The Ghost Agent

by Alex Berenson

  The Land Cruiser pulled up beside an Airbus A340 painted in the distinctive white-and-gold of Air China, the state-owned Chinese national airline. Four Chinese men stepped out of the first limo and positioned themselves around the second. Only then did the doors of the second Mercedes open. Five men emerged, two bodyguards in suits and three older men wearing the uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army.

  The last man to step out was taller than the rest, broad-shouldered, deep into middle age, with short black hair and shining golden sideboards on his green uniform. He was General Li Ping, chief of the People’s Liberation Army and one of the nine members of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the group that ruled the world’s most populous nation.

  Li and his bodyguards strode up the jetway as the Land Cruiser and limousines rolled away. A few minutes later, the Airbus accelerated down the runway, its engines purring, and lifted into the cloudless night.

  From the outside, this Airbus looked like the usual Air China A340 widebody that flew the 5,000-mile route from Beijing to Tehran three times a week, down to the stylized red phoenix painted on its tail. But inside, this jet was very different. In place of the usual complement of three hundred seats, it held twenty lie-flat recliners. Near the front of the plane were two staterooms, with king-sized beds, bathrooms, and showers. The jet also came equipped with its own fulltime crew from the Chinese air force, as well as three armed guards who lived in a suite at the back and never left the plane unattended.

  For despite its markings, this Airbus was far from an ordinary commercial jet. Only the nine men on the Standing Committee had the right to use it. Naturally, China had official state aircraft as well, painted with the country’s five-starred red-and-yellow flag. But the A340 offered advantages for those times when Politburo members wanted to keep their travel plans secret. American spy satellites watched over all the major airports in Iran. But they weren’t looking for an Air China widebody. The jet gave General Li a way to travel invisibly to his meetings in Tehran, meetings he’d been having more and more often.

  In some ways, China and Iran had every reason to get close. Both nations had long and proud histories. Both had suffered during the twentieth century from invasions and internal strife. Both were now powerful once again, though for different reasons. China’s strength was built on two decades of spectacular economic growth. Iran’s gains were based on oil and the failure of American policy in the Middle East. The Islamic Republic now dominated the Persian Gulf and had the ability to choke off half the world’s oil.

  Any serious threat of war between Iran and the United States would take the price of crude to $100 a barrel. An actual American attack on Iran would move oil closer to $200 and put the world into recession. If Iran retaliated by destroying the giant fields to its west in Saudi Arabia, the world would have to ration oil for the first time since the original wells had been drilled in Pennsylvania 140 years before.

  And despite what environmentalists liked to pretend, the modern world could hardly exist without oil. Airplanes would be grounded. Electricity and fertilizer would double or triple in price. Middle-class Americans and Europeans would be squeezed, and the lives of the poor everywhere would grow more desperate. So Iran was not just another third-world country that got the world’s attention only for plane crashes and earthquakes. When its leaders spoke, London and Washington had to listen. But America didn’t enjoy being at Iran’s mercy, a fact that the leaders of the Islamic Republic knew only too well. To make sure that the United States never tried ‘regime change’ in Iran as it had in Iraq, they wanted a nuclear arsenal.

  Li understood the Iranian desire for nukes. It was no coincidence that the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council – China, America, Russia, Britain, and France – were the five countries with the largest nuclear stockpiles. Because of their unique destructive power, nukes guaranteed national security like no other weapon. No country that openly possessed a nuclear stockpile had ever been invaded. With nuclear weapons to give it cover, Iran could push its neighbors around even more aggressively.

  For that reason, Washington and Jerusalem had vowed to stop Tehran from getting even one bomb. In response, Iran had turned to China for support.

  And China? China had reasons to help Iran. Li had reasons too, his own reasons, ones that not even his fellow ministers on the Politburo Standing Committee could imagine.

  Thus Li had made the trip to Tehran three times in the last year, each time in secret on this Airbus 340, for talks with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

  The trips hadn’t been easy. China and Iran might need each other, but they didn’t necessarily trust each other. Li found the atmosphere in Tehran as suffocating as the long black robes the women wore, and the national obsession with Islam as bewildering as the calls to prayer that rang through the presidential palace.

