The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  The soldiers dig out the doors so we can open them, and then stomp down the snow, making a path to a banquet table in the middle of the field. It’s piled high with liquor bottles and platters of food. My shoes are instantly soaked, my feet freezing. I’m resigned to another very long day.

  Tok barks something in Kazakh, and a soldier runs to the table, going down face-first in the snow a couple of times. He comes back with three glasses and a bottle of brandy. Tok fills up our glasses. “Oh, why the hell not,” Garth says, finishing his brandy in one gulp. I follow suit, hoping it will take the bite off the cold.

  Tok looks over my shoulder. “Now, sportsmen, we have fun.” I turn around to see a soldier with an armful of skis, boots, and poles.

  Garth sees what’s happening. “You know, Tok, I think I would rather stay here with you,” he says. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  I look at the banquet table, the dozen or more brandy and vodka bottles waiting there, and grab a pair of boots from the soldier. “I’d love to ski,” I say.

  Two of Tok’s soldiers try to keep up with me by running under the lift. But the snow is too soft, and they fall behind. I’m halfway up before I notice my skis are different lengths. If anyone notices I’m skiing in a suit, they’re too polite to say anything.

  By the second run, my feet are killing me. I ski to the bottom and trek across the field to the banquet table. Tok meets me with a tumbler of something brownish. “The President’s own cognac,” he says, handing me a glass. “A toast to you, a great American ski champion,” Tok says. He downs his. I take a sip. Tok frowns, and I throw back the tumbler.

  I take the skis off and look for something to eat, knowing that the only way to get through the rest of the doomed day is on a full stomach. I find a plateful of pieces of something white, greasy, and pulpy. I ask Garth what it is. “Raw horse mane,” he says. “It’s exquisite, try some.” I put it down and pick up another plate of something. “Oh that’s delightful too,” Garth says. “Sun-dried horse rectum.” He giggles. Garth is already drunk. I grab a handful of radishes.

  It’s getting very cold, which at least keeps me sober—or maybe not, because I seem to have missed the fact that everyone else is heading back to the Suburban, which has been miraculously turned around. When I finally catch up, I ask Garth where we’re going. “Do you know how to skate too?” he asks.

  At Almaty’s gigantic skating rink, we follow Tok down a set of stairs into a lighted corridor. Tok opens a door to reveal a stump of a woman with arms of steel. She’s holding a bundle of birch sticks. “Now we take bath,” Tok says. Tok doesn’t mind when Garth and I say no. He tells the woman to bring us a bottle of vodka and glasses instead, and when she comes back, we toast eternal Kazakh-American friendship.

  By now I’m on my way to being good and drunk. We follow Tok farther into the guts of the rink, down a dark maze of corridors and offices. I’m completely disoriented. People come out and shake Tok’s hand. Everyone seems to know him.

  At last we end up in a gloomy, windowless, private dining room with gaudily painted Styrofoam rocks attached to the walls. I think it’s supposed to look like a grotto. One of the tables is set with a dozen vodka bottles. Tok opens one and pours us shots. A couple of men wander in, Russians and Kazakhs. Tok pours them vodkas too.

  A woman appears with a giant platter of broiled carp ringed by potatoes. Everyone wolfs the food down, stopping only long enough to make toasts. Tok drinks along with the rest of us. So far I haven’t caught him emptying his glass under the table, but he’s stone-cold sober as far as I can tell.

  When we’re finished, Tok takes the free chair next to Garth and throws an arm around him. “Mr. Garth,” he says, “it is time that we enjoy ourselves as men.”

  “What?” Garth says, his eyes alert now. It’s probably my imagination, but I think Garth is willing himself sober.

  “Ladies. Beautiful ladies.”

  On cue, two very attractive girls in their twenties come floating in, accompanied by a recording of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York.”

  Garth looks as if he’s going to throw up, but then roars with laughter. He stands up and puts his arm around Tok and pulls him in for a hug. “God, I love you Tok. Thirty-five years in the CIA, and no one has ever offered me a girl. I’ll have to say no, but it truly is a wonderful offer.”

