“Oh yeah? Well, here’s my nightmare version, based on zero information. I worry that Hani tossed Alderson so that I would run the station. I’m young and I don’t have much experience. He thought he could manipulate me, so he trumped up something against Alderson. That’s why he took me to Berlin. So he could get more leverage over me.”
“You’re paranoid, my boy. A useful quality on occasion, but in this case, it’s a reach. Hani didn’t have to trump up anything on Alderson. Believe me.”
“So what did Francis do? Come on, I want to know. I need to know.”
Hoffman scratched his head and thought a moment. “Okay. I’ll tell you, but only to keep you from imagining things. Francis Alderson’s fuckup was that he tried to recruit one of Hani’s deputies. He had gotten friendly with the guy, invited him out to dinner. The guy seemed ready for a pitch, so Francis pitched him. Offered him some money. It’s normal. We do it every day of the year, somewhere around the world. But Hani went batshit. He said it was a betrayal of our relationship. We tried like hell to cover it up. Francis said the money was for the guy’s kid to get an operation in the States. But Hani knew that was crap. He had us cold. So he PNG’d Francis, to make a point.”
“And the point was: Don’t fuck with me.”
“Precisely.”
“And now we’re fucking with him.”
“Look, Roger, for chrissake, lighten up. I told you, you have to cut me some slack on this. And like I said, he’ll thank us for it in the long run.”
HOFFMAN AND FERRIS went to see Hani the next morning. The Jordanian intelligence chief was at his most charming. He was dressed in a dark suit and tie to receive his distinguished visitor, but he loosened the tie and draped the jacket over the chair after they had talked a few minutes. He seemed to have a long history with Hoffman, to judge from the banter. Hoffman teased him about a woman he called Fifi, who seemed to have figured in one of their earlier joint operations. “A wonder of nature,” Hoffman said, winking at Ferris, who had no idea what particular natural wonder he might be referring to.
When Hoffman offered Hani a cigar, the Jordanian brought out his humidor and insisted that the visitor share one of his. They lit up the stogies and both puffed away contentedly, sharing anecdotes about recent operations. But Ferris knew that the bonhomie was a delaying tactic on both sides, before they got down to the business that had brought Hoffman all the way from Washington. Hani didn’t bring up the Berlin operation; he was too polite, perhaps. Or maybe he wanted to force the American to ask. Which Hoffman finally did.
“Maybe we should talk turkey,” the division chief said. “I know you’re a busy man, and the king is probably waiting for you.”
“As you like. I know with Americans there is always this ‘turkey.’” The tone of his voice implied that he had, indeed, won a small victory by forcing Hoffman to go first. “You want to talk about Berlin, of course. I assume that Mr. Ferris has given you the details.”
“As far as they go. I must say, you did a hell of a job spotting and developing this guy. It’s a nifty operation. Just nifty. But I’m frustrated.”
“Why are you frustrated, Ed?” The Jordanian was solicitous, and impenetrable.
“I’m frustrated because I want more input. I want to help you target the Berlin boy, Mustafa Karami. I want to see if we can steer him into the center of the center—to the network that is doing these car bombs in Europe. This is life-or-death stuff for us, my friend. These guys want to kill Americans. That’s why I’d like to ask you, as a special favor to the United States, to run this as a joint operation.”
Hani paused a good five seconds. He didn’t like to disappoint Hoffman. “I am sorry, Ed,” he said eventually. “But this is impossible. As you know better than anyone, there is no such thing as a true joint operation. There is always one side that knows more, and one side that knows less. So let me run it. I know my business. Have I ever failed you in the past?”
“No. This is the first time. And I don’t like it. We want to help you run it. We can bring a lot to this case. It happens that we know quite a lot about this guy Karami. NSA has had him on watch lists for a long time.”
Hoffman took a red folder marked with a string of code words out of his briefcase and put it down on the table. “I want you to do this right. But the problem is, I don’t want to share my goodies unless you share control.”
Hani looked at the folder, and then at Hoffman. Ferris could see that he was struggling with himself. “I am sorry. I do not want to play any games with you, Ed. I could tell you we will run it jointly, to make you feel better, but it would not be the truth. We found him, we recruited him, and we will run him. You will share in everything that we learn. I am sorry. That is the only way we can do business.”
