The Faithful Spy jw-1

by Alex Berenson

WELLS’S ROOM HAD a double bed, a separate bathroom with a steel shower and toilet, even a narrow window that overlooked the agency’s lush green campus. Aside from the cameras in the corners, he could hardly tell it was a cell. “High class,” he said to Dex, the guard from the conference room.

  “I just do what they tell me.”

  “You and everyone else.”

  “Get some sleep. I’ll be back at noon.” Dex left. The door closed with an electromagnetic thunk that let Wells know he was locked in.

  Between the Greyhound and the interrogation, Wells had hardly slept since Missoula. But before he lay down he opened his Koran and recited the ninety-fourth sura, a beautiful verse:

  In the name of Allah, the Compassionate and Merciful

  Have we not caused your chest to relax

  And eased you of the burden

  Which weighed down your back

  And exalted your fame

  But — truly — with hardship goes ease

  Truly with hardship goes ease

  So when you are relieved, still toil

  And strive to please your God

  He lay down and fell immediately asleep.

  WELLS HID BEHIND a boulder as a black-robed man walked toward him, whip in hand. Crack! The whip swung toward him. The air was foul and thick. Bats screeched overhead. He was lost in a cave; a distant glimmer marked the world outside. But the man in the black robe blocked his escape route. Who was he? Khadri? Duto? Bin Laden? Wells would be safe if he could answer that question. He shrank lower behind the rock.

  Crack! The cave itself was crumbling, its walls shattering. A heavy stone fell from the ceiling and crashed beside him. Smoke seared his eyes. The man vanished and Wells tried to run for the mouth of the cave. But as he did the light receded, and the ground beneath him turned to muck. He stumbled and fell into the mire, which covered him, filling his nose and mouth so he could not breathe—

  He woke to find Shafer shaking him.

  “Sorry,” Shafer said. “I let myself in. You seemed to be having a nightmare.”

  “I don’t have nightmares,” Wells said. At least this one was easy to read. He felt trapped. What a shock.

  “Most people would after what you’ve been through. Then again, most people wouldn’t have survived what you went through.”

  “I’m not most people.”

  “Don’t get touchy.”

  Immediately Wells felt his temper rise.

  “Are you saying they let me live because I turned?”

  “I meant it as a compliment, John. Believe it or not.”

  “Sure. Everybody has a job to do, Ellis,” Wells said. “Like Duto’s the bad guy, you’re my real friend.”

  “Duto doesn’t even know I’m here. I’m not sure he’d be happy about it. We have some differences of opinion.”

  “Yeah?” Wells said. “Like what?”

  “Well, I think he’s a Class A prick. He thinks he’s Class B.”

  Wells laughed. “As long as you spare me the speech about how it’ll go easier if I just tell you everything right now.”

  “If we really thought you’d flipped we’d be treating you a lot worse than this.” Shafer stepped back and pointed to a shirt and a pair of jeans stacked on a chair. “Yours, from the hotel.”

  “Ellis—” Wells stopped himself. He wanted to ask Shafer about Exley, where she stood, but he would have that conversation with her directly.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks,” Wells said.

  Shafer looked at his watch. “The poly’s in an hour.”

  “Am I a prisoner, Ellis?”

  “That’s for the lawyers to decide. Let’s say you’re a guest.”

  “Like the Hotel California?”

  “You’re showing your age, John.” Shafer opened the door.

  “It’s not locked?”

  “Not for me,” Shafer said. And walked out, closing the door behind him.

  WELLS HADN’T TAKEN a polygraph since his agency training, and he was surprised when he realized that a flat-panel computer monitor on the examiner’s desk had replaced the paper-and-needles box. Otherwise the room hadn’t changed: beige walls, a thickly padded chair, and an obvious one-way mirror on the far wall.

  “Sit,” said the examiner, a tough-looking guy, early fifties, with the thick forearms and unfriendly squint of a marine gunnery sergeant. He strapped a blood-pressure cuff around Wells’s arm, tightened rubber tubes around his chest, and attached electrodes to his fingers. “Pull up your pant leg.”

  Wells hesitated, then rolled up his jeans. The examiner knelt next to Wells’s left leg. He pushed down Wells’s sock and pulled a straight razor from his pocket. “Hold still.” He shaved a patch of Wells’s calf and pasted another electrode to the spot. He stepped back to consult his monitor.

  “What’s your name?” His tone was harsh, as if Wells were a prisoner.

  Wells controlled his temper, visualizing the top of Lost Trail Pass, the Montana mountains.

  “Easy, killer,” he said. “What’s yours?”

  “You can call me Walter. What’s your name?”

  “Walter what?”

  “What’s your name?”

  Wells knew he couldn’t win this fight. He could either pull off the electrodes and walk out — and be back where he started — or answer Walter’s questions. “John Wells.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Hamilton, Montana.”

  “When?”

  “July 6, 1969.”

  “Any siblings?”

  “No.”

