The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  Ali asked me if I’d go to Lebanon to tell the Lebanese Forces commander that Aoun was a liar. He’d believe an American official. At first I didn’t think Ali was serious. The airport was closed, and the Syrian border tricky to cross. But Ali said he could arrange it. He’d been true to his word.

  Sometime after one in the morning, we begin to ascend into the mountains between Syria and Lebanon. At the border, the convoy veers to the right, onto the military road. A soldier watches us silently. As soon as we’re through, I turn around and see him closing the gate behind us.

  The Lebanese side of the border is empty, a no-man’s-land, and now it’s a straight shot through the Biqa’ Valley. At a little after 2:00 a.m, we start up a narrow road into the mountains. We go only half a mile when the first BMW stops, and my traveling companion finally breaks his silence. He tells me he’ll soon leave me, and a Captain Walid will take me the rest of the way.

  Another mile up the road we stop again, at the edge of a village.

  Before I can get out, an old Mercedes pulls up next to us. A man in jeans and a collared shirt gets out and introduces himself to me as Captain Walid. He doesn’t say it, but I know he’s Syrian intelligence. He opens the back door of the Mercedes, and I get in. Captain Walid gets in the front, next to the driver. The driver doesn’t look at me, and we start.

  The road up into the mountains is one lane, large stretches of it rough. It’s too dark to see if the villages are inhabited or even where we are, but the shelled-out buildings say we’re close to the confrontation lines. After a mile the driver gets out to push a couple of boulders off the road, the only thing that separates the Syrian army from the Christian Lebanese Forces militia. There has been fighting along this front since 1975.

  We stop at the far edge of an abandoned village. “Here we wait,” Captain Walid says. So I doze off.

  When I wake up, it’s dawn. The driver is gone, and Captain Walid’s staring straight ahead. I’ve no idea what he’s looking at, and I close my eyes to see if I can get back to sleep. Maybe five minutes later, Captain Walid says it’s time for me to go. He gets out and opens the door for me.

  Above us on the road, about 50 yards away, is a white Isuzu, with a man behind the wheel. I walk toward him. The fresh air wakes me up. I can see down in the Biqa’. It’s hard to tell, but I think we’re in the mountains across from Tripoli.

  I climb into the passenger side of the Isuzu. The driver asks if I’m hungry. Not waiting for an answer, he hands me a manoushe wrapped in paper—flat bread garnished with olive oil and thyme. He finds one for himself in the bag between his legs, and we eat. He starts the car and we take off.

  By eight, we’re climbing up through a steep pass. At the top there’s a sudden expanse of water, the Mediterranean. Tiny fishing boats are coming back into port. The villages we drive down through are now awake, people talking in front of grocery stores and bakeries. Every village has a church and a small, neatly kept municipal park with swing sets.

  Another hour later, we reach the coastal Tripoli-Beirut road. We’re only on it ten minutes before the Isuzu turns back up into the mountains at the sign to Laqluq, a small summer resort in the mountains.

  The chalets and hotels in Laqluq are closed for the season. The driver turns down a gravel road lined by pine trees, and we stop in front of an A-frame house with a Lebanese Forces radio jeep parked outside. When I get out of the Isuzu, I can hear the heavy artillery from the direction of Beirut.

  The Lebanese Forces commander—hollow cheeks, bald, dressed in olive green—opens the door for me. “Thank you for coming,” he says, shaking my hand. He shows me into the living room, where a beautiful woman in Spandex and a sheepskin vest waits. “My wife,” he says. We shake hands too, and the three of us sit in front of the fireplace.

  I start. “The United States in no way supports General Aoun. No matter what he says about secret emissaries and a back channel to Washington, there isn’t one.”

  The militia leader’s wife interrupts. “If this is to be believed, you know what it means.”

  “This is strictly a Lebanese affair. It’s the Lebanese who must decide what to do with Aoun, follow him into a war with Syria or remove him. Either way, expect no support from the United States.”

