Direct Action

by John Weisman

  “Why is Langley so unwilling to see what’s going on?”

  “Like I said, politics.” Tony Wyman shook his head. “Headquarters rejects your premise because it contradicts everything they’ve been telling the president for almost three years now. Accepting the Ben Said–slash– Imad Mugniyah–slash–Arafat–slash–Tehran–slash–al-Qa’ida alliance would mean a direct link between Arafat, UBL, and Tehran.”

  “So? The president himself has talked about the UBL–Tehran link.”

  “Ah,” Wyman said, “but the Romanoffs at Langley have consistently argued that with the exception of Ansar al-Islam, no such link exists. Worse, tying Mugniyah and Ben Said to Gaza would indicate Arafat’s involved—Arafat would be connected to UBL, the Seppah, and Imad Mugniyah. C’mon, Tom—the CIA for years has its money on Arafat and Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority. CIA spent hundreds of millions helping the PA create a security apparatus—it was even called the Tenet Plan. CIA spent millions teaching Palestinian security people tradecraft. And what have the Ps done with all that education and all that money? They’ve become better terrorists is what they’ve done with it. How the hell can Tenet admit he was so wrong for so long and still not resign? He can’t—and so, he and his crowd stick their heads in the sand, leak positive stories to their friends in the media, and tell the White House and the oversight committees everything’s great, and they’re making real progress on America’s global war on terror, and in a mere five years, the clandestine service will be better than ever.”

  “It’s all horse puckey.”

  “Of course it is. The DO’s in a heap of trouble.” Wyman’s eyes flashed. “Christ, Tom, Ali Atwa, Mugniyah’s number two on the TWA 847 hijacking, is wandering around Beirut these days, under real name, and free as a bird. And what has CIA done about it? CIA has done nothing. What has Colin Powell’s State Department done? They’ve done nothing.” Wyman paused. “I took a snatch plan to Langley three weeks ago and they turned me down cold. ‘State will never agree. The Syrians might get upset.’ The Syrians? The frigging Syrians are getting paid to ship foreign fighters into Iraq. We should have bombed Damascus the same night we did Baghdad.” Wyman played with the monocle hanging around his neck. “Christ, how I wish Casey were still alive.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Tom scratched his chin. “Isn’t there any way—”

  “I spoke to the goddamn ADDO25 himself on this. He assured me the materials you sent forward were brought to the highest levels.”

  “So they could be round-filed.”

  “We have a problem here, Tom. We’re dealing with a dysfunctional organism. The WMD groups in Iraq are incapable of handling their jobs and yet they’re getting performance bonuses. The chief in Riyadh doesn’t speak Arabic, there are no Saudi recruitments, and he got a performance bonus, too. We hired Jim McGee because Langley hadn’t recruited a single PA officer in years—but TA got station performance bonuses. A system that pays people bonuses to reward them for failing is entirely broke. But it’s the only system we’ve got right now. Until someone gets rid of Tenet, nothing’s going to change.”

  Tom curled his lower lip. “Thanks, Tony, I needed that.”

  Wyman’s eyes narrowed and his tone grew frosty. “Sarcasm isn’t going to help. Bottom line, Tom: Langley insists on handling things their way.”

  “Which is?”

  “To hunker down, stay quiet, and hope all the problems will go away. They won’t pay us to uncover Ben Said. And you know as well as I do that these ops are both complicated and costly, and without Langley’s funding…” He looked at the younger man apologetically. “We’re not the government, Tom. There are limits to what we can do unless someone’s willing to pay.”

  “This sucks.”

  “Agreed. But unless we can find ourselves a wedge…”

  Tom crossed his arms. “What about the bombs? The detonators? Ben Said’s new explosives? If that isn’t a call to action, I don’t know what is.”

  “Action?” Wyman snorted derisively. “The system, Tom, detests action. Trying to get the system to react is like trying to turn a supertanker around.”

  “What do they want? Another World Trade Center?”

  “I think it would take about that much.”

