Agents of Innocence

by David Ignatius

  Jamal touched his heart. Was it the politeness of the Arabs, or an example of the inexplicable, mesmerizing power held by whoever happened to hold the position of Director of Central Intelligence?

  “That is kind of the Director,” said Jamal. “Please give him my regards. Tell him that whatever our differences on the political level, we will continue to abide by our promise to protect American citizens.”

  “He will be pleased,” said Rogers.

  Jamal nodded. He took out a cigarette and lit it.

  “Jamal,” said Rogers. “I have something that I want to tell you.” But Jamal wasn’t listening. The mention of the Director and security cooperation had sent him off on a new tangent.

  “I have a spy story for you,” said Jamal. “You can tell the new Director when you get home.”

  “I’m not sure that he likes spy stories. And there is something important I have to tell you.”

  “He will like this one,” said Jamal. “Do you remember the man they called the Snake?”

  “The man from the PFLP?” said Rogers. “The super-terrorist.”

  “Yes. You read that he died, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Rogers. “Of leukemia. In a hospital in East Germany.”

  “That is not how he died,” said Jamal with a thin smile.

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. He was murdered.”

  “How?”

  “He was radiated to death.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about? Where was he radiated to death?”

  “In Baghdad.”

  “How?”

  “Aha. Now you are interested. I will explain. The Snake was working then for the Iraqi Moukhabarat. Whenever he went to see the chief of the Moukhabarat, he would be received in a special waiting room, which had been constructed just for him and shielded with lead.”

  “Lead?”

  “Yes, lead. The Iraqi would make the Snake sit there in that waiting room for thirty minutes, maybe an hour. The Snake thought nothing of it. You know how the Arabs are. They always keep you waiting. But all the time he was in that room, they were pointing an X-ray machine at him, beaming it through a hole in the wall.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got sicker and sicker. Just as all the newspaper stories said at the time. But he didn’t know why. He went to Algeria for treatment. And then finally to East Germany.”

  “Where the diagnosis was leukemia.”

  “Yes,” said Jamal. “But when he died finally in East Germany, they made an autopsy. And that East German autopsy report was very interesting. It spoke of ‘unnatural complications’ in the case. We have a copy of the autopsy report, if you are interested.”

  “Of course I am interested,” said Rogers.

  “Would you like to know what the payoff was for the Iraqis?”

  Rogers nodded.

  “Look at the oil production totals for the OPEC countries in the months before and after the Snake’s death. You will notice a large increase in Iraqi production and a roughly equal decrease in production by Saudi Arabia.”

  “That’s the damnedest story I’ve ever heard,” said Rogers. “Why don’t we know about this?”

  “Because you are slipping,” said Jamal with a wicked smile.

  There was silence.

  “Jamal,” said Rogers again, more insistently. “I asked for this meeting because there is something I have to tell you.”

  “Very well,” said the Palestinian. “What is it?”

  “I want you to be very careful,” said Rogers slowly. “Your life is in danger.”

  The Palestinian laughed.

  “You came all the way to Beirut to tell me that? That is hardly news to me, my dear Mr. Reilly.”

  “Your life is in danger,” Rogers repeated, “from the Israelis.”

  “The Israelis have given up on me! They know that I am invulnerable.”

  “Don’t be so sure that they have given up,” said Rogers. “Remember that there is a new Israeli government, and there are old plans that can be dusted off.”

  “What of it? Our fates are all in the hands of Allah.”

  “Let’s cut the crap,” said Rogers. “I am trying to save your life. So listen to me.”

  “I am listening.”

  “I want to tell the Israelis that you have been working for us. That you are off limits.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? I think they suspect as much already.”

  “No,” repeated Jamal.

  “But why not?”

  “Because what you said is false. I don’t work for you. I work for my people.”

  “Yes, of course. But you’re in danger…”

  Jamal cut him off.

  “My answer is no. I will not depend on the charity of the Israelis. I would rather be dead.”

  Rogers realized that he was getting nowhere.

  “I have another proposal,” said the American.

  “What is it?”

  “I want you to leave Beirut.”

  “Maybe you did not hear me before,” said Jamal, his voice rising. “I am not yours to command. You don’t tell me where to go.”

  “I know. I understand. I’m only suggesting that perhaps now, for a little while, you might think about going somewhere safer than Beirut.”

  “For me, there is nowhere safer.”

  “You are impossible!”

  Jamal smiled for the first time.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

  “Look,” said Rogers. “If you won’t listen to reason, there isn’t much we can do for you. But there are a few things. What kind of car are you driving?”

  “Chevrolet,” said Jamal.

  “Bullet-proof?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can get you a better one.”

  “All right,” said the Palestinian. “I accept.”

  “What kind of radios do your bodyguards use?”

  “East German.”

  “They’re junk,” said Rogers. “The Israelis can easily intercept the signals. We’ll get you new radios. Fuad will bring them to you.”

  “Fine,” said the Palestinian.

  “What else?”

  “That is enough,” said Jamal.

  “No, it isn’t,” said Rogers. “What else, God-damn it!”