  Just then, we stop to listen to a volley of artillery coming from the mountain above us. To have the range to hit Beirut from here, the guns must be 155 mm.

  “Why is he saying he has American support?” the militia leader asks.

  “He’s a liar.”

  “Can we trust you?” his wife asks.

  “You’ll have to decide that on your own.”

  When we finish, the Isuzu is waiting outside. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it back to Damascus by dark.

  I don’t know if my message had anything to do with it, but a week later a battle erupts between the Lebanese Forces and army units loyal to General Aoun. Aoun loses and takes refuge in the French embassy. The U.S. never lifts a finger to help either side.

  It’s odd. In this business, we lie all the time, live with false identities. We suck the lifeblood out of our sources, pillage our contacts. Every arrangement has a twist; every favor comes with an IOU. But in the end, it all comes down to what Ali was talking about in a slightly different context: relationships, loyalty, trust. You have to tend to the human element. Without that, there’s nothing.

  TWO

  Did that James Bond movie marathon have you dreaming of being a secret agent? If you’re a U.S. citizen, and want to work with the nation’s top career choice for aspiring spies, read on. But first, however, there is much to know. First, the Directorate of Operations, or “clandestine service” (the branch that includes spies) makes up only a small percentage of the CIA; most employees hold fairly mundane office jobs. Second, the selection process for any job there is rigorous, and even if your experience and education qualifies you, you can be turned down for many reasons. Still want to give it a go? Here’s how!

  Stay squeaky clean. The CIA requires security clearances for all positions, and you’ll need to pass a very thorough background check to obtain this. It’s not public exactly what the background checks entail, but generally, you must be a model citizen starting quite young. Avoid criminal activities; be responsible, ethical and dependable at work; maintain good credit; avoid gambling; be trustworthy; and be faithful to your spouse and the United States. You don’t need to be perfect, but the CIA places very high importance on personal integrity, sound judgment, and loyalty to your country. Your parents and friends must also be as squeaky clean as possible!

  —www.wikihow.com/Become-a-CIA-Agent

  Los Angeles, June 1991: DAYNA

  Two months after I start working for the CIA in Los Angeles, I decide that it’s crazy the way they have us racing all over L.A., going from one background investigation to the next. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to assign interviews near where we live? It would cut down on the driving by half and, I don’t know, double the number of cases we clear in a month.

  I live in Corona del Mar, a beach town an hour south of L.A., or at least when there’s no traffic. Logically, my cases should be in Orange County. But the way they have it, I’ll catch a case, say, in the San Fernando Valley, three hours away. The next day it’s Santa Monica, which puts me on the freeway almost as long. In the meantime, an agent who lives in North Hollywood is assigned a case in Laguna Beach. He ends up making the same slog I do, only in the opposite direction.

  True, I know L.A. freeways better than the people who built them. In my sleep I can navigate the 5, the 405, the 605, the 110, the 710, the 91, the 10, the 134, the 101, and the 210. I can tell you exactly how many minutes it is from the chalk-colored Best Western Royal Palace on the 405 to the Garden Grove exit. I know every off-ramp to Redondo Beach, the shortest way to TRW, every backstreet to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed. I still laugh at the stale office joke that if you can’t drive, read a Thomas Guide to L.A., and eat an In-N-Out Burger at the same time, you’re
not working hard enough. I can do all that, but do I want to?

  At first I thought screening people applying for a CIA job would be interesting. But soon enough I found out that the job comes down to looking for the unappetizing mess in people’s lives. Like a lot of other outfits, the CIA attracts misfits along with very bright, talented people. My job is to dig deep into an applicant’s life, find out if there really is a mess, and then let Langley decide whether the mess is going to lead to stealing or spilling the nation’s secrets.