  Tony was right, of course. Between organizational timidity, political correctness, risk aversion, and lack of strong leadership on the operational level, it was virtually impossible to defeat the jihad Islamists were waging against America and the West. The USG was spending buckets o’ cash to—as the State Department’s public diplomacy panjandrums kept saying—“win the hearts and minds” of all those hundreds of millions of Muslims living under various forms of dictatorship. “You can’t act without listening to the Arab Street,” State kept insisting. What crap. Bill Casey said it best: “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

  Tom said, “The Israelis seemed worried enough when I laid it out for them. Maybe they can convince Langley we’re on the right track.”

  “Not these days. There’s a problem with Israel these days.”

  “There seem to be a lot of problems, Tony.”

  “There are a lot of problems, son.”

  “What’s up with Israel?”

  Wyman adjusted his right shirt cuff. “We’re about to experience a huge hiccup with our Israeli friends. Something to do with Iran policy, classified documents making their way to Mossad via a leak somewhere in the Pentagon. The FBI’s gotten into it within the past couple of weeks and Langley is keeping Gelilot26 at arm’s length these days.”

  “Christ.”

  “I took some heat over our Israeli associate.”

  “Reuven?”

  “They said they don’t like the fact that we have foreign nationals working for us.”

  Tom was incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I love it. Most of our embassies are run by foreign nationals. CIA depends on foreign nationals—liaison relationships. And Langley’s upset because we have a retired Mossad officer working for us?”

  Tony Wyman played with his monocle. “There are those who insist retirement’s just another form of cover when it comes to Mossad combatants.”

  Tom cocked his head toward the window, which was covered with three layers of antisurveillance drapery. “Sam Waterman used to say that all the time about everybody.” He paused. “You don’t happen to know what Sam’s up to?”

  “No idea. Saw him about a month ago at the club. He was having lunch with Ed Kane.” Wyman shifted in the big leather swivel chair. “Anyway, the seventh floor is unhappy about Reuven Ayalon.” He looked at Tom reassuringly. “But they’ll get over it.”

  “Hope so. Because we’ve made progress because of Reuven, Tony. You saw the messages from Israel. Reuven and I know who, and we know where. We just don’t know when, or what the targets are. That’s why I wanted to get inside the safe house.”

  “Understood.” Wyman shifted himself in the chair. “Still…”

  Tom looked at his boss’s face. “What?”

  “There’s something else. I haven’t mentioned it because neither Bronco, Charlie, nor I is sure how to handle things.”

  The remark was uncharacteristic, and Tom said so.

  “We’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that our contacts at Langley are lying to us. The reluctant conclusion is that they’re trying to push us away.”

  “But why?”

  “Ah,” Wyman said, “there’s the rub. It doesn’t make any sense. We’ve produced incredible product for them over the past twenty months. Charlie’s work in Libya helped result in Qaddafi’s decision to end his WMD programs and allow inspections. Bronco’s done a lot to repair the rift between the U.S. and Russia. And so far as al-Qa’ida goes, 4627’s been responsible for developing the intelligence instrumental in the capture of sixteen top-level AQN27 operatives. Sure, we butted heads over Iraq—the WMD material. But…” His voice trailed off.
“It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Tom started to speak, but Wyman cut him off. “Look, this isn’t your concern. What does affect both you and Reuven is that Langley won’t pay 4627 to follow up on the Gaza murders, even if they were to track to Imad Mugniyah and Ben Said.”

  “It makes no sense.”

  “When has absurdity ever been eliminated as a factor when we’re talking about the seventh floor?”

  Tom looked at his boss. “You think it’s coming from the seventh floor?”

  “I think the whole seventh floor is running scared. There are four separate reports due out next year from Congress, from the 9/11 Commission, and from CIA’s inspector general. Each one will be more devastating to CIA than the last. So how bad do you think it will look when it’s revealed that CIA leadership has had to outsource the war on terror because they didn’t have the internal resources to develop adequate human-based intelligence to be able to satisfy the administration’s demands for answers and results?”

  “That’s why they’re shutting me down? Goddamn seventh-floor egos? Frigging executives worried about job security?” Tom was furious. “People are dead, Tony. And there’ll be more corpses soon. We know that.”

