“How big a mistake was this in Oosay?”
“When we know, we’ll be done with this.”
“And you’d like to stay alive long enough to also find out what they’re hiding.”
“Not funny, Sam.”
“Sure it’s a joke?”
“If I were, I wouldn’t be asking you to do this.”
She offers the first shadow of a genuine smile.
“Okay.”
And they eat their lunch in peace.
RENA HAS BEEN HOME a few days from California. He has made little more progress on Oosay than he has with the cat Vic gave him for Christmas.
The animal has spent his first days in Washington hiding behind the dryer in Rena’s row house. The only evidence the animal has moved is when Rena returns home from work and there is a little less food in a dish that now sits on the floor in the breakfast nook. Even the litter box is inconclusive. The cat still has no name.
Twenty
FRIDAY, JANUARY 3, 3:15 P.M.
TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA
When Jill Bishop arrives at the restaurant, the woman she calls “Talon” is already seated at the usual table in the back. She’s nursing a Thai beer and ordered one for Bishop.
Talon is a nickname Bishop uses in her notes for a senior CIA officer from the intelligence division. The name is a reference to the long fingernails Talon once mentioned she wore in graduate school, a small indulgence in her otherwise utilitarian approach to personal grooming. When she joined the CIA after getting her master’s, an instructor at “the Farm” where the Agency trains new recruits ordered her to cut the nails short. Back then she did everything she was told.
The story is obscure enough that Bishop thinks “Talon” would be a safe alias if anyone ever got access to Bishop’s notes—by hacking them, stealing them, or, God forbid, by court order. The woman’s real name is Katherine.
Talon slides the beer toward Bishop. The reporter in turn leans down to her bag, picks out a box, and puts it on the table. “Merry Christmas,” she says. “From Peru.” Talon unwraps the box and admires the scarf inside.
“I got something for you, too.” Talon gives Bishop her own box. Inside is a set of three monkeys carved in ivory.
The reporter grins. “I love it.”
A year ago Talon helped Bishop break a story about three men in Iraq who had peddled bad intelligence to the U.S. government. The faulty intelligence connected a well-known militia leader to Islamic radicals. Many at Talon’s level in the Agency doubted the information but were overruled from above. The militia leader was killed in a drone strike, destabilizing that part of the country. At the Agency, the Iranian men who’d peddled the bad intelligence were known as “the three monkeys.” Such fuckups need to be reported so they don’t get repeated, Talon thought.
She is tiny and dark haired, with thin, delicate features that have taken on a harsher look over the years from the stress of her job. She is in her midforties, about five years younger than Bishop, and has reached a point in her career where she is highly skilled and has already made many of the compromises women confront in the covert world. Katherine has lost one marriage and is weighing how much she wants to fight to save her second. She mostly worries about the effect that would have on her two daughters.
“Well, you’ve got the whole freaking U.S. intelligence community in lockdown right now, Jill,” Talon says.
“Oh?”
“The investigation into Oosay has basically slowed down to nothing. The excuse is the holidays.”
“Maybe it is the holidays.”
Talon offers Bishop a doubting look.
A waitress approaches but keeps some distance. The two diners are regulars, and the waitress, an older Thai woman, knows they like their privacy. Talon nods for her to come to the table. The CIA agent orders pad thai, as she always does. Just as she always insists they come to the same Thai restaurant.
These meetings of reporters and intelligence sources are not like the ones you see in the movies. You don’t meet outside, on the street by the Washington Monument—good for a location “wide shot”—or at a secluded park or in a parking garage. Being outside makes surveillance too easy. It is also, to be honest, too campy, and it makes sources self-conscious.
So Bishop usually suggests a restaurant, someplace not too crowded, a place with booths where you can talk and expect some privacy. You go late afternoon or early evening or sometimes late—whenever there aren’t a lot of people around. Someplace innocuous. Somewhere in the suburbs. Somewhere that neither Bishop nor the source is likely to bump into someone they know.
When you cover the intelligence beat, you also don’t wear a press pass around your neck that gets you access to a building. You don’t have a cubicle at CIA headquarters or attend press briefings. You don’t get official statements and press announcements sent to your “in” basket. You have to develop your own clandestine network of people in national security who put their careers in your hands. You earn their trust, and you pay it back by protecting them—even going to jail to do it. These are relationships, friendships. Bonds. They take time. Sometimes years. Ninety percent of the job, Bishop estimates, is spent finding people and earning their trust. Only about 10 percent is spent actually reporting and writing stories.
“People are sheltering in place,” Katherine says. “Hiding under their desks. You touched a nerve.”
Bishop and Talon have known each other three years. They were introduced by a retired Agency source of Bishop’s who was a mentor of Talon’s. Retired spies were critical to covering intelligence. They felt freer to talk, and if they were retiring early, as many did, they usually had grievances. That’s why they were retiring early.
In time, former agents introduced you to their own network of friends still on active duty, people whose information is more current and who can track things down for you, be your guide and your sounding board.