  The next morning, as we board the Falcon for London, I tell Garth that we should have invited the girls to come along. I sort of like the idea of getting thrown out of the CIA for ferrying two hookers on the Director’s plane, if nothing else than to see the expressions on the faces of Her Majesty’s immigrations at Heathrow airport.

  In fact, how to get out of the CIA occupies more and more of my mental energy these days, and Garth knows it. It’s part of why he has invited me along on his farewell tour. It’s not only that we’re pals, or that I’ve done time in many of the places we have been visiting, or that I can generally be counted on to do stupid things like barreling down a slope in mismatched skis and my meet-the-president suit. He wants to see how I handle myself in polite company, see if when I resign from the CIA, maybe we can work together.

  Garth and I both know there’s a big, endlessly fascinating world outside the precincts of the CIA, a place with lots of possibilities. It’s a world we’ve convinced ourselves we could get along in very well, looking up old friends like Tok. We might even be able to make a good living at it.

  Here’s what I need to do before I pull the plug though: get the FBI off my back, divorce, and take one last bite of the cherry.

  SEVENTEEN

  U.S. Department of Justice

  Criminal Division

  Office of the Deputy Assistant Attorney General

  Washington, D.C. 20530

  Mr. Jeffrey Smith

  General Counsel

  Central Intelligence Agency

  Washington, D.C. 20505

  Re: NSA Serial Z/EG/00/60-95

  Dear Mr. Smith:

  The Criminal Division of the Department of Justice has received from the Federal Bureau of Investigation a report of investigation involving the above-cited report. After carefully reviewing the FBI’s report, we have reached a determination that the Department will decline prosecution of the matter.

  Thank you for your cooperation in connection with this investigation.

  Sincerely,

  Mark M. Richard

  Deputy Assistant Attorney General

  EIGHTEEN

  NATO commanders said they may have prevented terrorist attacks on NATO troops when they arrested 11 men at the home, which a NATO official described as a “terrorist training school.” But the Bosnian government said it never posed a threat to the Implementation Force.

  No shots were fired in the raid and no one was hurt.

  Pentagon sources said three Iranians and eight Bosnian Muslims were taken into custody. Two of the Iranians were said to hold diplomatic passports or papers.

  The house is in Bosnian government territory near the town of Fojnica.

  NATO said it contained an “extensive armory” of handguns, explosives and rocket launchers. Pictures taken during the raid show ammunition and weapons stores and explosives hidden in children’s toys.

  Also found were diagrams of buildings in Sarajevo, and training manuals written in Farsi, according to sources.

  —www.cnn.com/WORLD/Bosnia/updates/9602/16/

  Sarajevo: BOB

  I sit on the bed, listening to the landlady move around in the kitchen. I start to get up, but then decide I don’t want to see her. Our impromptu Serbo-Croatian lessons are going nowhere, she bustling around the kitchen, pointing at things, giving them names, and me repeating after her like a parrot with a bad accent.

  I keep reminding myself it’s okay not to mingle with the Bosnians or learn their language. I came to Sarajevo for only one reason—to take my Parthian shot at the Iranians and their proxies Hizballah, my last hurrah before I leave the Company. And to
do that I need anonymity. Mixing with the locals can only end up “eroding my cover”—CIA speak for the enemy smelling a rat. And, if I know Hizballah, they’ll be a lot faster to smell one than the Bosnians.

  Hizballah operatives and their Iranian backers are great spies and saboteurs, some of the best. They have been ever since they launched their undeclared war on the United States during Khomeini’s revolution in 1979. I watched from the front lines as the Iranians won every skirmish we ever fought with them. They got away cleanly with taking our diplomats in Tehran in 1979, turned a rescue mission into a fiasco, blew up our embassies in Beirut and Kuwait, and kidnapped and killed our chief of station in Beirut. In Kuwait, they shot one of my best Hizballah informants point-blank in the face. In all of it, they never left a fingerprint behind.