Hoffman scowled. He looked at Ferris, as if deliberating whether to send him out of the room, and then turned back to his host. “I would hate to have the president call His Majesty and complain about this. We are allies. That is why the U.S. Congress is happy to authorize covert payments that account for most of the operating costs of your service. And other, shall we say, activities of the Jordanian government. I would hate to do that. But you are putting me in a pickle, Hani. You are making me eat the shit sandwich. And I don’t like it.”
“Don’t threaten me, my friend,” the Jordanian broke in. His voice, usually so decorous, had a sharper edge. “Don’t ever threaten me, Ed, because it won’t work. The king won’t stand for it, and neither will I. We would rather have none of your money than let you think that for a few hundred million dollars you have bought us. I told that to your young man here, Mr. Ferris, and I assumed he would tell you.”
“Roger advised me against making this request. He told me you would be pissed off, and he was right. But I still want some control.”
Hani shook his head. “You can’t have it. As I told Mr. Ferris, this operation is complicated. It takes time. If you try to force it to get the big payoff, you will get nothing. That is why you must be patient.”
“I know it’s complicated. I’m not an imbecile.” Hoffman patted the manila folder before him. “I’ve read the intercepts.” He smiled. “So should you.”
Hani looked at the folder again. “I’d like to,” he said. This was the real card America had in the intelligence game—not its money, certainly not its HUMINT, but its ability to overhear almost any conversation in the world. “How good are the intercepts?” the Jordanian asked.
“Very good. They show that this guy Karami has been in contact over the past six months with an AQ operations man in Indonesia by the name of Hussein Amary. We heard about him from the Singaporeans. Is he on your radar?”
“Amary.” Hani thought a moment. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Well, he should be. Because we think Amary is very dangerous. He’s connected with the operations planner who we think is running these car bombs in Europe. We call him Suleiman. If Amary is also linked to Karami, that means he’s more in the operational line than you seem to realize.”
“This is very interesting,” said Hani. He looked off balance.
“Yeah,” said Hoffman. “Isn’t it, though?”
“Can I have those files?” asked the Jordanian. “They may be helpful to us. As you say, we share the same enemy.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Same as before. You share the take. The point is, we’ll run a better operation if we know more. And you’ll get more out of it. If there are ways to share more of the operational planning down the road, why not? I do not think His Majesty will object. But for now, we will run it. And we will be most grateful for the help of the United States.”
Hoffman picked up the file. Ferris wasn’t sure whether he was going to put it back in his briefcase. But after several seconds he handed it to Hani. “I like you,” he said. “You play tough.”
“Ahlan wa sahlan,” said Hani. “You are most welcome.”
“Don’t screw me on this,” said the American.
&n
bsp; “We are allies, my dear Ed. We have a common enemy. We treat each other with respect.” He held the file close, as if he had just won it in a fight. They shook hands, talked a while more and the Americans eventually departed.
NEITHER HOFFMAN nor Ferris said a word on the ride back to the embassy or the walk down the corridors. They talked only when they were back inside the bubble of the secure conference room.
“How did you do that?” Ferris asked. “By the end you had him begging for the thing you came all this way to give him.”
“Easy. You just have to be a manipulative son of a bitch. That has never been a problem for me.”
“Were those intercepts real?”
“More or less. Amary and Karami have definitely been in contact. The first contact was, let me see, not long after the Jordanians started surveillance of Karami’s apartment in Berlin.”
“How did you know they had him under surveillance?”
“We’re not completely stupid. Or at least, I’m not. You see, the Germans don’t like people conducting unilateral operations on their territory. So when they noticed something, they let us know.”
“Hani thinks the Germans are clueless.”
“Well, that’s one of his mistakes. He’s a genius in his own environment, but that makes him a little arrogant when he leaves home base. Sorry to say.”
Ferris was scratching his head. He was still trying to understand how the pieces fit together. “These conversations between Karami and Amary. Who initiated them?”
“Amary, of course.”
“Why do you say of course?”
Hoffman pulled Ferris toward him. Even in the secure conference room, he couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t being bugged.
