Direct Action

by John Weisman

  And what if something did go wrong—what if Tom mucked up? Well, as Tony had said more than once, the bottom line is that 4627 and all its people were disposables. He had said as much to Tom the day he’d recruited him. “We can’t afford to screw up,” is what Tony said. “Because unlike your time at Langley, we work out here without a net. Just like the guys in Mission: Impossible, ‘The secretary will deny any knowledge…’ You know how the mantra goes.”

  Which was one reason the thought of hunting and killing made Tom Stafford just a little uncomfortable. Well, he didn’t have to like it.

  Besides, they weren’t anywhere near the direct-action stage yet. “There’s a lot to nail down before the hunting season opens, Reuven.” Tom took a long pull on the cigar. “First things first. Check with Shin Bet on the explosives—see if they’ll run supplemental tests for you. And Shin Bet is holding two prisoners I want to interrogate. The ones Shahram told me about. The guy from Jerusalem—the one with no hands. Then the bomber from Tel Aviv. Set it up for me first thing in the morning.”

  “First thing in the morning?” Reuven drained the cognac and poured himself another. “First thing in the morning, my friend, I am going to drive you and your lady friend to Jerusalem so she can walk through the Old City and feel some of the magic of this country—and tell her not to worry about the Intifada because she’ll be a lot safer in Jerusalem than she would be in much of Washington, D.C. Then we’ll drive back to Tel Aviv so I can take the two of you to a great fish restaurant in Jaffa for lunch. After lunch, we go up the coast to the Roman ruins in Caesarea. And for dinner, I have a friend from Shayetet 13—the Israeli SEALs—who opened the best restaurant in Herzlyia.”

  “Reuven—”

  The Israeli’s hand went up like a traffic cop’s. He cocked his head toward the second floor of the house. “Look,” he said in Arabic, “Imad Mugniyah is long gone. Zip-zip through the Rafah tunnels to Egypt, and from there, who knows where—maybe Tehran, maybe back to Beirut. Ben Said no doubt used the same route, although now that I have a name and a picture, maybe I can pick up a scent.” He shot the American a look that preempted any objections “That’s that, Tom. So, tomorrow we go sightseeing. The whole day. Tuesday afternoon, your friend, she goes on a plane back to Washington, full of stories about her wonderful surprise trip to the Holy Land.”

  The Israeli knocked an inch and a half of ash off his cigar. “Frankly, I think you should propose.”

  Reuven saw the shocked expression on Tom’s face and cocked his head in the American’s direction. “What’s the problem? You love this woman, right?”

  “For sure, Reuven.”

  “So in Tel Aviv I know a place you can find an engagement ring for her. He’s a diamond merchant. I served with him overseas. He has only the best. And I can get you a great price.”

  “Reuven—”

  “Look, I’m thinking only professionally. Engaged. That would give her real—how do you Americans say it—cover for status for being here.” He laughed. “Cover for status. Perfect.”

  “Marriage isn’t a game, Reuven.”

  “I’m not playing games. You love this woman, right?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So do the right thing. Don’t make trouble for her—marry her, Tom.” The Israeli’s face clouded over. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d marry Leah five years earlier than I did. That would have given us five more years, Tom. We had thirty-six years together. I can tell you now it wasn’t enough.”

  “I’m sorry, Reuven.”

  “Believe me, Tom, I am sorrier than you. So give your MJ a good time, buy her a ring, then put her on the plane home. No business, Tom. Not a hint of it. After she’s safely away, ecstatic with a diamond she can show all her colleagues—that’s when we do business. Then—I’ll arrange for you to debrief the scum who came here so they could kill women and children. Then we can start the hunt.”

  12

  26 OCTOBER 2003

  10:02 A . M .

