Agents of Innocence

by David Ignatius

  “It is possible that this is the explanation,” said the Omani doctor. “Visceral larva migrans. We will have to run tests, of course. A biopsy of the liver. That will be a nuisance, but I would strongly suggest it.”

  “Yes, please,” said Rogers.

  “I can arrange for your regular doctor to supervise the tests,” said the Omani.

  “No!” said Rogers. “Absolutely not. I want you to treat my daughter.”

  The Omani protested that transferring the case would be awkward. But Rogers pressed him and he eventually agreed.

  “Doctor,” said Jane warily. “Can roundworms be cured?”

  “Oh yes,” said the doctor. “Quite often there is a complete recovery within six to twelve months.”

  Jane Rogers collapsed into her husband’s arms. Rogers was still too scared to let himself believe the good news.

  The Omani doctor’s diagnosis proved right. Amy was suffering from roundworms. The doctor prescribed the appropriate medicine, and she began to respond to the treatment.

  But there were complications, of a political sort. Dr. Fawzi, the Egyptian, was furious at the young Omani doctor for interfering in his case. He petitioned the local medical society to withdraw the young doctor’s license. Later, as the Rogers were leaving Oman for Beirut, they heard that Dr. Fawzi was bringing pressure on the local hospital, through some of his wealthy patients, to have the young doctor removed from his residency.

  Rogers was enraged. But the American Ambassador in Muscat insisted that he shouldn’t get involved any more deeply. It was a local matter.

  Now, in Beirut, Amy was getting better. It was like a reprieve. Like one of the Old Testament stories where God devises a terrible punishment but in the end, for reasons that are unfathomable, relents.

  The next morning Rogers left early for the office to send a message to Jamal. He showed a draft to Hoffman, who in turn showed it to the ambassador, who cabled the State Department desk officer. When the brief message had been cleared by the various layers of the bureaucracy, Rogers typed it on a blank sheet of paper and put it in a plain white envelope.

  The message read: “The United States is urging the leaders of the Lebanese Christian militia to show restraint in the current crisis. The United States urges Fatah to show similar restraint.”

  Rogers attached a cover note to Fuad, instructing him to pass the message to Jamal for delivery to the Old Man. He also asked Fuad to press Jamal for details on the military situation in Beirut.

  The message was simple but the processs of delivering it was complicated by security procedures. An embassy courier took the letter and dropped it in the mailbox of “Trans-Mediterranean Forwarding Agents,” a fictitious company that maintained a one-room office in the Starco Building downtown. A Lebanese contract agent carried it from there to a dead drop in an alleyway in the Souk Tawile. The courier then called Fuad from a public telephone and, using a prearranged code, told him that a message was waiting.

  Fuad retrieved the message and called Jamal. Using another prearranged code, he set up a meeting an hour later at a crowded café. Three layers had been interposed between the American case officer and the Palestinian. If the system worked, the links in the chain were invisible.

  Fuad reported back to Rogers twenty-four hours later. They met in an apartment off Hamra Street, entering the building fifteen minutes apart through different doors. Fuad handed Rogers a brief message from Jamal written in neat Arabic script, quoting the text of an Arabic proverb that was unfamiliar to Rogers.

  The message read, in its entirety: “They came to milk the goat. He broke wind.”

  “What in the hell is this supposed to mean?” demanded Rogers.

  Fuad looked reproachfully at his case officer. He removed his sunglasses.

  “I assume it means that this particular goat has no milk for you.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Rogers. “Translate for your American friend.”

  “I believe Jamal means that you asked the wrong person for information about the Kahhaleh incident, and so you are getting a rude reply,” Fuad said gently.

  “Great!” said Rogers. “That’s very helpful. Anything else?”

  “We talked for a few minutes about the situation,” answered Fuad.

  “What did Jamal say?”

