“That is a myth and absurd on its face,” Webster says with a great expulsion of air. “If we wanted to interrogate people in Morat, we wouldn’t do it in the middle of the city, on a property that had frequent visitors and is known as U.S. soil.”
The folds of flesh in Webster’s face mask any tension or emotion. Corpulence as cover.
“So what is the Barracks?”
Webster glances at the mysterious aide Durson.
“It’s actually a barracks,” the director says. “We wanted some place safe, where our people could spend the night and not worry about mortars. Something modern, with proper communications. Something impenetrable, which circumstances have shown, I think, was a pretty good idea.”
Garrett Franks had told them as much.
Rena leans forward to speak for the first time.
“What can you tell us about the drone video?”
“It doesn’t belong to the CIA,” Webster says.
“To whom does it belong?”
“I’d ask the air force. Or the DIA.”
Yesterday Howell had told them she had only just seen the drone video the day before. Now Webster is distancing himself from knowledge of it as well.
“What is your understanding of what that video shows?” Rena asks.
“I haven’t seen it.”
“I didn’t ask if you had seen it,” says Rena coldly. He is surprised by his own sudden metallic anger. It is as if their frustration with all the clever evasions of the last few weeks has come to rest in this last one by Webster. “I asked what your thoughts are about what it shows. I can’t imagine you would not have been briefed.”
Webster regards Rena a moment, trying to decide how to react to his visitor’s sudden change of mood. Two beads of sweat have appeared on Webster’s wide forehead.
“But you have seen it,” Webster says to Rena.
“Yes,” says Rena. “I’ve watched it carefully. It shows that the men who died that night in Oosay were not with General Roderick. He was guarded by one man. Why was that?”
“I’d ask the DIA.”
“The contractors who died, Phelps and Halleck, and the contractor who was wounded, O’Dowd, were they CIA hires?”
“The budget is classified.”
“Why would Adam O’Dowd lie to us about his location when he was wounded?”
“Did he?”
Rena leans closer to the director: “Why won’t you help us? Why won’t you help the president?”
“I am helping the president.”
“Then give us some idea of why Adam O’Dowd would lie about his location when he was wounded. Why was he not guarding General Roderick? Why was he running toward the Manor House and why, when he was wounded, were he and Franks then running away from the House, abandoning Roderick inside?”
Webster rises heavily from the sofa, with a great gasp of air, and walks in surprisingly delicate steps to his desk. He pushes a button and says into a speaker, “Can we get a pot of tea and some coffee?” When he returns, he settles back onto the sofa by shifting and easing his big body until he fits.
Then with a sigh, as if getting the lungs to work in the new position, he says, “Have you ever heard of the Office of Special Directives?”
“Should we have?” Brooks says.
Webster smiles. “Ah, yes, evasion may be government’s highest accomplishment. I suspect that is a tendency of any great power. In a democracy, secrecy is often a rarity and in the modern world a concept we have almost entirely lost. WeLeaks has hacked our classified budgets, and the Washington Tribune has published them. Congress has investigated our past. Rather than a secret agency located on a campus we cannot admit exists, we sell T-shirts now at the airport that say ‘CIA Langley’ on them and we have a highway exit sign on the George Washington Parkway. What is the alternative when you operate in the secret world in an age when nothing is secret? The only alternative is evasion.”
“You were talking about the Office of Special Directives,” Brooks says.
“Yes, confusing name, isn’t it. I believe it is part of the Defense Intelligence Agency.” Webster pauses. “Do you know Henry Arroyo?”
“I’ve heard the name,” says Rena.
“I think he and General Roderick may have been quite close. They are both, or were in the case of Roderick, very creative. Very bold warriors.”
Webster’s eyes move between Rena and Brooks.
“You might ask General Willey, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
Webster takes a deep breath and is done. He has delivered the message he had summoned them to hear: Oosay was a DIA operation, or more precisely the operation of something called the Office of Special Directives, an office run by someone named Henry Arroyo.
Rena’s face hardens.
“May I speak candidly, Director?”
Webster turns to Durson and smiles. “Are we in a secure location, Alan?”
“I believe so, sir,” Durson says.
Rena has had enough. His voice becomes quiet, just above a whisper, and his words come slowly and with a kind of menace.
“Whether or not you had anything to do with the incident in Oosay, sir, you own it. It happened on your watch. If the president is damaged by it, the CIA will be, too. It will be part of your legacy. It may, if it all goes badly, define your legacy.”
Rena pauses to make sure Webster is listening.
“In political terms, frankly, there really isn’t any space here between you and Oosay, you and the DIA, you and this Office of Special Directives, you and the president. Or you and us. The best way to protect your agency is to be on the side of those who want to get to the bottom of this. When it’s over, the only thing people will remember is who was trying to find out the truth, and who was covering it up.”
Rena and Webster hold each other’s gaze.
“I couldn’t agree more,” the director says at last. “I believe I have tried to do just what you suggest. Thank you for coming in today. I know how busy you must be.”
The young female agent who greeted them in the lobby now appears through a door Rena didn’t know existed. And she leads them all the way out.