For reasons Bishop could never quite figure out, most of the introductory meetings at which trusted sources brought along a friend to meet Bishop occurred at the same one or two places. The favorite one was an espresso bar at the Hotel Royale near Tysons Corner, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. The coffee bar, with the absurdly ironic name “Ronde-voux,” is a favorite of old spies, many of whom went on to work for defense contractors after leaving government. A lot of arms, matériel, and technology got sold in Ronde-voux. Not all of it legally.
Bishop never understood why spies liked to behave so daringly in front of each other. Maybe, having lived in the secret world, they felt safer doing their business where they could watch one another.
After their own introduction at Ronde-voux, Bishop and Talon spent months talking—sometimes every week—usually at the same Thai restaurant they are in now. “Tell me about your career. Tell me about your kids.” Katherine had earned a master’s in international relations at Wisconsin. She wasn’t recruited to the Agency through some talent spotter. That sort of thing was rare now. She’d seen the job opening at the CIA online, like she was applying for a job at IBM.
“You’d think spies would have more backbone than to be frightened by one newspaper story,” Talon says.
“Depends on the story.” Bishop smiles.
“They’re like frightened little boys.”
The two women got together nearly every week for six months before Bishop ever pulled a notebook from her bag. She set it on the table between them. Wordlessly. Ceremoniously. The motion deliberate—the message unmistakable: Here is a notebook. I’m now going to ask you questions and take notes. I am becoming a reporter. You are becoming a source. The crossing of the Rubicon. She had engaged in the same ceremony with a number of spies over the years.
Bishop and Talon crossed that Rubicon two and a half years ago. Since then, Talon has helped on a half dozen stories.
People in the secret world talk to reporters for various reasons, but none do so without getting something out of it. Sometimes it’s violent disagreement
over policy—trying to stop the government from making what a source thinks is a terrible mistake. Sometimes it’s moral outrage over something the government intends to do that a spy thinks is wrong. Spies oddly tend to be idealists. Sometimes the motives are more personal, trying to exact revenge or vent frustration. Nearly everyone Bishop knows in the intelligence world is unhappy about something. Sometimes when spies talk to reporters they are simply playing a dangerous game of office politics, one faction vying with another using the New York Times or the Washington Tribune as leverage. Sometimes people just want to feel important. Usually it isn’t one reason alone.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether any one leaker’s actions are noble or traitorous, Bishop thinks, but the more senior someone gets in the world of intelligence, the more likely that at one time or another they have been a source. You don’t survive near the top, and almost never rise higher, without having allies in the press.
Through all her years at it, Bishop has learned one lesson that is constant. You never judge a confidential source by his or her motives. You judge them by the information they provide. Period. Is what they are telling true? Can it be verified? Should the public know it? Or is it better kept a secret? Everything else is quicksand.
“Tell me, Katherine. What do you mean by lockdown?”
“After your story ran, there was an order to expedite a full draft of the internal Agency report on the Oosay incident. The section you saw and others were put together and sent up the line. Then it was supposed to be sent back down for one last review. But now it’s vanished.”
“What do you mean vanished?”
“The people who were working on the report can’t find it anymore. It’s gone from the system. Or they no longer have access.”
This was a story—if Bishop could get more:
An internal intelligence community review of the events leading up to the attack in Oosay that left four Americans dead has been pulled back from distribution.
But Bishop would need more. She’d need to talk to someone who’d seen the report and knew for certain what was in it, someone who could confirm that it had now disappeared.
What Talon has told her is only a tip.
When did the report go up the line? What day? When did someone first notice it had vanished from the system? How many people have tried to look for it? Did the report have a title? What department was responsible for it?
Before she finishes eating, Talon says, “I have to go.”
“Meet in a week?” Bishop suggests.
This is how almost every encounter with a national security source ends. Bishop always meets her intelligence sources face-to-face. You avoid electronics as much as possible. No phone calls. No text messages. No email. At the end of each meeting, Bishop makes a verbal plan for the next one. It isn’t only safer. If someone wants to back out, they can just fail to show up. But then they would be ending a relationship that was usually as valuable to them as it was to Bishop. And they’d have to hazard electronics all over again if they wanted to reconnect.
“I could do next Friday,” Talon says.
Bishop nods.
Talon looks at the calendar on her phone. “I could do two o’clock. Then I have a field hockey game.”
“See you here, two o’clock next Friday. A week.” Bishop writes it down in a small Filofax notebook she keeps. She still has one. Pen and paper are more secure. Katherine keeps one, too. One Bishop gave her.
Katherine rises. “I gotta go.” They hug and kiss and Katherine leaves the restaurant for her kids and the husband she isn’t sure of.
Bishop wonders how she can confirm the story of the missing report and what it contained that people at the highest levels of the CIA wanted to keep hidden.
Twenty-One
THURSDAY, JANUARY 9
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Dick Bakke had been waiting for something like this, something from the outside to trigger hearings on Oosay. When you mix power and ambition and foolishness—and they are always part of the mix in Washington—you never had to wait too long.