  “He said that he talked to the Fatah military leaders after he returned to Beirut. They told him that Fatah wasn’t to blame. The Christians provoked the crisis. He said that Fatah has shown restraint from the beginning and doesn’t need advice from the Americans.”

  “That’s the party line,” said Rogers. “I could have read that in the newspaper.”

  “Jamal says it’s true. He said one other thing. One of the PLO splinter groups is trying to exploit the situation. They fired mortar rounds on Christian areas of the city last night and they will try to do it again. He said that the Old Man is opposed to the extremists, and that they are the ones you should worry about, not Fatah.”

  “If it’s just the crazies, this will die down,” said Rogers.

  “Probably,” agreed Fuad.

  “Was Jamal angry at my message?”

  “He was until he thought of the proverb about the goat. Then he stopped being angry. He said that you should add it to your collection.”

  Rogers briefed Hoffman on the intelligence report and drafted a cable for Langley. The crisis in Lebanon would blow over, the cable said. The PLO group with the most firepower, Fatah, didn’t want a confrontation. Other Palestinian factions were trying to exploit the situation, but without Fatah’s support they could be contained easily by the Lebanese authorities.

  “Not bad,” said Hoffman. “Maybe your little operation isn’t entirely worthless, after all. But loverboy had better be right about this one. Because if he isn’t, we are in very serious trouble. There are people on the Christian side screaming bloody murder. They want to pound the refugee camps into rubble, and we’re telling them to cool it.”

  “I trust our man,” said Rogers. “Besides, he’s all we’ve got.”

  “Send the cable,” said Hoffman.

  The Beirut station looked good the next day when the gunfire around the Tal Zaatar refugee camp stopped and the Lebanese prime minister, a Moslem, issued a statement declaring that the crisis was over.

  17

  Beirut; April 1970

  It took Rogers several weeks to complete the Personal Record Questionnaire, or PRQ, formally proposing that Jamal be enrolled as an agent. The real work was already done. The contacts had been made in Beirut, Amman, and Kuwait. Jamal, whatever his status, was already providing timely information. But none of that mattered to the bureaucracy. Their triumph was to reduce the mysterious and often sublime relationships of the intelligence world to an orderly flow of paper.

  Rogers loathed this sort of paperwork. The PRQ was a lengthy document that was itself compartmentalized for security reasons. Part I was a seven-page biographical summary, much like the résumé that a normal job-seeker might present to a prospective employer. It included the subject’s name, birth date, and home address; the names of his parents, his educational background, his hobbies; it also summarized his drinking habits, drug usage, and sexual history. Part I used true names throughout.

  The PRQ Part II had the juicy operational details. It explained how the subject had been spotted and assessed, how the information about him in Part I had been gathered, and most important, how the case officer intended to use him. It was a sort of operational game plan, outlining how the agent would be run and what intelligence he would be expected to provide. Part II referred to the agent only by a cryptonym. The segregated parts of the PRQ went into the agent’s basic file in the central registry, known as the “201 file.” In theory, the people who had access to the real names of agents hadn’t any access to their operational records, and vice versa.

  The agency had borrowed many of these bookkeeping practices, along with so many other details of running a secret service, from the Bri
tish. The British, however, took the business of secrecy far more seriously than the Americans. In the early days, they didn’t even like to use code words in their operational records and preferred, where possible, to use numbers. Rogers had read of an SIS man who had been reprimanded for a security breach years ago. His crime was that in a message home he had identified Berlin as the capital of the country known in SIS jargon only as “12000.”

  A six-letter cryptonym was assigned to the case. Agents in Lebanon all had code names that began with “PE.” Jamal Ramlawi became, in agency-ese, an agent with the code name PECOCK.

  The portrait of PECOCK that emerged from the biographical material suggested that he had the makings of a quite remarkable agent. Indeed, the Americans could not have invented a better target for recruitment.