  SEVEN KILOMETERS NORTHWEST OF QADIMA

  IT WAS THE SMELL, more than anything, that had made Tom uneasy; an ineffable but palpable mélange of disinfectant, urine, sweat, must, and fear. The result of this assault on his senses—and this took place even though Tom knew intellectually he was just a visitor here—was a huge and totally unexpected psychological tsunami. It sucked Tom into an emotional undertow that combined apprehension, anxiety, and, as much as he tried to fight against it, complete and utter heart-palpitating dread. He couldn’t help himself. Dread was…just in the air.

  They’d left at nine. Reuven had taken the coast road. Just north of Udim, opposite a Toys “R” Us superstore that would have done justice to the Paramus Mall, he’d swerved off the highway, drove down the exit ramp, and continued north on a dusty track that ran parallel to the highway. Two kilometers on, he’d made a sharp turn onto a potholed, single-lane road bordered on both sides by denuded cotton fields. There would be only one interview today. Reuven told Tom that Heinrich Azouz, the Jerusalem bomber, had died of his wounds. But he’d pulled enough strings to get Tom granted permission to interrogate Dianne Lamb. It was a one-shot deal.

  They’d driven due east, followed the browntop as it turned north then east again, crossed the tracks of the main Tel Aviv–Haifa rail line, and continued another three kilometers past brick factories, concrete plants, and quarries until they intersected a four-lane blacktop road so new that the center line hadn’t been painted yet. Tom caught glimpses, but he was focused on the work at hand.

  Reuven turned north. Tom looked up. The highway was bordered by cypress groves. About three-quarters of a kilometer north of the intersection, Reuven turned onto an unmarked gravel road bulldozed into the wall of trees. He headed west, toward the sea. For the first half kilometer, the road ascended. Then it crested and dipped. As they descended, the tree line opened slightly and Tom saw an old British fort in the distance. It was a squat, square three-story affair built of thick Jerusalem stone, with crenellated watchtowers that looked like old-fashioned chess pieces at each corner.

  Reuven pulled up at a rudimentary roadblock manned by half a dozen troops armed with M-16s. Tom glanced into the woods and was surprised to see four olive-drab Jeeps with pintle-mounted .50-caliber machine guns and three camouflaged APCs close at hand. He waited while Reuven palavered with the guards, then watched as a soldier pulled a twenty-foot length of tire spikes out of the way so they could proceed.

  The heavy weapons had gotten Tom’s attention, and he scanned carefully as they drove the last half klik to the old fort. In the sixty seconds it took them to do so, he identified five layers of defensive countermeasures: raked cordons sanitaires, surveillance cameras, infrared sensors, K-9 teams, and razor wire. He wondered what he’d missed.

  As they pulled onto the small parking lot Reuven turned to him, his face serious. “Listen carefully. This place does not exist. So far as I know, you’re the first foreigner ever allowed inside. Point of fact, Tom, I was surprised when they said yes. So treat what you see and hear here accordingly, okay?”

  Tom’s expression showed that he understood the gravity of what he was being told. “Got it, Reuven. And thank you.”

  10:12 A.M. In a sterile, windowless interrogation room holding a metal desk and two metal chairs bolted to the concrete floor, he stripped down to his underwear and was given a set of utilitarian olive-drab coveralls and a pair of scuffed black leather boots that looked about half a size too small. He’d even had to hand over his watch, which along with his other personal belongings were sealed into a heavy brown envelope then taken away to be stored in a safe in the commandant’s office. The only thing he carried was the handkerchief he’d transferred from his trouser pocket.

  When he’d asked why he couldn’t keep the watch, he was told the prisoners were allowed no sense of time. It was an integral part of the interrogation process. The cells were lit by artificial light, which could be regulated to disorient and throw their biometric schedules and
thinking processes into chaos. Some “days” were eight hours in length; others might last thirty-six.

  “We do not use physical abuse,” the officer in charge of his visit explained. He was a diminutive man who looked to be in his mid- to late sixties and who spoke to Tom in Kurdish-accented Arabic. The left arm of his olive-drab coveralls was folded neatly and attached by the cuff just below the epaulet. From what Tom could make out, the man’s whole left arm had been taken off at the shoulder.

