by Alan Zendell
Though I couldn’t reasonably fault her for it, Gayle’s curiosity was a complication I didn’t need. Her frown told me she wasn’t happy with my response, but I hadn’t left her any wiggle room. I reached for her hand and squeezed it gently. “Are we okay?”
***
I spent the rest of the morning helping Jim catch up with our now joint inbox, leaving at 12:30 to make William’s one o’clock meeting at Federal Plaza. The rest of my team was there when I arrived, including, to my surprise, both Rod and Henry. William nodded me to a seat.
“Now that Dylan’s here we can begin. We have only one topic on our agenda: how to prevent the next radiological attack from being successful. In the interest of keeping a successful team together, Henry White’s been re-assigned to the New York FBI field office and detailed to work with us for the duration of this project. We’ll also have access to other FBI resources.”
We told Henry how glad we were to have him working with us, and William turned to Rod. “Most of you also know Rod Burdak. Someone with his background wouldn’t normally be included in a meeting like this, but our superiors believe he’s a valuable asset. I share that view, Rod. That’s why you’re here. I expect everyone to follow the rules and use the utmost discretion, understood?”
As he had with me, Saturday night, Rod argued that recent events were likely to cause the terrorists to speed up their timetable. Though they were known for patience, sometimes planning operations for months or years, if they thought we were close to apprehending them, there was no telling what they might do or when. We quickly reached a consensus.
“You know these people best, Rod,” William said. “How significant is it that someone new is coming to take over the operation?”
“I’d say it’s quite significant. The people who are sending him are clearly unhappy with the way things have been run, and I believe he’s coming with a specific plan that he intends to implement quickly. You’re right to feel urgently about his arrival.”
“I understand that your people have an idea who he is. Our intel’s beating the bushes – I got a note this morning about a guy on our terrorist watch list,” William read from a printout, “here it is – Azim Husam al Din. Mean anything to anyone?”
Samir said, “I’ve heard of him. He’s usually behind the scenes. Never gets his hands dirty. Some people say he made the bombing in Bali happen. He played a role in the Madrid train attack, and we think he was instrumental in the bombing of the American compound near Riyadh last year. You know him, Rod?”
“We hear rumblings about him, but he’s hard to trace. For one thing, I’m sure that’s not his real name. It’s too symbolic. It translates to something like ‘sword that defends the faith.’”
“Sounds like someone who thinks he can get to heaven by blowing himself and a lot of other people up,” William virtually spat.
“More likely,” Samir said, “he’s someone who manipulates other people into doing that. He’s not the suicidal type.”
Rod nodded his agreement, adding, “We’ve tried to keep track of him for some time, not always successfully. We think he spent the last few years trying to undermine the weak central government in Indonesia. You might have one of your operatives look into that.”
A few other names were tossed around, but Azim Husam al Din seemed to be the most likely candidate, and William steered the meeting toward its main focus.
“Here’s the problem as I see it. Terrorists using radiological weapons, low yield explosives that scatter radioactive particles, would look for targets that involve large concentrations of people and play a central role in their everyday lives. And of course, they prefer soft, lightly protected targets, of which there are still a disturbingly large number.
“Before nine-eleven, stock exchanges were high on the list, but exchange security’s tight, now, because big money financial interests made sure of it. In addition to places like Union Station and busy airports, we need to look at sports facilities, convention centers, schools and universities, concert halls, festivals, cruise ships, and so on.”
He picked up some stapled sheets from a stack he’d brought with him. “This is a list of every scheduled event fitting that description in the next two weeks, in every major metropolitan area between Boston and Washington.”
“Holy shit!” one of the new guys I didn’t know muttered. The list was four-and-a-half pages, with thirty entries per page.
“I see someone appreciates the magnitude of what we’re up against,” William said. “Any suggestions on how we should set priorities?”
“We know they prefer symbolic targets,” Henry said. “I’d put places like Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Yankee Stadium, and Fenway Park at the top of the list.”
“Also western religious icons like the National Cathedral and Saint Patrick’s,” Samir offered.
“Look here,” Mary said. “There’s a big evangelist group making tour stops in the East this month. The Verizon Center in Washington, next week, four days later at Madison Square Garden. They’ve been pretty loud declaring Islam the mortal enemy of Christian values.”
“Maybe we should bring back gladiator sports and let the fanatics from both sides fight it out to the death,” William said, shaking his head.
Rod had been listening quietly. “I’d advise against trying to predict what they’ll do. You’ll trap yourselves into trying to defend a short list of targets and maybe miss the whole point. Azim Husam al Din can write your list of priority targets as well as you can, then focus on a city like Philadelphia which no one expects him to attack. Trying to outguess him could be disastrous.”
In the past, I’d rarely commented at strategy sessions unless someone asked me a question about physics or nuclear energy, but I had a different perspective now. “Rod’s right. In fact, I think the whole idea of trying to stop them at the point of attack is wrong. We’ve been damn lucky so far that we managed to be there just in time.