  Before Li’s first visit to Iran, his staff had prepared a thick book for him about Islam. He had skimmed a few pages and then tossed the binder aside. Prophets, angels, devils, an all-knowing God . . . Islam was just like Judaism and Christianity. Li didn’t believe in any of them. Like many Chinese, he wasn’t very religious, though every so often he burned fake money to honor his father and mother, both long dead. He wanted to make his mark in this world, not wait for another life. Meanwhile he had a question for his hosts, one he didn’t plan to ask: If the Iranians had such faith in Allah, why were they so desperate for nuclear bombs?

  The A340 reached 38,000 feet and leveled off. Li touched a button on his leather recliner. Sun Wei, the Airbus’s steward, appeared in seconds. ‘General.’

  ‘Please ask the pilots if we can expect a smooth flight.’ Chinese men his age rarely exercised – at most they contented themselves with tai chi – but Li took his workout regimen very seriously. He always brought an elliptical trainer with him on the Airbus.

  Wei disappeared. A minute later he was back, holding a gym bag packed with Li’s exercise clothes. ‘The winds are with us, General. A smooth flight.’

  In the main stateroom, Li changed in silence and alone. Some other members of the Standing Committee had valets to help them dress. Li hadn’t fallen so far into bourgeois decadence, not yet anyway. Though he had to admit that he’d grown used to great luxury. He had chauffeurs, guards, housekeepers. Still, he always tried to remember that he served the people, not the other way around. Unlike other leaders, he hadn’t used his position to make a fortune from bribes or corrupt business deals. He had no hidden bank accounts, no villas in Hong Kong.

  For the next hour Li forgot himself on the trainer. When he was finished, he stretched and showered and returned to his chair. A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice awaited him. Sun Wei knew the favorite drinks of everyone lucky enough to be a regular passenger on this plane.

  Li sipped his juice and tried to relax. As always, he was glad to be free of Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, a scrawny man with hard black eyes. At their first meeting, a year earlier, Ahmadinejad had begun by haranguing Li about the United States and Israel, the eternal enemies of Muslims everywhere. The words spilled from Ahmadinejad’s mouth so quickly that Li’s translator could hardly keep up. Though the Iranians kept the presidential palace frigid, sweat rolled down Ahmadinejad’s face as his voice rose.

  For half an hour, Li had sat across from Ahmadinejad, hands folded patiently in his lap, waiting for the man to exhaust himself. He was used to sitting through boring speeches, though usually they came in his own language. The Iranian poured out words, a river of nonsense. He seemed to be preaching at an audience of thousands, an audience that only he could see. Finally Li broke in.

  ‘Mr. President,’ he’d said, first in Chinese, then in English. ‘Mr. President.

  ‘The Chinese people appreciate your grievances with the global hegemon, the United States. We agree that every state has the right to rule itself.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But the problem is deeper. The Zionists –’

  Li had no intent
ion of sitting through another rant. ‘And I thank you for your hospitality. But I must return to Beijing tomorrow, and we have much to discuss.’

  Ahmadinejad seemed to have forgotten that Li was an emissary from a country more powerful than his own, not a rival to be bullied. ‘General, before we can continue, you must understand –’ But Li never found out what he had to understand. Before Ahmadinejad could go on, the clean-shaven man beside him whispered into his ear.

  The man was Said Mousavi, the head of Iran’s secret police, and whatever he had said, his words were effective. Ahmadinejad ran his hand through his coarse black beard and whispered back to the security minister. From then on, his conversations with Li had been mostly businesslike, though Ahmadinejad still blustered occasionally about Zionist conspiracies. Yet by the end of their second meeting, Li realized that the Iranian was more subtle than he appeared. As much as anything, his windy speeches were intended to distract, to hide Iran’s real ambitions.

