Body of Lies

by David Ignatius

  “Of course. So long as you’re really coming back.”

  He didn’t answer at first. Pledges of commitment, in his experience, were only spoken if there was reason to doubt someone’s fidelity. He thought of what Hani had said: Every extra word adds a measure of insincerity.

  “I don’t want to leave you.” Each word carried the emotion he felt.

  “Oh, Roger.” She shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. “Promise me something. If you decide you’re not serious about me, you must tell me. I don’t want to be hurt. I have a good life now that makes me happy, and I don’t want to be unhappy again.”

  “I could never hurt you,” said Ferris. She nodded, and then turned her back. As she walked away, Ferris thought to himself: So this is what it feels like. This helpless feeling, this is love.

  11

  LANGLEY / WASHINGTON

  A CAR BOMB EXPLODED IN Frankfurt while Ferris was on his way back home. He called the watch officer in NE Division during his stopover in London, asking whether he should turn around and return to Jordan and was told no, that Hoffman wanted him in Washington, ASAP. You could tell, just by watching people at Heathrow, how frightened they were. They were crowding around the televisions in the airport lounges to watch the news. Several flights were canceled, because of the heightened security alert.

  Ferris called Alice from London. She hadn’t heard the Frankfurt news yet. Ferris told her to be careful, and she laughed out loud. “Me? You be careful. I’m not the one making the trouble.” Ferris laughed, but it ached. He wanted to be back home with her. Not once in his marriage with Gretchen had he wished to hide away with her and let the world disappear. She was of the world; that was the point about Gretchen. She was mint-perfect, coin of the realm. Alice was in another space, still mysterious to Ferris, and he wished he could be there now.

  Ferris brooded on the long London-Washington leg of the trip. They were losing ground. They had bungled their few, precious chances to get inside the enemy network. Ferris himself was no better than Hoffman. He had been impatient and greedy, and he had lost the trail of his adversary. The thought of returning to CIA headquarters was depressing. It wasn’t the flat, linoleum feel of the place, or the instantly dated, 1960s “modernist” look of the architecture. It was the civil-service culture that permeated the corridors like dry rot. Ferris had heard the elite, band-of-brothers rhetoric when he joined. The agency had to be less smugly bureaucratic than Time, Inc., he reckoned, but he had been wrong. It was worse. It was a culture that had been lying to itself for so long that people had lost the ability to differentiate between what was real and what wasn’t. Failure wasn’t acceptable—so, as far as the agency was concerned, the CIA never made mistakes. These were people who believed their own PowerPoint presentations.

  Ferris had brought along a book from the British Council library, and he read it now for comfort. The Brits had bungled, too—damn near crumpled in 1939 in the disarray of Dunkirk. Yet when they realized their very survival was at stake, they had found a raw ruthlessness in their character. The fumbling chess players and common-room eccentrics proved to be killers. That was the message of the intelligence histories Ferris liked to read. Facing an enemy they couldn’t defeat head-on, the British found other ways. They raised lying to a form of warfare. They stole their enemy’s Enigma cipher machines and recruited Britain’s oddest and brainiest to break the codes. They captured German agents and played them back, creating a network of lies so intricate and believable that, for the Germans, it became reality. Knowing that they would not prevail unless America entered the war, they launched a covert action program to destroy the isolationists in America, spreading lies and gossip to defeat members of Congress they didn’t like. The Brits maintained their guise as genial, patrician bumblers, until they bumbled their way to Berlin. They succeeded, lie by lie, day by day.

  Ferris read the slim volume he had brought along about one particularly audacious piece of British deception, and as he turned the pages, he thought about his own adversary. Lacking a face to put to the name “Suleiman,” he saw pure black when he closed his eyes. But he heard the sound of explosions—car bombs in Rotterdam, Milan, Frankfurt and coming soon, no doubt, to Pittsburgh and San Diego. The failure to destroy Suleiman wasn’t the agency’s failure, it was his own. He had grabbed at one of the far-flung roots when he recruited Nizar at the beginning of the year in Iraq. In Berlin with Hani, he had touched one of the nodes. And with Hoffman, it had seemed so easy to insert a probe into the enemy’s flank. In his mounting frustration, he had imagined he could tease the enemy out of hiding in Amman. But all he and Hoffman had accomplished with their schemes was to sever the few connections they had. And all the while, the bombs kept going off.

