Body of Lies

by David Ignatius

  Living well might not be the best revenge, but it was the only one currently available for the Palestinians who were now a majority of the population. They came back from Doha and Riyadh with small fortunes, which they used to build huge villas in Amman where they could entertain each other, hatch business deals and show off their wives, Western-style. Cosmetic surgery had become a leading industry in the new Amman; a woman hadn’t arrived until she’d had her nose fixed or her breasts done. It was like Los Angeles, without the ocean. Amman even had a magazine called Living Well, with ads that told young Arab women where to shop for bikinis and Sex and the City DVDs and retro furniture. The recent Iraqi refugees had added their own acrid flavor to the mix; they were bidding up local real estate and providing work for thousands of thugs to protect them from the other thugs.

  The young king seemed to understand that cupidity was Jordan’s national glue. Under his reign, the nation had graduated from the petty corruption of the old days to a baroque, Lebanese-style corruption—where even some of the army generals had their own bagmen. The leading operatives were so well known that their identities were an open secret, gossiped about around town but never published. Hypocrisy was mother’s milk here.

  And Jordan had Islam, the secret inspiration and torment of every Arab country. That was the Amman station’s biggest concern, other than ministering to the young king. The Jordanians were Sunnis, and the state-run network of mosques here was as ossified as the Church of England. The big pink-and-white-striped Husseini Mosque in the old downtown was nearly empty on Fridays. Religious people went to little mosques in the slums and refugee camps outside of town—or to Zarqa, the big industrial city just north of Amman that was the prime recruiting ground for the underground. Sometimes it seemed the fundamentalist sheiks were the only people who told the truth in this society; they mocked the corruption and decadence of the new elite—voicing the anger everyone felt when they saw the Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs driving by, but could never express openly. The young king might be hosting the titans of the World Economic Forum down at the fancy resort hotels on the Dead Sea, but in the back alleys of Zarqa, they were selling carpets bearing the image of Osama bin Laden and listening to cassettes of his declaration of war on America.

  Ferris had called it the “Pipeline” in a cable to Hoffman that he sent a few weeks after he arrived. There was a jihadist network that passed through Zarqa, carrying people in and out of Iraq, slipping them into the lymph nodes of the Arab world and then into the global bloodstream. Ferris was looking for a network that had a name—the name he had bought at such a high price in Iraq, and which he had been tracking since he arrived in Amman two months before. He knew the location of the safe house in Amman where his Iraqi agent had been recruited; he knew the names of a few people who traveled between Zarqa and Ramadi. Those shards of information had nearly cost him his life, but they were a starting point.

  From his first day in Amman, Ferris had been brandishing these few facts as a chisel that might break into the underground cavern. He had established fixed surveillance at the safe house in Amman. The NSA was listening to all the phones and computer links of anyone who had ever been near the house. Overheard reconnaissance tracked cars that left the villa. Ferris didn’t tell Hani who he was targeting, but he suspected he didn’t have to. In Berlin, he had become certain that they were chasing the same man.

  THE AMERICAN Embassy sat like a gaudy fortress in the neighborhood of Abdoun, outside the city center. It was a façade of white marble that opened in the middle to a crescent-shaped courtyard decorated in salmon-pink stone. It was pleasing to the eye, but forbidding. Jordanian armored personnel carriers were parked out front, manned by hawk-nosed members of the Jordanian special forces in their blue camouflage uniforms. It looked like the embassy of a nation under siege, which was about right. The embassy car took Ferris into the compound, and he made his way upstairs to the top floor and the secret precincts of the CIA station. Most people were still at their desks when he arrived. Perhaps they wanted to impress him, but to Ferris it was a sign they had nothing better to do than sit in the embassy.