  PECOCK, the documents explained, was a sort of Palestinian aristocrat, with the self-assurance and disdain for conventional manners that are typical of the children of prominent families around the world. In 1964, after graduating from Cairo University, he had attended the founding session of the Palestine Liberation Organization in East Jerusalem. At that meeting he accosted some of the leaders of Fatah, then a small underground network based in Kuwait, and asked to join them. Several of the elders tried to convince him to go to graduate school instead, but he would have none of it. He moved to Kuwait in 1965. Because of his easy bearing and his knack for languages, he was used often as a courier in Europe.

  Like so many aristocrats, the young man gravitated toward intelligence work. Perhaps the visible world bored him. He moved to Amman in 1967 and worked under Abu Namli, vetting new recruits to Fatah. The next year, the Egyptians quietly offered to help Fatah form a security service. PECOCK was among the ten members of Fatah who went to Cairo in mid-1968 for a six-week training course in intelligence. The course covered recruitment and control of agents, surveillance and interrogation techniques, and the preparation of intelligence reports and estimates.

  The ten Cairo graduates, who returned to Jordan in late 1968, formed the nucleus of a new Fatah intelligence organization, known as the Jihaz al-Rasd, or “Surveillance Apparatus.” Like many security services, it was divided into two parts: one responsible for counterintelligence and the other charged with collecting information and conducting special operations. The chief of the Rasd, from 1969 on, was Mohammed Nasir Makawi, known as “Abu Nasir.” PECOCK was one of his three top assistants. He was thought to be the most influential because of his relationship with the Old Man, who treated the handsome young Palestinian like a son.

  Why had the Old Man placed such trust in Jamal? Rogers asked himself. Why had this relatively junior intelligence officer been singled out and given responsibility for Fatah’s most sensitive operations? Perhaps because the Old Man couldn’t trust anyone his own age, who might be a potential rival.

  Suspicion was the universal sentiment of the Arab world, Rogers believed. This was the land of the stab in the back, a culture that believed the admonition: “Fear your enemy once, fear your friend a thousand times.” The bond of friendship among Arab men was intense, but it never lasted. Confidences were always betrayed, pledges of trust and fidelity always broken. Look at Islam. Within a few years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, his followers were at daggers, hatching assassination plots against each other. The same problem had afflicted Arab politics ever since. The suspicions and rivalries were so intense that it was difficult to trust anyone long enough to build something solid, like a political party or a nation. An Arab man trusted only one other man completely: his son. Even his brothers were potential rivals. The Old Man had no son. But he had Jamal.

  The rest of the PRQ Part II summarized operational details. It was obvious that agent PECOCK had access to Fatah’s most important secrets. The only question was how to run him.

  Here Rogers made a recommendation that he knew would upset headquarters. PECOCK should be regarded initially as an asset, rather than a controlled agent. He should be encouraged to believe that the CIA accepted his definition of the relationship—as “liaison” between two potentially cooperative intelligence services—and didn’t view him as an American agent. Rogers drew on the conversations in Kuwait. He noted that the young Palestinian had been directed by the Old Man himself to work with the United States. The agency should appear to accept this approach. It should enhance PECOCK’S stature and encourage the fiction of a two-way relationship, by providing him with a regular flow of low-level intelligence that might be useful to Fatah. There was a strong chance that PECOCK could eventually be recruited in the usual way, paid a stipend, and run as a controlled agent. But only if the agency was patient.

  “We shouldn’t get greedy,” Rogers stressed in a cable to Stone that accompanied the PRQ. “The operation may collapse if we insist at the outset on complete control and reliability. We should make no effort to buy or compromise PECOCK, and we should not, at this point, ask him to submit to a polygraph.”

  For now, recommended Rogers, the Palestinian should be handled discreetly. The Lebanese contract agent who had spotted him and helped develop the case should continue as the courier and intermediary. His cover as a Lebanese leftist with strong pro-Palestinian sympathies would give him easy acesss to Fatah without arousing suspicion. Rogers should meet regularly with PECOCK, but outside Lebanon whenever possible.