  And it’s definitely not going to help that in Sarajevo the Bosnian Muslim government is a client of Iran. The Bosnians haven’t forgotten that it was Iran that came to their aid when the Serbs had them under siege, sending money, food, and arms while the West turned a blind eye to the slaughter. If it’s a choice between the CIA and the Iranians, they’ll take the Iranians any day.

  Finally, there’s the added problem that Sarajevo is just plain small. It took me one day of walking around to realize that there’s nowhere to go—no place to kill time or blend in with the locals. The only important landmark, the old National Library, is a burned-out husk. There’s the Holiday Inn, where you can get a drink in the lobby bar, but it’s almost always empty and gloomy. Operating in this place is going to be like swimming in a straitjacket.

  I’ve picked this apartment with the chatty landlady because it’s off the grid and out of Hizballah’s sights. I didn’t have to sign a lease or show an ID or a reference. The alternative was the Holiday Inn, where most foreigners stay. But it’s a spy’s trap because the desk clerks, maids, and everyone else report to Bosnian intelligence. And all the rooms are bugged too. If I stayed there it would be a matter of days before my presence filtered up to Hizballah.

  As soon as I hear the landlady leave, I get up, dress, make my way through the chickens in the backyard, and let myself out the gate. I take a back alley behind a mosque and make my way into town.

  The café I stop at is empty except for two men out front playing chess on a gouged board, painted stones standing in for the missing pieces. Neither is much interested in the game. They have to remind each other to make a move.

  I pull out a book and try to read. But I’m too distracted to concentrate. I don’t know if it’s because of too much sleep or too much sitting around waiting. I order another coffee and go back to watching the chess players, checking my watch every couple of minutes.

  At 9:55 I pay and walk to the synagogue off Vladislava Skarica. My inside officer, Dan, is already there, waiting for me behind the wheel of a new teal Jeep Cherokee. When I get into the passenger’s seat, he pulls away, not saying a word. All that I know about Dan is that he’s only been in the Company five years, he’s the son of an FBI agent, he’s recently divorced, and he gets up early in the morning to work out.

  Dan keeps one eye fixed on the rearview mirror to make sure we haven’t picked up a tail. We drive up into the mountains until we come to a restaurant that has a deck with a good view over Sarajevo. I get out to see if the place is open. I shout into the darkness of the restaurant, asking if anyone’s there. A man comes out of the kitchen in a stained apron. I tilt my thumb at my mouth to let him know we want something to drink.

  Dan and I sit at a table on the deck, Sarajevo at our feet. I have no idea why, but I say we should order a bottle of wine. Dan just as stupidly says yeah. The cook understands vino, and goes back in to find us a bottle.

  I prod Dan for news. He tells me the boss has told him that we should start using different car pickups. He thought I should walk down a road where Dan’s parked on the shoulder, the hood up as if he has engine problems, and we meet by chance.

  “He even told me what you should say,” Dan says.

  “Let me guess: ‘May I help you?’ ”

  “Europe. What do you expect.”

  Operatives in Europe have a reputation for leisurely lunches and duty-free BMWs more than they do a spy’s craft.

  “What about my Land Rovers?” I ask.

  At our last meeting I asked for a couple of armored Land Rovers, camouflaged to look like the British army’s. They’re everywhere in Sarajevo, like yellow cabs in Manhattan. They don’t have license plates, and with their tinted glass, you can’t see into them—perfect for parking and keeping an eye on Hizballah—static surveillance, as it’s called. Or just moving around Sarajevo anonymously.

  “They think you’re an idiot.”

  “So I’m supposed to drive those fucking cars with advertisements down the side?”

  At our last meeting I told Dan about the drive in with the girl who calls herself Riley, who as much as said she wasn’t going to get back in one. Dan looks at me and doesn’t say anything, swishing wine around in his mouth.

  “I could see Riley in the turret of a Land Rover,” I say, “manning the thirty-cal. She’s got that certain gleam in her eye. I wonder what her real name is.”

  Dan doesn’t answer. He’s been in the Company long enough to have gotten used to false names, how an operative will be known to each of his informants by a different name (an alias), a nom de plume he uses to sign off cables (a pseudonym), and a made-up name for his informants (a cryptonym). In the CIA, there are even made-up names that stand in for countries, political leaders, and geographic locations. It’s some bizarre nominalism, but it works.