  If outsiders had known of these meetings, they would have assumed China had the upper hand. Yet it was Li who flew to Tehran, not Ahmadinejad to Beijing. The men who ran Iran took such eagerness as a sign of China’s weakness. Li didn’t try to change their minds. He had his own reason for wanting these meetings in Tehran instead of Beijing. This way, only he and his closest aides knew exactly what he was telling Ahmadinejad. Of course, he reported back to his fellow ministers on the Standing Committee after each meeting. But he didn’t report everything.

  As they tried to build a bomb, the Iranians needed engineering help, lots of it. Even for a sovereign country with a multibillion-dollar budget, building a nuclear weapon was harder than it looked.

  Nuclear weapons are both complicated and very simple. Conventional explosives get energy from breaking chemical bonds between atoms. Nuclear bombs release the energy bound up inside individual atoms, a far bigger source of power. The difference in power is staggering. Fat Man, the bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, used fourteen pounds of plutonium to produce a blast with the energy produced by 42 million pounds of conventional explosive. The bomb killed 70,000 people immediately and tens of thousands more over the next generation. Yet by modern standards, the Fat Man bomb is puny.

  Fortunately for humanity’s survival, most types of atoms can’t be used in nuclear weapons. The exceptions are plutonium and a certain kind of uranium, called U-235, so-called fissile materials. The United States and other major nuclear powers prefer plutonium for their bombs, because plutonium is even more potent than uranium. But plutonium is also harder to handle, and it doesn’t exist naturally. Making it requires nuclear reactors, big buildings that are prime targets for guided missiles or bombs. So uranium is the nuclear material of choice for countries like Iran, which need to make bombs in secret.

  Still, uranium can’t simply be pulled out of the ground and plugged into a nuclear weapon. In its natural state, uranium ore consists of two different isotopes, U-235 and U-238. They look the same, a heavy dull yellow metal. But they have different atomic structures. U-235 can be used to make a bomb. U-238 can’t.

  In its natural state, uranium is made up of 97 percent U-238, the useless kind, with just 3 percent U-235 mixed in. When the United States began the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons, its scientists had to find a way to separate the valuable U-235 from U-238. They found the answer in centrifuges, enclosed chambers that spin very fast, and enabled them to pull the lighter U-235 out of the U-238.

  In theory, the centrifuge procedure is relatively straightforward. But as the Iranians had found out, bridging the gap between theory and reality could be difficult. Even under the best of circumstances, it required a small army of well-trained engineers and physicists. The Iranians had an added challenge. Because of the threat of the Israeli air force, they were working in labs buried seventy feet underground.

  Until this meeting, Ahmadinejad hadn’t told Li exactly what problems the Iranians were having. In part, his reticence was a matter of national pride. The Iranians hated to admit that they had failed where North Korea had succeeded. At the same time, Tehran worried that Beijing might be cozying up to them just to betray them to the United States.

  To overcome that suspicion, Li had gone to great lengths. Not even the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee knew the steps he had taken. Now, finally, his efforts were paying off. This time around, Ahmadinejad and his scientific advisers had made very specific requests, asking if China could lend Iran electrical engineers, metallurgists, and physicists – a hiveful of highly trained worker bees to build a very large stinger. In return, Ahmadinejad offered to name China as Iran’s preferred partner for oil and natural gas development, and to give China first call on Iranian crude in case of a worldwide shortage.

  Li hadn’t tried to hide his excitement at the offer. An alliance between China and Iran would be a giant shift in world politics. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, major nations would align in open defiance of America.

  Naturally, Li agreed. The approval of the Standing Committee would be a formality, he said. And why would the Iranians doubt him? He’d given them reason to believe that China hated the United States as much as they did.

  Li knew this alliance was risky. He didn’t fully trust the Iranians. But he needed their help, needed it now. He was setting China on a collision course with the United States. Without Iran’s support, his plan couldn’t succeed. And despite what he’d told the Iranians, the plan was his, his alone. The other eight members on the Politburo Committee didn’t know what he was doing. They would never have supported him.

