Agency Rules - Never an Easy Day at the Office

by Khalid Muhammad

  “The greatest skill of any operative,” Colonel Akbar explained, “was the ability to communicate.” Communication was crucial to every facet of the intelligence gathering process. It did not matter if you were an expert at covert operations and influencing people. If you were unable to communicate that information back to the handlers in an understandable and actionable form, then you held less value. Decisions were not made based on the words of an operative, but on the quality of his reports. Every instructor in every course taught the candidates how to prepare reports ranging from intelligence briefings for ‘customers’, to operational and diplomatic cables. The focus was on quality of reporting so that it could be acted upon effectively.

  Kamal surprised himself with the results of these classes. He wasn’t a talkative person, and didn’t consider himself a great communicator. He had always been solitary, and made few friends at The Jungle, except for those he had known coming in to the academy.

  “It’s not about volume, Kamal.” Major Iftikhar shared a smoke with Kamal after lunch almost every day. “I think that’s what’s surprising you – you manage to say what you need in just a few words. It makes you a great communicator in my book.”

  “Thank you, Major.” Kamal took the praise a little wryly. “It’s an old habit of mine – I learned to be careful with my words around my dad.” At the Major’s questioning look, Kamal brushed aside any explanation. “I’ll tell you about it… someday.”

  They had developed a bond during his time at The Bird’s Nest, where Iftikhar had been one of his many instructors. Kamal had piqued his interest early in his commando training with his tenacity and unwillingness to accept defeat. The more time he spent with the young sniper, the more respect he developed for him. After Kamal earned his maroon beret, the two had stayed in touch as much as two serving soldiers could. When he walked in the door at The Jungle, Iftikhar saw it as an opportunity to impart the knowledge that he had gained during his two tours in the ISI.

  The two would regularly sit together in the evenings, discussing his course material, techniques to better gather intelligence from unwilling participants and how to defeat the standard interrogation methods that were implemented against intelligence operatives. Some of these sessions included teachable moments where Iftikhar would create a situation from the surroundings. On one such evening, they sat enjoying dinner when Iftikhar noticed that Kamal had drawn the attention of an attractive young woman. She, however, was with her parents, making the challenge significantly more interesting for him.

  “She seems to be quite interested in you,” Iftikhar noticed. “You should talk to her.”

  “Who?” Kamal replied nonchalantly.

  “You are kidding right?” Iftikhar asked. “You haven’t noticed the young lady who has been trying to get your attention for the last twenty minutes? Maybe you aren’t as observant as I thought, Kamal,” he quipped laughing.

  “Come on yaar, she’s with her family,” Kamal retorted. “Unapproachable,” he observed drawing a mischievous smile from Iftikhar.

  “You think people will just come to you and hand over information?” he asked. “Sometimes they are unapproachable and you still have to get the information. If you are going to disregard anyone who is unapproachable… well… maybe you should just quit The Jungle now,” he replied stone-faced.

  “What exactly are you asking for, Iftikhar?”

  “Three things,” he said knowing that he had goaded Kamal into another game that would both entertain him while teaching Kamal. “First, get her name. Second, separate her from her family. Last, get her phone number.”

  “Now, I know you’re joking,” Kamal said with a grin. “All of those are impossible.”

  “One more thing, Captain,” Iftikhar added. “You have five minutes to do all three,” he said glancing at his watch.

  Kamal sat stunned for a moment trying to determine if his mentor was serious. When he realized that Iftikhar’s eyes were glued to his watch, he knew this was another one of his games.

  Kamal assessed the environment looking for a tactic that would allow him to approach the family and facilitate his three objectives. Looking down at the menu, he found his opening and slowly got up from the table.

  “Excuse me sir, I apologize for interrupting your meal,” Kamal said placing his hand on the father’s shoulder. The father looked up at him, wondering who the hell he was.

  “My friend and I were watching how much you were enjoying your meal and hoped that we could ask what you were having,” Kamal politely continued.

  The father was a bit surprised at the question, but Kamal’s good-natured politeness encouraged him to discuss the meal. “This is the… what is this… my daughter ordered the food,” he said motioning to the young lady across from him. “Laila, what did you order for me?”

  Laila smiled as she looked at Kamal. “Abbu, that is the chicken Manchurian. Is it good?”

  “It is excellent, beta,” the father replied. Kamal, seeing his opening, turned his attention to the older woman at the table. “Ma’am, are you having the same thing?”

  The woman glowed from the attention from the good-looking young man. “Oh, no beta. This is sweet and sour.”

  “Ah, one of my personal favorites,” Kamal replied with a smile.

  “Laila, right?” Kamal asked pointing to the young lady again. “You have something different than your parents. May I ask what that is?”

  “This is zhajiangmian - noodles with sauce,” she said proudly, able to pronounce the name without a stumble.

  “Zhajangman?” Kamal stammered out, slaughtering the name, but causing Laila to laugh with his attempt. “How do you say that again?”

  “Zha-ji-ang-mian,” she said slowly enunciating the syllables for Kamal, who shook his head, pretending he would never be able to pronounce it correctly.