  “Mr. Reilly,” said Jamal, putting his hand on Rogers’s shoulder. “If the United States cannot keep its friends in the Middle East alive, then it is the United States that has serious problems, not me. So I will trust in your good offices.”

  “I told you once in Kuwait that I had never lost an agent,” said Rogers. “And I don’t intend to start now.”

  “Yes,” answered Jamal. “You did tell me that. And do you remember what I answered? I told you that I was not your agent.”

  They talked for a few minutes more and then Jamal excused himself. He had a meeting with a visiting intelligence officer from Japan. It was getting to be an industry, Jamal said, this business of security cooperation.

  After Jamal left, Rogers sat for a while in the apartment, thinking of what Jamal had said. “I am not your agent.” Rogers had to admit that he wasn’t sure what Jamal was. He wasn’t a CIA agent. He certainly wasn’t an ally of the United States. He was something awkward, in between. The American relationship with him was, in that sense, out of control.

  45

  Beirut; January 1979

  The Israeli special-operations team entered Lebanon mostly through the Beirut International Airport. They came one by one, as businessmen travelling on various European passports. They were well trained and intensely motivated. Among them was the cousin of one of the Israeli athletes who had been killed at Munich.

  Their mission was to finish once and for all a job that had been started years ago—and to make no mistakes. But even professionals make mistakes.

  There were little hints, tipoffs, bits of evidence. The first came from the Mossad officer in East Beirut who was responsible
for liaison with the Lebanese Christian militia. He paid a visit to the Christian militia’s chief of intelligence one day in early January and said that he would be away for several weeks. He added that it would be wise to stay out of West Beirut for a while. When the Lebanese Christian pressed for details, the Mossad man just winked.

  What the Israeli didn’t say was that most of the Mossad station was quietly slipping out of Beirut. There was no sense in leaving them there, vulnerable and without good alibis, while the special-operations team did its work.

  The incident seemed odd to the Christian militiaman. So he sent his own agents to check the logs of Beirut hotels and car-rental agencies and the records of arriving airline passengers to see if there were any unusual developments. It took him a week to gather all the information, and most of it was useless. But he did eventually notice one peculiar detail. Three cars had been rented by foreign passport holders from a particular car-rental agency in East Beirut that week. That seemed strange. Foreign visitors didn’t usually rent cars in Lebanon. They took taxis. Stranger still was the fact that all three cars had been reserved by the same travel agent in Paris. When the militiaman called the number of the Parisian travel agency, it had been disconnected.

  The Christian intelligence man wasn’t sure what to do with the information, so he did what intelligence officers usually do. He traded it. As it happened, he owed a favor to the head of Lebanese military intelligence, Samir Fares, who had recently helped his men obtain some American-made electronic-surveillance equipment. So he simply passed along to Fares his scanty evidence that the Israelis might be up to something.

  Fares was busy that month with an escalating war in the streets of West Beirut between Syrian, Iraqi, and Libyan agents. So he didn’t pay any real attention to the militiaman’s tip until he got another piece of information—this time from an agent in a small and very secret Christian underground group called Al-Jabha, which was said to have close ties to the Israelis.

  Someone was trying to monopolize the group’s bombmaking business, the agent complained. Al-Jabha’s workshop in the mountains had been commandeered by one member who was especially close to the Israelis. The man had brought special welding equipment to the garage, along with sheets of heavy steel plate. That was state-of-the-art for car bombs, the agent explained. The sheets of steel were welded under the car, around three sides of the bomb, so that the force of the explosion would blow out in a particular direction.

  It wasn’t fair, the agent said. Lebanon was a country of entrepreneurs. Nobody should try to monopolize the bombmaking business.

  The intelligence reports made Fares nervous. Somebody—apparently connected with the Israelis—was planning to hit an important target in West Beirut. But Fares had no idea who or why. He made a mental list of the possible targets: the Sunni prime minister, the Shiite speaker of parliament, several Druse members of the cabinet. The security of these Lebanese officials was Fares’s responsibility. He called in the officers who were responsible for protecting them and issued an alert: The Lebanese Moslem officials should alter their normal travel routines until further notice—and stay off the streets of West Beirut.

  Fares thought of other possible targets. There were various Druse, Sunni, and Shiite religious and political leaders, of course. But the most likely targets were among the Palestinians. The Old Man was planning to travel that week to Damascus, along with many of the other Fatah leaders. But Jamal Ramlawi, the Fatah chief of intelligence, was still in town. Fares wondered whether he should send Ramlawi a warning.

  Fares did one other thing. He sent a brief report to the new station chief at the American Embassy, a man named Bert Jorgenson who had recently arrived from Kuwait, with a request that a copy be sent to Tom Rogers in Washington.

  None of these tips and hints would have come to Rogers’s attention if Father Maroun Lubnani hadn’t panicked.

  The Maronite priest had gone off to meet with his Israeli case officer, as he did once a month. The Israelis were meeting much more openly with their agents in Christian East Beirut now, ever since the civil war and the partition of Beirut. Why not? The Israelis were in open alliance with the Christians. They were the new kings of East Beirut!