  They were back to the starting point, and they were running out of time. The Frankfurt bomb would make people panicky all over again. It was a particularly brazen act, in the middle of Europe’s financial capital. It told people there was a network so cleverly constructed and well hidden that the CIA and its friends didn’t know where to look. Your shield is gone, these car bombs said; you are helpless before your enemies.

  In the drowsy stump of the long flight, Ferris pondered what Hani had said about taqiyya, the necessary lie. In the Islamic texts he had studied back at Columbia, the term usually applied to Shiites, who were taught to dissimulate when necessary to avoid danger. Indeed, this slipperiness was one reason Sunnis viewed them as inveterate liars. But there was a deeper meaning that went back to the Koran. It concerned a companion of the prophet named Ammar bin Yasir, who was imprisoned in Mecca with his family after the Prophet fled to Medina in the hijrah. Bin Yasir’s parents were tortured and killed for their allegiance to Islam. Bin Yasir was more devious: He tricked the infidels by pretending to worship their idols, and then escaped to Medina, where he rejoined Muhammad. When he asked the Prophet if he had done the right thing by lying, Muhammad assured him that he had done his duty. Bin Yasir had surrounded the truth with a bodyguard of lies, as the British put it many centuries later. He had treated the infidels with the contempt they deserved. He had gone into the heart of their encampment and deceived them, so that he could fight another day.

  In the time of the Prophet, deception was the essence of survival. Another story concerned the head of an Arabian tribe who was plotting to kill Muhammad. The Prophet advised his companions that the assassin’s weakness was his vanity. So when they visited him, they complimented the sheik on his fine perfume, and asked him to lean a little closer, so they could savor its pleasing scent, and a little closer, handsome sheik, and a little closer. And then they chopped off the vain man’s head. The story illustrated an eternal truth of warfare. Facing a difficult adversary, it is sometimes best to play upon his arrogance. Lure him forward; draw him in. The right pressure on just the right spot and he will collapse from within. That was what the Muslims had done to America in Iraq, wasn’t it? But it could work in reverse.

  The British book was still open on Ferris’s lap, and he returned to it now with greater attention. The operation it described had been as much theater as warfare. In 1943, the British had needed to disguise their true plan to attack in Sicily by convincing the Germans they would be landing in Greece. They had created an illusion so perfect that the Germans had leapt at it, thinking they were discovering a great secret—not realizing that it was a lie. And it had worked.

  Ferris sat upright in his airplane seat. He ordered some black coffee from the flight attendant and began scribbling notes to himself. By the time the plane landed at Dulles, Ferris had the beginning of an idea.

  HOFFMAN WAS sitting gloomily at his desk when Ferris arrived. He looked awful. The ruddy face had turned doughy, and there were dark ruts under the eyes from too little sleep and too much drinking. Even his brush-cut hair was limp. He didn’t look like a tycoon anymore, but a bookie whose bets had come up wrong. His deputy was sitting at the conference table looking at a thick binder, but when Ferris arrived, Hoffman asked the d
eputy to leave and closed the door.

  Hoffman spoke in a low, raspy voice. He looked down at his desk rather than directly at Ferris. “I could apologize, but that would be bullshit. Nonetheless, I should have warned you in advance that the shit was about to come down on your head with Mustafa Karami. That was a mistake.”

  Ferris was startled. “What do you mean? You knew that Karami was dead? Before I saw Hani?”

  “Yup. I heard it from the Spanish, at the same time they told the Jordanians. That’s how we managed to get Amary out. We had a head start.”

  “Shit. You know what, Ed? You’re right. You should have told me. Why didn’t you?” Ferris was furious. He thought the situation couldn’t get worse, and it just had.

  “Because you would have told the Jordanians. Nothing wrong with that. I would have told them, too, in your place. But I couldn’t risk that. And don’t start sulking. I told you I was sorry.”