  Rogers included, as appendices, summaries of his sessions with Jamal in Kuwait, along with summaries of Fuad’s meetings in Beirut. He gave the bulky file to Hoffman, who reviewed it and sent it to Langley.

  “You’re going to lose on this one,” Hoffman warned Rogers before sending the PRQ on its way. “You have me half-convinced that you can recruit an agent who isn’t really an agent. But you’re not going to convince them.”

  “Why not?” asked Rogers. “What I am proposing makes perfect sense. It will give us what we want, without the risk of blowing the operation.”

  “Because they are stupid,” said Hoffman. “In the way that only very smart people can be stupid.”

  “Why?” asked Rogers, genuinely puzzled.

  “Something happens to people at Yale, I think,” answered Hoffman, picking at his teeth with a wooden match.

  “They become convinced that it’s only because of a few people like them that the world isn’t a hopeless mess. They think the world’s problems stem mainly from the fact that there aren’t enough rules and regulations—and well-educated gentlemen to enforce them. That’s where they come in. They are the rulemakers, standing guard against chaos and disorder. And that’s why they’re going to say no to your proposal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it violates the rules.”

  “But what I’m recommending makes sense.”

  “Don’t waste your breath on me, sonny,” said Hoffman. “I just work here.”

  18

  Washington; April 1970

  Rogers was summoned to Washington three weeks later. The Operational Approval branch didn’t like his plan of action. Neither did John Marsh, the operations chief of the NE Division, who urged Stone to recall Rogers for “consultations.”

  It was the first real rebuff Rogers had faced in a career that, until then, had been a steady progression of successes and commendations. Hoffman tried to assure him that being summoned home was part of the game, a rite of passage in mid-career. They didn’t take you seriously in the front office until they had hauled you on the carpet and given you a lecture. Anyway, Hoffman said, if Rogers wanted to play it safe, he should have chosen another career.

  Hoffman was kind enough not to add: I told you so. But Rogers could hear him thinking it anyway.

  Rogers dreaded the trip. He was edgy at home with Jane, distant in their final few nights together, restless and temperamental even around the children. He didn’t like being second-guessed, especially by people who hadn’t recruited an agent of their own in years. He also didn’t like to be reminded that he was in mid-career, no longer a prodigy, exposed to attack from people back home
who regarded him as a threat or a rival. Rogers liked to keep his life in neat compartments. The biggest one, called work, had suddenly passed out of his control.

  Rogers tried to relax on the airplane. He had a few drinks. He thought of his athletic exploits in high school. He reminisced about old girlfriends. He reviewed in his mind some of the intelligence operations for which he had been commended in the past.

  On the Paris-Washington leg of the flight, Rogers struck up a conversation with an attractive French woman, blond and blue-eyed, in her mid-thirties.

  She was carefully coiffed and dressed in an expensive tweed suit. When she moved, Rogers thought he could hear the rustle of her undergarments.

  Rogers asked the woman why she was travelling to America. Business or pleasure?

  “Pleasure,” said the woman, drawing out the syllables of the word. Rogers heard the sound of silk and satin as she adjusted herself in the seat.

  “Any plans?” asked Rogers.

  “We shall see,” said the woman.

  She was the wife of a French industrialist, she explained. A flat on the Isle Saint-Louis, too many parties, too many responsibilities. She was tired of Paris and wanted a holiday in America.

  Rogers found the woman overwhelmingly attractive. When she leaned forward to talk to him, he could see the fine white powder of her makeup, the gloss of her lipstick, and the fullness of her breasts. She had the perfect manners of a woman kept for the pleasure of a refined and wealthy gentleman.

  As they were leaving the plane, Rogers, without quite knowing why, asked for the name of her hotel.

  The woman blushed and averted her eyes but said quietly, “The Madison.” She handed him a card with her name: Véronique Godard.

  “Shall I call you?” asked Rogers, taking the card.