Damascus Station

by Unknown

  Sam pulled the tab off his empty beer can and stared out at the shadowed mountains. He grabbed the final round from the cooler and tossed a can to Ed.

  “I’ve got an errand I need you to run,” Bradley finally said. “Might cheer you up from this ugliness with Val.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Warm-pitch recruitment attempt in Paris. A Syrian Palace delegation is meeting with a few of the exiled oppositionists. Since Syrian government officials don’t leave Damascus much anymore, it’s worth a shot. You are the perfect candidate: a top recruiter in NE Division, fluent Arabic, you’ve recruited Syrians before. There are a number of Syrian officials traveling; you’ll need to determine the right one to pitch.” Sam knew before Bradley opened his mouth that he would say yes to whatever was proposed. But he wanted to sit in the warm buzz that had settled over his body, so he asked needless questions, all of which he knew the answers to already.

  “Paris Station not interested?”

  “We’re trying to keep the French out of this, so we don’t want to use local talent they may know about.”

  “You never send me nice places. This will be a welcome change from the usual hellholes. Can I bring the BANDITOs? They know Paris and we’ll need countersurveillance.”

  BANDITO was the cryptonym for the Kassab triplets: Elias, Yusuf, and Rami. All were CIA support assets. The brothers were Syrian-American dual citizens hailing from a wealthy Christian family that owned car dealerships throughout Syria and Lebanon. The family lived mostly in Beirut and Istanbul, preferring to manage the dealerships remotely. Sam had struck up a close friendship with the brothers, which eventually transformed into recruitment during his Istanbul tour. They secured cars, safe houses, and conducted basic surveillance for Beirut Station. Sam occasionally read the cable traffic and learned that they’d each passed a polygraph.

  “Yes, bring them.” Bradley paused to swat at a mosquito. “And I’ve also taken the liberty of sequestering a few analyst resources for your use. They can get you up to speed on Syria and help prep for the pitch. Look, I’m gonna hit the sack—it’s been six days and I’m still jet-lagged from my Cairo trip.” Bradley stood and was about to open the door to the house when he stopped and looked back at Sam.

  “Give the op some serious thought, okay? A Palace official would be a big fish. We’re basically flying blind inside Syria right now.”

  “Of course,” Sam said. “And Ed, one more thing.” Bradley turned his head, still holding the door ajar. “My next tour. I have a proposal.”

  “Yes?” Bradley said, closing the door to turn and face Sam.

  “How about Damascus?”

  Bradley smiled weakly and looked out to the mountains.

  “You need good people there,” Sam continued. “It’s a hardship post now, no families. I don’t have that complication. I can help out there. I can help you and Procter.”

  “Is this a revenge play or something? Get back at the Syrians for Val?”

  “You tell me where else I could be more helpful. You said it yourself. We’re flying blind in Syria. My Levantine Arabic is pretty good, you don’t have to send me to language school in Rosslyn for a year, I’m ready now. Plus, if I put one of these Syrians in harness coming out of Paris I can work the case inside Damascus.”

  “Procter is a hard-ass,” Bradley said.

  “So?”

  Bradley shrugged. “So, it could be miserable if you guys don’t get along.”

  “There’s a civil war burning,” Sam said. “It’s not gonna be an easy one, Procter aside.”

  Bradley smirked.

  “Not joking, Ed. I want the post. And I never ask you for anything.”

  “Fine. Done. Damascus it is. We’ll set it in motion tomorrow.” Bradley swung open the creaky swing door and disappeared into the house. Sam went to the fridge for another beer. He cracked it open on the porch and closed his eyes. Val’s scream again passed through his mind before it drifted off into the warm night air.

  THE NEXT DAY SAM WALKED to the analysts’ spaces in the New Headquarters Building—a box of steel and glass facing the concrete of Original Headquarters. The Front Office Conference Room’s centerpiece was a faux-wood table ringed by government-issue swivel chairs: some new and ergonomic, while others’ creaks and moans suggested they had been procured during the Carter administration. On the wall hung four clocks showing the time in D.C., Rabat, Tel Aviv, Baghdad—the rough boundaries of the Middle East and North Africa analytics shop. Each clock was amusingly between four and seven minutes slow. The interior wall was a scattershot of random awards and plaques, many quite dated (“Meritorious Unit Citation—Camp David Accords,” “Team Chief of the Year—Erin Yazgall”), others weeny-ish and incomprehensible to the visiting operator (“World Intelligence Review Article of the Month —James Debman”).

