“Sorry to keep you,” he said. “I just liquidated the bank account of a Salafist leader in Riyadh. He’s going to think another man from his prayer group stole his money. And if we’re lucky, he will try to kill that man.” He smiled at the thought of all these good outcomes flowing from a few keystrokes on his computer.
“Meet Sami Azhar,” said Hoffman. “He runs day-to-day operations down here in the pit. He’s much too smart for people like you and me.”
“Certainly too smart for you, Ed,” said Azhar, looking over the top of his glasses again. “You appear to be smart, but you’re simply over-caffeinated. When you aren’t overintoxicated. I don’t know about your guest. We’ll have to see.” He stuck out his hand and greeted Ferris.
“Sami used to be a quant on Wall Street. He was born in Egypt, but he came to America to go to graduate school. He has a doctorate in mathematics and another one in economics. He got very rich working for a hedge fund. So rich that he decided to give something back to his adopted country. Have I got this right, more or less, Sami?”
“It is true that I was well compensated, Ed, but I also invested wisely.”
“Sami used to do some fancy freelance work for the agency and the NSA in the nineties, helping us understand the crazies who were trying to kidnap his religion. But after 9/11 he realized that the world had gone off its rocker and that only a complete idiot would keep working for a hedge fund. As a Muslim, he felt a special responsibility to help stop the loonies. Am I right?”
“Yes, indeed. Or as you would say, Ed, ‘Fuck yes!’”
“Right. So he asked if he could do something important for me, off the books. Because I knew Sami, I thought he might be just weird enough for what I had in mind here. I’d read the file on him: a math genius when he was a kid in Egypt; got a scholarship to go study in America; made so much money on Wall Street he stopped counting zeros. He was an oddball, in other words—one of a kind. Smart and ruthless, but he also gave a shit. He was special.”
“Actually you are wrong, Ed. I am not special. Most people on Wall Street are smart and ruthless. The difference is that I am less selfish, at the margin. I should also point out that I am not especially weird for a mathematician. I’m just angrier. There’s a difference.”
Azhar turned to Ferris. “I tease Ed, but I truly enjoy working here. We are attempting what everyone always talks about but rarely accomplishes—which is to think ‘outside the box.’ In fact, we are so far outside the box that I’m not sure we will ever find our way back in again.”
“Enough bullshit,” said Hoffman. “We need to talk.” He closed the door, sat down at the conference table and motioned for the other two to join him. A large screen was mounted on the wall across from Azhar’s desk.
“Here’s the drill. We are creating something new, from scratch. To do that, Roger, I’m going to read you into some secrets that are very close-hold, even around here. Just want to be sure you understand what the deal is.”
Ferris nodded. “The deal is that I will not disclose the information to anyone else, even within the agency.”
“Well, yes, obviously that. But I was talking about something else. After you leave here, you are going back into the field. That’s why I didn’t tell you about all this stuff before. It’s dangerous. I can’t share it with people who might get caught. But I’ve thought about it, and I don’t see any other way. So the deal is, if some bad shit happens and you are captured, you cannot reveal this information. You must take appropriate measures. You follow me?”
Ferris sat back with a start. He thought he understood what Hoffman was saying, but he wanted to make sure. “Appropriate measures,” he repeated.
“If captured, you would have to take ‘appropriate measures’ if you thought you couldn’t resist interrogation. And let’s be honest, nobody resists interrogation for very long, despite what they tell you at The Farm. So we give you a gel bridge to put in your mouth when you go back into the field. If you’re in extremis, so to speak, it will do the trick. When you bite down hard on it, it releases a poison—very quick, very easy. It even tastes good, or so I am told. I haven’t had the pleasure, although I take one of these little suckers with me every time I travel. Anyway, do we agree on that? I won’t think you’re a pussy if you say no. I’ll just end the conversation here.”
Ferris thought a moment. He had been pulled into a world that hadn’t existed for him fifteen minutes ago. It was the zenith of his chosen vocation, or perhaps the nadir, but it didn’t matter which. It was at the farthest edge. He thought fleetingly of Alice, and then her image slipped out of his mind.
