A Most Wanted Man

by John le Carré

  “Zakat is the two and a half percent of a Muslim’s earnings that, under Shariat law, should be devoted to good causes such as schools, hospitals, providing food for the poor and needy, scholarships for students and orphanages. Muslim orphanages. These are his great love. For our orphans, Signpost has declared, he will travel the earth for the rest of his life without sleep. And we should admire him for that too. Islam has many orphans. And Signpost from an early age was himself an orphan: the product of strict, very strict Koran schools.”

  But there is a downside to this commitment, as the tightening of his voice indicates:

  “Orphanages, I would suggest to you, are one of the many points at which social and terrorist causes cannot help meeting. Orphanages are sanctuaries for children of the dead. Among the dead are martyrs, men and women who have given their lives defending Islam, whether on the battlefield or as suicide bombers. It is not the business of charitable donors to inquire into the particular form of martyrdom. I am afraid, therefore, that links with the purveyors of terrorism are in this context inevitable.”

  If the congregation had murmured a rapt amen, Bachmann would not have been surprised.

  “Signpost is intrepid,” Professor Aziz insists, resuming his role as defense counsel. “In pursuit of his life’s mission he has witnessed the plight of his Muslim brothers and sisters in some of the worst places on earth, I would say the absolute worst. In the last three years he has traveled at personal risk to Gaza, Baghdad, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia; also to Lebanon, where he experienced at firsthand the Israeli devastation of that country. That does not, I am afraid, excuse him.”

  He draws a deep breath, as if filling himself up with courage, although courage, in Bachmann’s memory, is the last thing Aziz lacks.

  “I must tell you that in these cases there is, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, always the same question: If the persuasive evidence is correct, is a man like Signpost doing a little good in order to do bad? Or is he doing a little bad in order to do good? Signpost’s purpose in my submission was always to do good. Ask him about the acceptable uses of violence and he will tell you that in addressing the issue of terror, we have to distinguish between legitimate revolt against occupation on the one hand, and outright terrorism, which we do not endorse, on the other. The United Nations charter allows resistance against occupation. We share that view, as do all liberal Europeans. However”—he appears suddenly wistful—“however, what we have learned in these cases—and Signpost on the strength of persuasive evidence is no exception—is that good men accept a little bit of bad as a necessary element of their work. For some it may be as much as twenty percent. For others twelve or ten. For others again, even as little as five. But five percent bad can be very bad indeed, even if the remaining ninety-five percent is very good. They know the arguments. But in their heads”—he is tapping his own—“they consider them unresolved. They have a place for terror in their minds and it is not an entirely negative place. They regard it”—is he searching his own conscience and pretending it is Abdullah’s?—“as a painful but necessary tribute to the great diversity that is the Umma. Unfortunately, that does not constitute an excuse. But it constitutes, I would venture to suggest, an explanation. Therefore while Signpost may be sure in his own mind of what he considers the right path, he would not actually go so far as to tell the militants to their faces that they are wrong. Because in his heart, he is not totally sure. That is his insoluble paradox, and he is not alone. For are not all true believers looking for the right path? And are not God’s commands difficult to comprehend? Signpost may deeply dislike what the militants do. Probably he does. But who is he to say that they are less pious, or less guided by God, than he is himself—assuming always that the persuasive evidence persuades us?”

  Bachmann glances at Burgdorf, then quickly at Martha, because the American top spy and the would-be German intelligence czar are sharing the same stare, and it is directed at each other. It is a stare without expression, signaling nothing beyond the existence of a private bond. Then watchful Lantern sees the stare too and, straining to be part of it, leans backward in his seat until he is as close as he can get to Martha’s bejewelled ear, and whispers something into it that makes no impact on her features either.

  If Aziz has witnessed this interaction, he ignores it.