  “Langley’s beginning to think like an automobile manufacturer.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s say carmakers discover a flaw in a vehicle’s ignition system that might lead to fires. They estimate it will cost X dollars to fix the problem for the two hundred thousand autos with flaws. If there’ll only be Y number of fatalities, and the lawsuit factor is Z, they decide that it will be more cost-efficient to allow the flaw to remain than spend the money to recall every imperfect vehicle.”

  “That’s immoral.”

  “What’s your point? We’re in a business that sometimes confronts us with nothing but immoral choices,” Wyman said.

  He slapped his palm on the desk. “Enough of the thumb-sucking, Tom. Here’s something you can act on: I learned that as of last week, headquarters dumped the whole Imad Mugniyah–slash–Tariq Ben Said mess onto Paris station.”

  That didn’t make sense at all. If Reuven was right—and Tom had no reason to doubt him—Imad Mugniyah had slipped back into the shadows—he was either in Lebanon or Iran. It was Ben Said who’d returned to Paris to put the finishing touches on his backpack IEDs. Tom gave his boss a quizzical look. “I thought you said Langley’s opinion was Ben Said doesn’t exist.”

  Wyman gave Tom a jaundiced look. “Strange development, ain’t it? We’re told it’s not Imad Mugniyah in the photos and there is no Ben Said, and now Paris station is ordered to poke around for them.”

  Tom thought about it. “Very weird.”

  “Of course it could just be RUMINT. I was having dinner with an old colleague. He said he’d heard some corridor gossip about a meeting in Paris with an Iranian source—couldn’t give me a name or any other specifics. The Iranian offered us Imad Mugniyah’s head on the proverbial platter. But he wanted the twenty-five-mil reward State’s posted. He asked for a down payment of half a million dollars—seed money for baksheesh and payoffs in Tehran was how it was described to me—and the balance of twenty-four mil five hundred thou to be paid on delivery.”

  “Tony…” Tom’s antennae went active. “When was that offer made?”

  “When…” Wyman took a Palm Pilot out of the desk drawer, turned it on, screwed the monocle into his right eye, tapped the screen with the stylus, and peered. “Sometime in mid-October. I was told it was put on the table within a couple of days of the Gaza flap.” He looked at Tom. “About the same time you were meeting with your Iranian friend Shahram Shahristani.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tom’s mind was kicking into overdrive.

  “My contact said RUMINT was the Iranian met with someone from Paris station.”

  “Do we know who?”

  “I thought you’d want to know, so I checked. The name that was floated to me is Adam Margolis.”

  “Who?”

  Wyman squinted at the screen again then let the monocle fall onto his vest. “Margolis. Adam Margolis. He’s the deputy to the deputy CT branch chief. A greenhorn. I checked. This is his second tour. First was Guatemala—consular cover. Decent ratings but nothing spectacular.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Wyman’s eyes locked coldly onto Tom’s. “I said I checked.”

  When Tony looked at you like that, Tom thought, you could see he was capable of ordering someone’s death.

  Tom broke off from his boss’s lethal stare. “That’s odd.”

  “Why?”

  Odd, Tom explained, because Shahram had specifically said he’d telephoned the embassy on October 16—and he’d been deflected. Never made it past the gatekeeper was how Shahram put it.

  “Hmm.” Tony Wyman pushed back, tilted the big chair, rested his Ballys on the desk mat, and closed his eyes.

  After half a minute, Tom grew itchy. “What?”

  “But Shahram never denied he went to the embassy.”

  Tom thought hard about Wyman’s query before he answered. “No. In fact, he went evasive when I pressed him.”

  Wyman put his arms behind his head and interlocked his fingers. “There’s something funny going on here.” He looked at Tom. “Somebody’s trying to run a game on us.”

  “Who?”

  “Maybe the seventh floor. Maybe your friend Shahram. Didn’t you say he was down on his luck? Could be he was hoping to score a quick half mil and disappear.”

  “Isn’t Langley smarter than that?”

