“I’ve been making cover calls on the various ministries, and officials seem to be interested. Well, at least they’re not hostile. Anyway, let’s talk about you. By the way, we made a large deposit in your bank account just before I left.”
Steve then discussed the mechanics of the operation. The permanent case officer would arrive in a month and make more long-lasting arrangements. In the meantime, they agreed to meet once a week. They also agreed on a car pickup in an area frequented by foreigners followed by a meeting in the hills at one of the many informal eating-places in the Alborz Mountains north of Tehran. No cell phone calls, no calls to the hotel. The communications system that Steve set up was a hybrid borrowing from denied area tradecraft but not entirely dependent on impersonal means.
People were coming from the restaurant toward their car, and Steve didn’t like being on stage.
“Should we get something to eat?” he asked.
They walked to steps that led up to a restaurant with tables outside and inside. They settled down at a corner table, and Yazdi ordered kebabs and rice for the two of them. Steve assumed that was the only item on the menu. Two cooks operated a large barbecue behind a long counter. The minimal lighting suggested a romantic rendezvous to Steve. It was far enough out of the city that it might be a favorite for illicit trysts, in which case informants for the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the religious police, would keep the place under watch.
“Is this place safe?” Steve asked.
“Don’t worry. I know what we can do here. This is my territory. Trust me.” Yazdi’s initial frown at the question turned into a reassuring grin.
“I do trust you or I wouldn’t be here. Have you been able to learn anything about the nuclear time table since you came back?”
“First, you know that al Quds, or rather the mother organization, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, your newspapers always call it the IRGC, has a major role in the program. However, I’ve never been on that side of it. I’m not a scientist.”
“We know. You must know others who are directly involved.”
“By chance, I ran into one of my former comrades from fighting the Iraqis, the Iraqis who were getting their intelligence from you. Don’t deny it. Everyone knows.” Yazdi took a breath, looked at the other customers and leaned forward.
“He was in army counter intelligence, one of the guys in the back shooting those who didn’t want to cross the Iraqi minefields. He’s now overseeing security at one of the nuclear sites. It used to be a clock factory, right in Tehran, in the Southern part of the city. It’s between Park-e-Shah and the Khayam Metro station. I have not been inside but I know where it is. There is a large warehouse. They installed a new model centrifuge there about six months ago. It’s about to go operational.”
“Did he say how many centrifuges there were?”
“No. Keep in mind when you photograph it from your satellites and try to figure out how many that warehouse could contain that the new centrifuges don’t take as much space. That’s what he said.” He took a bite of kebab and leaned back. “It should be easy to find on a photograph.”
Steve refrained from taking notes. “What is the model number of the centrifuge?”
“I don’t know. But it’s supposed to be at a better level than those at Natanz, which are, I think, either Pakistani models or copies of Pakistani models.”
“How will this affect the timing of the program?”
“You mean when will we have the first bomb? I can’t say for sure. My friend said that this centrifuge will be installed in ten other locations like this old clock factory and that the lead-time is more like weeks than years. The goal is fifty thousand centrifuges.”
“Can you find out where the other locations are?”
Yazdi seemed impatient. “One is near the village of Sanjarian on the Jajrood River,” he replied curtly. His eyes down, distracted, he went on. “Its cover name is ‘Research Center for Explosion and Impact’. Another is located near Qom.” His tone was that of an adult answering an insistent child.
Before Steve could ask another question, Yazdi changed the subject. “I have been given another job by Mousavi.” He told Steve of his new assignment, to eliminate Steltzer. “I could spend much time in Hamburg. We have sources there, and I’m sure that, in time, we’ll find him. However, it’s not good for me to be out of the country right now,” he said, showing off his gold tooth in a gotcha grin.
“You’re right. Can you possibly put him off, claiming other priorities?”
“Whatever is important to Mousavi is the number one priority. Right now that’s Steltzer, as far as I’m concerned. Maybe you can help me with Steltzer and I help you with other things...”
At that moment, Steve wondered who was running whom. He smiled and said, “We’ll try to help you. Steltzer may not be his true name.”
Before leaving, Steve asked about the elections to ratchet down the intensity of the meeting triggered by their competing agendas. “Will they mean anything? Does anyone except the incumbent have a chance?”
“Ahmadinejad? Yes, he will win. He is not good with the economy.” Yazdi thought a moment before adding, “Everyone knows that his origins are what in India would be called low-caste, working class. Many like him. He is pious, but he is also against some ayatollahs’ excesses. There is much grumbling about the traditional clerical elite. They have gotten very rich, Rafsanjani for example. Ahmadinejad has replaced some with his own clerics, so they owe him; others don’t like him or fear him. Also, he comes from the IRGC, and he is popular with the military and the security services. Important support.”
“Crucial constituencies,” agreed Steve. “What about the other guy?”
“He has been out of politics for a long time. He was close to Khomeini--a former prime minister before that post was eliminated and replaced by a president.”
As Yazdi spoke, Steve glanced at three men who were coming into the restaurant. They sat at a table about fifteen feet away. One of the men took in the room with a visual scan that stopped on Steve for an instant. Yazdi followed Steve’s eyes and turned back but lowered his voice.