  Two analysts sat inside, bickering. They stood to greet Sam as he entered the room.

  Zelda Zaydan was skinny and had a shoulder-length bob of jet-black hair. Her nose was beaky and Romanesque and she wore an ill-fitting black pantsuit with a pink scarf.

  James Debman, on the other hand, was a butterball who wore a short-sleeved white dress shirt and garish orange bow tie. He offered a clammy hand to Sam, who had no choice but to accept, and beckoned him to sit. Zelda slid a giant stack of papers and binders across the table. “This is our team’s production over the past six months, you should read it,” Debman said. He sat back, picking at the flaking plastic cover securing the blue badge hanging around his neck. Zelda eyed him, then said: “We know you’ve done a bunch of tours in the Middle East but never Syria. What is most helpful to cover?”

  “The typical briefing you give to case officers,” Sam said. He knew the country at a high level, mostly from his time in Iraq, but hadn’t paid much attention to the CIA analysis so far.

  Debman’s eyes flickered with excitement. He slid his prepared talking points aside, mumbling overcoordinated and watered down in Zelda’s direction. He coughed, took a drink of water from a large bottle, and cracked his knuckles.

  “Our story begins in 1930.”

  Zelda rolled her eyes.

  THIS WAS THE BIRTH YEAR of Hafez al-Assad, the current President’s father, and it was, Sam thought, a bit too early in the chronology.

  Zelda agreed. “Goddammit, Debman, you always do this,” she said, her voice rising. “Let’s start with the war. The relevant stuff.

  “Here’s the thing,” she said, wiping a forelock of hair from her face. “Syria prior to the war had become a brittle thing. Sure, it was stable”—Debman supplied air quotes as Zelda said the word—“but the state itself had hollowed. They don’t have oil, so Assad can’t grease the skids and pay off the population with cash. The patronage that did exist went to a smaller number of people, mostly members of the Assad family. This pissed people off. All the telecom operators are owned by the President’s cousin, for example. Big drought in the north and east that brought more than a million people west, to slums outside the big cities. Destabilizing. Security forces are brutal, absolutely ubiquitous: you need their approval to add a second story onto your house, to get married. Mundane stuff. Pissed everyone off.”

  “Quotidian brutality,” Debman said. “Absolutely banal.” Zelda looked as though she wanted to strangle him with the chain holding his badge. Sam would have been satisfied with the orange bow tie.

  Someone opened the door to the conference room, then ducked back out. “Where was I?” Zelda said. “Oh yeah.” She took a drink of water. “Tunisia and Egypt happen. Some Syrians think, Why not us? Kindling is bone-dry, we just need a spark. A few smallish protests occur in Damascus. Nothing. We get one in the south, random place called Daraa. Visited it once. Not a happy town. Mukhabarat tortures a few kids. Boom. Protest, killings, funerals, killings. Rinse and repeat. Protests blossom in other cities. It becomes a nationwide movement. Demonstrations get big, like really big. Tens of thousands one Friday in Hama. Satellite images are crazy. And the regime, th
ey have no clue what to do. I mean, think about it. You could just go in guns blazing, mowing down the protesters. Like his old man did in Hama back in ’82, leveled most of the city to suppress a rebellion.”

  “More than ten thousand dead, but no one can really agree on the number,” Debman added, making a distasteful slicing motion across his neck.

  Zelda wrinkled her forehead. “What the hell, Debman? Behave yourself. Anyway, the regime does not do this. They waffle instead. They were restrained in some ways early on, despite all the press coverage saying the opposite. They give half-hearted political concessions that please no one. Sometimes they shoot protesters on purpose, sometimes it’s an accident, sometimes they don’t shoot at all and allow the protests. Then finally the regime shifted to a scorched-earth military campaign because they ran out of options. Kill them all.”

  “Confusing, Sam, it was confusing,” said Debman, wiping his glasses on his shirt. “The regime eventually burned its bridges. No way back, fight on.” He took another drink and wiped his mouth with his hand.