  “Langley,” Wyman scoffed, “once paid a Lebanese fifty thousand cash for a map of the Beirut sewer system. The Agency was going to infiltrate a Delta team through the sewers and have them come up next to the house in south Beirut where two Americans were being held hostage.”

  “So?”

  “There are no sewers in Beirut, Tom—except the open sewers in the old Palestinian camps.” He paused. “Look—Shahram was smart. He knew Langley’s vulnerabilities as well as anyone. And he had a score to settle. He’d been labeled an untouchable. He was out in the cold.” Wyman looked at Tom. “Possible?”

  “Possible, Tony.” Tom sighed. “But I don’t think Shahram would run a game on me. He gave me the photographs—never mentioned money.”

  “Okay—here’s another scenario. It’s the seventh floor. You know how that crowd loves head games. Maybe they’re trying to manipulate us to do their work for them but they get away without paying. Hell, for all I know, this Adam Margolis is marking the deck so he gets a promotion and a big performance bonus. Who’s doing what here, Tom? Not sure. But some-one’s trying sleight of hand—and we’d better find out who damn fast, or we’re gonna end up holding the short end of the stick.”

  Wyman’s monologue had set Tom’s head spinning. Had Shahram played him? Not according to the photographic evidence. Not according to MJ’s results on her photo analysis software—and Langley’s negative reaction to it. Tom leaned forward and drummed his fingers on the edge of the desk. “I should talk to this Margolis. Maybe I can shake something loose.”

  Wyman lifted his monocle and examined it, exhaled on the lens, used his silk pocket square as a polishing cloth, then let the instrument fall back onto his lapelled vest. “I agree, Tom. Perhaps you should.”

  22

  6 NOVEMBER 2003

  2:48 P . M .

  RUE DU FAUBOURG ST. HONORÉ

  SCARF FLAPPING IN THE BREEZE, the collar of his sport coat turned up against the chill in the air, Tom slalomed his way past Place Beauvau, where submachine-gun-toting guards in crisp blue-and-white uniforms manned the ceremonial gates of the Ministry of the Interior. He stopped long enough to admire a pair of old Roman amphorae in the window of a posh antiques store, sprinted across the rue des Saussaies against the light, then pushed through the meandering knots of afternoon window-shoppers crowding the Faubourg’s sidewalk.

  The day was bracingly cold; the cloudless sky the distinctive shade of azure cum cerulean t
hat makes Paris skies in the fall, well, Paris skies in the fall. The Christmas decorations were already up in the windows of the dozens of haute couture shops crowded côte-à-côte on the Faubourg, and the intense woodsy perfume of chestnuts roasting on a charcoal brazier swept suddenly and mercilessly over him as he strode past the rue d’Aguessau, causing his mouth to water involuntarily.

  Tom hadn’t been to the embassy in months. Indeed, he seldom came to this part of town unless it was to share a bottle of young Bourgueil with his old friend Robert Savoye, who ran Le Griffonnier, a cozy wine bar sandwiched between a pair of shoe-box office buildings on rue des Saussaies opposite the Ministry of the Interior. So he was, if not amazed, then certainly taken aback at the overwhelming amount of security personnel present in this most upscale of Parisian neighborhoods.

  Portable barricades lined the south side of the Faubourg, cordoning off both the Palais de l’Élysée and the entrance to the British embassy. The smartly dressed gendarmes in their spiffy caps, red-trimmed tunics, white dress gloves, holstered revolvers, and mirror-polished shoes who normally guarded the French president and the Brit diplomats’ front doors had been augmented by dozens of tactical officers in midnight-blue fatigues tucked into jump boots and body armor. The cops had their war faces on. They carried compact FN submachine guns and long rubber truncheons and wore black leather gloves whose knuckles were filled with lead shot. Packets of flexi-cuffs hung from their duty belts. On the side streets, black vans and minibuses held SWAT teams. At the north end of rue d’Aguessau where it dead-ended at the rue de Surène, a huge windowless bus turned into a mobile command center bristling with VHF antennas, a GPS receiver, and a pair of satellite dishes that straddled the narrow street.