“As prime minister, he also supervised the Department of Investigations and Studies, which ran military operations in Lebanon in the early 1980s. He and Mousavi worked together. Now he is an artist, a rich artist I guess, an architect. Very popular with the westernized liberals like those who live in the expensive suburbs in North Tehran, intellectuals, doctors, people like that. For those who don’t like the current president, he is as an alternative who can say ‘I am not Ahmadinejad.’ Like in America, where Obama could run as the not-Bush candidate.”
They left the restaurant and drove back down the hill to Tehran proper.
Steve asked, “What about those three men?”
“Don’t worry, I said. I know Iran, I know how this works.” Yazdi kept his eyes to the front, dismissing Steve’s concern.
Before Steve got out of the car, Yazdi said, “Send my greetings back to Marshall. Tell him that I said you are almost as good as he is. You even look like him.” Speeding away, he rejoined the kamikaze players of Tehran auto traffic.
Steve melded in with other evening pedestrians going home or heading for stores before they closed. The first hurdle, the initial meeting with an agent he had not recruited, had gone better than expected. He had not had the unenviable obligation to recruit Yazdi all over again. Granted that their relationship was far from one hundred percent; the essential mutual trust that the other party was not going to do something stupid took time to establish. The cement of confidence was usually laid during the development phase when the case officer’s goal was to convince his potential agent that he was the father or mother or mentor or big brother or professional leader that he had never had and wished for. Steve recognized that his father had done a complete job when recruiting Yazdi.
In a grin-and-bear-it mindset, Steve was thinking, Am I ever going to escape my fath
er’s shadow?
16. Tehran: The Persian Esteghlal International
Steve returned to his hotel on the corner of Vale Asr and the Chamran Expressway going over his initial meeting with SENTINEL. He walked into the lobby past four well-dressed young men who seemed to be hanging out. They were each sipping from bottles of juice and talking. They looked at him as he went by.
One said, “Hello.”
Steve nodded and smiled. He didn’t want to lead them to suspect that he was an American. He had been briefed at Langley that this was the former Hilton hotel, which had changed hands after the 1979 revolution. Maintenance was obviously not a strong point of the Iranian hotel industry. Everything looked old and in need of either paint or replacement. He was in the old section because there was less chance that those rooms would have been equipped with audio and visual security equipment.
He continued directly to the Thai restaurant, the agreed upon venue to make initial contact with Kella who had reservations in the same hotel. The Iranian hostess, dressed in a dark-blue chador, guided him to a table and gave him an English language menu. She was correct and professional in an absent-minded way, no smile. Kella was not there either and he ordered Tam Yam Koon, lemon grass soup. A half hour later, he read the newspaper he had brought with him. He had given up on Kella for that evening and stood to leave when, simultaneously, he saw Kella coming from the lobby toward the hostess, and the lights went out.
Not knowing whether she had seen him, he walked in her direction and bumped into her. “I’m very sorry,” he said knowing that she would recognize his voice. At the same time, he put his newspaper in her hands and went back to the lobby where he obtained matches and a couple of candles from the front desk. Their availability suggested that electrical outages were not infrequent.
The young men were laughing. In the semi-darkness, one was doing his imitation of a Dervish dance with a soda bottle in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Steve stepped around him and went outside where the street lamps and other buildings in the neighborhood were also without lights. One of the young men, the one who had said hello, Steve thought, came out to join him.
He asked, “From England?” “No, Canada,” Steve replied.
“I can help you. What do you want? I can drive you anywhere.” “Thanks but no.”
“Exchange money? Best rate. You want whiskey? Have you been to Sweden? I was a student there–good whiskey, good girls.” He laughed loudly.
The last thing Steve wanted was to risk arrest for a minor offense, such as the ban on alcohol. He was already guilty of espionage. If he just waited a while, he could get arrested for espionage.
“You want to see Baha’i shrine? I will drive you. Tomorrow. Private tour. You will see Baha’i art treasures that tourists don’t see without special contacts.”
Steve barely listened. He was thinking of Kella. How long would it take her to discover his note in the pages of the newspaper giving her the number of his room?
He waited another five minutes and walked up the stairs to his room. On the way, the lights went back on. He opened the windows of his room, washed his face, changed his shirt, turned the TV on to a local soccer game, and waited. With the lights out, he had been able to get his message inside the newspaper to Kella in secret. The longer they were perceived to be two separate, unconnected visitors, the better.
Kella arrived about an hour later. On TV, a commentator announced the score: zero to zero.
Steve opened the door to her discreet knock and said, “Hi. Room service?
What kept you? I was about to go to bed.”
“Don’t let me stop you, Monsieur Breton,” she said mischievously as she eyed the bed. “What service is it that you wish?”
He took her in his arms and they kissed. “Thank God you’re here. I was about to call the emergency service number. Except, in this country, they might have sent me a young boy.”
In a characteristic gesture that Steve loved, she tossed her head up and laughed reminding Steve of a child’s unrestrained and guileless pleasure. As she sat on the bed and kicked off her shoes, he sat beside her, kissed her, and started unbuttoning her blouse.