  Ferris closed his office door and called Hoffman on the secure phone. He’d sent a cable from Berlin, but he hadn’t had a chance to talk directly to his division chief. He had learned over the past several years that it was a mistake to assume you knew what Hoffman wanted. Like the agency itself, he was a series of compartments. You could be in one box, thinking you understood the big picture, and then suddenly discover that what really interested Hoffman was in another compartment, which you might or might not have known about. Ferris had learned to call the watch officer when he wanted to reach his boss. The folks at NE Division often seemed to have trouble tracking him down—although it wasn’t clear whether they were being deliberately unhelpful or really didn’t know. The watch officer put Ferris through.

  “I’ve been waiting,” said Hoffman. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “On a plane. Then in a car. But I’m here now.” Ferris had expected that he would have to give Hoffman an oral summary of the Berlin operation, but from Hoffman’s abrupt tone, that evidently wasn’t necessary.

  “What’s Hani after? That’s what I want to know. Is this Berlin thing going to get us inside the tent?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Hani won’t tell me much. You know him better than I do, but my sense is that he moves at his own speed. He doesn’t like to be rushed.”

  “Hani has two speeds, slow and reverse. But that isn’t going to work now. This slowly, slowly shit has got to stop. We have to move him into a different gear. The Milan bombing has everybody spooked. The president is screaming at the director, asking why we can’t stop these guys, and the director is screaming at us. Or at me, to be more precise. We have to break this network. Now. You tell Hani that.”

  “He’s not back yet. He’s still in Berlin.”

  “Great! That means he’s working his new boy without us. That’s not going to fly. Who does he think is paying the bills?”

  Ferris debated a moment, and then decided to share his suspicion with Hoffman. “I think he’s after my guy. I can’t be sure, but I think that’s what his Berlin op is about.”

  “Suleiman?”

  “Yes, sir. Otherwise, I can’t figure why he would work so hard to set it up. Or why he would invite me along. It’s got to be the Suleiman network he’s trying to penetrate.”

  “That settles it,” said Hoffman. “I’m coming out to see you. We’ve got to own this one. Otherwise the president is going to have my ass. And yours, too, not that anyone would care. I’ll send you some goodies for Hani, to show we love him. Try to soften him up when he gets back. Big Daddy will be out soon to finish the job.”

  “Are you sure that makes sense?” Ferris had a sinking feeling, partly that he would be losing his handle on the Berlin operation and partly something else that he couldn’t put in words, even to himself. That wasn’t how things worked in this part of the world. You couldn’t kick someone’s ass and then assume they would cooperate. This wasn’t the KGB. Arabs helped you because they trusted you. They would do everything for a friend and nothing for a stranger; and less than nothing for someone who treated them with disrespect. He was going to try to talk Hoffman out of the trip when he heard a click on the other end of the line and realized that his boss had hung up.

  3

  BALAD, IRAQ

  WHEN FERRIS HAD FIRST HEARD the name Suleiman, he was beginning what was supposed to be a one-year assignment at the CIA’s base in Balad, Iraq. Hoffman had resisted giving him the Iraq job at first, wanting to keep Ferris as his executive officer, but Ferris had insisted. If anyone should go to Iraq, it should be him: He spoke the language and understood the culture. He had been tracking this target, one way or another, for a decade—ever since he had become interested in Islamic radicals while he was a student at Columbia.

  “Iraq is fucked up,” Hoffman had said.

  “So what,” Ferris had answered. “T
hat’s what makes it interesting.”

  Ferris wasn’t interested in policy. That was for the State Department, or people on TV talk shows. He was the one person in America who didn’t want to talk about what a disaster Iraq was. He wanted to be there. Working for Hoffman, he had helped devise the tradecraft that was keeping young officers alive. The Arab headdress and robes, the darkened moustache; the cheap shoes; the rickety cars with Islamic beads hanging from the mirrors, Arab music blaring from the stereo cassette player. For a certain kind of person, it was the only job that was interesting. Hoffman knew he couldn’t stop his protégé, so he arranged an assignment that could actually make a difference.