  Father Maroun had gone, as usual, to an apartment building on the beach south of Jounie. He had dressed in his bathing costume, as he did each month, and sat by the indoor pool waiting for the Israeli to meet him there. He had waited and waited. But his Israeli contact hadn’t arrived. So he had followed orders. He had come back to the beach apartments the next day, at the same time, and sat by the pool again, feeling increasingly embarrassed as he watched the nubile Christian girls in their bikinis parade past him.

  The Israelis never made mistakes, Father Maroun told himself. But the hours passed that second day, and the Israeli contact still didn’t arrive. Finally, after waiting too long by poolside in an ill-fitting swim suit, Father Maroun panicked.

  Father Maroun’s case officer had made a simple and forgivable mistake. In his haste to get out of Beirut, the Mossad officer had forgotten to notify his contact in the Maronite clergy that their meeting that month would be postponed.

  Father Maroun was worried. The Israeli officer would not miss a meeting unless something was very, very wrong! So he did what he had been told to do in an emergency. He called the Israeli Embassy in Paris and asked for his special emergency contact there by name.

  A voice came on the line.

  “What is happening?” said Father Maroun, his voice trembling. “I went to meet my friend, but he has disappeared!”

  “Calm down,” said the voice. “Your friend is busy. Something important has come up that requires him to miss his meeting. Everything is fine. Your friend will contact you in several weeks in the normal way.”

  “Very well,” said Father Maroun, much relieved.

  “Please do not call this number again,” said the voice. The line went dead.

  A brief intelligence report on the conversation came across Rogers’s desk two days later, in the midst of a thick pile of other reports from around the world, with a note from the watch officer: “FYI.” After his visit to London and Beirut the previous September, Rogers had asked to see as much of the raw intelligence from Lebanon as he could.

  The call had, in fact, been monitored by American intelligence, which tapped all calls going in and out of the Israeli Embassy in Paris, as well as much of the telephone traffic in and out of Lebanon. The intelligence report noted the basic details: the caller was a Maronite priest named Maroun Lubnani. The person he called was a Mossad officer in Paris who, it was thought, handled some Lebanese accounts.

  What caught Rogers’s eye was the name of Maroun Lubnani, which brought to mind the figure of a stout Lebanese cleric dressed in lederhosen. But as he read the intelligence report, he found it intriguing. Why the panic? What were the Israelis up to? Why were they breaking off meetings with agents?

  Rogers felt his stomach churning. He pulled from a file another recent SIGINT report from Lebanon that had come across his desk several days earlier. The signals people had captured a transmission from Lebanon by a high-speed transmitter, which sent coded communications in rapid bursts. It was state-of-the-art equipment and only used for sensitive jobs. Rogers had assumed, when he first saw the report, that the Soviets were up to something.

  Now he suspected that it was the Israelis. And he thought he knew what they were doing.

  It was late. Nearly 5:00 P.M. in Washington. First, Rogers sent a cable to Jorgenson, the new station chief in Beirut. Jorgenson wasn’t a genius, but he would have to do. “Request your help urgently on a sensitive matter,” the cable said. Jorgenson called back from his home on an unsecure line. That was a bad sign.

  “Can’t help you, my friend,” said Jorgenson. “We’re mighty tight this week. Big project going.”

  “I have a feeling this may be more important,” said Rogers. Jorgenson’s last big project had been a conference on Arab folk art.

  “M
aybe it is, and maybe it isn’t,” said Jorgenson. “But if you’re talking about something sensitive, then I’m going to need some paperwork. A finding. A memo from the general counsel. A note saying you’ve briefed the appropriate committees.”

  “But we don’t have time for that, Bert. Somebody could be dead by then.”

  “Sorry, Tom. But rules are rules. The days of the rogue elephant are over!”

  “For Christ’s sake!” said Rogers. He was almost shouting.

  “Sorry, pal,” said Jorgenson amiably. “Can’t help. Maybe you can scare up a little local talent. Some of your old pals. We don’t see much of them any more. Be my guest.”

  Rogers cursed. Jorgenson rang off.

  Rogers’s next call was to Fares. It was past midnight in Beirut when he reached him.

  Rogers apologized for waking the Lebanese chief of intelligence. He wouldn’t have called at all, Rogers said, except that he had a tip that somebody might be planning a major operation in Lebanon.

  “Didn’t you get my message?” asked Fares sleepily.

  “What message?”

  “I sent a message to the embassy nearly a week ago passing along some interesting information that had come our way. I asked the embassy to forward it to you. Didn’t you get it?”

  “No,” said Rogers. He was fuming. Calm down, he told himself.

  Rogers thought for a moment. He was in trouble. His options were all bad. There wasn’t time for him to go to Beirut. The CIA station there wouldn’t help. Time was running out. There was only one alternative.

  “Samir,” said Rogers. “A few months ago I promised I wouldn’t ask for your help again. But I need a favor. Will you do something for me?”

  “Of course,” said Fares. “Tell me what it is.”

  “Can you send someone you trust to an address I will give you. When your man gets there, a friend of mine named Fuad will be waiting for him. Could you have your man tell Fuad the information that you sent to me via the embassy.”

  “I will go myself,” said Fares.

  Rogers gave him Fuad’s address and room number in West Beirut and thanked him, haltingly.