  “We must also consider this possibility,” he continues. “That Signpost, owing to his provenance and the connections that have sprung from it, is under moral pressure from his fellow believers. That can happen. His cooperation is not merely assumed, it is demanded. ‘If you don’t help us, you are betraying us.’ Perhaps Signpost is subject to other forms of coercion also. He has an earlier wife and beloved children from a previous marriage, now living in Saudi Arabia. We do not know,” he insists, with painful emphasis. “We shall never know. Perhaps Signpost himself will never know just how he became what he is—assuming that is what he is.” He steels himself for what sounds like a final appeal to their unlikely understanding. “Maybe Signpost doesn’t want to know—maybe he genuinely doesn’t know—where the five percent ends up. Right down to the last link, maybe nobody knows. A mosque needs a roof. A hospital needs a wing. And by merciful Allah’s grace, there’s a go-between who gives them the money. But the poorest outposts of Islam are not exactly renowned for their meticulous bookkeeping. So the go-between is able to keep enough back to buy explosives for a couple of suicide belts.” He has a last message. “Ninety-five percent of Signpost knows and loves what he does. But five percent of him doesn’t want to know, and can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Sorry for what? Bachmann wants to ask him.

  “So what is he?” an impatient male voice demands abruptly. It is Burgdorf’s.

  “By his actions, Herr Burgdorf? In his effect, you mean? Assuming the evidence is correct?”

  “Isn’t that what we’re dealing with here? Once we have made that assumption? His actions?”

  Burgdorf the grumpy man-child is famous for his loathing of liberal equivocation. “Just give me one-armed advisors, Michael,” he is reputed to have shouted at Axelrod in the course of an unseemly public spat. “Don’t give me any more people who tell me, ‘on the one hand, on the other hand!’”

  “Signpost is a hub, Herr Burgdorf,” Professor Aziz admits sadly, from the rostrum. “Not in the substance of what he does, but in the detail. A little bit shaved off here, a small diversion there—the sums are not large. At the level at which terror currently operates, they don’t need to be. A few thousand dollars can be enough. In the worst places, a few hundred will do the trick. If we are talking Hamas, less.”

  He seems about to add something. Perhaps he is remembering what just a few hundred did. Burgdorf cuts him short:

  “So he finances terror,” he retorts loudly, spelling matters out for the benefit of the many.

  “In effect, Herr Burgdorf, yes. If what we believe is true. Ninety-five percent of him does not. Ninety-five percent of him supports the poor and sick and needy of the Umma. But five percent of him finances terror. Consciously, and with ingenuity. He is therefore an evil man. That is his tragedy.”

  Axelrod has seen this moment coming and prepared for it.

  “Professor Aziz, aren’t you suggesting something different? From what we’ve been hearing between the lines, wouldn’t you agree that—given the right inducements, shall we say, and the right convergence of pressures and misfortunes—Signpost is ideal material for recruitment to the peaceful path—much as you yourself were, many years ago, back in the days when you were a Muslim brother supporting direct action?”

  Professor Aziz bows farewell to his audience and is escorted out. He is security-cleared—but why take the risk? Watching him depart, Bachmann overhears Martha’s deliberately ill-concealed aside to Lantern: “Tell you what, Ian. I’ll settle for five percent right now.”

  A flurry of uncoordinated activity followed the departure of Aziz. Martha rose and sailed out of the room with her cell phone to her ear, sweeping
Newton and the big-shouldered blonde along with her. Mohr, it appeared, had set aside an office from which the Agency could do its harmless observing. Burgdorf was leaning over the seated Keller, murmuring in his ear while they looked in opposite directions. And Bachmann, struggling to quell the anxieties that were banking up in him, was praying to himself in the language of his unsung Cantata:

  We are not policemen, we are spies. We do not arrest our targets. We develop them and redirect them at bigger targets. When we identify a network, we watch it, we listen to it, we penetrate it and by degrees we control it. Arrests are of negative value. They destroy a precious acquisition. They send you scrabbling back to the drawing board, looking for another network half as good as the one you’ve just screwed up. If Abdullah is not part of a known network, I personally will make him part of one. If need be, I will invent a network, just for him. It worked for me in the past, and it will work in the case of Abdullah, just give me the chance. Amen.