  The Israeli introduced himself as Salah and volunteered no further information as to his rank or position. When Tom asked how the prisoners were treated, Salah cocked his head defensively. “There are no stress positions, hooding, or coercion used here.”

  “Why not? That’s how our detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq are being treated.”

  “Of course.” Salah rubbed his pencil-thin mustache with the edge of his right hand. “They are effective techniques in the acquiring of actionable intelligence. Quick results for immediate needs. A slap in the face, a threat, the pit-of-stomach claustrophobia from being hooded sometimes works to jar loose information about an imminent operation. That’s fear, my friend. You can extract information by using fear—I believe you Americans teach a technique at Fort Huachuca called ‘fear up/fear down.’ But fear is short-lived. I prefer dread. Day-in, day-out, marrow-of-the-bone angst is what I want to produce. Our prisoners know we have a reputation for ruthlessness. It doesn’t matter whether that reputation is true or not. What matters is the psychological effect it has on them. Let me tell you something, my friend: dread works. Dread works very well.”

  Tom remembered how he’d felt when they’d come through the gates. The unpleasant sensations that had been prodded by what he’d smelled. “Including sensory exploitation, right?”

  A sly smile crossed Salah’s face. “How do you mean?”

  “What I smelled when we came into the facility. It made me react viscerally.”

  “Ah, le parfum pénitentiaire. It took us months to develop. What did you think?”

  “I was impressed. It made me extremely…apprehensive.”

  “You felt dread, correct?”

  “Precisely.”

  “That’s why it works. Look—I throw into a cell a man. He’s no hard-liner, but let’s say he was standing close by when two Israeli reservists are attacked, beaten, then thrown out of the second-story window of a Palestinian Authority police station, then stomped to death by the crowd the Palestinian police have assembled below. There is video—a Western camera crew was rolling during the incident, so we have lots of faces but no names. This guy, we think he has names.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in the video he’s a part of the crowd. He looks like he knows the people around him—the same animals who tore our soldiers apart limb from limb and then turned to the camera to show off their bloody hands. Either they’re his neighbors or he’s a part of one of the murderers’ extended families. I have to fracture that clan loyalty and get him to name names before Arafat ships the scum with the blood on their hands out to Gaza or Egypt or Syria, where it’s harder for us to lay our hands on them. So Shabak noses around until they find him, scoop him up, and bring him to me. Not here. To another place. Things are abrupt, quick. He has no time to think or react. He’s yanked into a truck, and the next thing he knows he’s smelling what you smelled—and all of a sudden he is afraid. He is very, very afraid. Then he loses his clothes. He’s handed dirty, anonymous over-alls that smell of someone else’s sweat and urine. He’s alone. He’s frightened. He’s been separated from his family, his village, all his friends. He’s pushed into a cell. A very spartan cell. Then I start the disorientation and, more important, the anticipation of dread. A few slaps in the face—whapwhap. A cuff or two on the back of the head—smack-smack. Then he’s left alone to wonder what’s coming next. Then I use heat. Followed by cold. Then sleep deprivation. During this time, he’s hooded for what he thinks is a day, maybe even two.”

  “How does he know?”

  “Because we designed the hoods so he can see just enough to know when the lights go on and when they go off. Because he can hear the other prisoners being served breakfast or dinner.” Salah’s eyes narrowed. “His senses tell him what’s what.”

  “And how long are we really talking about?”

  “Nine to thirteen hours tops. Sometimes much less.”

  Tom pursed his lips. Impressive.

  Salah continued. “He can hear things but not see anything. He hears someone being taken away. He hears screams—I mean serious. Like fingernails being pulled out, or hot irons burning flesh or electroshock. Sometime later—he has no idea how long—he hears the sound of a body being dragged down the corridor and thrown into the adjacent cell. If he listens very carefully, he can make out excruciating moans. It may all be role-playing or sound effects coming from a compact disc and a very sophisticated speaker system—sophisticated enough to make the walls of his cell rumble if we have to. But my target doesn’t know that. All he knows is what his buddies have told him and what he’s picked up on the street about how ruthless we are—and what he’s just gone through. Believe me, by the time I ask him the first question, he is already putty.”