  “Your job is to feed the machine,” Hoffman told Ferris before sending him off. Ferris hadn’t understood what that meant until the day he arrived at the Balad air base about fifty miles north of Baghdad. The agency’s small fleet of Predators was based there, and most members of the CIA base spent their days watching what they liked to call “Pred Porn.” These were the real-time images from the cameras on board the three unmanned aerial vehicles that were cruising lazily over Iraq. Ferris got his introduction from the base chief. He escorted Ferris into the operations room and pointed to a giant screen that loomed over them.

  “My star agents,” said the base chief. Displayed in military block letters below the screen were three names: “CHILI,” “SPECK” and “NITRATE.” They sounded like the names of pets or cartoon characters, but these were the code designators of three Predators operating out of Balad. On a smaller screen were images from the three drones stationed in Afghanistan—“PACMAN,” “SKYBIRD” and “ROULETTE.” The pictures were riveting, even when you didn’t know what you were looking at. Ferris gazed up at the Iraq screen and saw a dark car poking along a two-lane road and then slipping onto a side road heading toward the desert. The Predator puttered along behind it, a thousand feet above, silent and invisible. Ferris asked what they were looking at.

  “Western Iraq, near the Syrian border,” answered the base chief. “We think the car is picking up a high-value target.” They stood together watching the car for perhaps ten minutes and then the picture went dark. The base chief spoke to one of the operators and then advised Ferris, “Dry hole.” Meaning that the target, of whatever value, wasn’t in the car after all. That was the moment Ferris began to understand the problem.

  The base chief was summoned for a videoconference with Langley, and he left Ferris sitting in his chair in the command platform at the center of the ops room floor. There was a low buzz in room, with people peering at the banks of flat-screen monitors, doing the rote work of planning and targeting and assessing. The watch officer seated near Ferris was monitoring a half dozen separate online chat groups that carried the latest raw intelligence from all the birds and bugs around the world. It was the dull hum of intelligence work, until there was a sudden whirr of attention and everyone was looking at the Afghanistan screen.

  “Check out PACMAN,” murmured an Air Force NCO at the desk next to Ferris. That particular afternoon, PACMAN was lingering over Waziristan in northwestern Pakistan, looking for one of Al Qaeda’s elusive chieftains. The drone was almost motionless, above a cave high in the trackless mountains—waiting for its prey to emerge, hovering, searching, lazily looping over the craggy slopes and the snowy summits. “I think something’s moving in the cave!” said one of the watch officers, and nobody spoke in the big dark room.

  The people controlling PACMAN were back at Langley, in a building in the parking lot. They were studying the sensors, waiting to launch a Hellfire missile if they saw a tall, gaunt man in the shadows of the cave. Ferris could see more movement in the shadows, and then something broke into the light, and Ferris thought: This is it.

  But it turned out to be a yak that had broken out of the cave’s deep shadows into sunlight. There were groans around the room. PACMAN had once again led them to a treasure trove of bats and vermin and animal dung. Still Ferris lingered, as PACMAN moved on toward another set of coordinates and the camera captured the slow effacement of the Hindu Kush, the ravines and escarpments and roaring rivers. He found himself transfixed by images that normally could be seen only by a hawk or a falcon. Here was the genius of American intelligence—that it could fly its mechanical bird of prey over the world’s most hostile terrain. The folly was that most of the time it didn’t know what it was looking for down below. A bird with perfect eyesight and no brain.

  Feed the machine. Now Ferris understood what Hoffman had been talking about when he made the assignment: Bring in real intelligence, so that the controllers will know where to send the drone; so they will know who is in the sedan meandering along the Syrian border, know which ramshackle bus is carrying the latest group of jihadis from the Damascus airport to the safe house in the Baghdad suburbs, know which battered GMC belongs to the operations planner. If Ferris could gather that information, then the Predator could watch each stop the target made, each accomplice who helped along the highway, every place they stopped to eat or sleep or take a shit. But someone had to feed the machine.

  “You’re perfect for the job, you poor bastard,” Hoffman had said, and it was true. Ferris spoke Level Four Arabic; he had the dark hair and complexion that would allow him to pass as an Arab in his robes and kaffiyeh, and he had that essential hunger, which he thought he could satisfy by taking risks.