  I interview their bosses, co-workers, friends, and ex-friends, as many as I can find from the last fifteen years of their lives. I run police checks in every city in which they’ve lived, worked, or gone to school. It helps that people will tell you all sorts of things when you flash a badge at them, things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. Maybe they think you can arrest them or something—I can’t—or maybe they’re just scared of the CIA. It helps too, that I’m a girl. Women are more disarming when they ask the hard questions.

  Usually the first thing I do in a background investigation is talk to the applicant’s boss, even though I know bosses are uncomfortable offering the unvarnished truth. Who wants to admit they have a lousy or crooked employee working for them? Of course, sometimes they’re happy to try to foist off their losers on the CIA.

  Neighbors are more forthcoming, and so are teachers and co-workers. But the real gold mines are ex-spouses and ex-lovers. They’re more than happy to talk about their exes’ dirty secrets. By now I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it all: alcoholics, pedophiles, adulterers, wife beaters, tax cheats, embezzlers. I’ve come across perversions so strange I have to look them up in the dictionary.

  Another class of people the CIA won’t hire is congenital liars, the kind who lie about the size of the fish they’ve caught. I can’t miss the irony that an organization that lies for a living won’t hire men and women born to the task, but I guess the CIA prefers to train its own to lie.

  The main objective of my job, of course, is to keep foreign spies—moles—from infiltrating the CIA. Moles are as rare as a black swan, but CIA security has caught its share.

  One of the more notorious cases before I was hired was that of Edward Lee Howard, an operative who was on his way to Moscow when the unexpected happened. Like anyone assigned there, he was administered a special polygraph—“hooked up to the box,” as we say. The agent asked Howard if he’d committed a crime since joining the CIA. Howard said no.

  The polygraph measures heartbeat, blood pressure, and perspiration. Howard sent the needles quivering on all three fronts, up and down the rolling graph paper. The agent watched the needles for a second and told Howard that he seemed to be having a problem with the question. Howard asked if he’d unhook him so he could talk off the record.

  Howard told the story of how, a couple of weeks before, he’d been on a plane, a domestic flight. A lady sitting next to him got up to go to the bathroom, leaving her purse on her seat. Howard looked around at the other passengers, made sure they were deep into books or nodding off, then reached into her purse and grabbed her wallet. He took out a twenty-dollar bill, pocketed it, and put the wallet back in her purse.

  The agent couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Why would you do that?” he asked.

  The question surprised Howard. He saw absolutely nothing wrong with stealing the money. It was only twenty dollars. But the real point was that he’d soon be on Moscow’s streets, watched every minute of the day by the KGB. Howard said he’d needed to steel his nerves, and this had been the perfect opportunity. The money was nothing when it came to America’s national security.

  The conversation, of course, wasn’t off the record. There’s no such thing as off the record in the CIA. Howard was fired, and he later volunteered to spy for the KGB. When the FBI found out, Howard fled to Russia, where he died of a broken neck. But that’s another story.

  Edward Lee Howard, though, was the exception, not the rule. Most people get through a background investigation fairly smoothly, which leaves me, aka CIA security, in the uncomfortable position of living for a “Denial”—the turndown of a top secret security clearance. A denial is where recognition comes in, and promotions. But, as I said, denials are few and far between, and short of that, it comes down to the number of cases you clear in a month—in other words, how efficiently you get around the L.A. freeways. I finally get the nerve to bring up all the pointless road time with my boss, Ed. “Is there some reason we do it this way?” I ask, plopping down in the chair in his cubicle.

  Ed’s a big guy with a surly baby face. He’s always been frank with me, and I like him. I have the impression he knows his way around the government. His father worked for the State Department, and he grew up in Washington, D.C.

  Ed agrees with me that it doesn’t make any sense. He tells me to bring it up at the next staff meeting with Carol, the agent in charge in Los Angeles. Carol is a pinched woman of few words, and I’ve never really talked with her, but Ed tells me not to worry. He’ll speak up too.

