The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  Maybe this whole gig is bad karma punishing us for our downtime last month. We dubbed our latest swing around Europe the “Tour de Bally,” in honor of the midsummer shoe sales at the high-end store.

  Then, in the rearview mirror, I see a car pull out of the drive at 14 chemin du Petit-Sacconex. The angle’s wrong to see whether our Russian is behind the wheel, but Jacob or Alan, whoever is on the binoculars, will have clear view from the 7th floor. I look at the radio crammed between the seat and the gearshift. Come on, guys, I whisper under my breath. Is that him? I pick up the radio and key it twice. Nothing. This time I hold the key down and ask, “Did you catch that?” No answer.

  I make a half turn to get a look back down the street, but a delivery truck blocks my view. I look at the radio again. Why hasn’t anyone called it out? Even if it’s not the Russian, they should have said something.

  Then the car goes right past me, and my heart pounds. It’s the Russian for sure, the first we’ve seen of him in two weeks. What’s going on? “Where are you two!” I half scream into the radio. I need backup, but there’s no way I’m waiting another half month to latch on to him again.

  The Russian is two blocks ahead of me, merging into traffic. I don’t think he’s trying to lose me—it’s just that he’s a fast driver. He’s switching lanes back and forth to pass, gaining distance on me. I need a red light to stop him. One does at the next intersection, and I nose into his lane, three cars behind him. That’s enough cover for right now. But I need Jacob and Alan to take over. Otherwise the Russian’s going to pick up on me. The innocent-girl-in-the-van act can only go on for so long.

  I keep the radio in my lap and key it twice to let Jacob and Alan know I’m still up on the network. But there’s nothing in the way of an answer. Only static.

  “I’m eyes on, east on Route de Ferney,” I say.

  Static.

  The light turns green. “Crossing Chemin de sous Bois,” I say.

  Static.

  “I repeat. Crossing sous Bois.”

  I name each street as we pass them, hoping they’re listening and will catch up. I know I can’t hang on like this much longer, especially if this guy turns off onto a street with light traffic. He’s an ex-intelligence officer, and there’s no way he won’t see me.

  What I keep thinking is that this is our first break in two weeks. All headquarters wants us to do is to find out where he lives, or even goes. We’d settle for a nightclub, a bachelor’s pad where he spends time with his mistress, the store where he buys his chocolate. Just as long as it’s away from his office, neutral ground where later we can arrange for an operative to run into him. Recruiting a spy is a long, slow process, and my team and I are just the very start.

  “Right on Giuseppe Motta,” I say. “Hey, if you guys are out there, let me know!”

  I take a left with the Russian. The street is deserted. It’s just him and me. I can’t follow any longer without getting burned, and make a right when the Russian takes a left.

  I get back on the radio. “I’m heading back. I dropped him.”

  Silence.

  It has to be the radio, I think. The repeater’s down or something. There’s no other explanation.

  I let myself into our room on the seventh floor and stare daggers at Alan and Jacob. Alan’s got a pair of binoculars in his hand; Jacob is on the sofa.

  “What the hell happened?” I ask.

  Alan looks at me sheepishly. “Where’d you go?”

  “I looked away for less than one minute and when I looked back you were gone,” Jacob says, getting up from the couch.

  “Yeah, uh, we looked away and looked back and you were gone!” Alan says, sounding just as stupid but also just as guilty.

  I drop it and don’t say anything. But that night over beers it comes out.

  “It’s Jacob’s fault,” Alan says. “I was watching you, and Jacob wouldn’t stop about the topless women at the pool. I went over to take a look only to shut him up.”

  “The radio was in the room,” Jacob says. “When we came back to check on you, you were gone.”

  It makes me feel better they’re both genuinely repentant, and we all laugh at the same time.

