Direct Action

by John Weisman

  The words came out “Yenki Duudul dendi.” The Israeli looked at Tom, his face serious. “You speak even your French with a slight Tunisian accent. There is no hint of American in your speech.”

  “Is that important?”

  Salah shook another cigarette out, put it to his lips, and replaced the pack in his pocket. “It is critical. It is important for some of the detainees to believe they have been shipped somewhere that is not Israel. And so there is no Hebrew spoken anywhere in this facility. No English either. Arabic, French, and sometimes Farsi, Russian, or German.”

  “Isn’t that skirting the ethical edge?”

  “Ethical? It’s not ethical to murder civilians, my friend. I told you: I am against torture. I am against abuse. But I’ve already been condemned to fight with one sleeve pinned to my shoulder, my friend. I’m not willing to tie my only good hand behind my back, too.” Salah withdrew a greenish bandanna from his coveralls, blew his nose loudly, then stuffed the handkerchief back in his back pocket. “So, we can—and we do without apology—hold detainees in solitary confinement for years if we feel it is necessary. Just like the French, incidentally. In fact, a major factor in our high success rate is the complete isolation in which these terrorists are kept. You Americans tend to coddle prisoners—even terrorists. You cave in to human rights organizations. You allow lawyers, family visits, and other amenities. I cannot believe what I saw when I visited high-security facilities in the United States some years ago. Cable television. Gyms. Libraries. It was like sending your criminals to college.”

  “That was a civilian prison.”

  “But your so-called white supremacists were incarcerated there alongside rapists and bank robbers. You treat your own terrorists as if they were burglars or carjackers.” Salah’s hand made a dismissive gesture. “Terrorists are not criminals. They are enemy combatants, and they deserve no coddling. You Americans often ignore the realities. That kind of fuzzy thinking pervades your abilities, especially in this kind of total war.” He exhaled smoke through his nose. “Jihad, they call it. All-out effort, remember? Sometimes I think you Americans forget that when you deal with enemy combatants.”

  “That’s not what I hear about the ones being held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo.”

  “For you, Iraq and Afghanistan are the exceptions to the rule, believe me.” Salah pulled on the collar of his sterile coveralls. “Besides, you Americans have very few trained interrogators.” His black eyes flashed in Tom’s direction. “You had to send more than fifty of your paramilitary people here just after the Kandahar and Baghram facilities were established in Afghanistan because your CIA didn’t have any qualified personnel. Any. Unbelievable. So we had to teach them the basics, believe me. But it didn’t matter, because they all lacked Arabic, not to mention Pashto, or Urdu, or Uzbek. A friend of mine at AMAN14 told me when the 9/11 attacks occurred, there were less than a hundred Arabic-speaking interrogators in your entire army—and perhaps another hundred and fifty in the reserves. And CIA? It was a joke. At the military interrogation center in Kandahar, not a single CIA officer had sufficient Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, or Farsi to do proper interrogations. And yet the most critical element is the ability to speak in the detainee’s native tongue and understand his culture. You cannot do the job using an interpreter.”

  Well, Salah was right about that. The 4627 Company had more Top Secret–cleared four-plus Uzbek speakers than CIA did these days. In fact, in the spring of 2002, CIA had approached 4627 to recruit, vet, and hire language-capable interrogators for Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Langley was offering $2,500 a day plus expenses for ninety-day deployments, and they wanted a minimum of a dozen people. The math was great: 4627’s profit on two ninety-day cycles would be $3.2 million—and Langley wanted a minimum of six ninety-day cycles. But Tony Wyman turned the Agency down cold. It was a slippery slope, he said. One bad apple—one case of prisoner abuse in the newspapers—and the firm’s credibility worldwide would be jeopardized. Let some other contractor take the money and run.

  And yet Tom understood the need. It often took Americans weeks to accomplish what trained native speakers could do in a matter of days because the Americans too often had to rely on interpreters—linguists, they were euphemistically called by the Pentagon. It was like trying to play the old kids’ game of telephone. Tom knew it was impossible to recruit an agent using an interpreter. So why the hell did the numbskulls at DOD and Langley believe it would be productive to interrogate hard-core al-Qa’ida militants—Wahabists who were willing to die for their beliefs—that way? It made no sense at all.