It comes in the form of a phone call from a man named Lester Winley. Winley is the legislative director of a conservative foreign policy think tank called the National Security Institute, which is famous for filing copious numbers of federal Freedom of Information Act requests designed to expose the government as bloated and dysfunctional. And he hates President Nash.
“Senator, I come bearing a gift,” Winley says in his ornate way, as if they were citizens of ancient Rome.
The gift, Winley explains, is a four-page memo written by a press aide to Arthur Manion titled “How to Discredit the President’s Critics on Oosay.”
The memo’s author, Aaron Rubin, was a friend of Diane Howell, who had been sent to State to help Manion with communications.
It argued, “The only way to defend the president on Oosay is to play offense.”
The memo even offered “talking points” to attack anyone curious or critical about what happened in Oosay.
While cynics might not be shocked that the administration was trying to organize its political defense on Oosay, a paid government staffer using his time and official capacity to do so went too far. It seemed proof that the administration did not want anyone to really know what happened that tragic night in Morat; it even raised the possibility that the administration’s so-called internal probe into the incident by Rena and Brooks was a sham.
Bakke thinks the talking points themselves aren’t half bad—if you played for the other team.
“Denounce anyone attacking the president over Oosay as disgracefully exploiting the death of American citizens for political purposes.”
“Say these critics are emboldening our enemies by sowing division at home.”
“Note that Oosay critics are weakening the United States by presenting a conflicted face to the world.”
“How’d you get this?” Bakke asks.
A year ago, Winley explains, he submitted an FOIA request to the State Department demanding all documents relating to improving security at U.S. foreign installations abroad—everything from Jim Nash’s inauguration to the present. Yesterday, that request was approved. Among the ten thousand pages Winley received was this memo.
“An oversight, I suspect,” Winley says.
Bakke leans back in his high-back red-leather senatorial chair and thinks there are times when you have to love the incompetence of the federal government.
After Winley emails the memo over, Bakke thinks that if it isn’t exactly a smoking gun, it would still make news. Friendly cable hosts would call it “explosive,” and even newspapers, which Bakke thinks are so liberal now they don’t even recognize it, would call it “controversial.”
But he doubted it would be enough to finally persuade Senate Majority Leader Susan Stroud to allow him to hold hearings. He’d tried twice before in the month since Oosay, and the Senate majority leader had resisted: “Too soon . . . we’re on recess . . . we should wait for a public clamor.”
Mainly, Bakke thought, Stroud didn’t want him to chair hearings about the current president because she didn’t want Richard Bakke to become the next president.
For all Dick Bakke disliked liberalism, with its elitist disdain for the idea that America had been anointed by God to be a beacon for the rest of the world, his most dangerous enemy, he knew, was the old guard in his own party. And that meant people like Susan Stroud.
Bakke had entered politics with a purist’s vision. The country had been on a long slide toward faded glory since the 1960s, he believed, and the main reason was the government had swollen in size like a cancerous tumor. America had become basically a socialist nation. The federal debt had exploded and, with it, our vulnerability to foreign powers that held the notes, especially Chinese, Russian, and Middle Eastern powers that backed radical Islam. The only way back was to return to the vision of small and efficient government that predated Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and even Woodrow Wils
on’s activism—a true belief that the best government was one kept off people’s backs.
Susan Stroud, Bakke thought, was not only from a different time—at seventy-three she was twenty-five years his senior—but she also came from a whole different world. She came from a world of privilege, political dynasty, country clubs, and her daddy’s car dealerships all over Mississippi. In Stroud’s world, conservatism was about conserving what you had.
That was emphatically not Dick Bakke’s world. He came from nothing and spent his life making his own hole to climb through. He didn’t like to complain or even talk much about it. But with his mother largely absent and his father dead, he was raised by grandparents and recalled his childhood now as a growing realization he was smarter than most of the people his grandparents described as “above” them. They ran a failing roller rink in rural Kentucky, and “their Richie” worked every humiliating job in the place, taking tickets, working the concession, waxing the floor, even serving as “Roll-ee the Raccoon,” the rink mascot, adorned in a giant, wool, sweat-soaked raccoon suit on roller skates. A worker, a watcher, angry, envious, and driven, he learned that resentment could be a kind of fuel. He also learned as he got older that he was not the only one who felt the way he did, and he could use that fuel to outpace nearly everyone who had all those advantages he lacked. Bakke was the first in his family to go to college, lived at home through law school, finished first in his class, and later was picked to be a Supreme Court clerk. Roll-ee the Raccoon.
Susan Stroud will still say no to hearings if he calls her.
“Les, you give this memo to anyone else?” Bakke asks.
“I went to you right away, Senator,” Winley says.
“And I’m mighty glad you did, Les. Mighty glad. But to be fair, though, why don’t you give a call to Curtis Gains in the House, too.”
The Good Lie Page 12
