The Jericho Sanction

by Oliver North

  “Yes, General. So...your political plans are still on track?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn't they be? I am the best candidate, after all.”

  Euphrates Café

  Ar Ramadi, Iraq

  Monday, 23 March 1998

  1330 Hours, Local

  Peter Newman and Samir Habib sat at a table in an outdoor café on the outskirts of Ar Ramadi, an hour's drive west of Baghdad. Newman had skipped breakfast; he was glad for the light lunch the waiter brought to their table.

  That morning, Newman had felt as though his life was on fast forward. After his early-morning meeting with Dizha, Newman had first called General Grisham. He conveyed to the general what the for mer scientist had said. He had then taken the phony briefcase, along with his bogus business cards, and called on two nearby Baghdad businesses, posing as Ram Fales, a Portuguese-Indian salesman for a complicated computer program. Both of the managers were completely baffled by his presentation and turned down his sales pitch, as did the supervisor at the small pipeline services firm across from the petrol station where Samir had refueled his diesel-powered pickup.

  “Good thing I'm not a real salesman, Samir—I'd starve to death,” he told his friend. “Oh, well...the sales calls corroborate my cover identity. I can give those guys' names if I get picked up for questioning.”

  He had been back in his room at the Al Rashid less than two hours when Samir called on the hotel phone. “Mr. Fales...this is your guide, Samir. I have just talked to the man you were with early this morning. He is certain he knows where your three customers are, but we must leave soon.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Well, we should depart right away so we can get back before curfew tonight. I will pick you up at noon. I must first obtain a travel authorization.”

  Samir arrived at the front of the Al Rashid at 1200 hours in the pickup, and Newman got in, carrying only his briefcase and a dark blue windbreaker. As they pulled away from the front of the hotel, Samir said, “Good. You left your travel bag. That will lead anyone who is suspicious to believe you will be coming back. You have your passport?”

  Newman nodded and smiled. “You're good, Samir. Anybody eavesdropping on your phone call would never suspect a thing.”

  Samir shrugged. “To stay alive, we have to be careful.”

  “Dizha contacted his friend in the Highway Department records office and another one in customs,” Samir said as they drove. “They confirmed that a heavy truck, accompanied by a Mercedes and at least four Europeans, was on this road last night. The truck is one used routinely by a contraband smuggler named Leonid Dotensk.

  “This man Dotensk often delivers equipment, chemicals, weapons, electronics, and the like to various government agencies in Baghdad. Dotensk very rarely takes anything out of Iraq. But this time he did. Three large cases—big enough and heavy enough that they also had a forklift in the truck to load and unload them.”

  “How do you know this, Samir?”

  “My dear Peter—oh, excuse me—Ram.” Samir grinned at his slipup. “Our family is in the import/export business. We carry commercial goods across all these borders year-round. We get to know the border police, the customs agents, and the interior ministry officials. Sometimes we expedite a shipment with a little consideration for a poor man's family. Do you understand?”

  Newman smiled and nodded. “Bakshish.”

  The young man looked offended. “Oh no, Ram—that would be bribery. What I mean is that when we get to know these men, sometimes we learn of a need they have—sometimes for a particular kind of medicine, or a tool, or a part for a water pump. They know we travel to where these things are available. It's a small thing for us to help them. When we provide what they need, they sometimes repay the favor by providing what we need. But they know we are Christians and that to us, bribery is wrong. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” said Newman. “I'm sorry if I offended you.”

  “It's all right,” said Samir.

  Al Ramadi was coming into view. “We will be here only long enough for you to meet with the business across the street,” Samir said, “while I fill up the extra drums in the back with diesel fuel and water. Then we must find a bit of food and get underway. We have a long drive ahead of us.”

  They were nearly finished with their light lunch. Newman looked at Samir.

  “Tell me about your family. Do you have any more children?”

  The Christian Arab smiled. “No more. But all three are in school now, and my wife thinks perhaps we should have another. What about you? Do you have any more babies?”

  “No...just our little boy.” Newman smiled, but his face clouded a little as he thought of James, now thousands of miles away in the U.S.

  “Well, we'd better be on our way, Samir. How long do you think it'll take us to drive to Ar Rutbah?”

  “It is about three hundred kilometers. My father and I have driven this road many times, and it takes about five hours. We have plenty of fuel and water, but the road is not good enough to travel very fast.

  They went outside and, as they climbed into the truck, Samir said, “We will meet my father and another man in Ar Rutbah.”

  They had traveled only a few miles on the highway when Newman heard the chirp of the sat phone from inside his briefcase. He opened the case where the two Iridium phones—one given to him by the Israelis, the other by General Grisham—had been placed beside the radiation test gear, disguised as sales samples of computer equipment.

  The small screen on the face of the Israeli sat phone blinked the message, Incoming Call. He listened for the electronic ping of the encryption synchronization.

  “Newman.”

  “This is Major Rotem. Tell me where you are.”

  “Uh...I just finished lunch. Why? Do you have some news?”

  “Yes, I do have some news. Can you talk freely?”