  Besides, interrogating terrorists was an art as well as a science. The Israelis had perfected it out of necessity. In the United States, until 9/11 at least, terrorism had been largely considered a criminal activity not an act of war. The FBI’s techniques for interrogating terrorists were exactly the same as they were for interrogating bank robbers or mafiosi. Christ, the Bureau was surveilling potential militants at Washington, D.C.’s Massachusetts Avenue mosque the same way they’d taped comings and goings at the old Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street. Sure, they had audio as well as video from bugs planted inside the Mosque and adjacent grounds. But rumor was, translation lag time at SIOP15 was about nine months.

  In the military, interrogator trainees at Fort Huachuca were still using Cold War scenarios. The only change was that instead of calling the role-players Boris, they were calling them Muhammad. At CIA, the subject of prisoner interrogation still took up less than six hours of the basic intelligence operations course taken by trainees at the Farm. Didn’t anybody Get It? Tom zipped the coveralls up to his throat. “Will there be a transcript available to me?”

  “We will give you a DVD—full audio and video, as well as a transcript, in Microsoft Word format.” He watched as the American sat on the edge of the straight-backed chair and pulled on the scuffed black leather boots. “Obviously, you will not possess these materials unilaterally.”

  “I understand.” Tom yanked the laces secure and tied them in a double bow. “How long can I have with her?”

  “As much time as you need. But I don’t think you’ll need a lot of time.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I believe we were pretty thorough. Reuven has made the interrogation transcripts available, yes?”

  “He has—except for the summary and several pages that were redacted.”

  “That was because I wanted you to come to your own conclusions. Afterward, we’ll compare notes. You will give me your evaluation of the situation, and I will give you mine.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “Thank you.” Salah spat the cigarette from his lips and ground it out against the floor. “Remember: you’ll interrogate the woman in French, please.”

  “Will do.” Tom looked at Salah. “I could even use a Marseille accent if you think it would be effective.” The accent was something he’d worked on as he created the persona he’d use during the interrogation.

  The Israeli cocked his head in Tom’s direction with newfound respect. “Yes,” he said. “It is a good idea.”

  “Then I’m ready.”

  Salah examined Tom up and down. Tom started for the door, but Salah cut him off. “Wait—” The Israeli slapped the file folder he was carrying onto the chair, rummaged through the drawer of the steel desk, pulled out a wrinkled olive-drab barracks cap, shook it energetically, then slapped it against Tom’s upper arm. “Here—put this on,” he said brusquely. “You have an American-style haircut.”

  13

  10:26 A.M. Tom pulled the cap on and followed the Israeli. They walked down a long corridor, turned right, descended a flight of stairs, and turned left, entering another ominous, dimly lit corridor lined with heavy gray steel doors.

  Interesting. The room where Tom had changed clothes had a concrete floor. So did the corridor. The steps he’d just descended were also concrete, with steel edges. But the floor in this corridor was covered in inch-thick, hard rubber—like the nonslip pa
ds sometimes used in restaurant kitchens. Their footfalls made no noise whatsoever.

  Tom worked to keep his emotions under control. It was difficult. He had actually run agents who were terrorists. His first had been a courier for Al Jihad—a handover on his first overseas tour when he’d worked under consular cover in Cairo. There’d been a car bomber in Sudan—a worker bee in the Muslim Brotherhood who was occasionally loaned out to al-Qa’ida. And of course there was Rashid in Paris. Rashid had what—half a dozen Israeli scalps on his belt. But this was different. He’d never interrogated a jailed terrorist before, never got up close and personal.

  More pertinent: Tom had had only three days in which to prepare for this one-shot deal. That was like having no time at all. Prior to agent meetings, you often went back over months and months of reports, memorizing the tiniest details, so that if there were contradictions or fabrications, your internal b.s. detector sounded and they could be identified, highlighted, and probed. You asked your developmentals the same question twenty different ways, perpetually searching for minute inconsistencies or tiny discrepancies, because one word could make the difference between success and failure; between a unilateral asset and a double agent; between that agent’s life and their death.