  In the hands of a legendary woman researcher called Frau Zimmermann whom Bachmann had encountered on her fleeting visits to the Beirut embassy, Signpost is transforming himself from honey-eating religious academic with a five percent flaw into a red-toothed terrorist paymaster.

  On a screen above Frau Zimmermann’s squat head, diagrams like family trees have appeared, demonstrating which of the highly reputable Muslim charities under his control Signpost is believed to misuse in order to syphon money and matériel for terrorists. Not all his five percent transactions are financial. The wretched of Djibouti are crying out for a hundred tons of sugar? One of Signpost’s charities will make sure a consignment is dispatched at once. On its way to Djibouti, however, the mercy vessel happens to put in at the humble port of Berbera on the north coast of war-torn Somalia in order to deposit other cargo, she explains, jabbing irritably at the screen with her pointer as if to rid it of an intrusive insect.

  And in Berbera, it transpires that ten tons of sugar are unloaded by mistake. Well, such things happen, whether we’re in Berbera or Hamburg. The trivial error is not discovered until the ship is once more under way. And when the ship reaches its official destination of Djibouti, the recipients are so hungry and so grateful to receive their ninety tons that nobody complains about the odd ten that have gone missing. Meanwhile back in Berbera, ten tons of sugar are buying detonators, land mines, hand guns and shoulder-held rocket launchers for Somali militants whose aim in life is to spread mayhem and slaughter at bargain-basement prices.

  Yet who can pin the blame on the honorable charity that, in its unquestioned goodness, supplied sugar for the starving of Djibouti? And who would dare pin the blame on Signpost, the ninety-five-percent pious champion of tolerance and inclusiveness among peoples of all religions?

  Frau Zimmermann would, for one.

  She would also refer her audience to their Felix dossiers, which provide the detailed reasoning behind her findings. Meanwhile, for dummies, she has another diagram, even simpler than the first. It consists of an archipelago of commercial banking houses, small and large, scattered across the globe. Some are familiar names, others more likely to have their headquarters in the shanties of a hill town in Pakistan. Nothing connects the one with the other. All they have in common is a pin light, which comes on when Frau Zimmermann shakes her pointer at them, the way an angry little lady shakes her umbrella at a departing bus.

  One fine day, a moderate sum of money is paid into this bank, she says. Let’s say in Amsterdam. Let’s say ten thousand euros. A kind man comes off the street and pays it in.

  And the money stays in this bank. It can be to the credit of an individual or a company or an institution or a charity. But it doesn’t budge. It remains to the credit of the lucky account holder. Maybe for as long as six months. A year.

  Then a week later, lo and behold a sum in the same amount is paid into this bank thousands of kilometers away in—let’s say—Karachi. And it too stays where it is. No phone call, no wired transfer. Just a different kind man from the street.

  “Until one month later a very similar sum finally arrives here,” Frau Zimmermann says, her sharp voice rising in indignation. The tip of the pointer rests on northern Cyprus. “At the place it was intended for all along, paid in by silent barter, which without detailed operational intelligence we cannot hope to trace. Countless transactions of this sort take place every hour. Only a tiny few support terrorist acts. Combined sources and computerized data occasionally show us the way: but only one way. That’s the dilemma. If we trace the chain this time, who’s to say we’ll trace it next time? Next time it could be completely different. That’s the beauty of the system. Unless of course the chain master becomes complacent, or lazy, and starts to repeat himself. Then a pattern forms and, over time, certain presumptions can be made. The optimum is to identify the chain master and his first link. Signpost is a chain master who has gone lazy.”

  A pin light is burning over the city of Nicosia. The pointer gives it an accusing tap, and rests there.

