The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  Through junior high, he waited for the feeling to wane. Instead, it put vines in him. Only one problem. He had no idea how he would make his mark. The obvious routes to fame and fortune were out. He was five-ten, one-sixty, no athlete. He couldn’t act or play guitar. He was average-looking, with dark hair and brown eyes that were a little too small. He was smart, but plenty of kids were smarter.

  What, then? Finally, he saw that he did have one exceptional quality, an uncanny ability to blend in. He was at home with the jocks, the theater geeks, the UN club. The teachers liked him, too. He simply shut his mouth. Everyone in the world wanted to talk. He listened. He let an endless stream of words flow over him, offered the right answers at the right moments. Over time, he grew to see conversations almost as a game. How little could he say? He never passed on the gossip he heard. X had cheated on her boyfriend? Y was cutting school to smoke pot? So what? Once he’d learned a secret, he no longer cared.

  He’s so mature, the teachers told his parents. So empathetic. In fact, he was the opposite. The right test would have revealed that he was close to a psychopath. But he wasn’t conventionally dangerous. He had no interest in hurting anyone. Not back then.

  In eleventh grade, he took a modern history class whose syllabus included The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. When he read it, he knew. He belonged with these men who lied to one another and everyone else, who stood outside the world’s laws.

  Finding a way into their world was straightforward. The era of Ivy League shoulder taps had ended decades before. He studied Spanish and international relations at UC San Diego. After graduation, he became an analyst at the RAND Institute in Los Angeles. RAND was federally backed, thick with former intelligence officers, a clear path to Langley. The agency called three years later. You can’t tell anyone, the recruiters told him. Not your friends. Not your family. The most thrilling words of his life.

  He aced training and was sent to Peru. With the Cold War over, Congress was cutting the agency’s budget. But the news hadn’t gotten to Latin America, the last refuge for cowboy case officers who ran their own foreign policy with duffel bags of cash. For a while, he loved the job. Especially the tradecraft. Countersurveillance runs through the slums on his way to meetings. Growing into his cover as an engineer for a mining company prospecting around Machu Picchu. Helicoptering into the Andes with a briefcase full of cash handcuffed to his wrist.

  After a year, the thrills began to fade. Slowly. Like a song he’d heard too many times. He realized the agency was a bureaucracy like any other, driven by its own perverse internal incentives. The CIA’s primary mission in Lima was helping the Peruvian army fight leftist guerrillas who called themselves the Shining Path. By the mid-1990s, the Path was unraveling. Its violence had alienated the peasants who formed its core. The CIA could have encouraged the army to stand aside, let the Path commit suicide. Instead, it kept paying for ops that mostly killed civilians. Anybody ever think about dialing things back? he once asked his station chief. A casual question over beers.

  We have a budget. Budget means ops. Don’t get any points for saving it. We don’t spend it, they don’t give it to us next year.

  —

  A few weeks later, he fell in love.

  He’d never been in love. Never even had a girlfriend, though he’d slept with scores of women in California. The girls were usually a little overweight, a little older. They were needy and unhappy, and they always told him what a good listener he was. After he moved to Los Angeles to work for RAND, he began to dream about hurting them, dreams that always ended the same way, him taping their mouths shut.

  What the hell? He wasn’t a killer. He’d become a vegetarian in college because he couldn’t abide the taste of dead flesh. He stopped going to bars. Maybe his brain wasn’t wired for love. But he resolved to stop the listening game, look for a real relationship. To his surprise, he found one.

  Julia was a Peruvian who worked as a translator and reporter for the Associated Press. She was small, almost scrawny. She wore her hair long and had deep brown eyes, the most beautiful he’d ever seen. He met her at the ambassador’s Fourth of July barbecue, a cheap way for the embassy to build goodwill with reporters in Lima. She filled her plate like she was training for an eating contest. In forty-five minutes she plowed through two hamburgers, two ears of corn, a plate of ribs. She didn’t make a mess, but she left nothing behind.