  “Actually, Ed, I think you said apologizing was bullshit. But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Why doesn’t it matter? Everything matters.”

  “Because Hani won’t talk to me. I thought he was going to kill me when he realized what we had done to him. He was furious. I’m dead out there.”

  “Don’t be too sure. He likes you. And you’re a better bet than the next guy we’d send. So maybe he’ll wise up. And for the record, I apologize.” Hoffman puckered up his tired, beat-up face and made a kissing noise. Then he gave Ferris the finger.

  Ferris laughed, despite himself. It was weirdly reassuring that Hoffman could still act like an adolescent after a disaster like this. He decided to let his anger go.

  “You really think they’ll let me back in Jordan?” Back to Alice’s place, Ferris’s place.

  “Not entirely impossible. Let’s wait and see.”

  “Hani is worth the trouble, Ed, if we can get past this flap. Not that you need my opinion, but I watched him break the man who shot Karami. It was the damnedest thing. The guy confessed everything—the hit, the fact they knew we were running Amary—without Hani ever touching him. He’s good.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. He’s a superstar. And we fucked him over. Et cetera. I’m sorry you had to be there and take his anger. I’m sure that wasn’t fun. He called me up and screamed at me, too, for what it’s worth. I told him to calm down. Bad things happen in war sometimes. Friendly fire. Get over it.”

  “Did he calm down?”

  “Not really. But he shut up. I asked him to take you back, but he seemed to be off in another world, thinking about something. Long pauses, very strange. But he’ll come around. He’s a pro.”

  Ferris looked at his boss, wondering if he should say any more. “That’s what bothered me, to be honest. Hani is a pro. He worked hard on that operation. Set it up, pitched the guy. And we were establishing a little trust, him and me. That’s the one thing I’ve learned with the Arabs—it’s all or nothing, total trust or zero. But we lost that. We became…nothing.” He trailed off.

  Hoffman put his ruined face in his hands and rubbed his sleepless eyes. When he spoke again, there was an edge of anger in his voice. “Okay. We did screw the guy. It was in a good cause, but if I were Hani, I would be pissed off. And if I were you, I would be pissed off. You had misgivings. You told me. Okay? We’re all clear on that.”

  The division chief stood up. His bulky form loomed for a moment above his chair, and then in an impulsive burst of frustration, he pounded his fist down against his desk.

  “But I am not Hani, goddamn it! And I am not you. I am me, and I have a job to do. And I am not going to guilt-trip myself into dropping the ball. We are at war, for chrissake. These shitheads are setting off a new bomb almost every day, while we jerk off. We’ve got things going you don’t have a clue about, and you know what? They’re not working, either. The president asked the director at the briefing today whether the CIA had taken a permanent vacation.

  “Jesus Christ,” Hoffman muttered as he shook his head. “These people are trying to kill us, and we are running out of tricks to stop them. This Amary thing took me as long to set up as Hani’s little operation did, and now it’s all pissed away. So I’m going to worry about that, thank you very much, and not about how much we fucked over our Jordanian pals.”

  SILENCE SETTLED on the room. Ferris waited for another thunderclap from Hoffman, but he was sullen and withdrawn. His boss was losing it. They all were losing it. Hoffman was right. They were running out of tricks. They were waiting to get hit again, hoping they could find somebody in one of the networks and beat the crap out of him in time to disrupt the next attack. That wasn’t a strategy; it was slow-motion defeat. Hoffman was still silent, and it occurred to Ferris that he was waiting for a suggestion. Ferris turned over in his mind the idea that had been forming on that long gloomy flight back to Washington. He thought of Hani’s word—taqiyya. When the truth isn’t working, you lie. When you’re losing on one field of play, you create another.

  “I have an idea,” said Ferris. His words fell into a pit of silence. “Maybe it’s crazy.”

  “Say what?” asked Hoffman. He wasn’t used to Ferris making operational proposals.

  “I said that I have an idea. It came to me on the plane. I’d been thinking about it before, but it seemed too weird. Now, maybe not. Want to hear?”

