, and you, Eva, were in Dubai, I had lunch in Jerusalem with Israel’s top spook at the Mossad. He told me, look, the world already knows Iran is building nuclear facilities. The world already knows they’re training nuclear scientists and enriching uranium at a breakneck pace and building ballistic missiles that can reach not only Israel but Europe as well. The world has already heard the Iranian leadership repeatedly threaten to annihilate Judeo-Christian civilization and wipe Israel and the U.S. off the map. So why isn’t the world taking decisive action to stop Iran from getting the Bomb? Why isn’t the U.S. building a coalition to invade Iran and change this fanatical regime? The world, he noted, went to war with Iraq in 2003 with far less evidence. I told him there is simply no appetite—and no money—in the U.S. or Europe or anywhere for another war in the Middle East. So he asked, doesn’t Israel, then, have not only the legal right but the moral responsibility to go to war with Iran now, if the world is just going to sit on its hands and do nothing?”
“I hear his point,” David said. “But given the fact that a war between Israel and Iran could set the region on fire and seriously impact the global economy, do we really want Israel to be deciding the fate of the region and the world all by itself?”
“No, we don’t,” Zalinsky said. “And that’s what I told him. That’s why the secretary of defense is en route to Tel Aviv as we speak to warn the Israelis not to take matters into their own hands. That’s why President Jackson has had no less than three phone conversations with Prime Minister Naphtali in the past month urging him to let us ramp up covert efforts rather than drag the world into a war no one wants. Which brings the three of us to this room. Last week the president quietly signed a highly classified national intelligence directive. It authorizes the CIA ‘to use all means necessary to disrupt and, if necessary, destroy Iranian nuclear weapons capabilities in order to prevent the eruption of another cataclysmic war in the Middle East.’”
Zalinsky then reached into his briefcase, pulled out a copy of the directive, and slid it across the table for David and Eva to read for themselves.
As David read the one-page document, Eva asked, “How much time does the Mossad think they have before Iran has an operational nuclear weapon?”
Zalinsky took back the “eyes only” directive and returned it to his briefcase, then answered the question. “They’re convinced Iran will have the Bomb by the end of the year . . . and an operational warhead by the end of next year.”
David tensed. Even if the Israelis were wrong, even if they were being too pessimistic, their assessment could mean only one thing—if the U.S. did nothing, the Israelis were going to launch a massive strike against Iran, and soon.
32
It was just after midnight when Zalinsky let them go.
They had spent nearly fourteen hours poring over the briefing book and talking through various aspects of the mission. It was now February 12. They would meet again at a safe house in Dubai on the evening of Monday, February 14, he told them. There he would give them several more days of briefings before sending them in. In the meantime, Zalinsky suggested they get lost for the weekend—the Caribbean, Cancún, Cozumel, someplace that didn’t start with a C; he didn’t really care.
“Enjoy yourselves,” he ordered. “Clear your heads. Get some fresh air. It might be your last break for a while.”
Eva immediately started texting someone to make plans. David wondered if she had a boyfriend or a fiancé and surprised himself with the twinge of disappointment he felt. They had, after all, only just met. But he said good-bye and left the building without asking any questions. He didn’t want to seem too forward or too interested so quickly. He would find out in due time where she had gone and with whom, he figured. He and Eva were about to spend a lot of time together. There was no point stumbling at the starting gate.
As he stepped out of the CIA’s main building and headed to the parking garage to pick up his company loaner for the weekend—a Chevy Impala—he stared up at a million diamonds sparkling on the dazzling black canvas above him. He breathed in the brisk, still, cloudless night air and tried to enjoy the beauty and the silence. He was energized by the prospect of the mission ahead of him, but at the same time he suddenly felt alone in the world. He didn’t have a girlfriend. He didn’t have a best friend. He hardly had any friends to hang out with aside from Zalinsky and his Mobilink rent-a-friends in Karachi. He tried to think about the last time he was really happy, and it inevitably brought him back to thoughts of his time with Marseille in Canada. Before 9/11. Before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before joining the CIA. It was so long ago, and the memories were painful. He tried to think of something else.
There was, he realized, nowhere to go except home. He was rarely in the U.S. these days, and he hadn’t really kept in touch with anyone in the States aside from his parents. His brothers had little interest in his overseas life. They would have, of course, if he told them that he worked for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. That he’d been hunting down the upper echelons of al Qaeda’s leaders to have them assassinated. That he was now on a mission to penetrate the inner circle around Iranian president Ahmed Darazi and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Hamid Hosseini.
But he couldn’t tell them any of that without going to prison. So even with his family, he stuck with his cover—that he was running his own little computer consulting practice in Munich. And Azad and Saeed’s lack of caring did have an upside. It prevented David from having to lie so much to their faces.
His parents, on the other hand, were a different story. They cared a great deal about David’s work and personal life, and their curiosity had made things significantly more complex. For one thing, it produced twinges of guilt every time he told them anything other than the truth. His mother, in particular, constantly peppered him with questions. She wanted him to call more, to write more, to come home for Christmas (though they had never celebrated Christian holidays growing up). His father was almost as persistent, urging him at the minimum to come home for the annual fishing trip to Canada. But there was nothing David wanted less than to go back to that island and relive memories of Marseille.
So he always had a million excuses. Business trips, conferences, new clients, old clients, billing problems—the list went on and on. He hated the secrecy and the deceit and the distance, but he really didn’t see another way. Increasingly, however, he worried that if he didn’t go home soon, his parents would make good on their threats to just fly to Munich one day and “pop in.” Given that David didn’t actually even live in Munich—his apartment, phone, and mailbox there were all simply to maintain his cover story—that would be a disaster.
It was time to go home, he concluded. So he signed out the Impala and headed north.
He drove all night.
He arrived in Syracuse just under seven hours later, pulled into his parents’ driveway—tucked away in a little cul-de-sac off East Genesee Street—and finally turned off the engine. As a light snow fell, he stared at his childhood home. He knew he should go in. He could see lights beginning to come on
inside. He could picture his mother padding about in her robe and slippers, making tea and toast for his father and softly singing Persian melodies with the Food Network on in the background.
But David wasn’t ready to go domestic just yet. His body might have come home, but his head was still back at Langley, swimming with numbers.
• 5,000—the number of miles of fiber-optic cable networks in Iran in the year 2000.
• 48,000—the number of miles of fiber-optic cable networks there in 2008.
• 4,000,000—the number of cell phones in Iran in 2004.
• 43,000,000—the number of cell phones there in 2008.
• 54,000,000—the number of cell phones there now.
• 70,000,000—the combined number of Iranians in country and in exile.
• 100,000,000—the number of SMS messages sent daily in Iran.
• 200,000,000—the number of text messages that would be sent daily in Iran in the next twelve to eighteen months.
• $9.2 billion—the revenue produced by the Telecommunication Company of Iran, or Iran Telecom, in 2009.
• $12.4 billion—the projected revenue for Iran Telecom in 2014.
Zalinsky believed such explosive growth in the Iranian telecommunications arena afforded the Agency a unique window of opportunity. The regime in Tehran was investing heavily in modernizing and expanding its civilian communications networks. Simultaneously, they were spending aggressively on a parallel track to create a secure and robust military communications system.
As Iran feverishly tried to become a regional nuclear power—and soon a world power—the Supreme Leader wanted his country to have state-of-the-art voice and data networks for all sectors of society, but especially for the military’s system of command and control. To get there as quickly as possible, the Iranians were reaching out in an unprecedented way to European technology companies, offering them contracts worth billions of dollars to upgrade Iran’s hardware and software and provide them with much-needed technical assistance.
The Twelfth Imam Page 14