“I’m in,” Ferris said.
“Good boy.” Hoffman shook his hand. “Fact is, I would never have asked you unless I was sure you’d say yes. Okay, this is the conspiracy, right here. The three of us and that’s it. Nobody else will know all the pieces. Are we clear on that?” The two coconspirators nodded, and Hoffman continued.
“I briefed Sami on your off-the-wall idea, Roger. And guess what? He loves it. And he thinks they will swallow the bait. Isn’t that right?”
Azhar nodded. “A very creative idea.”
“So the first thing we need to do, obviously, is find a body. Any suggestions, Roger?”
“He has to look like a case officer, that’s the main thing. He should be about my age, early-mid-thirties, someone who would be assigned to handle a penetration of Suleiman’s network. He should be Caucasian. Healthy. Good muscle tone. And certifiably Christian.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning he shouldn’t be circumcised. If the bad guys don’t find a foreskin, they’ll think he’s an Israeli.”
Hoffman shrugged and turned to Azhar. “That right, Sami?”
“I am afraid so. Arabs are, so to speak, Jew-crazy. I am sorry.”
“That’s what the body should look like,” continued Ferris. “But how do we get one? Can the FBI find a body in a morgue somewhere?”
“God, no,” said Hoffman. “I wouldn’t trust the FBI to find a stray dog. This is a job for our military brothers and sisters in Special Operations. They’ll just do it, deliver the body and not ask questions.”
“So let’s tell the military to get us a body,” said Ferris. He was beaming. It was really happening.
“I already have. Contacted MacDill yesterday. It may take a few weeks. You’ll probably be overseas again by the time we get our man, so I want your proxy. Sami and I will build a legend. Backstop his cover. I already have a name for him. Harry Meeker. It’s a clean identity we built for an operation a couple years ago. Like it?”
“Any name you like, so long as it’s not Roger Ferris.”
“We’ve been doing some thinking, me and Sami, while we were waiting to get you wired up here. And we think we need some collateral, to make your taqiyya thing work. We have to really drive these guys nuts—make them think their whole world is coming apart. To do that, we need layers of deception that reinforce each other. Otherwise, Suleiman is going to smell a rat. That make sense?”
“Sure,” said Ferris. “But I want to help run the collateral.”
“That won’t be a problem, Roger. As a matter of fact, you are going to be doing most of the work. I’m too old and Sami is too weird, so that leaves you. Sami, why don’t you explain for our contestant what he’s just won?”
Hoffman flipped a switch and dimmed the lights. Azhar stepped toward the computer next to the projection screen, his curly black hair and cocoa-butter face projected in gray shadow behind him.
14
LANGLEY
SAMI AZHAR FIXED HIS GLASSES on his nose and fiddled with his computer, queuing up bits of information he wanted to share. He seemed lost in time for a moment, somewhere between this place, here and now, and the little elementary school in Cairo where he had astonished his teachers long ago with his ability to multiply large numbers in his head. Ferris studied him and thought perhaps he was like the refugees who had helped Britain and America win World War II. Grow
ing up in Cairo, he must have sensed the great Muslim crack-up that lay ahead, and wanted to escape it. But it turned out that was impossible. The war was everywhere.
“You will forgive me, I’m sure, if I start with the object of our pursuit,” Azhar began. “In the months since you heard the name Suleiman in Iraq, the team here has been doing some research. We know a bit more about this gentleman than you might think.”
Azhar touched a computer mouse and the first image appeared on the screen. It showed a thin Arab man with a neat beard and a knitted white prayer cap on his head. It was an intelligent face—displaying not the rough demeanor of a killer but the austerity and asceticism of a scholar. What struck Ferris was the intensity of his eyes. They were small fireballs of rage.
“We were very lucky to get this picture. It is from an old passport, before he vanished. Now, he is a will-o’-the-wisp. He is everywhere and nowhere. In the radical mosques, people whisper his name as if he is a phantom. They write poems about him; we have even found a few underground CDs that talk about his exploits. But he leaves no traces. In the diffuse world of Al Qaeda, he has become the true operations planner. He is the man who has fused the Class of 1996 from Kabul with the Class of 2006 from Baghdad. He is the bridge between the old Al Qaeda and the new. You have been looking for him. We have been looking for him. The Jordanians have been looking for him. But none of us can find him.”