  That’s why the bloody recruitment process took so long. Tom shook his head. God—the damn 9/11 Commission was already leaking stories about putting more CIA agents, as they often incorrectly called them, on the street. Either the commission was made up of ignoramuses, or they’d all seen too much TV or read too much Tom Clancy.

  The way they talked, all you had to do was hire someone, give him or her six months of training, and poof, presto change-o, a full-grown case officer—Smiley out of the head of Zeus. It didn’t work that way. It could take years to learn the ropes, even if you were talented. You needed mentoring. There wasn’t a day that Tom didn’t silently thank Sam Waterman for taking the time to inculcate the dark arts of tradecraft into him.

  The commission acted as if you could stroll into a bar in London’s Shepherd’s Market, spot a suspicious-looking Yemenite Arab sipping a bourbon daiquiri, sidle up next to him, have a ten-minute conversation, and all of a sudden said Arab tells you precisely where Saddam Hussein has cached his weapons of mass destruction, or in precisely which cave in Tora Bora Usama Bin Laden is currently hanging his kaffiyeh.

  Jeezus. Didn’t anybody realize it doesn’t work that way? First of all, for every ten pitches you make, you strike out nine times. In Cairo, Tom had botched his first attempt to recruit an agent. He’d pitched an Egyptian Army major attached to the Mukhabarat el-Khabeya (military intelligence service) whom he’d cultivated for more than six months. The officer had looked at him as if he were crazy, stood up, and said, “Do not ever try to contact me again or I will have you arrested.” Recruiting was a risk-intensive business. And when you did finally snare a target, the information you received most of the time was piecemeal—a fragment of a puzzle, not the whole thing.

  Didn’t people understand that HUMINT—for HUMan INTelligence gathering—was like paleontology? You probed and you dug and you prodded and you excavated for what seemed like forever. And then, after an excruciatingly and often interminable period of time, you might—if you’re smart, and talented, and above all lucky—you might discover a tiny intelligence fossil that is, perhaps, a single part of a much-larger life-form. And yet from this microscopic shard—which may, by the way, have been planted by an evil archaeologist working for one of your adversaries—Congress and the 9/11 Commission, and, for that matter, the misguided and ill-informed American public insist it is not only possible to divine what sort of creature the fossil could have come from, but also tell you exactly where the entire skeleton of the creature can be found.

  In real life, the recruitment process could take months of careful gumshoeing to make sure the opposition wasn’t screwing with you. In the field, you had to watch your emotions so you didn’t get sucked in. In the field, enthusiasm was the enemy of thoroughness. You developed a mental sonar that was never turned off. That’s what had killed McGee. He lacked the sensors to realize he was developing a double. Or a dangle. Or a provocateur. Or an assassin. Achieving that highly developed defensive awareness took years.

  It looked easy in the movies. Or in fiction. But in real life, becoming a productive, streetwise case officer doesn’t happen overnight. And spotting, assessing, developing, and then recruiting a single agent is a laborious, time-intensive, painstaking process. Charlie Hoskinson, who’d recruited the of the Syrian president, said it had taken him the better part of his three-year-tour in Damascus to do so. Bronco Panitz, who was 4627’s CEO, had been promoted to the Senior Intelligence Service on the strength of two Soviet recruitments, a process that had taken him more than four years on two continents—only to lose them both to Aldrich Ames.

  So when the 9/11 Commission or the fools on the House or Senate intelligence oversight committees wrote reports with prose that read it is imperative for CIA to increase its human intelligence capabilities immediately, Tom and the rest of his fellow intelligence professionals had to laugh. George Tenet—a disaster as DCI—had boldly told Congress that the DO wouldn’t be up to speed for another five years. Everyone at Langley who had an ounce of sense knew Tenet grossly understated the case to make himself look better. The evidence? Tom’s own curriculum vitae belied the DCI’s assertion.