  I never tell our inside officer about the slipup—I wouldn’t think of it. Someone’s always making a dumb mistake like this. I have, and will make more too. But what it really comes down to is that I’ve worked with Jacob and Alan long enough to know that they’re really good at their jobs. I can count on them for anything. We’re like a close family. Although we don’t stay in touch between assignments, and a lot of the time we’re on opposite sides of the world, I know I can take them at their word. If we’re in Singapore and agree to meet two weeks later at noon in the southwest corner of Rome’s Piazza Navona, they’ll be there.

  I travel with Jacob more than with anyone else. We’re good as a pair because we never get on each other’s nerves, and on downtime we do our own thing. Jacob sits for hours in his room, fiddling with computers and cameras. I cruise the streets, window-shopping. At night we usually meet up for dinner at some out-of-the-way restaurant. Jacob’s told me more than once that it’s easier to make plans with me in some obscure part of the world than it is to plan a dinner out with his wife in Washington, D.C. At the same time we know that even if we were single, we aren’t meant for each other.

  This isn’t to say that all relations in this makeshift family I live in are platonic. Affairs do go on, though they tend to be discreet. As I hear the guys say, if you can’t carry on a secret, amorous liaison, you’re not worth your salt as an operative. But some couples don’t even bother hiding it. A pair I often work with actually fell in love, neither caring that the woman was already married and had no plans to divorce. No one complains, though, because they work so well together. There’s nothing like a passionate embrace to cover up the fact that you’re taking pictures with a concealed camera. Washington pretty much knows what’s going on but looks the other way. It’s the CIA’s version of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”

  One evening, completely breaking the rules, I go down to the lobby of the Hilton to call my husband from a pay phone. It’s seven in the morning in California, and he answers on the second ring.

  “How’s it going?” I ask. I talk in a hushed voice out of habit, not because I’m worried about anyone overhearing.

  “Fine,” he says.

  He doesn’t use my name or ask me where I am or what time it is. I’ve told him enough about the way we work that I can’t give up that kind of information on the phone.

  We talk about the weather, friends, and golf, the same things we always talk about the few times I’ve ever called him. I wait for him to ask when I’m coming home, but he doesn’t. I promise to call again when I can and hang up.

  A month later, the first night I’m home on leave, my husband tells me that his father died while I was away. I calculate the days in my mind. He died two days before I called him from Geneva.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?” I ask, both shocked and hurt.

  “You were busy.”

  “But he was your father.”

  “There was nothing you could do about it.”

  ELEVEN

  Operations Officers (OOs) are focused full time on clandestinely spotting, assessing, developing, recruiting, and handling individuals with access to vital foreign intelligence on the full range of national security issues. This human intelligence plays a critical role in developing and implementing U.S. foreign and national security policy and in protecting U.S. interests. OOs employ sound judgment, high integrity, strong interpersonal skills, and ability to assess the character and motivations of others to establish strong human relationships and trust that provides the foundation needed to acquire high-value intelligence from foreign sources. OOs deal with fast-moving, ambiguous, and unstructured situations by combining their “people and street smarts” with subject matter expertise and a knowledge of foreign languages, areas, and cultures. An OO’s career can in
clude assignments in the NCS’s three key areas of activity—human intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and covert action—on issues of highest interest to U.S. national security, such as international terrorism, weapons proliferation, international crime and narcotics trafficking, and capabilities and intentions of rogue nations. Operations Officers serve approximately 50–70 percent of their time in overseas assignments that range typically from two to three years.

  Operations Officers are given great amounts of responsibility and trust early in their careers. While they work in teams, they often need to “think on their feet,” using common sense and flexibility to make quick decisions on their own. OOs have demanding responsibilities, often requiring them to work long hours, so it is essential that they be psychologically fit, energetic, and able to cope with stress. They must know themselves very well, and a sense of humor is also a plus.