  But I’m not going to let the cars go. “Do they want us to ride around on bicycles?”

  Dan doesn’t say anything. We’ve run out of things to talk about, and drink in silence. The wine is warm, but I don’t care. All I know right now is that I don’t want to go back to my hovel even if it means drinking all day. What I’ve decided about Sarajevo is that it’s a city radiant with sorrow. Everyone has slipped into a dull acceptance of violence, indifferent to what’s left of their lives. And the one way to combat it is spend your time outside—and drink.

  It could be a month before Langley gets the stuff I need here on an airplane. And in the meantime I’ve got people coming to work for me. I dread sitting everyone down and telling them they have to stay in Split until we get our act together. Their enthusiasm is going to fade as fast as mine.

  Neither of us realizes how intense the sun is. We’re surprised when we come to the bottom of the bottle. When the cook comes out to check on us, we order another one.

  “At least I don’t have a butcher’s bill to pay,” I say.

  “What does that mean?” Dan gets up to go look for the bathroom.

  I try again to remember what else Dan is supposed to do for me. I pat my pockets to look for a pen, but I don’t have one. Dan comes back, turns his chair away from me to look down at Sarajevo.

  “Where’s my satphone?” I ask.

  “Have another drink, you drunk.” He half turns in his seat and tops up my glass.

  “I need communications.”

  “Tomorrow, the next day. I don’t know. Do you have a weapon?”

  “When’s the next resupply flight?”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  I make a circular motion in the air imitating a propeller. “The airplane. The airplane.” I decide I’m drunk.

  I think more about how we’re going to have to fly by the seat of our pants, improvise, and keep our fingers crossed that we don’t do something really stupid.

  I slide my chair around so Dan has to look at me. “This is goddamned bureaucratic terrorism. We don’t have cars. We don’t have a place to live, and on top of it I don’t have a clue where we’re going to put this damn ray gun.”

  In fact it’s not a ray gun. It’s a kind of parabolic microphone that sucks conversations out of the air at a long distance, even through the walls of buildings. My plan is to find an apartment with a lin
e-of-sight view of a Hizballah safe house, position the mic in the apartment’s window so it can’t be seen, and wait for the Hizballah operatives to blurt out something they shouldn’t—a name, an address, or a telephone number. Whatever it is, we run it to ground. For instance, if we were to get the plate number of a Hizballah operative’s car, we would then try to put an owner’s name to it.

  I’d like to put blanket coverage even on the Iranians—watch their offices, residences, and cars around the clock. But there’s just no way to do it. First, we don’t have enough people. Second, in a place like Sarajevo the Iranians would spot us in a second and retaliate. Which makes the parabolic mic the silver bullet in this circus. However, with a little luck on our side, in six months we’ll be able to hand European forces a dossier on Hizballah, one they’ll use to unstitch the whole apparatus in a coup de main. That’s my dream at least.

  “I would have waited in Split if I were you.” Dan points vaguely in the direction of Split. “There are better bars there.”

  I flip him off.

  “You moron,” he says.

  “Who the fuck are they, sending me out here?” I have a headache. I empty my glass over the rail.

  Dan pays, and I go out to the parking lot and get behind the wheel of the Cherokee. But I’m still sober enough to realize I’m too drunk to drive. I climb over the gearshift onto the passenger’s seat.

  “How far is Pale?” I ask when Dan comes out to the car.

  Pale, a village in the mountains above Sarajevo, is where a handful of notorious Serbian war criminals are holed up. It’s where the winter Olympics were held in 1984. No one will raid it for fear of reigniting the war. We’ve been warned never to set foot in the place.

  I don’t say it, but what I have in mind is seeing if Pale’s a good place for Dan and me to meet, somewhere I know the Iranians, Hizballah, and even Muslim Bosnians would never dare set foot in.

  “Let’s do it,” Dan says.

  “Let’s first go get Cheryl.”