Man in the Middle

by Brian Haig

  Bian was staring at the top of the conference table. Sounding deeply stunned, she blurted, “Do you realize what this bastard did?” Phyllis obviously did. We all did. Treason. To save his sinking career, Cliff Daniels had conveyed a huge and damaging secret to an enemy nation. I wasn’t sure I understood everything, nor did I have the expert knowledge or regional expertise to fully analyze it. But I understood this: In exchange for the name of a terrorist, Clifford Daniels had exposed to Charabi, and thereby to the Iranians, the knowledge that we were reading and decoding their most sensitive communications. On top of everything, this wasn’t even a good trade. I mean, Cliff Daniels not only was a traitor, he was stupid.

  But instead of replying to Bian’s question, to me Phyllis said, “Now, give me back that page.”

  So I did, positive it would never again see the light of day.

  Nobody said anything for a moment. We were all three, I think, too stunned and completely consumed in our own thoughts.

  Regarding Phyllis, I had no idea what thoughts were running through her mind. But I had a premonition, or, considering the circumstances, a postmonition, that Phyllis knew when she sent me to Daniels’s apartment that morning it might lead to something like this.

  Maybe not exactly like this. But something.

  As for Bian, I was sure she was thinking what I was thinking. Clifford Daniels was lucky; somebody beat us to him. By the time we finished lumping him up, a bullet through his brain would’ve been an act of leniency.

  Phyllis stood and walked toward the door. She said, somewhat ominously, “There is somebody here who can explain all this to you,” and then she walked out.

  Normally, when you have a crime, through exacting detective work, the miracles of modern forensics, and pathology, you work backward, from the aftermath to the crime itself; you reconstruct, analyze, and reconnect the evidentiary traces, because the parts have to be made whole again, because that whole is a human identity—a name—the person whose fingertips left the telltale stain, whose skin is embedded in the fingernails of the victim he shoved off the balcony and sent caterwauling down twenty floors onto the pavement below.

  But when the crime is bureaucratic in nature and origin, you have a different species of criminal, with a different genre of evidence. To get from A to Z, you follow a different arc—less linear—more M to Z, then full circle back to A to M. In place of a corpse, and in place of forensic traces, you have a long trail of paper, words, thoughts, and expressions that, when added together, expose a deed—a crime.

  So Bian and I now knew the category of the crime, the identity of the criminal, and we even had a roughed-out portrait of the motive: treason, Clifford Daniels, idiocy fueled by naked ambition. Also a murder remained to be solved, though that suddenly looked like the least of our problems, though it was also, quite possibly, a related one.

  Some sins are larger than others, no matter that they violate the same commandment. Thou shalt not kill—all its varying shades and distinctions are defined, parsed, and echeloned in the criminal code; murder in the first degree, murder in the second, murder in the third, criminal manslaughter, and right down the line. Yet when a killing is part of a holocaust, when it is a piece of a whole, one of thousands or one of millions, none of these terms fit—they become too tolerant, too morally shallow, too belittling.

  Such appeared to be the case here. Bian knew this, and I, too, knew it; like Alice peering into a rabbit hole, we had just glimpsed the fool in a crazy hat, and clearly somewhere, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and a Cheshire Cat were pounding the drums. I stared at Phyllis’s empty chair and wondered about the crazy queen’s role in all of this.

  Bian shifted in her seat. “Okay, I am starting to feel paranoid.”

  “Do you want out?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes. But it’s too late.”

  After a moment, she asked in a whispery voice, “What about Phyllis . . . can I trust her?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  She stared at me. “Do you trust her?”

  This was a different question and I replied, “Sometimes.”

  “Do you trust her this time?”

  “Her agenda and ours might not be the same.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s bad chemistry between this administration and the CIA. You’ve probably read the gossip and rumors in the newspapers.”

  “I have.” She took a moment to think about this.

  I gave her that moment, then said, “You know about the hunt for blame over who failed to prevent 9/11, and you know the White House and the Pentagon laid it on the Agency’s doorstep. Now the Hill is investigating how flawed Iraqi intelligence made it through the net.

  The administration’s already shoving the blame here. So is the Pentagon. Langley is pissed.”

  “This isn’t part of some bureaucratic vendetta, is it?”

  “I think everything we’ve seen is genuine. But now we need to consider why we were allowed to see it.”

  She stared at me without responding.

  I continued, “I also think what we do about it, how this is handled—” The door flew open and I stopped talking.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Phyllis was back with a gentleman in her wake.

  She informed Bian and me, “This is Don.” Don seemed to have misplaced his surname.

  He walked across the room and shook my hand. Then he shook Bian’s hand as well, and I noted he held it a few seconds too long.

  He was quite tall, about six foot five, trim, and moved with an athletic bounce in his step. About my age, very fit, with a full head of slicked-back black hair, and fairly good-looking, if you like the type.

  Of course, his name wasn’t Don.

  And of course, this meeting never took place.

  I asked Don, “Where do you work?”

  He smiled and said, “Same place as you. The Agency. That’s all you need to know.”