She said, “Wait,” and pointed toward the walls and ceilings, her counter-intelligence instincts struggling to overcome more primal emotions.
“Yeah, I know.” He clicked off the bright overhead light and took her in his arms again, his senses hungrily reaching out to her.
Afterward, they both took a shower, which produced an intermittent jet punctuated by loud noises in the pipes and finally a steady stream of ice-cold water.
She donned one of his shirts and sat in the easy chair while, in shorts, he settled on the bed. The TV was still on, and the soccer game was drawing to an end, score one to one. Steve turned up the volume to mask their conversation. While he watched, she pulled a two by seven inch Chanel eye-shadow palette case from her handbag. She opened the case, unscrewed the brush handle clockwise, and inserted the now uncovered pin on one end of the brush into the lower right hand corner of pink-ice. The mirror on the inside of the cover flipped up; using the pin on tawny-brown allowed her to flip the color palette down. Kella now had access to a keyboard on the bottom and, on the top, to the controls that would send and receive encrypted millisecond burst signals to and from the CIA’s Icarus satellite.
“I don’t think I showed you my new toy in Washington,” Kella said. “This is a spread-spectrum frequency-hopping device. It transmits small packets of information on several frequencies at the same time, and the frequencies change in the blink of an eye. The receiver puts them all back together into a coherent message on the other end. A listener without the proper equipment and the code only hears white noise—hard to intercept, demodulate, or jam.”
“I’m impressed,” Steve admitted. I don’t need to know any more. Are you ready for me to start?”
“OK, don’t talk too fast.”
Steve began with operational comments on his initial cover activities, the overt version of which he had already emailed to his cover company Magnus Control in St. John through the hotel’s business center. He then got into his first meeting with Yazdi and reported the information on the centrifuges and locations.
“XYSENTINEL’s recruitment is holding. However, the information on the new centrifuges and the further dispersal of the enrichment centers are not absolute proof that SENTINEL is not a double. I defer to your analysis on that point. If, over time, he keeps producing that level of information, it will establish his bona fides. Mousavi would not allow sensitive strategic information to flow into our hands just for the sake of running a double agent case. Mousavi could have had me arrested tonight--game, set and match.”
He took a sip from a plastic bottle of water on the nightstand. “Clearly, Yazdi has been around the block, and we both know that he has more experience than I do. But I’m his handler, and that’s not easy for him to accept. He probably assumed that my father would show up, and he may have guessed that the resemblance between us is not coincidental. But none of these factors will be show-stoppers, I hope.” He grinned. As he spoke, he again felt that fate was manipulating him. He had vowed to run his own life but he was acting on his father’s behalf. In terms of occupation, he was his father. It was frustrating and confusing.
He continued, and Kella resumed her typing. “SENTINEL’s self-confidence, however, is worrisome. It could lead him to step over the edge. I will have to keep his actions within the limits of operational security.”
Kella looked up, “Self-confidence is a problem?”
“I’ve heard from my father that intelligence officers spying against their own countries have done stupid things and gotten caught because of their arrogance, thinking they were more clever than their colleagues in the local security forces. Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, FBI and CIA officers who worked for the KGB, are now in prison because they didn’t practice their own tradecraft. They thought they were too smart.”
Steve then repea
ted Yazdi’s request for help on Steltzer. He added, “He’s right that we can’t have him travel outside Iran during this period. However, Mousavi needs to be satisfied. Could we give SENTINEL enough information, as well as a plausible source for the information? That would keep Mousavi quiet for the time being.”
Finally, he asked for traces on the two men he had met at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, Hans Brauer and Ali Pakravan. He guessed that those two gentlemen would resurface. If the agency had any information on them, he needed it.
Kella put her Chanel palette away and stretched. “It’s been a long day. I’m going back to my room. It’s 408 by the way, one flight up. I did meet someone on the plane, an Iranian woman. I think that she’s going to be my best friend and cover. She can help me be a travel writer. Not in so many words, but she warned me not to take this writing too seriously. People have gotten arrested for writing the wrong things. Tomorrow, she’s going to take me to some tourist attractions.”
“Good. Sounds safe enough. Might as well ask for traces on her too. Do you have a last name for her?”
“Yes, Khosrodad. I already did.”
After she left, Steve reflected that they had not been more at ease together since their adventure over a year ago in the Middle East. Was Washington too bland? Was high external stress the glue to their romance? Why had neither broached the M word during their time together in Virginia? He knew that he didn’t want to raise it from fear that she was too independent to say yes. Was this a temporary arrangement for her? Was she thinking of returning to Paris?
He wanted to take her to see his old school in the northern part of Tehran and to show her where his school bus had been stopped by a crowd throwing rocks. He wanted to drive by his old house where his father had taught him to rappel from the first floor balcony down into the empty pool. He wanted to retrace the route that his mother had driven him twice a week during the fall of 1978 when, at five a.m., she would take him to hockey practice at the “Ice Palace.” She had been confident that, “By five in the morning, all the revolutionaries have stopped rioting and shooting at each other. They’re in bed sleeping. It’s probably the safest driving part of the day.”
Satan's Spy (The Steve Church saga Book 2) Page 9