  “Now, what did this accomplish?” Zelda said rhetorically. Debman started to answer; she cut him off with a wave of her hand. “First, it did not suppress the opposition. It strengthened it, particularly the more radical Islamist and jihadi elements. The violence helped them make the case that they needed weapons to counter the regime. Second, it polarized the country along sectarian and ethnic lines. In general, it swung the minority groups—Christian, Alawi, Druze—toward the regime. The Sunni Arab majority against. The Assad family is Alawi, remember. Syria is really diverse, Sam. Christians and Alawis, for example, are each like ten percent of the total population. The regime has done a good job binding most of the minority groups—and many of the well-off Sunni Arabs, to be honest—into it. They don’t have other options. Third, it turned the government into a big, radicalized militia all its own.”

  “Except instead of worshipping Allah, it worships Bashar,” Debman said.

  “Huge chasm between the communities that support the opposition and the pro-regime side,” Zelda said.

  Debman chuckled. “Yeah, for example, regime side has electricity and food, opposition doesn’t.”

  “Policy makers are really interested in a few of Syria’s institutions,” Zelda said. “First, the Palace. It’s effectively Bashar’s personal office, includes his senior advisers and liaisons to all the big government agencies. For example, he just set up this thing called the Security Office to run his most sensitive mukhabarat errands. Ali Hassan is in charge. Bashar runs the country from the Palace. Second is the Republican Guard. Syria’s paramount military force, run by General Rustum Hassan, Ali’s brother. Rustum is the pointy tip of the military spear and acts as Bashar’s enforcing hand inside the Scientific Studies and Research Center, the SSRC. They’ve consolidated and centralized control because the institutions of state are weakening. Defections, rebel assassination campaigns. It’s all taking a toll.”

  “So where do you see the fight going?” Sam asked.

  Zelda stood now, hands behind her back, gazing out the window.

  “The regime stands,” Zelda said. “Because it is a deeper thing than the Assad family, its Alawi community, or even its repressive apparatus. It so deeply co-opted the nation and the organs of state that it was stronger than we all thought. It has the resources, the loyalty, and the ruthlessness to do so. And as for what is coming. The protests, the hope, all that is gone. Shot to pieces. Negotiations are window dressing because there is no chance for a settlement. Both sides believe they must win.”

  “And both sides believe they can,” said Debman. “The jihadists, who drive the rebellion on the ground, and the Assadists, the militia masquerading as a government. The bystanders, the people trying to get by, keeping their heads down, are faced with that choice.”

  Someone else poked their head in and said in a squeaky, insistent voice that they had the room, you guys are already five minutes late.

  “It’s a fight to the death,” Zelda said as they gathered the binders. “It’s the Octagon.”

  THAT AFTERNOON ZELDA HELPED SAM run bio searches and conduct research on the Syrians traveling to Paris with the Palace delegation.

  Trace results from the Syria Desk Staff Operations Officer came back late that night. Sam and Zelda ate hot dogs from the Hormel vending machine in the Original Headquarters Building. The CIA was the only place Sam had ever seen a hot dog vending machine. He’d always wanted to take a picture, but cameras were not allowed in the building.

  Seated next to Zelda in the analyst cube farm, Sam took a bite of the hot dog and read the results for one of the officials, Mariam Haddad.

  1.TRACE RESULTS (1 OF 2): REF SUBJECT SYRIAN NATIONAL IS PALACE POLITICAL COUNSELOR REPORTING TO PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER BOUTHAINA NAJJAR. REF A COLLATERAL INDICATES SUBJECT IS 32 YEARS OLD AND SYRIAN CHRISTIAN. REF B COLLATERAL INDICATES REGULAR CONTACT WITH SENIOR PALACE OFFICIALS, INCLUDING PRESIDENT ASSAD, AND COUNSELOR JAMIL ATIYAH.

  2.TRACE RESULTS (2 OF 2): REF C INDICATES SUBJECT’S MOTHER WAS CHARGE D’AFFAIRES IN PARIS BEFORE RETIREMENT. SUBJECT’S FATHER, MAJOR GENERAL GEORGES HADDAD, COMMANDS THE SYRIAN ARMY III CORPS, CURRENTLY IN ALEPPO. REF D INDICATES SUBJECT’S PATERNAL UNCLE DAOUD HADDAD IS COLONEL IN SSRC BRANCH 450.

  3.COUNTERINTELLIGENCE DIVISION SUPPORTS DEVELOPMENTAL CONTACT WITH SUBJECT PENDING NEAR EAST DIVISION CONCURRENCE.