“I know because Amary is our guy,” whispered Hoffman. “That’s the game here. He’s our guy. And the Jordanians are going to make his bones in Al Qaeda. They’re going to plug him into Suleiman’s network. And then it’s showtime.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Ferris. “That’s a nice piece of work. Except for tricking the Jordanians.”
“Can’t be helped. I tried to be reasonable and run the operation together, but your friend Hani refused. He shouldn’t have, but he did. So we play it another way. I didn’t make him take the intercepts. He practically grabbed that file. Anyway, this will be great for them. It will be the best operation of Hani’s career. Yours, too. Wait and see. You just have to understand, your country is at war. Different rules now.”
“That’s what my wife keeps telling me.”
“Well, she’s right. We are at war with a ruthless enemy, and we cannot rely on the charity of our friends like the genial Jordanians anymore. We have to fight our own war, which means we need our own unilateral ops against Al Qaeda. Now. We have no choice. If we wait, people are going to get killed.”
“I hope this works.” Ferris closed his eyes as he said it.
“It will work. It’s a good operation. And if it doesn’t, we’ll try something else. That’s what you do in wartime. You improvise. So stop worrying, my boy, and get with the plan. I’m counting on you. Can I count on you?”
“Of course. Totally. And I’m not worrying. I’m thinking. They’re different.”
“Well, don’t think too much. It’s bad for the nerves.” He put a meaty hand on Ferris’s back. “Go get a bottle of whiskey and some ice. I need to get seriously drunk so I’ll fall asleep on the flight back.”
“You’re flying back tonight?”
“Uh-huh. I promised Ethel I would take her to a show tomorrow night. The Lion King. I don’t get it, frankly. I mean, how do you turn a kids’ cartoon into a Broadway show? But she wants to go, and I’m a pussycat.”
The notion of Hoffman being henpecked by a wife named Ethel pleased Ferris. He thought, not of his own wife, but of Alice, and how much he would like to take her to a Broadway musical, or a movie, or anything that would help them forget they were living on the sharp end of a knife in these dry, dusty hills. Ferris departed to go get the whiskey, leaving Hoffman smiling beatifically in the secure conference room, like an anti-Buddha.
9
AMMAN
ALICE MELVILLE FLEW BACK to Boston for the funeral of her aunt. Ferris drove her to the airport. She was dressed in a lime-green A-line skirt and a white blouse. She had a ribbon in her hair. The only thing that was missing to complete the effect was a circle pin. “What’s with the sorority-girl outfit?” asked Ferris. It was a side of her he had never seen. “I don’t want to scare my mother,” she answered. “She thinks it’s okay for me to be in Jordan because the king went to Deerfield.”
Alice had adored the dead aunt, a doughty public-interest lawyer who had applauded her decision to go off to Jordan when everyone else was telling her she was mad. “Aunt Edith was even crazier than me,” she wrote Ferris in an e-mail the night she arrived back home. She sent a few silly messages the first few days, including a short cartoon video she’d found on the Internet in which the United States drives Osama bin Laden crazy by hounding him with telemarketing calls. Then she went silent. She was too busy, evidently, or too sad about her aunt’s death. Or perhaps, back home in the nest of privilege, she had forgotten all about him.
Ferris buried himself in his work. Hoffman’s visit had been a shock to his system—a reminder that he was in a business where any action was sanctioned, so long as it worked. He asked himself whether he was doing everything he could to penetrate Suleiman’s network with the tools he actually had in hand. He had only one, really: the address of the safe house where one of Suleiman’s operatives had recruited Nizar, the unlucky young Iraqi who managed to get himself killed less than twenty-four hours after he met Ferris. The house was a villa in Jebel Al-Akhthar on the southern outskirts of Amman. The agency had maintained fixed surveillance there ever since Ferris first landed the intelligence. They had run a covert SIGINT operation to tap the phone line, and had data-mined every detail they could gather about the Jordanian family that lived there, looking for links to known Al Qaeda operatives. But so far it had been a dry hole.