  I watch nervously as the twenty or so agents in our office start gathering in the pen. It’s not just Carol I’ve been quiet around. I’ve never said a single word at any of these meetings. Today I stand in the back as usual. Carol walks in, says good morning, and starts in about keeping better track of mileage, auto maintenance, coordinating leave, and some other bureaucratic ministering from Washington. As she gets to the end, I’m even more anxious.

  “Any questions?” Carol asks. It’s the way she lowers the boom on every staff meeting—more a dare than a question.

  I wait to see if anyone’s going to say anything and then raise my hand, at half-mast. I’m surprised she even sees me. “Yes?” she says. Carol stands up on her toes to see me better.

  “Carol, do you think there’s a possibility that cases could be assigned nearer to where we live?” I say. Carol cups her ear as if she can’t hear me. I force myself to raise my voice. “To cut down on driving time?”

  Carol’s face is a clenched fist. It’s as if I’d asked her why her shoes don’t match her purse. She turns around without saying a word and goes back to her office. When she reappears ten seconds later, she has a piece of paper rolled up in her hand.

  “I don’t see why you are complaining,” she says, sweeping the room with a gaze rather than looking at me. She unfurls the paper and holds it between her forefinger and her thumb, waving it in my direction. “From what I can see of your caseload, it looks pretty doable to me.”

  That’s not what I asked, of course, but I don’t say anything. Instead, I wilt into the fiberboard wall behind me, my face on fire.

  Afterward I go into Ed’s office. “I’m sorry I told you to bring it up,” he says. “I guess it’s always been done this way, and it always will be.”

  I want to ask him why he didn’t say anything at the meeting, but I let it go. As Lieutenant Escobar says in the great Robert Towne script, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

  THREE

  Cannabis in Europe is usually available in the forms hash and marihuana. Although marihuana is gaining in popularity, hash is still predominant in Europe. A substantial part of hash on the European market originates from Morocco. Traditionally, the mountainous Rif area in northern Morocco has been a production region for cannabis, mainly destined for local consumption. Since a nearby European cannabis market became accessible, the acreage under cultivation in northern Morocco has grown considerably. In 1993 it was estimated that between 64,000 and 74,000 hectares of cannabis were under cultivation in northern Morocco. This would imply the acreage increased tenfold in the period of ten years. Today, Morocco is considered as the world’s main cannabis exporter. The potential of Moroccan hash production is estimated to be around 2,000 metric tonnes a year.

  —Tim Boekhout van Solinge, “Drug Use and Trafficking in Europe” (1998), www.cedro-uva.org/lib/boekhout.drug.html

  Salé, Morocco: BOB

  Vera, my secretary, is waiting when I come outside,
sitting behind the wheel of her Peugeot 505. When she sees me, she flicks her cigarette out the window and waits for me to get in before starting it. She wheels it in a half circle, the tires slithering in the damp sand.

  “Which way?” she asks.

  I tell her I don’t care. She already knows the routine: she drives me north of the capital, Rabat, and drops me off. The more circuitous the route, the better. The trick is to see whether we’ve picked up a tail or not.

  Vera heads north on the beach road, turns right on a road called Tareq el Marsa, and then left on the N-1, the highway to Tangiers. We immediately get stuck behind a file of trucks. She lights a cigarette, rolling down the window to let the smoke out. She asks how far I want to go. I tell her Kenitra, the first big town between Rabat and Tangiers. She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell she’s pissed. It’s bridge night, and now she’s going to miss it.

  I’ve always suspected that Vera thinks a spy’s craft is hocus-pocus. Do the Moroccans really care about the CIA that much? I don’t know, but I don’t intend to find out by getting followed to a meeting with an informant.

  I slump down in the seat so I can get a better angle on my side mirror. The line of lights behind us is what you usually find on the Tangiers road this time of night—trucks moving when it’s cooler. A car comes out from between the trucks, ducks back to avoid an oncoming truck, and then comes back out to pass. It’s now right on us, flashing its light. Vera moves over a foot and it passes. And then it’s back to only us and the trucks again.