The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “They deliberately wanted us to find the driver?” ventured Drayton. “Unless the events are unrelated?”

  “Of course they’re fucking related!” Feldman boomed. “And of course they wanted us to find him. Which means we have to locate the Nippon Yoku-Maru and board her. If necessary, we will open every damned container on that ship, inspect every hatch, and we’ll do it fast, before she reaches Jakarta.

  Feldman’s executive assistant knocked on the door and came in without waiting. She held a newspaper in her hand.

  “The ambassador would like to speak with you in his office,” she said, handing him the paper, “probably about this.” The newspaper was a broadsheet, Pakistan’s most prominent English-language daily. A headline below the fold read French Arms Dealer Found Dead.

  “Oh shit,” Feldman muttered. “Now it gets worse.”

  The story recounted the discovery of the two bodies in Surat but did not mention ISI or CIA. Nor did it mention the freighter Nippon Yoku-Maru.

  “Phil, I want you to set up a conference call with Olof Wheatley for this evening. Try to get him at 8 AM or 9 AM his time, 6 PM or 7 PM here, and find a way to get Kate Langley plugged in also. She’s probably still in Surat arranging air-freight of the two bodies to the FBI lab in Quantico. We need to get all our ducks in a row and ask CTC to help us with all issues we can’t handle over here alone.”

  Feldman left for his meeting with the American Ambassador to Pakistan.

  “Does any of this remotely sound like Al Qaeda’s MO to you?” Drayton asked Carulla when they were alone.

  “No way,” Carulla said. “What Al Qaeda’s ‘events’ all have in common is, first, a devastating explosion that was unforeseen but that could have been prevented had the terrorist planning been known, and, second, sometimes an element of simultaneity. For example, compare the Cole bombing, the Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar, and 9/11. In all three you have the bombing, out of the blue, and in the last two, bombings at remote locations occurring almost at the same time. And what we’re seeing here is a kind of cat-and-mouse back and forth. It’s like they’re not trying to hide, but rather to throw false clues at us.”

  “Exactly. It’s a new kind of dialogue with the intended targets of the terrorism. They’re playing with us. We need to get this injected into the discussion,” Drayton said. “What it suggests to me is that they’re doing everything they can to keep us away from that ship. We should ignore all the diversions and go to the heart of the problem, which is the Nippon Yoku-Maru itself.”

  “Not necessarily,” Carulla said. “By your own logic, the ship to Jakarta could itself be part of the diversion. For all we know, whatever they shipped to Karachi could now be on a sailboat in the Caribbean.”

  “So what do they gain by sending us on a wild goose chase? Why depart from their usual strategy, which has proved itself time and again? There is something here that is staring us in the face that we are missing, damn it.”

  “Well, I agree with you that we need to find the Nippon Yoku-Maru,” Carulla said. “We’re missing the ship, and until we board her we’re not dealing with complete information. I’m surprised that wasn’t the first question someone would ask. Where on earth is the Nippon Yoku-Maru right now?”

  ***

  Alice Carulla installed herself at a makeshift desk in the narrow hallway outside of Kate Langley’s old office. Carulla prided herself on being part of a new, pro-active ‘kinetic’ CIA, to adopt the language of the PR people, that turned analysis into action. Gone were the days when CIA analysts merely wielded pens and keyboard to provide intellectual insights in the service of policymakers, papers that would be considered good work product in a university.

  Since 9/11, the Agency had morphed into an international SWAT team actively engaged in black ops. About a fifth of CIA’s analysis workforce were now called ‘targeters’ and they were busy scanning obscure databases to locate prospects for arrest, capture, or, in rare cases, for quite literal targeting in the crosshairs of an armed predator drone. Bang!

  That would have been unthinkable in the days when intelligence analysis was thought to be at least in part a scholarly profession. The drone program alone had killed between two and three thousand militants since 9/11, and perhaps a shameful number of innocents as well. This was direct military action by the Central Intelligence Agency operating largely on its own. The old model, in Cuba and El Salvador, for example, prescribed hiring third-country nationals to fight wars as proxies. Now, CIA fought its own wars and got its hands bloody.

  Carulla joined the Agency in 2003, responding to an advertisement at an Internet foreign policy website seeking a ‘Targeting Analyst—Full Time, Salary Between $49,861 to $97,333; Location: Washington, DC metropolitan area’

  The advertisement was provocative, demanding of prospective candidates: “Are you interested in being part of our national effort to dismantle illicit organizations? Do you like to write and brief the results of your work?” It was heady stuff.

  The Directorate of Intelligence was making a concerted effort in 2003 to staff up with a new breed. These were ‘creative candidates with initiative and strong critical thinking and communications skills to serve as targeting analysts on teams that bring analysis and operations together to maximize the impact of Agency resources against key figures and organizations who may pose a threat to U.S. interests.’