  —www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/clandestine/core-collector.html

  Dushanbe, Tajikistan: BOB

  One day my mother calls me in Dushanbe to tell me she’d like to see Tajikistan. When I don’t immediately warm to the idea, I feel her irritation barreling down the line like a freight train. When she senses I’m not softening, she goes to Plan B. “You know I’m getting old, and this may be my last trip. I so want to see Central Asia before I die.”

  My mother coming here isn’t a good idea. As I’ve said, my wife and children aren’t allowed to even visit because it’s too dangerous. But oddly enough—or maybe not—the CIA doesn’t ban mothers.

  I told her a long time ago about the travel ban, hoping it would be enough to dissuade her. But my mother, a stout, fearless woman, is determined to see the world. She gets off a plane in a strange place and immediately wants to start seeing things, no matter the hour or how long she’s been sitting. Invariably, she’s read up on the country and knows exactly what she wants to see.

  I cast around in my mind for an unassailable reason she can’t visit. But other than the obvious—getting killed—I can’t think of one. “OK,” I finally say. “I’d love to see you.”

  As soon as my mother sets foot inside the Oktyabrskaya, she sniffs in that peculiar way she has, letting me know the place isn’t up to her standards. We’re walking past the gloomy dining room where last night’s dirty dishes are still on the tables. “We’re not having dinner here, are we?” she asks. She ignores me when I tell her it’s military rations, as it will be every other night.

  My mother comes to terms with Dushanbe when I take her to my room and open a bottle of wine. For an hour she fires off questions about my wife and children, how they’re doing in the new house in France, what I’m reading, what I think about one political scandal or another, when I’m going to get serious about life. By the second bottle she’s ready to turn in and too tired to argue when I point to the bedroom. I tell her I prefer to sleep on the couch anyway.

  The next morning I leave her reading a thick history of China, her half-moon glasses perched on the end of her nose, one leg up under her. She looks content, but I know it won’t last. I picture her in midmorning, poking around my room, counting the number of shirts I own, looking for the suits she bought me, wondering what’s happened to the pair of silver-backed hairbrushes she once gave me as a Christmas present. Somewhere my mother read that a gentleman absolutely must have thirty-six collared shirts. She’ll be disappointed when she finds my dozen faded T-shirts, two frayed oxfords, and three pairs of Levi’s.

  My mother comes from that old mind-set that believes in thank-you notes, jackets at dinner, straight white teeth, and an expensive education. When she visits, she always arrives with a bag of books meant to improve me. And when she returns home to Los Angeles, she writes asking what I think about them. If I answer (as I almost always do) that I’ve been busy, I get another letter about how hard she’s tried with me. You can almost hear the sigh of resignation in the pages. My mother is someone who pictures herself in the tumbrel reading Lucretius on the way to her beheading.

  She’s definitely going to be irritated when she finds the Kalashnikov, the rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, and the hand grenades under the bed. I’ll tell the truth—that they’re gifts from Russian army friends that came at the end of long drinking sessions—but she won’t listen. Male bonding rituals don’t amuse her.

  When I first joined the CIA in 1976, I told my mother, but at the same time I admonished her that I was undercover and she couldn’t tell a soul. It was a needless precaution because all of her friends were liberals, and she was too embarrassed to tell them anyway. She herself doesn’t take espionage seriously. “Mickey Mouse” is the name she usually attaches to it.

  When I get back from work at three, she’s through with her book and bored. She complains that I’ve left her all day, so I propose a beer at the Tajikistan Hotel, warning that it’s a worse dump than the Oktyabrskaya. “Of course it is,” she says. “But do you think I’m going to sit in this room all night doing nothing?”

  An hour later she follows me across the Tajikistan’s dismal lobby at a half run and down a dark passageway that smells of urine and rotting carpet. When she says something I can’t understand, I slow down to let her catch up. “I said you should really get out more, meet people,” she says.