The house was a simple villa, built of concrete blocks and surrounded by a dirty masonry wall. The owner was a Jordanian man in his early sixties named Ibrahim Alousi who had worked for an Arab construction company in Kuwait and recently retired. His two sons worked as engineers for the same construction company here, and their wives and children shared the villa. The family were all practicing Muslims. They went most Fridays to the mosque and rose each morning at dawn for the Fajr prayers, but they had no apparent connection with any of the Salafist groups in Jordan. Ferris’s men had watched and waited and tracked, but they hadn’t found any hint of a link to Suleiman or his network. Maybe the Alousis were just being careful, but the ops chief at NE Division had advised Ferris to end his surveillance. It was expensive, and it wasn’t producing any intelligence. But Ferris hated to give up his one good lead, purchased at the cost of several human lives. And he thought the Alousi family was too clean, so innocent-looking they became suspicious.
Ferris decided it was time to take the offensive. He had been waiting for Suleiman to show his hand; now he would provoke him. He would throw something at the Alousis—a tantalizing provocation—and see how they reacted. And it happened he had the right bait to dangle in front of this prey. His predecessor, Francis Alderson, had recruited a young Palestinian named Ayman from a town in the West Bank called Jenin. He was living in Amman now, and like most Palestinians, what he wanted most was a visa for America. The consulate had flagged him for the CIA station as a potential recruit, and Alderson had okayed a pitch right before he got booted. Now Ayman was on the books as an asset, but without any operational role. Ferris would give him one.
Ferris met Ayman in a room at the InterContinental Hotel at the Third Circle. Back in the 1980s, when the U.S. Embassy had been across the street, the hotel had been the hub of Amman’s social life, but now it was safely out of the spotlight. Ferris was waiting in an upstairs suite when Ayman knocked on the door.
The sun was shining bright through the window, glinting off the water in the pool down below. Ferris could tell from the young man’s wide eyes that this was the fanciest room he had ever seen. He had the hard look of a young Arab: sinewy arms, taut facial bones, bad complexion partly hidden under the stubble of his beard. He was wearing a prayer cap of knitted white wool. He was perfect.
Ferris gave the young man his instructions. He was to go to the house in Jebel Al-Akhthar and ask to see one of the Alousi brothers. If they weren’t home, he should ask when they would be back and return. When he was with one of the brothers, he should tell them one sentence only. I have a message from Suleiman. If they asked what the message was, he should tell them to come to an address in Zarqa the following day at seven PM. That was a hook; if anyone in the house had any link to the network, someone would have to follow that message up—if only to confirm that it was bogus.
Ayman looked uneasy as Ferris went through the instructions a second time. Ferris tried to brace him. Do this right, he told Ayman, and you’ll have your visa to America. Make a mistake and we’ll turn you over to the GID.
THE ALOUSIS’ HOUSE was built on the side of a steep hill. It had two stories. Rusting steel reinforcing bars on the second-floor roof suggested that the old man had planned to build three stories but had run out of money. The neighbors walked the streets with their heads down, wrapped in their abayas or kaffiyehs, deaf and dumb. The wind whistled up the dusty streets and blew loose pebbles off the hillsides. Ferris had fixed surveillance across from the house, so he could watch on his monitor as Ayman approached the door. A woman answered, and then the old man, and Ferris shook his head, thinking the boys must be away. But eventually a young man arrived at the front door, dressed in a dirty blue track suit. He looked at Ayman warily, and then invited him in the villa.
Ayman was inside for nearly an hour. Ferris wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. In an hour, they could ask enough questions to shred the thin legend Alderson had assembled for his young agent. But when Ferris debriefed Ayman late that night, he said the long wait hadn’t been anything important. In fact, nothing had happened at all. He had passed the message, just as Ferris had asked. I have a message from Suleiman. Meet us at this address in Zarqa. But the Alousi boys said they didn’t know anyone named Suleiman. How could there be a message from Suleiman, if they didn’t know any Suleiman? It must be a mistake. Ferris asked what had taken so long, then, if they didn’t understand his message. They had given him coffee and tea, to be friendly, Ayman explained, and asked him about his family in Jenin, and his friends, and if he had ever been arrested by the Israelis. Ayman seemed happy to have completed his assignment, whatever it was. When could he get his visa? Ferris told him it would be a few weeks, a month at most.
Body of Lies Page 9