  Aside from administrative types and a cadre of appointed political overseers, Agency employees tend to be either analysts or operators. In general, analysts are fairly ordinary in appearance, bookish, intelligent-looking, and—no offense intended—they take their fashion cues from college professors.

  Also, analysts have last names.

  Don was attired in a blue wool and cashmere suit, severely tailored with a Savile Row cut right down to the Continental fanny flap, glossy black Italian loafers, and a thick, expertly knotted pink silk tie with a matching pink hankie in his breast pocket. Message to Don: Real men don’t have to wear pink neckties.

  That he spent too much on clothes, however, was the second clue. What gave him away was his overall demeanor—cocky and calculating. Also, he had icy brown eyes.

  A lot of these operational types think they are irresistible to the ladies, and maybe I was a little piqued at the way his hand lingered in Bian’s hand. I mean, this poor girl’s fiancé was probably at that moment fighting hand to hand with a bunch of blood-crazed jihadis in some Baghdad back alley, and Randy Don was trying to get into her drawers. Asshole.

  Anyway, Don sat at the head of the table, and Phyllis returned to the seat behind her desk. Phyllis mentioned a few things about Don: Ivy League degrees in Arabic studies, career man, able to leap tall buildings with a little help, and so on.

  She summed up by telling us, “Don has long and extensive experience with Iraq that dates back before the first Gulf War. He is a highly regarded expert who happens to be personally acquainted with Mahmoud Charabi.” She waited a beat before adding, “He worked, occasionally, with Clifford Daniels.”

  Don acknowledged this introduction with a droll, disaffected smile. Probably, had Phyllis informed us that Don was a dickless idiot with a pea-size brain, his expression would’ve been identical.

  Now it was his turn, and he looked at Bian and then at me. “I don’t actually like discussing this with you. Okay? The Director ordered this . . . so . . .” He allowed a long moment to pass, then added, “I
’ll tell you as much as I think you need to know.”

  I very reasonably asked, “How will you know what we need to know, Don?”

  “I’ll know.”

  I smiled at Don. “So, if it’s an embarrassment to the Agency, that’s off-limits and you won’t tell us about it?”

  Don, of course, did not reply to this. He stared back with an empty expression and suggested, “Why don’t we start with your questions?”

  “Okay. Was there a pissing contest between the Agency and the Pentagon over Iraq?”

  “There are disagreements between the Agency and the Pentagon over a variety of issues. Who controls intelligence? How much Agency effort should go to supporting soldiers, how much to politicians? That’s where it begins.” He offered us a reasonable facsimile of a smile. “It never ends.”

  “You forgot to mention Iraq.”

  His smile disappeared. “You need to be more specific.”

  “All right. Specifically, between the CIA and the Defense Department, were there differences of opinion over whether to invade?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you describe those differences?”

  He smiled again, which of course meant, “Fuck you.”

  I smiled back and asked, “Were there differences over whether Saddam had stockpiles of outlawed weapons?”

  “On that topic, even within the Agency . . . yes, there were . . . differences. Our general consensus was that there possibly were weapons, with a caveat of ambiguity.”

  “Say again.”

  He replied, “Buyer beware—that’s what it means, Mr. Drummond.”

  “You’re not blowing smoke up our ass, Don? According to news reports, the Director personally assured the President there were weapons.”

  “Maybe he did; maybe not. The Director, however, is not the Agency. Just a temporary figurehead.”

  “I’m still confused.”

  “So was he,” he said, and he laughed. Don apparently enjoyed his own humor.

  I did not laugh. “But the Agency is being blamed for the faulty intelligence?”

  “By certain quarters—yes.”

  “Certain quarters? Like the American public?”

  “Well . . . our friends in the press seem to have manufactured the unfortunate impression that the Agency was largely responsible. Then again, they have their own credibility issues, don’t they?”

  “Where would the press get this idea?”

  He did not reply.

  “From sources inside the White House? From sources inside the Defense Department?”

  Don did not reply to this either. Regarding this line of inquiry, Washington has an amazing cornucopia of more than a dozen different intelligence organizations. To an outsider this might sound superfluous and maybe absurd—an insider knows it’s insane. But they all are ostensibly indispensable on the basis that each does something different, or employs different collection means, or offers a unique perspective, or serves different masters with differing needs.

  It’s a little like medieval Venice with all those interlocking families sharing the same cramped turf, warily coexisting, sensitive to slights, and completely paranoid about their own territory, prestige, and existence. Bureaucratic drive-by shootings and political poisonings aren’t out of the question.

  Yet, despite this excess of riches, before the war, Tigerman and Hirschfield had decided to add one more, their own in-house intelligence hothouse, and Clifford Daniels was brought in from DIA as a founding member. The expressed mission for this small cell was to cull through the raw intelligence provided by other agencies, to question, to reinterpret, to determine if anything vital had been missed, misinterpreted, or overlooked. But there were critics who claimed the reason was to cook, customize, and massage the raw intelligence to justify an invasion, and a war.

  Don had known about this, and I now knew about it as well. The policy wonks in the Pentagon had muscled their way into the intelligence business, and a larger bureaucratic war was going on here, a battle for tax dollars, for influence, for reputations—and now a battle over blame—and I wanted to know where Don stood on it. Well, I already knew where he stood; I just wanted him to admit it. Then, when the bullshit flew, we would all know where he was coming from.