  The hotel’s terrace is positioned so a breeze can’t get to it, and the sun this late afternoon is a hammer. There’s not a drop of water in the fountain—instead, hedgehog-like steel quills poke up silently out of the cracked cement. We’re the only customers, but it’s ten minutes before the waiter wanders out from the darkness of the dining room. He’s been sleeping, and rubs his eyes with the flat of his hands. Our choice is warm, canned Rasputin vodka or warm, canned Heineken.

  We sip our warm beers and sweat in silence, watching the waiter fool with something behind the bar. A single stereo speaker crackles. It goes silent for a while, and then comes the wail of a woman who sounds as if she’s mourning her village bombed into rubble. Even my mother’s stubbornly chipper mood is dented. She lights a cigarette.

  Three Russian girls walk in. I’ve seen them before. They’re professionals, camp followers of the 201st. They sweat too, beads of pure alcohol running down their faces, their makeup melting. Naturally, Mother smiles at them as if we were all at tea at New York’s St. Regis. They ignore her and turn away, but Mother gets up anyway, walks over to the girl who looks the friendliest, the only one without a black eye or a broken nose, and grabs her hand, “So delighted to meet you. My name is Donna.”

  These girls have seen a lot in their short lives, but now they’re at a complete loss for words. They know they’ve met their match, and further resistance isn’t worth it. They offer her a chair at their table, and my mother summons me to join them.

  The afternoon turns decidedly merrier when we get into the Rasputin vodka. My mother wants to know all about the girls’ lives, what they studied in school, whether they intend to marry one day. A few Russian soldiers wander in and can’t help but notice our little fête galante. A couple of them pull up their chairs to practice English, and my mother orders rounds of vodka for everyone. Half a dozen times this happens, followed by half a dozen teary toasts to mothers and motherhood.

  At around eight, even good old Mom has had it. She writes down her telephone number in Los Angeles, should any of them get that way, and then we have one last toast to eternal friendship between America and Russia.

  I have to help her outside and into the car. I tell her a nice cold shower will make her feel better. She ignores me and asks me what we’re going to do tomorrow.

  Before going to sleep that night, my mother snoring gently in the next room, I tell myself there has to be a silver lining to her visit. It’s a fact that anyone who makes friends in strange places with so little cause is by definition a good Trojan Horse. I stumbled across this piece of wisdom years back when I was in Damascus.

  It was before I married, and my mother came to see me, but mainly to sightsee. Every morning at eight, she’
d set out with a 1930s Baedeker guide and walk the streets of the old city, not returning until after dark. She’d demand a glass of wine, make me listen to stories of all that she’d seen, all wound around some great historical event, and chide me for not coming with her.

  After three days of this, she’d seen everything there was to see in Damascus. The next morning, without saying a word, she went out as usual, but came back in the afternoon with a bus ticket to Palmyra, an ancient city in the Syrian desert, about 130 miles from Damascus. “You’re not going alone, are you?” I asked. She rolled her eyes. “What could possibly happen to me?” I knew there was no use pointing out that the night before, the USS New Jersey had shelled Syrian army positions in Lebanon, or that the United States was all but at war with Syria.

  Two days later the concierge came pounding at my apartment door. “Your mother is back,” he said with great excitement. “With people!” I followed him down to the street to find her talking with a Syrian man and woman in their mid-forties, both well dressed. They were standing next to a late-model Peugeot, my mother’s suitcase on the sidewalk. That was interesting, but what caught my eye was the other late-model Peugeot double-parked across the street. Three men in cheap Dacron suits and five-o’clock shadows were seated in it, staring at me—Mukhabarat, Syrian intelligence.

  Unaware of the crowd she’d drawn, my mother introduced me to the Syrian man and his wife, and hugged them good-bye as if they were old friends.

  “Who was that?” I asked, as soon as the couple drove away, the Peugeot with the three thugs pulling away after them.

  “Such delightful people.”

  “But who are they?”

  “I met them in Palmyra.”

  She told me how she’d run into the couple in the lobby of her hotel. They’d started chatting, which had led to dinner, which had led to an offer of a ride back to Damascus.