  Newman glanced at Samir. “I can talk. What do you have?”

  “Our locator system tells us you are still in Iraq. If you are, you must leave immediately.”

  He's trying to tell me something without saying too much. “Go on.”

  “We have intel that the Iraqi nuclear weapons have been discovered,” Rotem said. “We're mounting an operation to find and recover them. If we can't do that in forty-eight hours...”

  “How did you find out about the nukes?”

  “Our intelligence came through with the information this morning. They're trying to locate them, even now. Can you come back to Jerusalem? I'd feel more comfortable if we were working together to find our wives.”

  “Well...first I need to find a way to clear the deck. Let me get back to you.”

  He pushed the red button on the Israeli sat phone, terminating the call. He then replaced it in the briefcase and removed the unit General Grisham had given him and punched in the memorized emergency number.

  “Grisham here.”

  “General, Newman. Have you received any new intelligence about the nukes since my call this morning? I just got another call from Major Rotem, and he says the Israelis are close to locating them and are prepping for an op to get them or take ‘em out.”

  “I have nothing new. We've asked NRO to review the imagery tracks for western Iraq, but the Brits had things pretty tied up with their little POW prison break in that time frame, so we're probably not going to get much help there. I thought you were on your way with Samir to see if you could get more information from their people where they think the truck crossed the border into Syria.”

  “I am...but I'm still several hours away.” Newman looked at the map spread out on the seat. “General...Major Rotem hinted the Israelis were planning a preemptive strike on Iraq if they didn't recover those weapons in forty-eight hours.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone, and Newman thought for a moment the call was lost. “General...did you hear me?”

  “Yes, Pete. I've heard the same thing through my channels. I...I'm praying the good Lord put yo
u where you are in order to use you to do something...and I'm praying the people Samir and Eli Yusef know in Iraq can help us. It's got to be an answer to prayer that those nukes have surfaced before Saddam could get his hands on them. But we've got a long way to go before we can get them into ours. Call me after you debrief Samir and Eli Yusef's contact.”

  “Yes, sir.” Newman disconnected the call.

  He looked at Samir. “We don't want to attract undue attention, my friend, but we need to be at Ar Rutbah as quickly as possible.”

  GCHQ Echelon Station

  Morwenstow, Near Bude

  Northern Cornwall, UK

  Monday, 23 March 1998

  1050 Hours, Local

  The remote satellite Signal Intelligence station did not blend in well with the scenic rolling meadows and sheer cliffs above the seas. The facility was part of an enormous joint venture between the UK's GCHQ and the United States' National Security Agency. The Echelon network included clandestine listening stations in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Cyprus, Hungary, Pakistan, India, Oman, Kenya, and, of course, Israel.

  All these listening posts fed intercepted signals and communications to Fort Meade, Maryland, or to the GCHQ station in Morwenstow, where, in a dozen buildings scattered over the site, more than a thousand people were glued to computer terminals and audio monitoring equipment or analyzing reams of printed documents. Engineers tweaked the twenty-two giant and midsize satellite dish receivers, trolling for secrets.

  The governments that sponsored Echelon placed a high value on their ability to eavesdrop on almost any kind of communications: data, voice, fax, video—it hardly mattered. Much of the top-secret work at Morwenstow was aimed at intercepting written messages—telexes, facsimile documents, and e-mail. But the site also intercepted voice and other messages via landline telephones, cell phones, instant messaging devices, computers, satellite phones, and various kinds of radio traffic—everything but smoke signals.

  Loretta Morris, a forty-eight-year-old single woman who lived with her mother in nearby Bude, had been working in the Echelon computer network for more than two decades, through half a dozen project name changes. For years she had come in every morning at nine, booted up her computer, and sifted through the accumulated overnight intercepts. Her duty now was to sort through all the written messages, looking for any references to weapons of mass destruction. To aid Loretta in her search, the computers flagged any overnight ingoing and outgoing communications that carried key words relating to her subject category. Then the computer retrieved those communications and routed them into separate files, ready for Loretta when she got to work in the morning.

  Most of the references were spurious, of course; the software filters, despite the tens of billions of dollars spent on them, were still unable to put words into context. For example, today one transcript told about a “big bomb,” which seemed like a “hit.” However, after reading the entire text, Loretta saw it was simply an innocuous theater review of a new avant garde play. But there was no way of knowing that without reading the entire text. She had learned after so many years on the job to skim over the material and visually grab phrases that made sense in the context that was expected.

  Loretta's work had been so exceptional that on the first of March she had been selected to participate in a new experiment. The officials running NSA and GCHQ had decided that “overnight” was no longer fast enough in an era of proliferating weapons of mass destruction, so they had designated about a hundred intercept specialists to provide “near-real-time review” of communications as—or shortly after—they were made, and then to flag these intercepts for prompt review by a senior intelligence officer.

  It took extraordinary attention and concentration to perform this task but now, in her third week of this experiment, Loretta was still excited about her new assignment—although it sometimes seemed a bit voyeuristic. As she told one of her coworkers, she felt like she was “looking over someone's shoulder as they wrote a love letter.”