  “Sir, could I ask a favor?” Kamal politely asked. “If you could spare your daughter for a moment, I am a novice when it comes to good Chinese food and it’s my friend’s birthday. I would like him to have something interesting to eat and honestly, there is no way I am going to remember how to pronounce that.”

  The look on the father’s face changed from a laughing man to a protective father, scowling at Kamal’s request. The mother, on the other hand, gently nudged her daughter to help the kind man. “Go ahead, help the boy, Laila,” she said smiling at Kamal the whole time. She looked at him like a potential dammad for her young daughter who checked all the required boxes — young, good looking, polite and well-spoken.

  Laila excused herself from the table and went with Kamal to the waiter station. Kamal called over a waiter and asked Laila to place the order for him.

  “So what do you recommend?” Kamal asked, as the waiter joined them. Laila glanced over at Iftikhar and turned her attention to the menu. While she was considering the dishes, Kamal quietly mentioned that he had noticed that she was trying to get his attention before he came over to the table. She blushed, caught in her own game, and rattled off four dishes to the waiter trying to divert the conversation.

  “I’d like to call you some time. Maybe speak when your parents aren’t listening to every word,” he said with a smile, shielding her from her parent’s table, while sliding a pen and paper to her. She hesitated for a second, making Kamal wonder if he had misread the situation, and then quickly took the pen, writing out an email address along with her phone number.

  “Let’s talk on email and chat first,” she said sliding the paper back to him.

  Kamal smiled, slipping it into his pocket, before turning and escorting her back to her parent’s table.

  “Sir, if you would allow,” Kamal said. “For your kindness, I would like to buy you all dessert in honor of my friend’s birthday.”

  The father protested, but Kamal insisted, calling the waiter over to the table. “Tell their server that they will be having dessert and to add it to my bill.”

  Kamal smiled, thanking Laila and her family for their assistanc
e and turned to return to his own table.

  Iftikhar tapped the face of his Timex. “Seven minutes,” he said as Kamal sat down.

  “Two minutes over, but I got 4 out of 3 objectives.”

  Iftikhar’s eyebrow raised, “4 out of 3, how’s that?”

  “Name, Laila. She joined me at the insistence of her mother.”

  “That’s two, Kamal.”

  “Phone number and email address. She would like to write and chat before speaking on the phone,” Kamal added with a smirk. “Four out of three.”

  “Impressive, recruit. Now, tell me this,” Iftikhar sat up in his chair. “Assess each person sitting at the table.”

  “The father is traditional, maybe central Punjab based on his accent. The mother is Lahori. She is looking for a suitor for her daughter and thought she hit the jackpot with me,” Kamal said softly so that nearby tables would not hear him. “Laila is a modern girl, studying in one of the private colleges. You can see from the number of times she has looked over here since I sat down that she is interested.”

  Iftikhar returned to his reclined position and grinned satisfied with the game played out. “So, are you going to pursue?”

  Kamal thought for a second, looked over at Laila and smiled. Turning back to Iftikhar, he said, “Why not? Look at her.”

  Most of Iftikhar’s teachable moments involved approaching women, Kamal had noted long ago. In this society, men didn’t just walk up to women and start conversations. That was just not done. So the challenge of being able to glean the required information was much harder and a better test compared to the staged, controlled exercises at The Jungle. Plus, Kamal thought, Iftikhar enjoyed watching Kamal get cut down to size by the women he approached. His entertainment value at my expense.

  Instructors at The Jungle regularly tested the candidates on their ability to differentiate between fact-based intelligence and intuition, speculation and conjecture. Candidates were required to separate intelligence from operational information.

  Years later, in the middle of a desperate mission, Kamal would remember one particular exercise they went through on a regular basis – an exercise that routinely got him out of hot water. He was introduced, over a course of several days, to ten people playing different roles in different places. Each told him ten different versions of the same story. His job was to find the intelligence and the operational information, as well as identify which of the ten could be recruited and how. In other exercises, the tables were turned to see how much information others could get from Kamal, with methods varying from gentle inquires to hard interrogation tactics. All of the information would be drafted into an intelligence report that would be parsed by the instructor, leaving Kamal to wonder whether he had caught the right threads and identified the right people. This, much to Kamal’s consternation, was a daily event at The Jungle.

  The psychological training was peppered with tactical driving, close quarter combat, survival training, surveillance tactics and interrogation techniques to make the candidate a stronger operative, if they graduated with high enough marks to be put in the field. The goal of The Jungle was to create top-level operatives that could be posted to different stations around the world to gather intelligence, recruit potential spies and report back actionable information. Oh, and to stay alive in the harshest of conditions.

  Kamal had excelled in the art of tradecraft and human espionage. He also tested very high in linguistics and intelligence gathering skills. His only weakness was his rudimentary knowledge of international affairs. As a result, there were stacks of history books, magazines and newspapers on his desk in the hostel. As his instructors regularly reminded him, he had to understand the history of the cultures to be able to effectively influence them.

  He was luckier than most. His civilian classmates were almost all taking extra fitness training, including ten-mile hikes and runs through the forest.

  “It’s not fucking fair.” Irfan was one of the weakest members of the civilian students; Kamal irked him. “You get to lay in bed reading a stupid newspaper while I have to kill myself on the track every day!”