  Walter slowly worked his way through Wells’s life: the name of his first-grade teacher, the make and model of his first car. Sometimes he moved quickly, sometimes slowly, sipping from a water bottle as he mulled or pretended to mull his next question. The air in the room grew heavy and stale and Wells wondered if the air-conditioning had been turned off to make him uncomfortable. But he stayed patient, knowing Walter wanted to irritate him, distract him, so that the real questions would come almost as a relief. Finally they began.

  “When did you first go to Afghanistan?”

  “In 1996.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t think I’d forget.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mean for the agency.”

  “You mean when Osama called me after I graduated college, said he had a job for me. That time? Come on, Walter.”

  Walter said nothing.

  “I never went to Afghanistan before 1996,” Wells said slowly. “I never went to Afghanistan except on the orders of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Flew into Islamabad, found a ride over the border. The usual route.”

  “What was your cover?”

  “NOC.” Nonofficial cover, the CIA’s term for an agent who had no open connection to the U.S. government, as opposed to one supposedly working for the State Department or another federal agency. “Very nonofficial. I was a backpacker, a small-time dopehead.”

  “Were you nervous?”

  Wells laughed. “I was too dumb to be nervous.”

  “Someone in Kabul knew you were coming.”

  “Didn’t we just go through this?”

  “You were in contact with al Qaeda even before your first mission.”

  “I never even heard of Osama bin Laden until that first trip.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Walter. He walked Wells through the details of his first trip to Kabul and Kandahar. Wells answered mechanically, in his mind seeing Afghanistan. The thick sweet smell of a goat roasting over a spit, the moaning of an exhausted horse being whipped to death because it could no longer pull a cart. The Afghans, so hospitable and so cruel.

  The snap of Walter’s fingers pulled Wells out of his reverie. “Pay attention.”

  “Can I have some water?” Wells didn’t want to ask, but he was badly thirsty. Walter pulled a bottle out of his bag, an
d Wells gulped from it. For the first time he felt their kinship. They were both pros, just doing their jobs. Of course, Walter wanted him to feel that way.

  “WHAT WERE YOU doing in Kabul that first time?”

  “Trying to recruit. Unsuccessfully.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Where should I start? I hardly spoke Pashto. Under U.S. law I wasn’t supposed to recruit anybody dirty. Remember that stroke of genius, Walter? I was frigging twenty-seven years old and I was gonna turn these guys who’d been lying to each other for a thousand years?”

  “You failed to recruit a single agent.”

  “I didn’t even try. I would have blown my cover, gotten myself killed.”

  Walter walked toward Wells.

  “When did they tell you about 9/11?”

  Switching abruptly from a comfortable line of questioning was an old trick, but effective. Wells’s pulse quickened. “I found out afterward like everyone else.”

  “Why didn’t you warn the agency beforehand?”

  Pretending you hadn’t heard the subject’s denial was another old trick.

  “I told you I didn’t know beforehand.”

  “So you failed.”

  “I failed.”

  “What was your role in the Los Angeles attack?”

  “I wasn’t involved.”

  Walter stepped back and looked at the monitor. “You’re lying.”

  “No.”

  “The box says you’re lying.”

  “Then it’s wrong.”

  “When did you enter the United States?”

  “A week ago.”

  “You’re lying again.”

  Wells shook his head. “No.”

  “How many people have you killed?”

  “About fifteen.”

  “About?” Walter sneered.

  “I don’t keep an exact count.”

  “Americans?”

  “No.”

  “How many Americans, John?”

  “None. Never.”

  The questions were coming fast now.

  “But you want to kill Americans.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what al Qaeda does, right? And you’re an al Qaeda agent.”

  “I infiltrated Qaeda on the orders of this agency.”

  “Did this agency order you to convert to Islam?”

  “No.”

  Walter leaned in close to Wells. “Does al Qaeda have WMD?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” Walter spoke as if Wells were a rebellious but not very bright five-year-old. Wells wished he could jump out of the chair and break Walter in half, but he kept his voice even.

  “Getting those weapons was a priority, but I never saw any evidence that they were successful.”

  “You infiltrated al Qaeda all these years and you don’t know if it has weapons of mass destruction? You’re not much of an agent, are you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Or maybe you’ve been doubled.”

  Wells stood and pulled off the electrodes and the blood-pressure cuff. The door opened and Dex came in, his hand on his 9mm. “Relax,” Dex said.

  Wells sat. “Tell Vinny this little show is over,” he said. “Ask me whatever you like, call me a fool, but stop telling me I’m a traitor.” Walter walked out as Dex sat on the corner of the desk, hand on his gun.

  “Let me guess,” Wells said. “Just following orders.”

  IN THE ADJOINING room, Exley and Shafer watched the examination through the one-way mirror along with Regina Burke, another examiner, who was seeing a real-time data feed from the exam.

  As the interrogation progressed, Regina, a small woman with short gray hair, leaned closer to her screen. Occasionally she clicked her mouse to mark one of the lines scrolling across the monitor. Exley wished she knew how to read the response charts. But she didn’t need to be a professional polygrapher to see that Walter had gotten under Wells’s skin.