DRIVING BACK TO THE DISTRICT, Brooks darts her BMW 535 in and out of traffic, accelerating and then braking, provoking a serenade of honks and shaken fists. Rena’s feet move instinctively beneath him, as if there were a clutch and brake, but he is helpless.
“We’re getting closer,” he says, trying to calm his partner. His anger is spent and hers is peaking. “That’s why Webster summoned us.”
“You know this man, Henry Arroyo?” she asks.
“Maybe.” Rena isn’t sure.
“I’m calling Wiley and Lupsa to meet us at the office,” she says.
They need only a few minutes to find a Henry Arroyo, a Marine colonel who four years ago was assigned to the DIA. His exact role is not listed. Nor, anywhere, is something called the Office of Special Directives.
And they begin to puzzle together some of the clues Webster has given them. If Oosay were a classified DIA operation, that would fit with the hints they had heard and perhaps not paid close enough attention to. Rousseau had told them the military wanted a larger role in Africa, in part because the Pentagon felt the CIA had usurped its role in the Middle East. They knew Roderick was an iconoclast and the DIA was the military’s intelligence operation.
“Can we find him?” Brooks asks.
Wiley and Lupsa have gone home, and they are alone in Rena’s office.
“It’s easy to hide when you’re funded by a black budget.”
“I need to tell you something,” Brooks says. “David Traynor called again. And I did something without asking you. I had Lupsa run a preliminary scan on him.”
A preliminary scan meant Lupsa had done whatever initial deep Web check he could. It is something they would do if they were considering the job but hadn’t yet agreed.
Rena gives his partner a stare. “And?”
“You mean
what did it show? Nothing disqualifying. Less than I would have guessed.”
“Maybe he is better at hiding it than most.”
“We need to give him an answer.”
Rena makes a grim face. “We need to find out about Henry Arroyo and the Office of Special Directives.”
“And then,” she says, “we need to give Traynor an answer.”
Part Three
How Not to Govern
Thirty
FRIDAY, JANUARY 31
WASHINGTON, D.C.
They concluded there was simply no alternative. They had to move up the date of the first Oosay hearing.
The chairman of the joint committee on Oosay, Curtis Gains, would have preferred more time. There were documents to read and witnesses to debrief—in effect a show to write and even rehearse. Good congressional hearings, after all, are a performance—one performed best without improvisation.
But matters had quickly slipped beyond their control.
The key witnesses were difficult to pin down. Through a phalanx of lawyers, the State Department aide who had authored the political attack memo had tried to set conditions for his appearance. Even more frustrating, the military and intelligence communities were claiming national security and stonewalling the committee about having anyone testify in public.
Then came the drone story. With that, Gains’s committee had lost “control of the narrative,” a phrase Gains had come to loathe the more he heard it out of the mouths of commentators on TV, hysterics in social media, and even some members of Congress. Washington, he sometimes felt, lived on overused catchphrases and borrowed ideas. The truth was more than “a narrative.”
The morning after the drone story was published, Republican members of the Oosay Committee had gathered in a small conference room next to the Senate majority leader’s office.
“I hope you have the taste of blood in your mouth, Mr. Chairman,” Senator Dick Bakke had said. Bakke, who was becoming something of a mentor to Gains, was harsh about it. “Because I think learning about this drone from the newspaper is a punch to the teeth of Congress.”
“That’s enough, Dick,” Majority Leader Stroud said.
“No, the senator’s right, ma’am,” Gains said. “We asked for any evidence the intelligence agencies had about Oosay, and we’ve received almost nothing.”
“So we should hold the first hearing as soon as possible,” Bakke had argued. “Put a marker down. While the public is watching. Deal with some low-hanging fruit. It’ll help create pressure.”
Stroud had worried aloud that “a poor hearing is worse than none at all,” and then had asked for the thoughts of Wendy Upton, the Arizona senator she had asked to serve on the committee.
According to one rumor, Stroud had asked Upton to serve on the Oosay Committee so there could be “an adult in the room.” Gains took that as an insult, though he knew it could also have been meant as a barb aimed at Bakke.
Gains didn’t know Upton well, but her reputation was formidable. And she was nothing if not adult. The story was part of her political biography. Upton’s parents had died in a car crash when she was sixteen and her sister just ten. Without any aunts or uncles to take them, the state intended to separate the sisters and put them into the children’s services system. Still only a junior in high school, Upton had sued the state of Arizona to become an emancipated minor, taken the GRE, and begun running her parents’ restaurant with the intention of raising her sister. When the younger Upton entered high school, Wendy finally enrolled at the University of Arizona in Tucson, graduating in two years. When the sister was old enough to go to college, Upton entered the army and went to law school.
Even Gains thought there was something about Upton, in the quiet way she carried herself—a sense of judgment and propriety—that was impressive.
“What do you think, Wendy?” Stroud had asked.
“I think bad hearings help no one, so rushing is dangerous,” Upton had answered. “But I believe in this case Senator Bakke is right. We can hold an initial hearing, put a marker down, and it might give us time to get it right.”