  “As with decoding, so with invisible transfers,” the legendary Frau Zimmermann resumes in her schoolmarm’s South German. “Repetition is what the investigator dreams of. On the strength of three years’ observation of this extremely insignificant shipping firm which has a long record of unloading food and other commodities to dubious places by mistake and not bothering too much about getting it back”—the innocuous name of the SEVEN FRIENDS NAVIGATION COMPANY is suddenly splurged in red across the top of the island while the pointer remains resolutely at its post—“and on the basis of Signpost’s first-link payments into this charitable account at this bank”—Riyadh lights up, together with the name of the bank, in Arabic and English—“and matching money is paid into this bank”—the pointer has moved to Paris—“and the same sum goes into this bank”—we are in Istanbul—“all to accounts that we have now been able to preidentify, then we say that is a very clear assumption of Signpost’s involvement in terrorist finance. If Signpost was clean, it is our conviction that he would never ever have had direct contact with this low-grade, one-off shipping company. Yet he personally has hired this company on more than one occasion, although aware—and maybe because he is aware—that on more than one occasion it has delivered goods to the wrong place. Proof it isn’t. But as a basis for assumption, it screams out loud.”

  As the screen withdraws itself into the rafters, Frau Zimmermann’s meticulous voice is interrupted by majestic Martha’s ship-to-ship loud-hailer booming out across the room.

  “When you say clear assumption, Charlotte”—how the hell does she know the woman’s first name, wonders Bachmann, and how the hell did she get back in here without my noticing?—“are you talking like evidence here? He makes the move we want him to make—the first-link move—and then we have the evidence? Evidence that would stand up in an American court of justice?”

  The flustered Frau Zimmermann is protesting that the question is above her pay grade when Axelrod deftly takes it from her.

  “Which of your courts are we talking about here, Martha? Your military tribunals behind closed doors, or the old sort when the accused was allowed to know what he was accused of?”

  A few of the freer souls laugh. The rest pretend they haven’t heard.

  “Herr Bachmann,” Burgdorf snaps. “You have an operational proposal. Let us hear it, please.”

  A man who makes the weather does not take kindly to having the uninitiated peering over his shoulder while he performs his magic. Bachmann had the artist’s sensitivities about sharing the process of creation. Nevertheless he struggled to oblige his audience. In unpretentious layman’s language designed to appeal to those at the fringes of the spy trade, he set out the arguments that, with editorial assistance from Erna Frey and Axelrod, had formed the core of his hastily written submission. The operational aim, he explained, was to deliver the proof of Signpost’s guilt, but at the same time to leave his reputation and eminence unchanged and, in the long term, even enhanced, with all his charitable connect
ions intact. It was to take over his five percent and use him as a duct and a listening post. Against his better inclinations, Bachmann forced himself to use the term “war on terror.” Therefore the first move was the most vital: it must be to compromise Signpost absolutely, to let him know he was compromised and offer him the choice between remaining a distinguished, leading spirit of the Umma, or—

  “Or what exactly, Günther? Tell us.” Martha, the harmless observer, interrupting.

  “Public humiliation and possible imprisonment.”

  “Possible?”

  Axelrod to the rescue: “This is Germany, Martha.”

  “Sure. It’s Germany. You try him and let’s say for a change the case sticks. How long does he sit for? Like six years, three of them suspended? You people don’t know what jail is. Who gets to interrogate?”

  Axelrod had no doubt who did. “He’d be German property and he’d be interrogated under German law. That’s if he refuses to play ball. Much better, however, he stays in place and collaborates with us. We believe he will.”

  “Why? He’s a fanatical terrorist. Maybe he’d rather blow himself up.”

  Bachmann again: “That’s not our reading of him, Martha. He’s a family man, settled, respected all across the Umma, admired in the West. It’s thirty years since he’s done prison. We don’t ask him to become a traitor. We offer him a new definition of loyalty. We entrench his position here, we promise him German citizenship, which he’s applied for half a dozen times without success. All right, maybe at first we threaten him. But that’s foreplay. Then we befriend him. ‘Come over to us and let’s work together creatively for a better and more moderate Islam.’”

  “And how about an amnesty for past terrorist acts?” Martha suggested, now appearing to join the argument rather than contest it. “Would you throw that in too?”