The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  “How likely? Ninety percent?”

  “Maybe fifty-one percent at this point, with everything else adding up to forty-nine.”

  Green caught the President’s eye.

  “Go ahead, Donna.”

  “What about a third party? Al-Qaeda, say. If they could find an Iranian to help them, wouldn’t they love to trick us into this? Get the Crusaders attacking the Shia. Two truck bombs and a hit on a station chief, that seems within their capabilities.”

  “We’ve considered nonstate actors such as AQ. We judge the possibility as unlikely. We have excellent intel on AQ and its offshoots and have seen no evidence of their involvement.”

  “Another terrorist group? One we haven’t heard of yet?”

  “That’s just it. The attacks themselves, I agree, the sophistication was limited. But two weeks have passed since James Veder was killed and we still have no leads. That makes us think we’re looking at a national intelligence service, one using high-level encryption to defeat our communications intercepts.”

  “So we bring this source in, talk to him?” the President said.

  “He’s absolutely refused to come in for a debrief. We’ve considered forcing him, snatching him, but we think we’d lose him as an asset. He’s provided information only on his own terms.”

  The President suddenly heard what Hebley wasn’t saying. “But at least we know who he is? We’ve checked him out.”

  Hebley looked at the door, like he was hoping for a knock to rescue him. It didn’t come. “Sir, at the moment we don’t even have a photograph of him. He’s a very difficult source.”

  “One reason I like you, General, is you aren’t afraid to tell it like it is.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “That said, you and your entire agency should be embarrassed.”

  The President generally considered foul language beneath this office, even if some of his predecessors were famous for profanity. Now, however, he decided an F-bomb was warranted.

  “It’s fucking ridiculous. He’s a ‘difficult source.’” The President put air quotes around the phrase. “You sound like a kindergarten teacher. ‘Little Johnny is so difficult I can’t get him to take a nap.’ Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job. You don’t want to snatch him, you think he’s more useful to you out there, fine. But get his picture, identify him. You know what? I guess I am telling you how to do your job. Find out if he could access this information. Along the way, maybe you could figure out who killed your station chief. I need more than this if we’re going to start scrambling jets. Way more. Fifty-one percent odds, that’s worse than nothing.”

  Hebley nodded.

  “Are we clear? I want to hear you say we’re clear.”

  “Yes, Mr. President. We’re clear.”

  Jake Mangiola, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was an Air Force four-star, an old-school fighter jock. Now he gingerly came to Hebley’s rescue, one general helping another. “Mr. President, if I may.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I think we all agree that considering offensive action against Iran would be premature. However, given the gravity of this information, it might be prudent for us to undertake a top-to-bottom review of our Iranian APs—”

  “AP?”

  “Action plan, sir—”

  After years of briefings, the President still couldn’t get over the way four-stars talked. Like they were reading from invisible PowerPoint presentations, complete with acronyms.

  “So you’ll have every option if the need arises. We can also move a second carrier group to the edge of the Gulf. We have the George Washington south of Sri Lanka now. It’ll take three, maybe four days to arrive. Call it an unscheduled training exercise.”

  “Run your review, get the carrier in close.” He had to admit he felt a certain pleasure at snapping his fingers, moving a hundred-thousand-ton aircraft carrier like a kid playing Risk. But his elation passed quickly. The United States hadn’t faced a threat this serious since the end of the Cold War. At least.

  He looked at Hebley. “Meanwhile, Scott, I assume you want a finding so you and your friends in the Navy can peek at those ships from Dubai. See if they’re carrying anything that glows in the dark.”

  Hebley nodded, obviously glad to be on firmer ground. “We think we have a low-risk option.” He explained.

  “Anybody object?” the President said when Hebley was finished. No one did. “Good. WHC will get you something this afternoon.” White House counsel.

  “Yes, sir. We have several days before they’re in U.S. territorial waters, but we’d like to make the intercept sooner rather than later.”

  “Let Donna know when you’re ready to move.” The President unsubtly glanced at his watch, signaling the meeting’s end. Hebley nearly levitated from the couch in his eagerness to leave. The others followed. “Donna, please stay.”

  Green had worked briefly for the CIA before leaving to go to law school, where she’d met the President. After graduation she had spent a decade on the Hill working for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Profiles usually called her the most hawkish member of the President’s inner circle. It was more correct to say she was the champion cynic, believing the worst about every nation’s leaders—and usually its people, too. The President had learned not to doubt her judgments, however bitter they seemed. Vladimir Putin had turned Russia into a police state. The leaders of China had stolen billions of dollars for themselves. The Syrian resistance was a bloody jihadi mess.

  “We really this clueless about Iran, Donna?”

  “Sir, much as I hate to defend Langley, draw up a list of our strategic problems over the last decade, Iran barely makes the top ten. China, Russia, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Egypt—then Iran. Maybe ahead of Egypt, but you see the point.”