Ferris studied the face, wanting to commit it to memory. Part of him was angry that Hoffman had kept this information from him for so many months. But a larger part of him was curious—and eager to understand how Hoffman and Azhar wanted to flesh out his idea of taqiyya.
“We know where Suleiman is from,” continued Azhar, “even if we do not know where he is now. He is a Syrian, from Hama. His real name is Karim al-Shams. The male members of his family were all killed by Hafez Assad’s troops in 1982—father, uncles, brothers. They were senior figures in the Ikhwan Muslimeen, the Muslim Brotherhood. After the massacre in Hama, the brotherhood in Saudi Arabia adopted Suleiman. He studied electronic engineering and then physics in Riyadh. He also studied some biology. He is very intelligent, I am sorry to say. We have some IQ testing that was done on him when he was at university in Riyadh, and it’s quite startling. We also found documents in Afghanistan that show he experimented in considerable detail with both nuclear and biological devices.”
“Tell him about Milan and Frankfurt,” said Hoffman, “and the car bombs.”
Azhar clicked his mouse and a new slide appeared. It showed what was left of the car bomb that had exploded in Frankfurt a few days before, across from the Citibank office. “We know that Suleiman likes car bombs. We intercepted a message after the car bombs in Baghdad really began to take a toll, saying that a senior Al Qaeda member, we didn’t know who, wanted the suicide bombers to come to Europe and America—to kill Christians and Jews, not Muslims. Suleiman wanted the terror to move to the West. It wasn’t him speaking, but it was someone in the network we think is close to him. That was the first connection. And then we have the detonator from Milan.”
Another click on the mouse, and the screen displayed tiny shards of metal. “I won’t go into all the forensics, because I don’t understand them. But the FBI thinks the Milan bomb has the same signature as ones the Baghdad station traced to Suleiman’s network several years ago in Iraq. The initial forensic reading from Frankfurt is the same, too, isn’t that right, Ed?”
“Yup,” said Hoffman. “Afraid so. Suleiman thinks big. He has a network of sleepers who can operate under our radar. They are able to build the car bombs, put them in place and escape. And they know their shit, these guys: They use stolen cars; they wear disguises when they are moving the cars. We have surveillance photographs from Milan and Frankfurt showing those cars on the way, and in both cases they show the face of the driver. The police in Europe have been going nuts pounding the pavement, trying to come up with matches, but so far it’s been useless because they’re in disguise. Their tradecraft is too good. We think Suleiman is coming to America next—maybe with nuclear or biological. Do you remember the KGB mastermind guy Karla in the Le Carré novels? Well, I’ve decided that Suleiman is Al Qaeda’s Karla. He has all the strings in his hand. And one of these days, he’s going to pull them.”
“Does the White House know all this?”
“Of course not. Remember, we don’t exist. And if they knew, they would just go even more batshit. No, they just know the crap they get from the CT analysts.”
Ferris studied the picture. They knew so much, and so little.
“Let me ask the dumb question,” said Ferris. “Why haven’t we been able to get a bead on him—you, me, Hani? Why is he such a hard target?”
There was an awkward pause. Ferris sensed there was something they weren’t telling him. He looked to Hoffman and made a motion with his hand, as if to say: Come on, say it.
“Obviously, that’s what the Amary operation was about,” said Hoffman. “To drive Suleiman up into space where we could listen to him. If Hani’s man in Berlin had reinforced Amary’s legend, we were going to have him send messages we could track as they made their way to Suleiman. Marked cards. Or if that didn’t work, we would have jerked their chain and tried to make Suleiman think we knew where he was. So that he might have panicked and moved or contacted people. That’s one of Dr. Azhar’s specialties. Tell him, professor.”