  She had been scrolling over live copy for about half an hour this morning when she hit the pause key. On the screen was a transcription of a satellite telephone conversation that had taken place in the Middle East only minutes ago. It was being converted into text by proprietary NSA software that transposed the intercepted digital voice stream into written copy. At the top of the screen was the keyword: NUCLEAR, and the phone numbers of both parties, the identifier codes that relayed the messages to and from their locations, and the time and date stamp. It showed that the parties were conversing over the Iridium Satellite Phone System, using a commercial encryption algorithm for which NSA and GCHQ had the key. Having first skimmed the content, Loretta now read the message carefully. She was more than halfway through before she saw the keywords that had caused the computer to target this message for review.

  TEXT OF CONVERSATION:

  Male Voice 1: ...Newman …

  Male Voice 2: This is Major Rotem. Tell me where you are.

  MV1: I just finished lunch. Why? Do you have some news?

  MV2: Yes, I do have some news. Can you talk freely?

  MV1: I can talk. What do you have?

  MV2: Our locator system tells us you are still in Iraq. If you are,

  you must leave [unintelligible].

  PAUSE

  MV1: Go on...MV2: We have intel that the Iraqi NUCLEAR WEAPONS have

  been discovered. We're mounting an [unintelligible]...to recover them. If we can't do that in forty-eight hours …

  MV1: How did you find out about the NUKES?

  MV2: Our intelligence came through with the information this morning. They are trying to locate them [unintelligible]...Can you come back to Jerusalem? I'd feel more [unintelligible]...working together to find our wives.

  MV1: Well, first I need to find a way to clear the [unintelligible]...Let me get back to you.

  END OF CONVERSATION.

  Loretta printed the text and placed it in the box on her desk marked Urgent. A few minutes later, a runner took the papers from that Urgent box and carried them to the second floor for the supervisory intelligence personnel to read and evaluate.

  Petrol Oasis

  Near Ar Rutbah, Iraq

  Monday, 23 March 1998

  1830 Hours, Local

  Samir saw his father's truck and pulled up beside it in the crowded truck stop. This was the last place to get petrol and water before crossing into Syria, where the prices for both were much higher. Eli and Samir Habib knew this place well; they could no longer count the number of times they had stopped here, carrying everything from toasters to baby incubators. Eli was well known to all the men who worked the pumps and even had the grudging respect of the black-market truck drivers who plied their tandem tankers and box trailers back and forth between Iraq and Syria.

  Eli had parked his pickup in the shade of a large date palm, and when Samir pulled up beside him, the old man seemed to awaken from a nap.

  “Ah, my son!” he said through the open window of his truck, “I was just praying that you and our friend would arrive safely and soon, for Nazir must soon go to work. He is on the night shift at the border station.”

  As the three men embraced in the sandy parking area, Newman noticed the person Eli had referred to as Nazir. He remained in the passenger seat of Eli Yusef's truck, hunched down in the seat, peering furtively over the dashboard.

  “Please,” the old man said, “let me introduce you.” Eli Yusef walked Newman by the arm over to the passenger door of the truck, saying, “Nazir, this is my friend Ram Fales, he is a dear friend of mine. Mr. Fales wants to ask you some questions about the truck belonging to International Scientific Trading, the truck we talked about this morning. You can trust Ram as you do me.”

  Then turning to Newman, he said, “Nazir is an old friend. He is Chaldean and knows the Lord. But he is quite worried about getting in trouble with the authorities. You may speak in English, for he studied the language at the Christian school before it w
as closed.”

  The American nodded and smiled at Nazir.

  Eli said, “Very well. My son and I will go and get some water. You may talk but should not tarry. Nazir must be at the border post in time for his shift, and I have promised to drive him there.” The old man and his son went into the petrol station as Newman walked around and got into the driver's side of the truck.

  “Nazir, please trust me,” Newman said. “I will not betray your confidence. Can you tell me what you saw last night?”

  The slight man in the uniform of the Iraqi Customs Service looked at Newman, took a deep breath, and began in a voice barely above a whisper.

  “I have been on night duty at this post for more than a dozen years. Eli Yusef is a friend. He says I can trust you.”

  “You can; I promise you that. What happened last night?'

  “Ever since I have been at this post, trucks and lorries from International Scientific Trading come and go through this checkpoint to and from Syria, carrying all kinds of things. Always we are told in advance by the Interior Ministry officer on duty that a lorry or a convoy of trucks will be coming and that we should simply stamp the import forms as paid. We are not to inspect the vehicles.

  “On Saturday evening, a Scientific Trading lorry with a canvas cover came through from Syria, but it was totally empty except for a forklift in the bed.

  “The same lorry came back last night carrying three large crates...the one that set off all the detectors.”

  “Detectors—what detectors?”

  “I do not know what they are supposed to measure, some kind of radiation, I think. They were just delivered to us a few weeks ago. But no one ever explained to us what they were supposed to do, or how to use them. You see, Mr. Fales, the Scientific Trading trucks have always come from Syria loaded and gone back empty. But this time, it was just the opposite.”