  “Well connected,” Sam said.

  “A real daughter of the regime,” Zelda said, chewing a pen. “You need a family like that to get a job in the Palace.”

  Sam swung around in his chair to face the analyst.

  “Mariam could be interesting,” he said. “Mid-level officials typically have great access and are less invested in the regime. Plus, if she can even casually elicit information from her uncle we could tap into the chemical weapons program. Can you pull up the REF reports?”

  Zelda nodded and started scrubbing the CIA’s galaxy of intelligence databases. All housed a mixture of overlapping and exclusive reporting like a shotgun blast of Venn diagrams. She pressed her face toward the screen as she typed.

  “Found something,” she said after a few minutes. Sam swiveled behind her to look. It was a stolen mukhabarat report describing a protest in Damascus. Sam checked the date. March 25. The day they took Val. The report said the mukhabarat arrested a young woman named Razan Haddad. He stopped reading.

  “It’s a common last name,” he said. “Like Smith.”

  “I know, but check out the bottom of the report. A comment from the author.”

  Sam read: Prisoner released following formal request traced back to Political Security officer attached to III Corps.

  “Mariam’s father’s unit.”

  “Yep. Can’t think of a good reason anyone else fighting in Aleppo would call a mukhabarat detachment in Damascus pleading for someone’s release.”

  “Arrested family members are good fuel for recruitment,” Sam said. “I ran a guy in Saudi whose brother had been tortured. He kept his mouth shut but spied for us for more than fifteen years. Silent revenge.”

  He finished the hot dog. “We found our girl.”

  4

  MARIAM STARED AT THE PICTURE OF FATIMAH WAEL clipped to the yellowed folder resting on the table. The mukhabarat photo, taken at the start of Fatimah’s last imprisonment, was now frayed. She ran her fingertips along its edges and met Fatimah’s haunted eyes. The eyes usually looked dead in these mukhabarat albums. But Fatimah bore the gaze of a woman who had taken a lifetime of beatings and still stood. Mariam put the photo aside and again reviewed the dossier contents as her boss spoke on the phone.

  The first page: a summary of Fatimah’s arrests. Most fell under the decades-old emergency law, which gave the state expansive authority to prosecute vague crimes, including “Sedition” (Translation: participation in peaceful protest) and “Nefarious Cooperation with a Foreign Power” (Translation: political discussions with the French ambassador to Damascus). The file
was at least five inches thick. It included every report filed on Fatimah dating back to the early 1990s, when, as a twenty-two-year-old, she unwisely submitted an article to a newspaper calling for the elder Assad’s resignation. Five years in prison from 2003 to 2008. Charge: Sedition. Now Fatimah was an exile, shuttling between France and Italy. A brave Syrian woman leading the foreign opposition, well respected by many of the fighting groups on the ground. A constant thorn in Assad’s side.

  Mariam put down the file as her boss, the political counselor to the President, Bouthaina Najjar, ended her phone call. Bouthaina had placed Mariam in charge of the negotiations with foreign-based oppositionists, namely the National Council, the umbrella group claiming to represent the fighters on the ground. Mariam’s goal was simple: persuade them to renounce the Islamist fighters now leading the civil war, denounce their fellow exiles, then come home, where safety and pardon would be granted in exchange for silence. It was Mariam’s most important assignment yet, and it promised to be a stepping-stone to greater things.

  Bouthaina joined Mariam at the table, opened her own file on Fatimah, and, as she always did when concentrating, began nibbling on her Gucci eyeglasses. “So, Mariam, what do you think about Fatimah? What angle should we take in Paris?”

  Mariam smoothed her beige skirt and pulled a report from the file. “The Iranian signals intelligence covering Fatimah’s Paris apartment and the Tuscan villa were superb,” Mariam said. “And they make it clear she misses Syria. She is living well abroad, but Damascus is home. She will want to negotiate.” Mariam took a sip of coffee. “But the price should be high.”

  She rifled through the stack of reports. Her thumb stopped on one she’d dog-eared the night before, cross-legged on her bed in a long T-shirt, preparing for this discussion. She’d been on her fourth cup of coffee.

  “Here it is. Three reports from opposition sources: Paris, Rome, Istanbul. All allege corruption and misuse of funds. Here is an amusing one.” She slid it across to Bouthaina, who put on her eyeglasses to read.