  ON HIS way in, Ferris spent a week with the ops chief in Baghdad. He was a burly Irishman named Jack, but when he dyed his red hair and moustache and put on a loose galabia, he could pass for a Sunni sheik. Jack gave Ferris a tour of the agency’s hideaways in the Green Zone: the body shop where they repainted cars overnight; the hundreds of dummy license plates; the back entrances the agency used to slip its operatives out of the zone and into real life; the dozens of beat-up agency cars parked on the other side in the Red Zone, each raunchier than the last; the locations of safe houses across central Iraq, where Ferris would be operating. They drank and joked, to keep away the fear.

  “Don’t get captured,” Jack said on the last day, before Ferris went north. “That’s the main rule here. If they capture you, they’re going to kill you eventually, but first they’ll make you spill your guts. So don’t get captured. That’s all. If you see a roadblock and you think they’re going to try to stop you, start shooting, and keep shooting until you’re out of there or you’re dead.”

  “My Arabic is pretty good,” said Ferris.

  Jack shook his head. “I’ll say it again. Don’t get captured. You’re not going to talk your way out of a fucking thing with these people. Shoot first. That’s what they respect. Don’t try to be smart. If you shoot enough of them, it won’t matter whether your Arabic is good or bad.”

  ON THE DAY Ferris got lucky, he had been in Iraq for almost three months. He was scared almost every day he was there, and this one was no different. The base was mortared early in the morning while he was showering, and he had to scramble bare-assed from the latrine near his trailer, with a towel barely covering his privates, and duck under the concrete barrier that served as a shelter. Two mortar rounds landed, one of them a quarter mile away. They didn’t bother to sound an all-clear anymore, because it was never all clear. Ferris went back and finished his shower, but he thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that starting the day this way was a bad omen.

  He was heading back that morning into what his colleagues called “the shit,” which meant anything outside the walls of the compound. His practice was to spend a week outside, then a week back in. Hoffman hadn’t liked that—the most dangerous part of the job was transiting back and forth—and he wanted Ferris to meet his agents inside the perimeter. The NE Division chief was genuinely afraid that he might lose Ferris in Iraq, a fight he wasn’t sure was worth it. But Ferris knew that caution was useless. Better not to have any agents than to rely on ones who made their way back and forth to an American compound. That was the point about Iraq: There was no way to be half in.

  Ferris put on his s
weat-stained robe and his checkered kaffiyeh. He had grown the required moustache in Iraq and a stubbly beard, never quite shaven or unshaven. With his coloring, he could easily pass for an Arab. Not an Iraqi, perhaps, but an Egyptian, which was his cover identity. He had in fact first learned his Arabic in Cairo, during a semester abroad when he was at Columbia, and he still spoke with the soft “G” of the Egyptian dialect. Ferris wondered what his wife Gretchen would say if she could see him. She always imagined his spy life as a version of James Bond, with nice suits and martinis. If she saw him now, she would tell him to go change. Gretchen liked everything about Ferris except his real life.

  Ferris left the compound with the other Arab workers when the night shift ended and the day shift came on base. He knew they wouldn’t talk to him; Iraqis who worked at American bases didn’t talk to anyone. They were risking their lives for the extra money they could bring home. If the insurgents found them, they were dead men. So they scattered as soon as they were outside the gate, and Ferris scattered with them.

  An Iraqi car was waiting for him on the outside. It was a beat-up Mercedes from the mid-1970s, purchased back when Iraq was flush with money. The driver was one of Ferris’s agents—a young man named Bassam Samarai. He had been living in the Iraqi community in Dearborn, Michigan, and had been dumb enough to believe the American rhetoric back in 2003 and head for Iraq with a fat stipend from the CIA. His family was from this area; they had protected him, and pretended to believe his story about coming home to start a new business importing satellite dishes and decoders. One day he would end up with a bullet in his head, Ferris knew. But there was nothing he could do about it.