  Tom had spent seventeen years and seven months at CIA. He’d entered training just after Labor Day of 1985, recruited straight out of Dartmouth College. In late March 1986, he’d been assigned to headquarters—spending seven months at NE Division as a desk officer trainee to learn the bureaucratic ropes. During that time, he managed to take a number of the advanced tradecraft courses offered in Washington: lock-picking, secure communications, and the “guerrilla driving course” out in West Virginia at Bill Scott Raceway, where he learned how to run roadblocks and make bootlegger’s and J-turns. Then it had been a year at the Foreign Service Institute’s language school in Rosslyn, Virginia, followed by nineteen months in Tunis, in FSI’s immersion Arabic program.

  Tom’s first overseas tour hadn’t commenced until June 1989, when he began work under consular cover at the Cairo embassy. And even then he was a greenhorn with no field experience. And little chance of receiving much in the immediate future.

  His chief in Cairo, John , was a prissy, non-Arab speaker who’d spent eighteen years as a reports officer before being brought into the Directorate of Operations under DCI Robert Gates’s “cross-fertilization” program that larded DO with inexperienced analysts, academic reports officers, and secretaries—all in the name of EEO diversification. A GS-15 on his second (and final) go-round for promotion to the Senior Intelligence Service, got so fidgety when the subject of recruitments was brought up he was known around the embassy as Twitch. The situation wasn’t improved by Tom’s immediate superior, a chronic alcoholic named McWhirter who signed out to interview developmentals but actually spent his afternoons sipping vodkas on the rocks in the bar of the Méridien.

  No one in Cairo showed any inclination to mentor the first-time case officer. So Tom sat in his teller’s cage and stamped visas, learned as much about Cairo as he could, worked hard to improve his conversational Arabic, and pursued his spycraft through trial and error—mostly, he realized later, through error.

  In point of fact, Tom didn’t receive any decent mentoring until after he’d arrived in Paris in July 1992. There, the deputy chief, Sam Waterman, took the youngster under his wing. He taught Tom how to go black—slip out from under DST surveillance—by exploiting the seams in the French domestic security agency’s rigidly defined regional areas of coverage. He allowed Tom the freedom to occasionally push the edge of the envelope when it came to recruiting and running agents with less-than-squeaky-clean backgrounds. And perhaps most important, he’d forced Tom to spend long hours working on his reporting and interrogation skills.

  Waterman had schoolmarmishly insisted that Tom spend
every bit of his spare time—and there wasn’t a lot of it—reading old reports so that he’d have absorbed all the background he needed for his agent handovers. Long before Tom met his first handover, he’d memorized three years of reporting about the man. Waterman had grilled him on the material before he’d allowed the handover to proceed. The interrogation hadn’t been pleasant, either.

  It didn’t stop there. Under Waterman’s incessant tutelage, Tom wrote and then rewrote every report half a dozen times—sometimes more. Waterman was merciless. “You’re not providing any frigging details, Tom.” Waterman would pound the desk. He was a big man and he knew how to use his size to intimidate “You were in a restaurant. What did it look like? What were the surroundings? Was there any sign of DST? Your developmental was ten minutes late. Why? Did his explanation satisfy you? Was he hiding something? What did your developmental wear? Was he wearing anything he hadn’t worn before? What about new jewelry? How did he appear to you? What emotional traits did he display? What did his body language tell you? Did he show any of the physical signs of deception or guilt? Dry mouth? Was his face pale? Did you see any throbbing in the vein on his neck or the backs of his hands? Was his voice steady? What were his feet doing while the two of you were speaking? I don’t see any frigging hints about any of those reactions in your reporting.”

  Now he’d had a mere three days to prepare—to construct a scenario, develop a persona, get all his physical and mental ducks in the proverbial row. Not enough time. Not by far, given the stakes. But it was all the time there was.

  He’d followed Reuven’s advice to the letter. Popped the question at six Monday morning. By eight that night, MJ was sporting a magnificent two-point-three-carat diamond set off by two quarter-carat baguettes, all in a regal but simple platinum setting. She couldn’t stop looking at the damn thing and smiling.