  Li believed he had sound reasons for taking this path. The others on the committee were cowards and thieves. He needed to act, and quickly. One day, the full truth would came out, and the world would judge his actions. By then he’d be dead, though not forgotten. Never forgotten. In the meantime, though, he needed to keep his scheme secret. For if the Standing Committee learned exactly what he’d done, his future would be short and bleak.

  Li turned his chair to face Cao Se. Technically, Cao was only the seventh-ranking officer in the PLA, but in reality he was closer to Li than anyone else. Li and Cao had served together in China’s three-week war in Vietnam in 1979. Li had come out unscathed, but not Cao. A mine had taken off his left leg below the knee. Sometimes Li wondered whether Cao was marked to take the misfortune for both of them. Perhaps in a previous life he had served Cao. Now the roles were reversed. Where Li was tall and handsome, Cao was small, his face pockmarked. His wife had died in childbirth in 1986 at a Shanghai hospital, and he had never remarried.

  A few years before, Li had caught Cao staring at him. The look wasn’t sexual, more like the devotion that a child lavished on a distant father. Sometimes Li wondered if a more independent adviser would have served him better. Yet loyalty like Cao’s was rare, and Li needed at least one man he could trust completely.

  Cao knew more about Li’s plan than anyone else. Even so, Li hadn’t told Cao exactly what he was doing. As much as he trusted Cao, he couldn’t take that chance. Not yet.

  ‘General.’ Cao was drawing intently in a spiral notebook, his lips pursed tight, his face rapt. At the sound of Li’s voice, Cao snapped the notebook shut.

  ‘Keeping secrets, Cao?’

  ‘You know I have no secrets.’

  ‘Let’s see.’ Li reached out for the notebook.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with anything, General.’ Nonetheless, Cao handed it over.

  The book’s pages were filled with sketches of buildings in thick black ink, skyscrapers and highways and apartment complexes. Long flowing strokes that caught the motion and vitality of city life. Li recognized the giant Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, the Empire State Building. Other buildings seemed to be of Cao’s own creation, narrow towers that stretched to the sky, stadiums with cantilevered roofs.

  ‘Cao. These are excellent.’

  ‘A way to pass the time.’

  ‘No. Truly. You could h
ave been an architect. You have a talent.’ At this, Cao smiled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be interested, General.’

  Li handed back the book. And wondered, What other secrets have you been keeping from me all these years, little Cao?

  ‘So what did you think of Ahmadinejad today?’ This conversation would necessarily be limited. Li and Cao knew that the A340 had a dozen bugs scattered through its cabin. As defense minister, Li controlled most of them. But not all.

  ‘These Iranians are strange people,’ Cao said. ‘In a way, they’re like the Red Guards’ – the young revolutionaries who had tormented China in the late 1960s. ‘They don’t mind tearing everything down. They take a certain pleasure in it. If they got the special weapon, they might actually use it.’

  ‘They think the world could end tomorrow. It gives them freedom.’

  ‘At first I didn’t think we could trust them. But now . . . Our interests are aligned. We help them, they help us. We’re in different beds but we have the same dream.’

  Li smiled. Cao had reversed the Chinese proverb of ‘different dreams in the same bed.’ The implication of the saying was that no two people could fully trust each other. Even a husband and wife who’d slept beside each other for fifty years had different dreams.

  In this case, though, Li and Ahmadinejad knew that they were in a marriage of convenience. Their opposition to the United States had brought them together.

  They didn’t need to trust each other, as long as their interests were aligned.

  ‘Different beds, same dream,’ Li said. ‘It’s enough for a partnership.’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘It won’t have to be forever, Cao.’

  EIGHT

  ANNANDALE, VIRGINIA

  THE GOLDEN RETRIEVER lunged after a fat gray squirrel, dragging the man in the green windbreaker forward. He fell on the muddy ground, banging his knee against a bulbous stone, his curses echoing through the empty woods. The dog ran off, chasing the squirrel until it darted up a birch tree and disappeared.