The Egyptian nodded. “On Wall Street, I dealt in the world of observables. If I could monitor something, I could observe its movement and then correlate that movement with other observables—mapping weather forecasts against the future price of corn, to take a crude example, or bond spreads against oil prices. In my analytical work, I tried to push information that had not previously been quantified or monitored into spaces where it could be observed—so that small differences could be arbitraged. That is how I made my money. What I do now for Ed is to apply that same methodology to his targets.”
“Isn’t he cool?” said Hoffman in a tone of genuine wonderment. “Tell him the rest, Sami.”
“Very well. In dealing with Al Qaeda, the challenge is to push them into spaces that we can monitor. If they’re not talking on cell phones we can intercept, our task is to frighten them into changing their procedures. Because every time they move, they throw up new signals. They buy new cell phones—without realizing that you can’t buy new phones or cards in Pakistan that we haven’t tagged. Or they get nervous about their computers, so they decide to buy new ones without understanding how completely we own that space. Thanks to our diligence, there is not an e-mail server in the world to which we do not have access. And as for computers—well, I have to laugh. We can get into anybody’s hard drive, anywhere. And thumb drives. Their couriers love to carry those around from place to place. But they have electronic signatures. Everything has a signature. That is the lovely thing about the digital world. It is so precise.”
“We’re driving them into our trap,” said Hoffman, picking up the narrative. “We own the communications space. When we disrupt these guys, it’s partly to make them nervous and push them into circuits we can track. Let’s say we arrest a bunch of guys in London, or Uzbekistan, or Bumfuck, Indiana. What do you suppose we’re after?”
“Interrogate them,” said Ferris. “Send them to Gitmo. Send them to Hani. Whatever.”
“Well, sure, interrogation,” said Hoffman. “That helps. But that’s not the real pop. Even if the guy we capture doesn’t say shit, the bad guys have to assume he has blabbed. So they’ll have to change their cell-phone numbers, and their Internet addresses, and even their hardware, and get new stuff. And sooner or later they’re going to call someone on our watch list—even if it’s a kebab place in Karachi. And then, blam, we’ve registered whatever new communications device they’re using. They just have to touch one hot wire and the whole circuit lights up. Or we force them to change locations. And you know what? Movement is dangerous. We may be stupid, but we’re not so utterly stupid that we
can’t monitor every airplane, bus and train that crosses a national border.”
“But you haven’t got Suleiman,” Ferris cut in. “So Suleiman is different, obviously. These techniques you and Sami are describing that worked so well on other people haven’t worked with him. He’s still maintaining radio silence. That’s why we need something new.”
“Amen, brother,” said Hoffman. “Now we have reached ground zero. But you already know the answer.”
“Taqiyya,” said Ferris.
“Just so. When you said it the other day, it was like, bing, a light went on. Just like you said: We have to make Suleiman think we have done the thing we in fact have been unable to do, which is to get inside his net. And then we can play with his mind. Jealousy. Vanity. Pride. Those basic emotions will crack Suleiman open like a fat oyster. We will introduce information into his sphere that is so upsetting, so confusing, so threatening that he must find out what it’s about. And at that point, he must contact others. Must. And then he is observable. Quantifiable. Destructible.”
THEY BROKE FOR coffee. A message had come in for Hoffman from the director, urgently asking him to call about Frankfurt, so he excused himself and went into his office, adjacent to Azhar’s, and closed the door. Ferris took advantage of the break to ask Azhar if he could see the operations room.
“I’ll give you the tour,” said Azhar, “but you have to understand that a lot of what we do here is to build illusions. We are backstopping a magic show. This room is the back office for the Al Qaeda Shopping Mall, which we have created to satisfy the needs of members of the underground—so that they lower their guard, unwittingly, and do their business through us. Let’s start with the travel agency.”
Azhar walked Ferris to a cluster at the far end of the room. At the desks sat a group of three young recruits, none of them more than thirty. From their pasty faces, it looked as if they hadn’t been aboveground in months. To Ferris, they had the look of the super-nerds who had won all the science fairs back at George Marshall High School. Azhar turned to the oldest of them, a woman with a bad complexion and gel in her hair that made it spike like a punk rocker’s.
Body of Lies Page 14