That had settled it, especially given that Upton and Bakke were considered to represent different parts of the party.
AND SO TODAY THEY ARE STARTING.
The lineup of witnesses isn’t perfect, Gains knows. National Security Advisor Diane Howell had agreed to talk about her now-discredited public statements about a protest run amok. Secretary of State Arthur Manion would testify about the failure of the State Department to deliver on instructions from Congress to improve the perimeter security on all U.S. installations abroad. An FBI forensics expert would describe what he had seen in the aftermath of the bombing.
It isn’t much. But no one wanted to launch the Oosay hearings with a closed session, which was the alternative. Senators and House members had statements they wanted to make, statements that would take up much of the morning. And a dull hearing, Gains told himself, might even signal to those who dismissed this as a political witch hunt that they were going to be serious in their approach.
That mattered to Gains. He aspired to be a serious legislator, just as he had been a serious prosecutor.
His young chief of staff, Tom Beyers, was by far the more political of the two. Beyers had urged him to press for hearings in the first place. And he had strong political instincts about how they should be structured now. One challenge was turning out to be the ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Fred Blaylish, who seemed to ascribe only the worst motives to everything Gains did. It was Beyers who had told Gains it was better, as a result, to operate largely without informing Blaylish of his plans.
Gains waits a moment longer for the other members to appear. They are just a few minutes behind schedule. And now it’s time.
Thirty-One
“Brian Roderick. Joseph Ross. Terry Halleck. Alan Phelps.”
Gains speaks the names with funereal solemnity.
“American heroes. Killed by cowards in the night. Patriots fighting for all that we hold dear in America.”
Is his microphone too low? Gains glances at Beyers, his chief of staff, seated in the row of aides behind him against the wall, and mouths the words “mike volume.”
The sound acoustics are complex: he has to be heard in the room, and Dirksen G50 is a large space. But the sound has to work for television, too, through the mult box, given that all the cable news channels are carrying them live.
Beyers nods, and Gains continues: “Our responsibility on this special joint committee is simple. It is to honor these four American heroes by learning everything we can about how they died.”
He’s worked on the opening statement hard, trying to tell a story, one that would sway a jury back in Pensacola.
“What do we owe these men and their families? We owe them justice, justice that their killers are punished. We owe them the truth. The truth about what happened to them. The truth about how our government and the Nash administration are conducting the war on Islamist extremism. The truth about what our intelligence agencies knew and didn’t know.”
Watching in his office at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Daniel Shane cringes. He has worried about Curtis Gains chairing this committee from the outset. By reputation, the Florida congressman is a serious person. But the man lacks experience, and no doubt is getting more advice than is good for him. Gains had been a prosecutor in Florida, Shane knew, and this was a prosecutor’s opening statement, but it was inappropriate at the opening of such a controversial congressional investigation. Were he still in the Senate, this rhetoric might have rolled off Shane’s back. But he isn’t in the Senate anymore. He is secretary of defense, responsible for the hundreds of thousands of people in uniform, and the thousands more who support them.
The more he hears, the more Shane bristles. In what universe, he thinks, should Congress air in public hearings what U.S. intelligence knows about America’s enemies? With these grandstanding opening remarks, Gains is all but advocati
ng treasonous acts without even knowing it.
Shane picks up the phone and calls Owen Webster at the CIA. Gains’s rhetoric, he imagines, is probably making the spymaster’s skin crawl. And he and Webster could use a little bonding.
“You watching this?”
“Do I have to?” says Webster.
“Yeah, Owen, you do.”
“Well, I am.”
“We owe these fallen heroes the truth about whether we provided all the protection they required,” Gains is saying.
The chairman’s list of “truths” is now at about twelve.
“We owe it to these fallen men to know whether our government has told the truth to the American people about their sacrifice.”
In the public seating area, about halfway back, Randi Brooks is also surprised by Gains but less disheartened. She had worked on many congressional investigations in her career. That’s where she and Rena met. And she knows melodrama doesn’t suit the chair of a major committee. It is better left to others, to pit bulls on your side, so the chair can maintain distance and some decorum across the aisle. Like Shane, she wonders if Gains is in over his head. One way you can usually tell is when the person chairing a committee is not fully in control: they talk too much.
But a poor hearing works to their advantage. Perhaps, just maybe, the Oosay Committee will be less of a threat than she and Rena fear. They should be so lucky. They were less than five minutes in. It was way too early to even wish such a thing.
Gains finishes, and the ranking Democrat, Senator Fred Blaylish of Vermont, leans into his microphone. He pauses a moment, an old trick, to get the room’s attention. Then Blaylish lets everyone know he is royally pissed.
“The chairman claims we’re charged with pursuing this investigation ‘on a bipartisan basis to get at the truth,’ but I fear the facts suggest something else. I am disappointed to have to report that the majority has concealed witnesses from the minority, withheld documents in violation of Senate and House rules, and withheld details of its plans. It’s hard to see how you get at the truth, or honor anyone, when you play fast and loose with the facts from the start.”
The Good Lie Page 17