  I looked at Don. “In any event, we all know the Agency has been made the public scapegoat. Does that piss you off?”

  “Personally? Why should it, Drummond? Just business.”

  Bullshit. “How did Charabi end up as the Pentagon’s man?”

  “That’s a long and complicated story.”

  “You’re a clever guy. Come up with an abbreviated version.”

  “All right.” He offered me a strange smile, like he was measuring my coffin size.

  As I mentioned, Don was full of himself—arrogant, actually—and that nearly always equates to thin-skinned. Also, he would tell us what he wanted us to know unless I pissed him off enough to provoke a few inadvertent truths from his lips. Sizing him up, he was a cool customer, a world-class bullshitter, and he affected a certain imperturbable coyness. He actually seemed to be enjoying this game of cat and mouse, and he obviously liked being the center of attention.

  He stopped smiling and said, “Charabi approached us after the first Gulf War.” He paused and appeared thoughtful. “Late 1993 . . . maybe early 1994. I, myself, met with him.”

  “What was the purpose of this meeting?”

  “It was in the nature of a negotiation.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was offering to provide intelligence about conditions inside Iraq. It sounded attractive. In fact, it sounded great. The truth is, getting and keeping good sources inside Iraq was . . . difficult. Saddam was—surely you’ve read this—almost insanely paranoid and ruthless. A lot of our sources ended up in graves. This was not helpful for recruitment.”

  He paused and looked at Bian. She said, “So it sounded good. What happened?”

  “His offer came with stipulations. For one, we had to agree to emancipate his people from a monster.”

  “I thought that was our policy.”

  “It was. Later. But then—and even later—we were . . . let’s just say, concerned about Charabi’s additional conditions.”

  Bian suggested, “He wanted you to put him in power.”

  He nodded. “He wanted to be king.” He paused, then said, “He claimed he had hundreds of Iraqis in his pocket, exiles, and also people in country willing to help. And of course these were Iraqis—very cliquish, very clannish. You get one, you get dozens of relatives and tribal members. They would gather intelligence, and after Saddam was gone, they would form the base of his power. Also, he’s Shiite, as are about 60 percent of Iraqis. Better yet, he’s a secular Shiite, so the Kurds—and maybe even the Sunnis—might find him palatable.”

  Bian commented, “For the situation, that sounds like an attractive résumé.”

  “The perfect résumé. So, yes . . . I agreed to meet with him.” He paused, then added, “I brought along another gentleman. An Agency psychiatrist who specializes in quick profiles of foreign leaders. He’s quite good at it. Would you care to hear his assessment?”

  I said, “Sure.”

  “A classic narcissist, compounded by a manipulative personality classification.”

  I looked at Bian and shrugged. She shrugged back.

  Don was amused by our ignorance and with a snotty smile informed us, “Here’s language even you’ll understand, Drummond. A self-serving asshole with a velvety tongue who will screw you for a nickel.”

  “Was that you, or Charabi? Or both?”

  He gave me a long, hard stare. He turned to Phyllis. “Do I really have to put up with this?”

  She advised him with some insight, “He’s trying to taunt you. Ignore him and he’ll stop.”

  I smiled at Phyllis. She ignored me, and to humor her, I stopped smiling.

  Bian said to Don, “I have no idea how these things work. Presumably this was a vetting process and this
snapshot psychoanalysis was part of it. Right?” He nodded, and she asked, “Did this psychiatrist veto an arrangement?”

  “That’s not how it works. He offers insights; I decide. However, he classified Charabi as a high-risk asset. Specifically, he predicted Charabi would follow his own agenda, guided by his own scruples, which in the doctor’s judgment were scarce and very elastic.”

  Incidentally, every time he spoke, Don’s eyes flashed toward Bian. You knew exactly what was going through his filthy mind. Geez— dogs in heat show more savoir faire than this guy.

  Bian, for her part, seemed totally oblivious, or perhaps she mistook Don’s interest as intellectual flattery. Message to Bian—it’s not your mind he wants to get into.

  I have known women who live for this kind of attention; others I know do nothing to invite it and are perilously blind to the signals. I don’t mean that Bian was naive, or a naif, but she spent four years at West Point, where the boy-to-girl ratio is about ten to one. In such a male-dominated environment, I imagine the female either dampens her antennae or becomes a sexual hypochondriac.

  Anyway, I tried to catch Don’s eye and said, “I haven’t knocked over any foreign governments, so maybe this is going over my head. For replacing Saddam, isn’t that a reasonable trade?”

  “On first blush, Drummond . . . yes, sure . . . I might agree with you. A duplicitous liar for a pathological mass murderer. Sure. Why not?”

  “That’s what I asked you—why not?”

  “I ran his background and he wasn’t . . . credible.”

  Credible, for most people, concerns integrity and trustworthiness; these people, however, play by different rules, and more often it’s about whether they can get a grip on his short hairs.

  Having not spent time with Agency types, however, Bian found this concept elusive and asked, “Can you explain that?”

  “Well . . . why do you think he fled Iraq in the first place?”