  “They must not pay you enough.”

  “They don’t.” She said the words without heat.

  “I’m Ron—” His cover name.

  “Julia.”

  He waited for her to talk. People always spoke; they couldn’t bear silence. Their voices relieved them. Once they started, they never stopped.

  But she didn’t start. After a minute, she walked to the pie table, the highlight of the afternoon, a half-dozen varieties, plus cans of Reddi-wip flown in by the case from Houston. She came back with wide slices of lemon, apple, and pecan. She ate carefully, relentlessly. He felt her responding to his stare. Maybe even putting on a show for him. All this in silence.

  She finished, reached into her pocket, slid a card across the picnic table to him. “Call me sometime.” She walked away.

  He looked at the card—Julia Espada, Associated Press—and wondered if he could fall in love with someone over the way she ate.

  —

  The fact that her English wasn’t great helped. He didn’t always understand her. She had to repeat herself. The irony did not escape him. But mostly they didn’t talk. Translating tired her tongue, she told him. The quiet relaxed her. They sat together, reading and companionable. Drove along the coast road as Pacific waves crashed into the rocks. Cooked in his apartment, the kitchen hushed as an operating room in the middle of tricky surgery.

  They saw each other two and three times a week, but she wouldn’t sleep with him. He should have been frustrated. In truth, he respected her for her restraint, so unlike the women at home. After two months, she offered herself to him with no false ceremony. Tonight I’m staying over. I hope you have condoms. The word sounded small in her mouth, the syllables precise and separate. Con. Doms.

  Their sex was quiet, too. In California, he’d learned not to believe the screamers, who were mostly parroting the porn that guys made them watch. But Julia was nearly silent. Is something wrong? he finally asked. She told him not to worry.

  Later he would wish he had.

  She moved in eight months after they met. Per agency regs, he reported the relationship to his boss. The station found no red flags in her background. Her father was dead, her mother a secretary at Peru’s national electric company. He assumed she knew what he did. But she never asked. In turn, he didn’t press her for information about the stories she was working on. He didn’t want her to wonder whether he was with her because he saw her as a potential source.

  Caring about her made him a better case officer. He spent less time at the station, but he had more energy, worked harder. His doubts about strategy quit bothering him. He began to see what he was doing as a job. A job that came with a diplomatic passport, a fake name, and an apartment with blast-resistant windows, but a job nonetheless. His tradecraft improved with experience, and so did his evaluations. A talented case officer who has recently grown into his work, his station chief wrote in his annual evaluation.

  If he’d been writing his own evaluation, it would have been far simpler: For the first time I can remember, maybe the first in my life, I feel like a human being.

  Then James Veder showed up.

  —

  Veder came to Lima on TDY, temporary assignment, from Bogotá. He was hot shit, as he would be the first to explain, a throwback to the agency’s OSS roots. He drank and smoked and screwed anything that wasn’t nailed down. He had once expensed a Harley to the agency. Somehow the report went through.

  Julia met Veder two years to the day after she’d met him
, the same Fourth of July barbecue. She still ate like she was starving. That guy’s such a jerk, she said afterward. Do you work together? She had never asked about another case officer before. I don’t even know him, he told her. The truth.

  Two months later, he scheduled an overnight trip to Iquitos, the northeast corner of Peru. He was recruiting an engineer for Chevron. See you tomorrow, Julia said. By then he was thinking about an engagement ring, wondering if she might want an emerald, something nontraditional.

  He arrived in Iquitos to discover that the engineer had a 104-degree fever. He decided to catch the afternoon flight home. Didn’t call. Figured he’d surprise her.

  He heard her moaning even before he opened their apartment door. Sounds she’d never made with him. He hoped he was caught in a bad dream. But he knew her voice. He let himself in quietly. The bedroom door was open. He watched Veder’s head between her legs, her hands squeezing his shoulders. When she saw him, she pushed Veder away and yelped and covered herself in sheets that until a few moments before he had thought of as theirs.

