The Chameleon Conspiracy dg-3

by Haggai Harmon

  I quickly ran my eyes down the list. “We got him,” I said slowly and decisively. Number twenty-one on the list was Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, an ethnic Iranian born in Tabriz, in northern Iran, on August 19, 1960. The short bio included additional background information. There were also passport-type photos of all but three men included in the list.

  With mounting excitement, I inspected the photos. I didn’t waste any time. In a photo marked as Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, I saw the Chameleon looking at me. I pulled out the photo of Albert C. Ward that I had received from his school’s principal, and compared the two. Both showed their subject at eighteen. But there was no doubt that they were of two different people. I didn’t have a photo of Kourosh Alireza Farhadi from when he assumed Ward’s identity, or later, when he impersonated Herbert Goldman. But I was already convinced that Farhadi was Goldman too. I had identified the Chameleon.

  “Nicole!” I cried, startling her. “We found him. Here’s the bastard. We’ve got the evidence.”

  Nicole looked at the pictures. “Which one is he?” “That’s the one.” I pointed at Farhadi’s photo. “I can identify him anywhere. He’s in my dreams.”

  Nicole wasn’t budging until she saw some hard evidence. “We need a positive ID. Do you want to repeat the humiliation in Sydney?”

  “What humiliation?” I responded. “I was right and they were wrong. Now the FBI owes me an apology. Big-time.”

  Nicole only raised an eyebrow.

  Ice must run through icy liquid in her veins, I thought.

  She inspected the photo, read the State Department’s note, and said, “Why don’t we e-mail the photo to Peter Maxwell in Sydney? He also met Goldman. Let’s see what he thinks.”

  “Fine by me,” I said. Her obsession with double-checking everything was starting to get to me, but there was little I could do. I waited as she went to her laptop and e-mailed the photo to Sydney.

  An hour later, as I skimmed the bits of information the State Department file had on the graduates of the American School in Tehran, Nicole walked in from the communication room. “We’ve got an answer from Peter Maxwell,” she said. “He cautiously believes the person they arrested and later hospitalized is the same person shown in the photo taken many years earlier of Kourosh Alireza Farhadi.”

  “What a surprise,” I said drily.

  Later, near midnight, a buzz at the apartment intercom heralded the unexpected arrival of Bob Holliday and Casey Bauer.

  “Evening,” said Bob. “We’ve got a few more questions.”

  “Before I answer you, let me bring you up to speed on the recent developments,” I said, showing them the State Department report and Maxwell’s e-mail.

  Bob barely kept his composure when he exclaimed, “Hot damn, that’s fantastic! Do you think Kourosh is still in Australia?”

  “I’d be surprised if he was,” said Nicole. “We now know he wasn’t operating alone or independently, so we can safely assume that he has help outside and inside many countries.”

  “Australia may have become too hot for him,” I agreed. “The Australian Federal Police told your office that there are no records showing that either Herbert Goldman or Albert Ward III, or any individual with any of the aliases we knew, had left the country. If we rule out swimming, then Kourosh must have used travel documents using another alias to leave Australia. Nicole has asked the Australian Federal Police for a computerized list of the names of all males leaving Australia during the five-day period after he was released from detention at the hospital.

  “We expect to get the list in a few days, but the Australians have already cautioned us that the list would exceed fifty thousand names,” I continued. “We’ll provide the NSA with an electronic copy and ask them to match the names on the list against their various databases. We’ll ask the FBI and the CIA to do the same. I don’t have high hopes in that direction, but we must try. Kourosh knew that the U.S. government was after him. So he isn’t likely to have used a passport that could be on somebody’s watch list.”

  We all knew what that meant-a stolen passport, one whose theft would have been reported to Interpol, which would have notified police in all 177 or so member countries. Soon enough, border control in almost every country would have its details.

  “So by what means do you think Kourosh has left Australia?” asked Casey.

  “I tend to think that if he has indeed left, he used a freshly forged passport, one that had never been used,” I said. “When you’re exiting a country, passport inspection is rather lax. At most, the officer checks if your name appears on a wanted list, or more likely, if you overstayed your visit. So exiting is less of a problem. However, if you use a forged passport to travel, safe entry is the main problem. Therefore, your destination should be a country which you can easily enter, either because the ability of that country’s passport control officers to detect forgery is limited, or because Iran can pull strings and get her agents to enter quickly with no questions asked.”

  “Other than Iran, which countries meet that requirement?” asked Bob.

  “Syria,” said Casey. “North Korea. A few more.”

  “Bear in mind that in many countries, particularly in the Third World, a $20 bill can go a long way,” I added.

  Bob smiled. “I hope you’re not doing it.” He was thinking about my work for DOJ, while I meant operating outside the rules, any rules.

  “There could be a twist here,” Nicole suggested. “For example. Kourosh could hold a ticket from Sydney to Italy with a stopover in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Cairo, Egypt. He could leave Australia using a forged passport and be met by an Iranian agent while in transit at the Jakarta airport. The agent would give him another passport to enter Italy, or a new airline ticket from Jakarta directly to Iran. So if an electronic monitoring of his movements is made, the airline computer will show he ended his trip in Jakarta, and searchers will focus their efforts on Indonesia, while in fact he continued his trip to another location such as Iran using a passport with a different name.”