  This was the sort of language that attracted ambitious people who might otherwise have not thought of spycraft. Carulla at the time was a graduate student at SAIS, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies whose Nitze Building was on Massachusetts Avenue, just south of Dupont Circle, across the river from CIA’s main campus. She had an undergraduate degree in Information Technology with a minor in political science. Her career plan was to seek work at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, but she changed gears when she saw CIA’s ad campaign. She had been more than intrigued, especially when she saw that the educational requirements could have been written with her in mind. A bullet at the bottom of the advertisement also caught her eye:

  “Important Notice: Friends, family, individuals, or organizations may be interested to learn that you are an applicant for or an employee of CIA. Their interest, however, may not be benign or in your own best interest. You cannot control whom they would tell. We therefore ask you to exercise discretion and good judgment in disclosing your interest in a position with the Agency. You will receive further guidance on this topic as you proceed through your CIA employment processing.”

  Now that was something she had not seen before: A job that you could not tell your family about. She began the application process and was soon accepted as a trainee. It was a career choice she never regretted. And she had never felt more fulfilled than at this moment in Pakistan, deployed in the field on the heels of a terrorist who might be armed with a nuclear weapon that could destroy a city.

  Without waiting for further instructions from Mort Feldman or the conference call with Olof Wheatley, Carulla pursued a simple idea: Use image intelligence, IMINT, or high resolution photography, to find the current location of the Nippon Yoku-Maru. How might this be done? She began by calling up reconnaissance satellite photographs of the Jageshwar Shipyard on the day of the Nippon Yoku-Maru’s visit to unload three intermodal containers.

  CIA could not be faulted for reluctance to use tax dollars to acquire the finest technology. The United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars every year on new spy satellites. The current resolution available was astounding, far beyond anything seen by the public on services like GoogleMaps. A better sense of the current level of magnification in spy satellite technology could be gauged by considering the increase in clarity and resolution of photographs of the planets and stars taken from space by the Hubble telescope. Spy satellites were essentially just telescopes pointed toward earth, and though it was still not quite possible to read a newspaper in the hands of a target on the ground, that capability was not far away. Findi
ng a cargo freighter on the planet’s 90 million square miles of water was no longer considered an impossible or even a difficult challenge.

  Using the file Phil Drayton had assembled for Kate Langley on the Nippon Yoku-Maru, and coupled with photographs of the shipyard taken from space at various times on the day the ship had offloaded cargo in the Narmada Estuary, Carulla quickly identified images of the ship tied to one of the Jageshwar jetties. She increased the magnification of the images to the maximum available and studied the surface of the vessel intently for an hour or more, moving up and down, from bow to stern, to familiarize herself with surface details of the ship as seen from space.

  Carulla then used a new computer technology to create a digital signature of the ship—she developed an algorithm containing unique measurements of non-moveable objects on the surface of the vessel to come up with a mathematical equation that a computer program could use to identify the ship through image processing at a speed thousands of times faster than any human eye could do it. Armed with the digital signature, NSA and Agency data crunchers could ‘look’ for that object in the thousands of digital images taken daily by satellites spanning the globe. If the ship was anywhere not obscured by clouds or a roof, she was sure she would eventually find it. She began the search process by looking in a circle of expanding radius centered at the shipyard.

  By the end of the day, Alice Carulla knew for certain that the Nippon Yoku-Maru was not sailing for Jakarta.

  ***

  “Olof, we’ve got something good for you,” Mort Feldman said into the squawk box. “Alice, will you take us through it please.”

  Feldman, Alice Carulla, and Phil Drayton were again in Feldman’s office, this time gathered around the secure speakerphone to brief Olof Wheatley in Washington and Kate Langley in India.

  “Mr. Wheatley, this is Alice Carulla. Do I need to review the technology we’re using here?”

  “No, I think I’ve got it. It’s not unlike like iris recognition software, or digitizing a human fingerprint. You’ve made a unique computer fingerprint of the Nippon Yoku-Maru and now you’re searching your database of satellite pictures for her current location.”

  “Trust that Ivy League education,” Feldman said.

  “That’s it exactly,” Carulla said. “And what we know for sure is that in the week after the two bodies were abandoned frozen at the shipyard in India, the Nippon Yoku-Maru sailed east toward the Gulf of Aden, not south toward Jakarta.”

  “So where is she right now?”

  “Well, the short answer is we don’t know yet.”

  “How come? Cloud cover?”

  “Storm clouds, really. We’ve had 72 consecutive hours of heavy cloud cover over the Arabian Sea and she slipped away from us. No ship currently outside the penumbra of clouds has the signature we’re looking for, so we’re assuming she’s still in the area around Aden. It’s possible she has docked there, which a ground search could determine with HUMINT. It’s also possible that she moved some of the intermodal containers on the surface of the ship, and that might make the digital signature more fragile, effectively screwing it up. It’s far from perfect technology.”

  “Wait a second,” Wheatley said, the exasperation in his voice evident even halfway across the world. “You’re saying that even if the clouds disperse and the ship becomes visible to the satellites again, they won’t recognize it because someone moved some crates on deck? That makes no sense, Alice.”