  He expected to find shame in her eyes. Remorse. He saw pity instead.

  Veder grabbed his boxers. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth with the relish of a kid who’d just eaten a chocolate bar. “She said you guys were breaking up.”

  “Out, Jimmy.”

  “Don’t hurt her, man. She’s not worth it.”

  Veder’s words broke his anger. He didn’t know what he’d been planning. Bloodying Julia’s nose, breaking her teeth. Replacing what he’d seen with an image that at least was under his control.

  He shoved her at Veder. “Both of you. Now.”

  “Don’t do this,” Julia said. But she almost sounded relieved.

  “Thirty seconds, then I get my gun.”

  Veder grabbed for his Levi’s, tugged them on both legs at once, like he’d been through this drill before. “Let’s go, babe.”

  The man watched his future pull on sweatpants and an Associated Press T-shirt. “Ten seconds.” She grabbed her passport from the nightstand. He wondered what she really thought of him. What clues he must have missed.

  “Vámonos,” Veder said.

  “You don’t even know her name, do you?”

  “Come on, Julia.”

  He wished he hadn’t asked. His wall safe was hidden behind a poster of The Kiss, the Gustav Klimt painting. The irony was so cheap that he wanted to cry. Then he did cry. He turned to the wall to hide the tears creasing his cheeks. The safe was an old-school model with a dial, not a keypad. Left three times to 22 . . . He gripped the knob in his fingertips. Too tight. He lost track of how many times he’d spun the dial and had to start over. He heard the apartment door close as the tumblers clicked.

  Inside, a 9-millimeter Sig. He didn’t reach for it. If he reached for it, he would pick it up. If he picked it up he would open his lips and put it in his mouth. If he put it in his mouth he would pull the trigger. Simple as dominoes falling.

  He shut the safe, set to work cleaning the apartment, removing all trace of her.

  —

  Maybe they would have reconciled. Maybe he would have quit the agency. Maybe he would have drunk himself into a suicidal stupor, put the Sig in his mouth after all. Maybe he would have figured out what had gone wrong and why he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he would have punched out Veder at a Christmas party and they would have wound up buddies. A long shot, but maybe.

  But none of those things had the chance to happen. He walked in on them on a Monday. Monday, September 10, 2001.

  The attack made his private grief small and self-indulgent. No one knew what might happen next. Every station went to war. Through the fall, he worked twelve-hour days, seven-day weeks. As the immediate crisis abated, the agency began planning for the Iraq invasion. He volunteered to return to Langley for training in Arabic. He left Peru without speaking to Julia.

  He arrived in Baghdad in June 2003. Within months, he realized that the agency was making the same mistakes he’d seen in Peru, focusing on its own priorities rather than the reality around it. Only this time, the stakes were far higher. Senior officers spent their time scheming with Ahmed Chalabi. Chalabi wanted to run Iraq, but he was a pretender who had fled the country a generation before. Meanwhile, no one seemed to notice the worsening chaos. Even after the insurgency erupted, the agency and its Green Zone overlords blamed al-Qaeda. They never acknowledged the truth. The occupation had made life miserable for ordinary Iraqis. Their children risked kidnapping whenever they left home. Each night they went to bed hungry, frightened, and waiting for civil war. Each morning more of them condemned the United States.

  He couldn’t tell whether his fellow officers couldn’t see the truth, or whether political pressure from the White House had overwhelmed them. He found himself profoundly disappointed, in them and himself. He’d wanted to live an unusual life. He supposed in a way he’d succeeded. He worked for a bureaucracy as allergic to reality as any in corporate America. His home was a trailer on a fortified base in a country whose people hated him. He had no chance to use the tradecraft he’d honed in Peru. And he had no family and no prospects for one.