“We can’t suddenly turn all these soft targets into fortresses. Maybe if we had a year or two, but if we’re trying to defend against something likely to occur this week or next week, we need to put everything we’ve got into prevention. We have to find these bastards and hit them where they live and recover the isotopes, before they put their plan in motion, whatever it takes.”
Everyone was quiet until Samir said, “I think Dylan’s right.”
“Anyone disagree?” William asked. When no one responded, he said, “I think he’s right, too. We can get the local police to beef up security at these events without expending our own resources, and we can equip security personnel at the entrances to baseball stadiums and concert halls with Geiger counters. Our task, now, is intelligence gathering and rapid, effective follow-up. We need to go all out on this, bust a few heads if we have to.”
No one disagreed with that, either. We’d use all available manpower to hit everyone on every watch list as hard as possible, anything from buying information to physical intimidation. None of that directly involved me, but I couldn’t pretend I had no part in it. It was another one of those moments that made everyone in the room question his fundamental beliefs. We’d heard all the arguments before. Hell, I’d voiced them myself, questions about whether ends justified means, slippery slope warnings, but this wasn’t some vague threat we were reacting to. At that moment, individual rights seemed insignificant compared to the cost of failure.
I thought, again, of the things my father said about having to do terrible things in combat. Was this any different from sending young people off to war? Did we worry that training them to kill the enemy without compunction would transform them permanently into hardened killers? We prepared them to do terrible things out of necessity, trusting that they’d return to their normal lives the same way they left them, hoping that having to kill out of necessity would make them never want to again.
We were literally involved in a struggle for survival, not of our own choosing, and watch lists were not simply racial profiles. Even as
I was causing Achmed Abdul Qadur extreme pain, I’d known that most of the detainees in those bleachers were innocents caught up in someone else’s war. But Achmed wasn’t, and I was in the unique position of knowing that with certainty. And everyone on a watch list had either made overt threats against us or violated our laws, fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
So, no. I didn’t believe that violating someone’s privacy or applying coercion to find a terrorist about to do us serious harm was outside the box, and I didn’t believe it would turn any of us into monsters. Doing it while knowing it violated what I believed in would strengthen my resolve to ensure that I wouldn’t have to again.
38.
Most intelligence failures are the result of bureaucratic breakdowns or failure to coordinate information. Field operatives generally know their business and get it right.
William had stripped away the bureaucracy, and we were doing the coordination ourselves. It took only eight hours to locate Azim Husam al Din on Sulawesi Island, Indonesia. He’d apparently been running the anti-Christian Laskar Jihad movement, supposedly disbanded after the 2002 Bali bombing, but Australian intelligence believed he’d taken it underground. We confirmed that he’d recently flown to Manila, where he was to board a Northwest flight to New York that connected in Tokyo. A communiqué to Langley from a CIA contract agent in Singapore, received Monday at 10:20 pm, said he was due to arrive at JFK Thursday afternoon.
So much for my plans to spend Monday and Tuesday working with Jim. At 8:30 Tuesday morning the team was back at Federal Plaza planning how to greet Mister Husam al Din when he arrived. We began with a difference of opinion. Should we apprehend him at Customs and take him straight to detention, then sweat him until he talked, or put a tail on him and watch his every move?
Rod argued for the second option. “I don’t think you’re going to break him. We all know that once basic interrogation methods have stalemated, physical coercion isn’t very effective at obtaining the truth. He could run us in circles for weeks with misinformation, while someone else puts his plan in motion.”
“That may be true,” Henry said, “but surveillance can be risky. What if we lose him? It’s happened before despite our best efforts.”
Mary Conlon had the most relevant experience. “We dealt with this kind of situation in Belfast during the years of the uprising. Am I right that Husam al Din has never been in the States before? Then someone will have to meet him at the airport. We can have the whole arrival area staked out with photo surveillance. His people will meet him with at least one motor vehicle, maybe more, so we’ll get license plates, pictures of everyone involved, even fingerprints if we play it correctly. And your people ought to be able to plant tracking devices on their cars. Nothing’s foolproof, but it should be hard for him to disappear.”
Rod supported Mary’s proposal, and after a bit more debate, William held up his hands. “We’ll go with Mary’s approach. That okay with you, Henry?”
“She made some good points. If we all do our jobs, it should work,” he said.
“All right, then.” William put a note of finality to the discussion. “Let’s put together the kind of team Henry used in Washington, last week. Sam, do we have photos of this guy?”
“We have several. He likes to change his appearance, but I’ll do my best.”
“Henry, will you get with the JFK Airport Police to map out a blanket surveillance of the International Arrivals Terminal and Customs area? I think we can let the police handle that with a couple of people from your field office joining them. Let’s have our own people monitor every vehicle that’s around the terminal during the time our target is in the area. I want film of every vehicle and a tracer on every suspicious one.”
“I’ll set it up as soon as we’re done here,” Henry said. “We’ll have the Airport Police interact directly with the drivers of every suspect vehicle. They’ll do complete ID checks and get the drivers to sign something, maybe a citation warning, so we can dust papers and clipboards for prints later. We’ll make it seem like routine traffic stuff and let the suspects see the cops hassling other drivers, too. And we’ll request a couple of helicopters to help track them on the road.”