  “I agree,” I said. “I’ve been down that road myself to avoid FOE-forces of evil. There’s no reason why a trained top Iranian agent who’s been successfully avoiding the law for more than two decades wouldn’t be capable of pulling it off.” I shook my head. “I wish I could put my hands on him now!” I clenched my fists in rage.

  “Dan, calm down,” said Casey. “We want to preserve his ability to talk.”

  Was he referring to rough encounters I’d had with a few of my targets, who had required a convalescence period before they could be interrogated again? I decided not to raise the issue.

  “Of course you do,” I said, matter-of-factly, and quickly moved on to change the subject. “He seems to steal money to provide off-the-books slush financing, probably for Iran’s web of terror. That makes him a prime target for us. When he’s caught, we’ll have to wrap him up in cotton wool to make sure he doesn’t catch cold, get sick, or anything, so that he talks and lives through a lengthy prison term.”

  Casey and Bob were getting ready to leave. Bauer turned to us. “Dan and Nicole, we need your full written report, including case summary covering all events that took place before you received the case.” He looked at me. “Start from the fraud perpetrated against that South Dakota savings bank in 1985, through your discovery in Australia, your visit to Pakistan, the most recent matching of the prints, and the NSA findings. End it with your recommendations, including suggested cooperation with the Israeli Mossad. Let me see it by Monday, then we’ll talk.”

  “What do you think?” I asked Nicole as soon as Bob and Casey had left.

  “I think Casey and Bob like the recent developments. It finally confines our case to a location. I have no idea how NSA got that information, and therefore we can’t weigh its credibility.”

  “Recent developments?” I said. “Are you kidding? This is a major breakthrough. And you really don’t know how NSA got it? Come on. Computer hacking perpetrated by a private individual sen
ds him to jail. But when an NSA technician does it, he gets an award. We now have four different sources, with varying credibility, that are in de pen dent of one another. They all put the spotlight on Iran.”

  “Four?”

  “Yes, my Pakistani source, Benny’s information, the FBI fingerprints report, the State Department’s file, and Maxwell’s confirmation.”

  “That’s five,” said Nicole. “OK, let’s see what value these clues carry.”

  We went back to the drawing board and reviewed most of what we had already learned. “The first clue came when I’d gone to Pakistan and bought information from that sleazy lawyer in Islamabad, Ahmed Khan. He’d told me that Ward was lured into coming to Iran with a promise to pay him $500 a month for three months. In fact, it was a kept promise, because he had actually received that money. When I’d first heard about that amount of money, it had flagged an ulterior motive immediately. Nobody pays a twenty-year-old photo-grapher $500 a month in 1980 dollars for taking some pictures during an archaeological excavation, when most others volunteer their work. Dr. Fischer and Professor Krieger had told us that most of the diggers were either volunteer students working for food and university credits, or two-to-three-dollar-a-day Iranian peasants doing the actual digging,” I said.

  “And you don’t know that the information Khan sold you actually came from Iran. Right?” Nicole pressed. “You said the lawyer was sleazy.”

  “Right. In fact, all the information he gave me might have come from his associate or relative, Rashid Khan, the bank manager. Ahmed Khan told me that Ward bought Iranian currency, and that there was a deposit exceeding $500 into his bank account, most of it still there. He also said that a successor in interest of the transferring bank, which we know was a center for distributing terror money, later tried to reverse the transfer. So the logical conclusion is that Ahmed Khan, the lawyer, was simply a conduit that Rashid Khan, the corrupt bank manager, used to sell me information, without compromising himself as breaching banking-secrecy law. I tend to cautiously believe it, except the part about the attempted reversal of the deposit at a later stage. That seems bogus.” I thought Nicole would be satisfied with that.

  “So why do you consider that an in de pen dent source of information?”

  “Because it doesn’t have to come from Iran to be genuine. These events took place before, or immediately after, Ward had left Pakistan. What supports the credibility of these pieces of information is that we learned about bits of them from different and in de pen dent sources. Then there’s the attempted attack on me in Islamabad, when I was driven in an embassy car just outside the embassy’s compound. Benny hinted it was connected to my search for the Chameleon. I’ve got no way of proving it, but I can’t disprove it either.”

  “The other source of information is the FBI fingerprints report we saw today, with the State Department’s photo that Maxwell confirmed to be of Herbert Goldman, formerly known as Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, who at a certain time assumed the identity of Albert Ward-and who is the Chameleon.” She seemed to get closer to my way of thinking.

  “We don’t know if it was an NSA or an FBI work product,” I said.

  “More likely a combined effort,” said Nicole.

  “Right. But what ever it is, in some points it matches perfectly with the other sources we have.”

  “Such as the existence of Department 81,” agreed Nicole. “I tend to give the NSA/FBI report a much higher degree of credibility,” I said.

  “Why, because it’s one of our own?” Her blue eyes were full of skepticism. “Don’t fall into that pit. Always question the value and credibility of information.” She sounded like some of my instructors at the Mossad Academy, although she was by far more attractive.