  So he stayed. If he couldn’t win the war, at least he could lose himself in it. Most case officers left Iraq after a few months. He spent more than three years in Baghdad. For eighteen months, he worked as an analyst for the agency/military task force that targeted top terrorists. With phone intercepts and interrogation reports, he pieced together networks in villages that he’d never seen. He felt like a kid who’d been given a jigsaw puzzle that had a trillion pieces and no edges. But at least the task forces had a clear mission, unlike everyone else in the Green Zone. And though he was under no illusion that killing Abu al-Zarqawi’s jihadis would turn the tide of the war, he wanted them to die. He’d seen enough of their videos to know that they gloried in torture and murder.

  He worked himself beyond exhaustion. In October 2006, he was caught sleepwalking while holding a loaded pistol. Time to get out, his boss said. He was so deep inside the war that he couldn’t imagine leaving. You punched your ticket. You know that, right? You’ve got one assignment until February, a paid vacation. And figure out where you want to go next. I mean anywhere. You’re at the top of the list. Sir— Don’t argue. You’ve earned it. Just thank me and pack.

  —

  He went home. He hoped Ontario would seem more real to him than it had as a teenager. He imagined he’d take care of his parents, bond with them in their slow decline. Love, one emptied bedpan at a time. Mom and Dad had other ideas. She was sixty; he was sixty-two. Their years of saving had paid off. They weren’t interested in bedpans. They’d bought an RV for an Alaska-to-Florida road trip. They loved him, but dimly, almost abstractly. They called him a hero, a meaningless word meant to free him of responsibility for the choices he’d made. They saw his sadness, but they knew they couldn’t help. They looked at him in a kindly, puzzled way, like dog owners who wished their Maltese would stop peeing on the floor.

  He left after ten days, lonelier than ever. He rented a room at the W Hotel in Westwood and made up for his years of celibacy. The women in L.A. were even easier to take home than they’d been a decade before. Internet dating and drunk texting had erased the last vestiges of shame from one-night stands. Then he had a torture dream, more vivid than he remembered, amplified by what he’d seen in Iraq. He knew that these cruelties were real. He feared what that knowledge might allow him to do.

  He quit the bars, wondered if he should try to find Julia. But that wound was both too raw for him to touch and too callused for him to care. His time in Baghdad had destroyed every instinct except survival, every memory except yesterday.

  Yet his puzzlement and anger at her infidelity remained. He still didn’t know why she’d slept with Veder. Had he seduced her, or the reverse? Had that afternoon in the apartment been their first time together? He’d imagined she
loved him. Why hadn’t she told him when she felt herself slipping away? The questions gnawed, but he would never ask her for the answers. Not after the way she’d walked out. Not after what he’d seen.

  He wished he’d killed Veder.

  He left California, spent the rest of his time off traveling, a month in Africa, then Thailand, the land of misfit toys. He drank himself stupid in Bangkok and Phuket and watched the low comedy play out each night, lonely farangs fulfilling their fantasies on the cheap. The men all had sob stories about women back home, who were too fat or cared too much about money or thought they were too good to do the dishes. Every tale finished with some version of These girls here, maybe they don’t understand English, but they understand me. They love me. They see me for who I am.

  Yeah, right. For the first time, he joined the world’s talkers, knowing the men around him would love every miserable detail of what Julia had done. Sometimes he even embellished—

  I had the ring in my pocket and I wanted to surprise her—

  Don’t say it, man—

  I walked in—I couldn’t even see his face, do you understand what I’m saying?

  I would have killed ’em both. Let’s get another, my friend. That calls for another.

  —

  He wondered if he should quit, but he had nowhere to go. He considered asking to be posted to Bangkok, but he feared he would become one of the whoremongers he despised. He chose Hong Kong. The city was the opposite of Baghdad in every way, glamor and neon, filled with hundred-story skyscrapers. Aside from the occasional gang fight, it was basically nonviolent. Money was its sole religion.