  “But thousands of people in Tehran and the nuclear facilities must be able to confirm this. Scientists, military—”

  “I doubt thousands. A few hundred. But most of them, remember, even the ones who aren’t religious, they want the bomb. National sovereignty, who are we to say Iran can’t have a few nukes when we have thousands. So let’s say ninety-five percent would never talk to us, no way, just on principle. The other five percent, maybe they’re on the fence, they’re scared of what the mullahs might do. Say a couple dozen people fall in that category. Mostly scientists. Literally working in caves. How are they going to reach us? Email nuke@cia.gov? They know if they’re caught, they’ll be tortured. Killed. Takes courage to make that choice.”

  “Recklessness, even.”

  “Yes. At the top, the mullahs have been in charge for thirty-five years. We don’t know much about what drives them, how many are genuinely religious, how many just want power. You can say that’s our own bad, that after all this time we should have a better picture, but cracking a closed society is tough. And the Guard are really good at what they do—they have to be or the Israelis would eat them for lunch.”

  “What about the IAEA?” The International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based group that tracked enrichment programs and reactors worldwide. “All those reports they put out, the monitors, could this really get by them?”

  Green didn’t smile much, but she was smiling now. “Sir. The way IAEA works is that Iran does what it wants and then lies. I don’t mean fibs. I mean they build entire enrichment plants and don’t declare them. Then we or the Israelis catch them lying and tell IAEA. Then IAEA goes to Iran and says, We caught you, tsk-tsk, now let us verify the production of this plant. The Iranians negotiate for a while. Sometimes they let the inspectors in, and sometimes they don’t. Usually they cooperate just enough that we can’t say they completely stonewalled us. Even when they do let people in, they delay long enough to have plenty of time to destroy whatever evidence they d
on’t want us to find. I mean, this HEU could literally be coming out of a facility that we don’t know exists.”

  She shook her head. “I know the obvious next question is, ‘Why even bother?’”

  The President nodded.

  “Because the games with IAEA slow them a little, give us a partial picture of what they’re doing, how successful they’ve been. Plus on some level it lets them know that we’re watching them. But it’s never stopped anyone who really wants a bomb from building one. Not India, not Pakistan, not North Korea.”

  “So you’re saying, yes, we’re this clueless. That maybe they have ten bombs done and this guy we’re calling Mathers is the only one with the guts to tell us.”

  “It’s possible, sir. I say that with fifty-one percent confidence.” Another smile, so the President would know she was joking. Green was a skinny woman, hipless, with short bobbed hair. She was married to a man who could have been her twin. Somehow they’d had one child, a son, though the President couldn’t imagine them in bed. He liked her complete sexlessness. He never worried why he wanted her around.

  “What if we confront them, tell them what we know? Tell them their choices are the truth or war—”

  “The one thing I am sure of, sir, is that that won’t work. They will deny. If they aren’t doing this and it’s a setup, of course they’ll deny. But even if they are, they’ll deny, because the mere fact that we’re asking will show them we’re not sure. We need evidence.”

  “So let’s bring this guy in.”

  “If we can. I was thinking about the material that’s on the ship. It depends what it is, though. Low-level material, that wouldn’t prove anything. But if it’s a chunk of bomb-grade uranium—”

  “At least we’d know.”

  “At least we’d know.” Green had been with him long enough to know when their meetings were over. “What can I do now, sir?”

  “I want a list of people in the Iranian government who might be open to a back channel. Anybody halfway reasonable. Ambassadors, whoever.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Never a dull moment, Donna.”

  “No, sir.” She stood, turned for the door.

  “By the way, happy birthday.” She was fifty today. They both knew that whatever celebration she had planned would be postponed for the foreseeable future. He reached into his desk. “I picked this up special just for you. And by I, I mean the Secret Service.”

  He pulled out a twin package of Hostess cupcakes and a candle. “Can you believe they almost discontinued these?”

  She shook her head. “Thank you, sir.” Her voice caught.

  “Should we light it now? Wish for no war?”

  “I will if you will, sir.”

  The cupcake was delicious.

  19

  ISTANBUL

  Reza, Duke, and Salome sat in the kitchen of the safe house in Kadiköy, a quiet district on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Reza had just finished telling them about his meeting with Brian Taylor.

  “Tell me you weren’t too queeny, Reza,” Salome said.

  “Just queeny enough.”

  Reza’s real name was Bijan Parande. He was the only child of an Iranian air force major who had stayed in Tehran after the Shah’s fall, betting that the new regime would need professional fighter pilots as much as the old. For a while, the major was right. But as Iran’s war against Saddam Hussein sputtered, the ayatollahs decided to purge their military of “counterrevolutionary infidels.” In March 1984, Major Parande sent his wife and eleven-year-old son to France. Three months later, the Revolutionary Guard arrested him on charges of treason. He was shot, his corpse dumped in an unmarked grave, his bank accounts seized.

  Overnight Bijan and his mother, Afari, were reduced to ungenteel poverty in the northern suburbs of Paris. Afari became a housekeeper. Bijan had been spoiled in Tehran, but he accepted their new life with surprising speed. He had never much liked his father, who had torn out a chunk of his hair when he was seven. Bijan’s crime was trying on his mother’s shoes.