  “No,” I said. “Because of the fingerprint match. Remember, I lifted a set of prints from the Chameleon’s cup next to his hospital bed.” When I saw Nicole’s brows rise again, I quickly added, “I know I’m not a qualified lab technician and might accidentally have contaminated the evidence. But apparently I didn’t, because these prints matched the prints the Australian police later obtained independently. Now comes a U.S. intelligence agency, and, through means they don’t tell us, it obtains another set of prints that match the two previous sets of prints. You can’t get better than that.”

  “I agree,” said Nicole. “Provided NSA got it from some files in Iran. If we can make a case for that, then I’m convinced.”

  “If you think NSA will tell you that they hacked into an Iranian government database and downloaded the personnel file of Farhadi, then good luck with this one. NSA didn’t even confirm its own existence until a few years ago. You know what people used to say that NSA stood for- no such agency. If you believe that they’ll tell us about their means and methods of gathering specific information, then there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.”

  I was certain that NSA did talk about it with someone outside its walls of secrecy. Namely, the FISA-Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-court, while they were seeking a court order approving the use of “electronic surveillance” against foreign powers or their agents. I did have a hunch how NSA broke into the Iranian computers. Before the Islamic Revolution, some Iranian government agencies had used tailor-made software written by American companies. They’d left a trap door to allow them to service the computers from a remote location. Now, that concealed method of access could be used to hack into the computer without leaving a trace.

  “Dan, there’s no need to be sarcastic. We need to generate a report that is acceptable to both of us. Therefore, before I put my name on any such report I want to make sure I can live with the facts it describes. What good will our recommendations do, if some guy with average common sense can punch a hole in the tower of facts we’re building?”

  “Fine with me,” I said. “Other than the prints, we have no facts, only a bunch of leads and pieces of information. The case isn’t over. We aren’t writing an autopsy report. We’re summing up a case that has just gotten closer to breaking than at any time during the past twenty years. The report will set the path to go forward, not to bury a corpse.”

  “And it has characteristics of national security, rather than just catching a successful serial thief,” she added. She’d finally jumped on the wagon of enthusiasm I had been single-handedly pushing uphill.

  “By the way,” I said. “We’ve got some indication that there’s at least one sleeper agent in the U.S. other than the Chameleon.”

  “What indication?”

  “Loretta Otis. She was murdered a few days after she reported to a rabbi in Sydney that Goldman was in fact Ward. The rabbi confronted the Chameleon, asking for his explanation. When no satisfactory responses came, the rabbi refused to marry the Chameleon. Now, knowing that his new identity as Goldman was in jeopardy, the Chameleon sealed Loretta Otis’s fate. The Chameleon was still in Australia when Otis was killed. That means he must have arranged for her elimination in the U.S., either by calling Iran or directly calling another member of Department 81 in the U.S.”

  “So he’s probably in trouble in Australia for that, and for the fraud.”

  “The Australian Federal Police is looking for him as well.” “OK. I think we should spend some time in making recommendations concerning our next move.”

  “We’ve a plenary meeting with the other working groups in a week. Do you think Casey set up Monday as our deadline to submit our report so that he could use our paper during the plenary meeting?” I asked.

  “I think he’s doing the same with the other groups-asking them for their reports. Since Bauer is acting as liaison, not as a decision maker, I think the real evaluation and decision making will be done at Langley.”

  “In Tel Aviv as well,” I added. “One working group consists of Mossad guys.”

  Nicole yawned and stretched. “Right. Well, let’s adjourn until the morning. I’m exhausted.”

  I looked at my watch. It was one thirty A.M. Based on my past experience, the big
ger the operation, the shorter the time that management would give us to finish it. But at least because there were a few of us, we could always find someone to blame for any failure.

  In the morning, it took four hours of debating and document review to write our report. The room was the worse for wear: empty beer cans, three half-empty bags of potato chips-a quarter of the chips on the floor and the rest in my stomach, giving me heartburn.

  “Let’s clean up the mess,” said Nicole. “We can’t have cleaners here.” We spent the next hour sweeping the floor and removing garbage, not before making sure we didn’t accidentally throw away any pieces of paper. Nicole went to the communication room and returned twenty minutes later.

  “There has been a change of plans. There’s a meeting in another safe apartment in northern Paris in two days. We should send our report immediately.”

  On the day of the meeting, we took Nicole’s car from a nearby parking garage and drove to the outskirts of Paris, to a leafy residential area. More out of habit than as a result of any suspicion, I routinely checked our backs to make sure we had no unwanted company. I wondered whether there was any security backup. There was too much activity around our safe apartment, and if any of the visitors was unknowingly compromised to the opposition, they’d contaminate us as well. Opposition? I wondered who our opposition would be, here. There were too many contenders for the title. I decided to raise the issue with Casey. I was uncomfortable. We were too visible.

  When we entered the meeting room, a large one with high ceilings, there were several other people already waiting. I recognized Casey, Arnold Kyle, and Benny. Four other men and one woman looked unfamiliar. In the center of the room was a big nineteenth-century-style dining table. We sat around it. I counted the participants. We were ten in all.