  “Yeah, sure. What have we got to lose? Other than the whole fucking country.”

  “Okay. We have to get to Suleiman. If we don’t, he’s going to eat us alive. Just look at us. We’re a mess. We have to get something going. Am I right?”

  “Obviously. What’s the idea?”

  “It’s something Hani said to me before I left. At the very end, before he threw me out. He talked about this Muslim thing called taqiyya. It’s the lie you tell to get what you want. And I was thinking, suppose we just lie. Suppose we make Suleiman think we’ve already done it—that we’re already inside the tent. We know we’re failing, but he doesn’t. For all he knows, we’re sleeping under his bed, waiting for the right time. We lie, that’s basically it. We pretend that we have him by the balls. And then we exploit his fear. Does that make any sense?”

  “Maybe,” said Hoffman. “If I knew what you were talking about.”

  “I’m talking about deception. Taqiyya is the only way we’re going to penetrate Suleiman’s network. We’ve been trying, and we haven’t gotten anywhere. We could keep on trying. We could dangle people at every Salafist mosque in the world, and wait for someone, somewhere to take the bait. And maybe it would work, eventually. But we are running out of time. So if we don’t have time to recruit a real agent, then let’s pretend we’ve recruited one—and run him as a virtual agent. It won’t be a real penetration of Al Qaeda, but a virtual penetration. But what’s the difference, right? If we don’t have the cards, let’s pretend we have the cards. Let’s bluff the guy—make him think we’re inside, that we’re running an agent. Hell, if we wanted to, we could pretend we’ve recruited Suleiman. We can pretend anything we want. If we’re brazen enough, it will work.”

  Hoffman shook his head. He was smiling again. The gloomy thunderhead had lifted. “You know, I am going to have to revise my opinion of you. I had no idea you were this devious. This puts you in a whole new category in Eddie’s book.”

  “I’m desperate,” said Ferris. “So are you.”

  “That’s a fact. So how do you propose we begin this razzle-dazzle? Assuming I was interested.”

  “That’s what came to me on the plane. I was reading this book about a British deception operation in World War II, when they really, totally needed to snooker the Germans. And I thought, maybe we could play that game, too.”

  “Okay, Mr. Peabody. What’s the book?”

  “The Man Who Never Was.”

  Hoffman closed his eyes and let it sink in. He saw it instantly—the dead body, the false message, the layering of lies. He went to his bookshelf and took down a dog-eared copy of the book Ferris had just mentioned.

  “Operatio
n Mincement. That’s what the British called it, right? I must be getting old and stupid, that I didn’t think of this myself.”

  “Just old,” said Ferris.

  “You know what? I like you, Ferris. You’re a pisser. You really are.”

  “Thank you.”

  “To do this right, we would have to plug you into a new circuit. I have some people doing some pretty unusual stuff already. I tried to get you to join that shop after you got wounded in Iraq, but you blew me off. We can still make a fit, if you’re really game. But don’t raise your hand on this one too quickly. This isn’t the Clandestine Service Trainee bullshit from the Farm. You sure about this?”

  Ferris didn’t think before he answered. We never do, when we make the decisions that change our lives.

  “We have to get to Suleiman. This could do it.”

  “Taqiyya,” said Hoffman, still savoring Ferris’s suggestion. He laid one of his big hands on the younger man’s forearm. “You said it a long time ago, Roger. This has to work. We cannot lose. If we can’t break Suleiman’s network, a lot more people are going to die.” He relaxed his grip on Ferris’s arm and told him his secretary would call in a few days to set up another meeting. He had to make some arrangements, do some rewiring, before he could plug Ferris into that new circuit.

  12

  WASHINGTON

  FERRIS SLEPT IN A HOTEL his first night back in Washington. It was a rickety little inn off Dupont Circle that reminded him of the places where he had lived before he joined the CIA. And he needed to be alone, away from anyone he knew. He didn’t want to see Gretchen until he had figured out what he wanted to say. She had a way of overruling his plans, or simply ignoring them. This time he wanted to set his own course. He called her at six-thirty the next morning, which he knew would be just after the shower, just before the makeup.