  By twelve, Bijan knew that he preferred men to women. Open homosexuality was neither understood nor tolerated in the banlieue where he and his mother lived, so he kept his desires to himself. At seventeen, he fled for London. He wanted to learn English and had the vague idea of becoming an actor. He was almost absurdly handsome, tall and lean with flowing black hair, but his looks far outpaced his skills onstage. To survive, he worked as a busboy and waiter and lived in a cold-water apartment in east London. On his twentieth birthday, a Saudi princeling offered two thousand pounds for a night with him, and his life turned again.

  Bijan spent the next fifteen years serving wealthy Arab men in London and Paris. He was expensive and discreet and picked up new clients through word of mouth. He spoke French, English, Farsi, and Arabic, and could easily pass as a business partner for his clients. Sometimes he even visited them on family vacations at their compounds in the south of France. Closeted Arab men took pleasure in such games.

  At thirty-five, Bijan found business dwindling. His clients could have what they liked, and they liked young. He could have cut his rates, or accepted men in their seventies with hair growing from their ears. But he had been careful with his money, even bought a small apartment in Paris a few years before. He knew he’d survive, though he feared being bored.

  He needn’t have worried.

  —

  The knock on his apartment door had come almost two years before, a breezy late-spring afternoon in Paris. Salome. She wouldn’t tell him her real name, who she was, or how she’d found him. But she knew everything about him, including what the mullahs had done to his father. He wondered if she worked for the DGSE, the French intelligence service. Though she didn’t seem French to him. Then again, the French wouldn’t consider him French, either, no matter that he’d lived in the country most of his life. When she outlined what she wanted, he agreed immediately.

  Don’t say yes too soon, she warned. Think it over. The danger here, it’s real. And once you start . . .

  But he didn’t need to think it over. He’d enjoyed his youth, but his youth was gone. His mother had died in 2009. Liver cancer. She’d never again seen Tehran. Bijan had no one else. Not a boyfriend, not even a dog. Now Salome wanted him to help make the ayatollahs pay for everything they’d done. “C’est bon,” he told her.

  —

  Bijan had never stopped speaking Farsi, mainly because his mother had never learned French. Still, his Farsi was rusty, his knowledge of Iranian culture even worse. A research trip to Tehran was obviously out. Instead, he moved to Sweden and took a studio apartment in Husby, a poor suburb near Stockholm where tens of thousands of Iranian immigrants lived. He kept to himself, spoke only Farsi. He watched Iranian television in local coffeehouses. He grew a scrubby beard, got a job as a dishwasher. He studiously avoided talking about politics. But after a few weeks, he noticed conversations dying as he walked into stores and restaurants. He’d been pegged as an Iranian spy, or at least a friend of the regime. When he told Salome, she laughed.

  Next she sent him to Sofia. Bulgaria. There he shared a basement apartment with roaches and rats. He hadn’t been so uncomfortable since his first days in London. When he complained, Salome laughed. You spent too many nights pillow-biting in hotel suites. Got to toughen you up if you’re going to pass for Rev Guard, even a closeted one. Along the way, her bodyguard—the most terrifying man he’d ever met—taught him basic espionage and self-defense. How to recognize a tail and lose it. How to shoot. How to handle a knife. Even if you never use any of these tricks, you have to know them. Colonel Reza would.

  Six months in Sofia roughened his skin, put bags under his eyes. We’re getting somewhere, Salome said. She moved him to Istanbul. There she gave him a tutorial on the Revolutionary Guard and the Quds Force and the first specifics about what she wanted him to do. He was surprised,
taken aback. Why would a trained CIA officer accept intelligence from a man whose real name he didn’t even know? Why would the officer even respond to his initial effort to make contact? You’re going to tell him a very believable story. Still, you’re right, he won’t trust you at first, Salome said. Maybe ever. But we’re going to make what you tell him come true. And he’ll have to trust that.

  Reza lived quietly in Istanbul through spring and most of summer. Then Salome told him the time for planning and training had ended. And he became Colonel Reza, an Iranian spy who was having second thoughts about his mission . . .

  —

  Now here he was. Twice he had promised Brian Taylor terror attacks. Twice they’d come. He had no idea how Salome and Duke had managed them. He had one job and one job only: to reel in Taylor, make him believe that Iran was about to send highly enriched uranium to the United States.

  “Stroke of genius, the gay thing,” Duke said. “Taylor thinks he’s figured out what makes you tick. Why you’re taking this chance. He’ll feel like he has an edge. It’ll give him more confidence when he goes to his station chief, all the way up the chain.”

  “Next time he sees me, he’s going to take my photo. Even if he has to tie me up himself to do it.”

  “I promise the agency has snatch-and-grab teams in Istanbul right now,” Duke said. “They’ll be tailing Taylor, sleeping at his apartment. Langley will have live ears on every phone. They might even have the Turks helping. Only question is whether they’ll try to snatch you the next time you meet him. I think we have to assume yes.”

  “Which is why you’re not going to meet him again,” Salome said.