“Let’s get a count of how many people we’ll need and make sure we have enough radios that can talk on the same frequency,” William said. “Get everyone down here tomorrow morning in the auditorium for individual assignments. All non-emergency leave for Thursday is canceled, and squads will be on alert throughout the area.”
When William was done, people dispersed quickly, but he stopped me. “We don’t really need you for this, but if you want in, I won’t say, ‘No.’”
“I appreciate that, William.” I did, but tomorrow morning’s session could be a problem. I still didn’t understand exactly how this worked, but if tomorrow was like the last few Wednesdays, everyone would consider me missing in action. Of course, there was nothing to stop me from attending Wednesday’s dress rehearsal after I participated in Thursday’s main event, but I couldn’t be sure how that would turn out, and I didn’t want to disrupt the operation, so I temporized.
“You’re right. Surveillance isn’t my thing. It’s probably best if you don’t give me a specific assignment, but I’d like to go along if I won’t be in the way, and that’ll leave me free to work on things at my day job tomorrow. That okay?”
In the past William would have been pleased with that response. Today he looked at me as though searching for a hidden agenda, before finally nodding his approval and walking away.
I walked in the other direction to what we referred to as our war room, a twenty by thirty foot enclosure with computer workstations lining two walls of wrap-around windows. Video flat screens and display boards covered one end and part of the other long wall of the room. In the middle was a conference table with sixteen chairs around it.
The windows looked out on a scene that included the World Trade Center and the Freedom Tower, ten blocks to the southwest. Henry was talking on the phone, sounding like the view fueled his motivation. Mary typed at one of the workstations, while Rod and Samir talked quietly, seated at one corner of the large table. I sat down across from Rod, with Samir at the end of the table on my left.
“Henry wants Sam and me to pose as passengers waiting in line at Customs, tomorrow,” Rod said. “We’ll hang close to our quarry and try to engage him in conversation. If he’s with someone, we’ll stay close and listen, making sure he notices us, so when we get through the line he won’t be suspicious if we’re all waiting around the baggage claim. By then his escorts ought to be there.”
Mary sat down next to me and laid a map of the International Arrivals Terminal on the table. “Airport Security just faxed this to me,” she said. “We’re going to need a small army to pull this off. Look at the size of the place.”
Henry had ended his call and overheard what Mary said. He picked up the stat sheet that accompanied the map and whistled through his teeth. “Customs and Passport Control process over three thousand people an hour, and there’s a 50,000 square foot area for greeting arriving passengers, four times that in the retail and restaurant area. Late morning could be a mob scene.”
“I’ll check arriving flights and ask Airport Security how crowded the Arrivals Hall is likely to be at that hour,” Mary said.
“We’re going to need every experienced surveillance officer we have,” Henry said. “This could be a nightmare.”
“What about you?” Samir asked me. “You going to be there? You seem to have been honing your detective skills lately,” he said, good-naturedly.
“Hell, I’m not a cop. William and I agreed that I’d just observe. I’d like to stick close to Henry if I won’t be in his way.”
“That’ll be fine,” Henry said. “You can be my backup eyes, and you never know when I’ll need a go-fer in that place.”
Everyone laughed, and I said, “I’m going to skip tomorrow’s planning session,” mostly for Samir and Mary’s benefit
. “I’ll meet you here Thursday morning.”
Henry looked thoughtful. “Walk down the hall with me, Dylan?”
I thought I knew what was on his mind, and he didn’t disappoint me. He steered me into a cubby-hole of an office down the hall and closed the door.
“Help me understand this, Dylan. I get that when you wake up tomorrow it’ll be Thursday and you’ll have missed tomorrow’s session. But after Thursday, you’ll have your own Wednesday, right? Just for argument’s sake, couldn’t you decide to show up for tomorrow morning’s meeting then?”
“I like to think I have free will to do anything I want to on Wednesday.” I probably sounded glib, but Henry had something to work through and I knew we’d both benefit from the exercise.
“So you could show up at tomorrow’s meeting after experiencing the result on Thursday. You could tell us what happened, whether it all went down the way it was supposed to.”
“I could, but I probably wouldn’t unless there was a very good reason to.”
“Why not? Aren’t we supposed to be trying to use your – let’s call it a talent, for now – to help nail the terrorists?”
“Yes, but there are other issues.” Henry leaned back in his chair, his relaxed posture telling me he was prepared to listen until he understood.
“I’ve been wracking my brain for a month about this, trying to figure out how it works. I think there’s a dangerous amount that I still don’t know, but one thing I’m sure of is that if I use my foreknowledge of Thursday to change what people think or do on Wednesday, there can be unexpected consequences down the road. I have to be pretty sure that trying to change things for the better won’t result in a worse outcome.”
“What about a few weeks ago? The ship incident you told me about? Isn’t this week a similar situation?”