  “Actually, it does sir,” Carulla said, standing her ground. “The pattern of the containers on deck leaks into the signature. We try to fix on immovable features of the ship—the beam, length, position of fixed objects—but if you move enough stuff around, or even change a few colors, you change the signature. Remember, we have tens of thousands of ships out there that are remarkably alike. It’s not perfect technology. I’m working on it and it’s just a matter of time before I find her again. My guess is that she will be on the eastern coast of Africa or in the Red Sea, if she has not docked at Aden or one of the other local ports.”

  “Let’s hope she’s not in port,” Wheatley said. “That’s my worst nightmare.”

  “Olof, this is Kate. We’ll relocate the ship. Meantime, we’ve saved ourselves a wasted trip to Indonesia.”

  “What if we try to focus also on the sender, not just the package?” Wheatley said. “Have you tried talking to Mahmood about making an effort to reach out to Al-Greeb?”

  “Yes, we’ve discussed it. He’s willing to do it.”

  “Mahmood can establish contact with Al-Greeb for us? My God, that would solve a lot of our problems! Al-Greeb likely knows just where that ship is.”

  “Al-Greeb in past months was willing to provide ISI with somewhat general updates on Al-Zawahiri’s plans simply as the price of staying in Pakistan, totally under the radar.”

  “So how does it work?” Wheatley asked.

  “Well, for starters, Mahmood would leave a low-level contact in Peshawar a signal indicating he wanted a face-to-face. Then Al-Greeb would come to him at a mosque in the Old City.”

  “And he’s willing to set that up for us?” Mort Feldman sounded skeptical.

  “Yes,” Kate said. “He’ll do it. I’m certain of it.”

  “This gives us another oar in the water,” Wheatley said. “Go for it. Wrap up what you’re doing in Surat and get back to Islamabad and talk to Brigadier Mahmood.”

  Chapter 29 — Peshawar

  There was a snake-oil salesman in Chowk Yadgar Square loudly proclaiming the virtues of his miracle cure for all ills in a singsong chant of many stanzas. He was perched on a narrow, rainbow-colored stool addressing a packed crowd of some twenty passersby, including several who seemed to be hanging onto his every word. They proffered their rupees. He held up a bottle of the concoction—it looked like Worcestershire sauce—and pointed to it as he sang.

  Chowk Yadgar Square was teeming with traffic and people. A fine blue haze of cement dust and exhaust fumes hung in the air. Honking horns, squealing pedi-taxis, and broken mufflers provided a cacophonous drumbeat that competed with the tuneful voice of the snake-oil salesman. Kate Langley strained to hear what Brigadier Mahmood was saying to her.

  “He sells a great deal of it because it is essentially fortified wine, a kind of cheap vermouth made in China,” Brigadier Mahmood said. “Most of these poor Muslims have never tasted alcohol in any form and so they don’t recognize it for what it is, but they love the ‘high,’ never guessing they are drinking ethyl alcohol. In fact, they will swear by its efficacy.” He laughed. “These city folks love their booze and consume vast quantities of this man’s wares.”

  “But does it cure snakebite?” she asked.

  “Any snake who bit these chaps would surely get drunk from their blood alcohol,” Mahmood suggested. “Let us hope that it is only the poisonous snakes in Pakistan who do not forswear alcohol. Never let it be said that alcohol is not popular in Muslim countries. They just call it medicine.”

  They had flown together to Peshawar the night before from Surat, using the same Beechcraft turboprop that had taken them from Karachi to India. Arriving in the city after dark, Mahmood had offered Kate a room in the posh villa that was always at his disposal in Peshawar. The house was so big that she took a whole floor to herself, with a bathroom and sitting room of her own. She did not see Mahmood again until breakfast.

  In the morning, he offered to show her the place in the Old City where he had previously rendezvoused with Al-Greeb’s courier.

  “Let me give you a tour of the most beautiful piece of architecture in Peshawar,” Mahmood said as they headed away from the crowded square and up the hill through Andar Sheher Bazaar, a narrow lane cutting through the steep walls of the densely packed market. The lane led to the top of a hill, which was the site of the Mohabbat Khan Mosque.

  “’Andar Sheher’ means ‘the inner city,’” Mahmood said. “This small hill is the oldest part of Peshawar, the center of what used to be a fortified, walled tow
n with sixteen gates. Humans have continuously occupied these few acres for at least the last three thousand years.”

  Kate told Mahmood that she had been hoping for a transfer to Peshawar the week before she was PNG’d from Pakistan. To a foreigner in Pakistan, even one who had lived for some time in Islamabad, the Old City of Peshawar seemed like a step back in time. The convoluted opulence of the Mohabbat Khan Mosque and its lavish, intricate tiles and minarets was heightened by the squalid, choked bazaars which framed it, a kind of palace growing amid the weeds of commerce. It was a Pakistan unhindered by government planners trying to make it look finer or more ‘Western,’ and so it seemed to Kate that its beauty was in point of fact enhanced.

  Kate saw a dark man in a turban and carrying a rifle stare at her. It brought her mind back to the task at hand.