  “But what you’re talking about is ruthless.”

  “Ruthless works, my friend. You have to be pragmatic. Flexible. You Americans forget you are at war. That’s because you think you are eight thousand miles from it, even though you’re not. We live in the middle of the battlefield, my friend.” Salah pulled a pack of Jordanian cigarettes from his pocket, shook one into his mouth, and lit it with a disposable lighter. “That’s how you get actionable intelligence. Stuff you use today, tomorrow, this week.”

  “But you said you don’t use those techniques at Qadima.”

  “Correct. Here we are interested in the long term. To learn how these people think and why. This woman you came to see—she is no terrorist. We know that. But we want to learn about the man she traveled with. We want to be able to give our security services information that will help them uncover developing capabilities, impending objectives, future trends. And so, we prefer psychological means—yes, we still use light, heat, and cold, sound or the absolute lack of it. But the key is long, intensive, almost psychoanalytic sessions.”

  “But she’s British. What about the British consul? Didn’t he demand to see her?”

  Salah put his right hand on the edge of the metal desk and exhaled smoke through his nose. “That is not my concern. When those in a position to grant the British consul permission to see this woman do so, she will be moved to another facility.” He swiveled toward Tom. “Our goals here are different. Time is of no concern. We want to extract information right down to the subconscious level. To understand what attracted these people to terrorism—to comprehend not only their motives, but get inside their psyches.”

  “When you say long…”

  The Israeli switched into French. “Twenty-two, twenty-three hours is common. I have seen interrogations that last more than thirty-two hours—almost a day and a half. And believe me, they are just as hard on the interrogator as they are on the subject.”

  Tom followed suit, speaking French. “You don’t tag-team?”

  “It doesn’t work if you switch boats in midstream. There has to be a real line of communication developed. Something akin to trust. Like I said, in many ways the process here resembles psychoanalysis. You get inside their heads. You take them back, get them almost fetal, and then bring them forward step-by-step.”

  Tom understood Salah’s modus operandi. The agent recruitment process operated under many of the same precepts. The case officer controls the situation by creating and subsequently encouraging the kind of rapport in which the agent quickly becomes dependent on the case officer. Through the ability to read people, the force of personality, and the exploitation of vulnerabilities, the case officer creates a Potemkin Village relationship in which he or she becomes the agent’s best friend, surrogate pare
nt, trusted confessor, and shrink. “Potemkin Village” because it is all an act. The case officer’s every emotion is feigned, every response choreographed in order to manipulate, steer, and influence the target in a certain prescribed direction. At the end of the process, which is called “getting close,” the target will trust the case officer more than he or she will trust their own husbands or wives, families, or the groups to which they belong.

  Indeed, if the case officers are sophisticated enough, and flexible enough, and know enough about the culture, mores, and psychological quirks of the target, they can even run this mind game on individuals whose religious and political beliefs might at first appear to be impenetrable and unshakable. Like members of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Da’wa, for example. Tom had recruited members of both vehemently anti-Western Islamist factions as agents. It hadn’t been an overnight process. It had taken more than half a year in one case—that had been a false-flag recruitment—and a local access agent to act as an intermediary in the other. But he had pulled them off.

  He looked at the one-armed man who flicked the cigarette from his lips and ground it out with the toe of his boot. This guy knew whereof he spoke.

  “Why was I allowed to come here?”

  “You are here because Reuven Ayalon vouches for you, and because Reuven has a lot of friends.” He gave Tom a sidelong glance. “I was against it at first. It breaks the rhythm, and we’re almost finished with her. But I was finally convinced that in the long term your visit will bear valuable fruit for us as well as you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t be so quick to thank. Besides, Reuven or no Reuven, you are here because I was told you are able to ask questions exactly the way we do—in Arabic or French that doesn’t sound as if it’s being spoken by a Yankee Doodle dandy.”