  Kamal gave him a cold look. He’d joined the military because classroom studies bored him, and here he was, with his nose stuck in a book. The last thing he needed was a sniveling idiot whining about being out in the fresh air. “There’s no such thing as an easy day at the office in the intelligence world. Get used to it.”

  Chapter 5

  “Captain, you’ve graduated now. You don’t have to skulk in corners to smoke a cigarette.” Major Iftikhar found a scowling Kamal in a secluded corner of the academy grounds, which were overflowing with people. “Why are you hiding?” It was a rhetorical question. Kamal didn’t mingle.

  “Iffi.” Kamal nodded to his mentor and friend. The Major gave him a friendly slap on the back.

  “Cheer up, yaar. This is a moment of celebration. Your career is just about to take off, and you’ve retreated to the only quiet place on the campus. Why aren’t you out there with your friends?”

  “Because family’s out there.”

  The Major’s eyebrows shot up at Kamal’s laconic reply. “Your… dad?” He knew that Kamal’s contact with his estranged father was limited to visits home for Eid holidays, whenever possible, but few and far in between compared to other enlisted men. There was no love lost between them. “Hmmm. Have you met him?”

  “Not yet.” This wasn’t Kamal’s first graduation ceremony. Basic training, sniper school in Quetta, his medal awards and now the ISI Academy. Afzal Khan hadn’t been to a single one of the previous events. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.” Kamal shrugged off the question niggling at the back of his mind. “I’m more concerned with my first posting. I’m afraid I’ll spend the next year behind a desk at Military Intelligence in Gujranwala or Peshawar. Then, as my last year of ISI posting starts, I might get a posting to one of the ISI division offices, but I’m not holding my breath for that one.”

  Unlike other academies he had been to, the Jungle did not share final marks or grades with the candidates. These were passed directly to the Commandant along with respective instructor’s notes, which were added to the candidate’s file. Kamal did not receive a report on his overall performance, other than what he had gleaned from his instructors, marking it hard to know where he might be posted. Nor could he eliminate possibilities by figuring out where his classmates were posted. His inner circle was tiny.

  Since he joined the Academy, Kamal had worked hard not to become overly friendly with his fellow candidates. He was naturally reserved and reticent, but he was also concerned that anyone could pass incorrect or compromising information about him to the Commandant. Instructors were kept at arm’s length, keeping the relationship contained to the course and the material covered, with the exception of old colleagues like Iftikhar. Now that his time in the Jungle was over, no one knew more about Kamal than he wanted them to know and that was limited to superficial information that was already in his military files.

  Iftikhar let Kamal change the subject. He had news for him, and had wanted to be the one who told him. “Kami, you should have a bit more confidence in your abilities,” he said, holding out a crisp, ivory envelope with an insignia in the top corner. Printed in bold in the center was Captain Kamal Khan.

  Kamal hesitated for a moment before he reached for the envelope, trying to read the Major’s somber expression. Good news? Bad news? Damn the man. He deserves to be an instructor here; I can’t tell a bloody thing. He held the slim envelope in his hand, trying to guess the result by its weight. “Do you know where I’ve been posted?”

  The Major rolled his eyes. “Just open the damn envelope.”

  Kamal pulled out his pocketknife and slit the top open at the seam. Minutes seemed like hours as he took in the information printed on the heavy bond ivory letter inside. Was this a practical joke? Good one, Iffi. But as Kamal reread the letter a second time, it began to sink in that this was no joke.

  “Due to your extens
ive experience and proven abilities in the field, the ISI is proud to post Captain Kamal Khan to the ISI divisional office in Peshawar, Pakistan for the period of one year, as a field operative,” Kamal read the words aloud. “Is this for real, Iffi?”

  “All the instructors were extremely impressed with your abilities, both in the classroom and out. The commandant still can’t understand how you were able to keep information about yourself so controlled from your own batch mates,” Iftikhar said, laughing. “We all believed that you would make an outstanding field operative, so we recommended that the command to put you in the field.”

  If Kamal had yelled out in excitement and celebration, Iftikhar would have been stunned. Kamal kept his distance, and hid his emotions as though it were second nature. He wasn’t disappointed. Kamal nodded gratefully, and carefully folded the letter back into the envelope. Would Dad be proud? Or would he just not care? He gave his friend a calculating look. “Want to meet my father?”

  Iftikhar grinned. “Need a buffer, or do you have something else in mind?”

  “It wouldn’t be wise for me to spill blood on this sacred ground. You’re coming along for his protection.”

  They put out their cigarettes and pushed through the crowd still milling around the parade ground. It had thinned considerably, as most of the military personnel had dispersed, leaving families hanging around waiting for their sons. After the parade, most of the new operatives rushed to their commanders for their posting letters, dreaming of being appointed to a Pakistani consulate or embassy where they could rub elbows with the influential diplomatic world. Kamal knew, however, that this was a highly unlikely scenario; they would be posted to either division or field offices around Pakistan to be trained further during live action exercises. A select few, those who had many years in military service, would get posted to foreign countries to join on-going operations as administrative staff.