  When Wells blew up, Regina picked up her phone. “Could you inform Mr. Duto that the subject has discontinued the examination?” She paused. “Thank you.” She hung up. “Duto’s secretary says he’ll be here in a few minutes.”

  Walter walked in.

  “So?” Shafer said.

  “He’s telling the truth,” Regina said.

  “Yes,” Walter said.

  “How sure are you?” Exley said.

  “You can never know one hundred percent,” Regina said. “But his responses are physiologically consistent. He didn’t shut down under the stress, which is what he’d do if he were trying to lie.”

  “If he’s faking he’s really good,” Walter said. “I think he’s loyal.”

  Exley looked at Wells, who was staring into the one-way mirror, his face set and unsmiling. Occasionally he would walk around the room, sliding from corner to corner with slow long strides as Dex watched. A few weeks before, Exley had taken her kids to the Washington Zoo. Now, watching Wells, she recognized the controlled fury of a tiger pacing his cage. If they weren’t careful, he might not bother to control that fury much longer, she thought.

  DUTO SCOWLED WHEN he heard Walter’s assessment. “You let him stop? You let the guys in the chair tell you what to do?”

  “It’s not there,” Walter said. “He’s not lying.”

  “Maybe he’s too tough for you. Maybe he needs a more coercive environment.”

  Coercive. The magic word. Coercive meant weeks without sleep inside a tiny cell with no heat or running water, sensory deprivation in a dark, windowless room until the hallucinations began. Coercive wasn’t quite torture, but it was close.

  Exley decided that if she didn’t say something now she might as well resign. “Vinny, you can’t do that.” She kept her voice steady.

  “Did I ask permission?”

  “Forget that he’s an American citizen and it’s illegal. He can help us.”

  “Let me spell it out for you,” Duto said. “He hasn’t produced anything for us in a very long time. And this Islam crap is the last straw.”

  “He’s the only agent we’ve ever placed inside al Qaeda,” Exley said.

  “He’s not inside anymore. For all you know he’s lying about meeting Zawahiri. And even if it’s true, what did he get? A few bucks and a ride home? They don’t trust him any more than I do.”

  Duto had just revealed the real reason he was being so hard on Wells, Exley thought. He didn’t care whether Wells was loyal. In his eyes Wells had failed, and Duto would do anything to distance himself from failure.

  “Vinny. Coercion is unacceptable,” Shafer said.

  “Unacceptable to who?”

  “Drop it.”

  “Who you gonna tell, Ellis?” Duto said disgustedly. “Your friends in the Senate? At the Post?” He looked around the room, as if seeing Regina and Walter and Exley for the first time, imagining what they might say if they were called to testify. “Fine,” Duto said. “He goes back on the box.”

  “He already passed,” Shafer said. “Why don’t we have a friendly conversation with him tomorrow. Get more on these guys Khadri and Farouk. Maybe Wells can put together a name and a face. Maybe he knows more than he thinks.”

  “I doubt it. Is that your official recommendation, Ellis?”

  “Call it that.”

  “Put it in writing and I’ll consider it. In fact, perhaps we shouldn’t detain Mr. Wells at all. What would you think of letting him come and go as he pleases?”

  Shafer was taken aback, Exley saw.

  “As long as he’s under surveillance,” Shafer said. “Maybe a monitoring device.”

  “A monitoring device. He’ll love that. Put that in your note as well.” Duto turned to Walter. “I want a full report on the poly this afternoon. Thank you.” Duto walked out.

  Exley was half impressed, half disgusted. These guys played bureaucratic games so hard that it was easy to forget the real enemy. S
hafer had gotten control of Wells, but Duto had forced Shafer to put himself on the line to do it. And none of the infighting made any difference to the kids who’d died in L.A.

  “Let’s go get our boy,” Shafer said.

  IN THE CORRIDOR that connected the rooms, Shafer stopped and leaned toward her. “When we go in there, don’t tell John he passed the poly. Don’t be too friendly.”

  “Why?”

  “Just trust me on this. I don’t want him too comfortable.”

  Then why’d you bother to take him from Duto? she wondered. But Shafer wasn’t going to tell her, so she didn’t ask. Something important had just happened. She wished she knew what it was.

  THAT NIGHT SHAFER moved Wells to an agency safe house in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Washington. From the outside the place looked like just another run-down town house. Inside, it had cameras and alarms in every room. Still, the surveillance was unobtrusive. Two minders sat outside the house overnight, and Wells wore an electronic ankle bracelet that broadcast his location.

  Every day Dex drove Wells to talk with Shafer and Exley. They were decent, but hardly friendly. No one mentioned the polygraph, and he didn’t ask. He spent most of his time explaining al Qaeda’s structure and trying to identify members from surveillance photos. He was certain he wasn’t being shown anything too new or valuable. After he mentioned Khadri’s Oxbridge accent, Shafer gave him pictures of every Arab student who had attended a top British university in the last twenty years. None matched. The name Omar Khadri didn’t pop up in the NSA database either, they told him. Whoever Khadri was, he had stayed out of sight. Which made him very dangerous.

  Privately, Wells seethed at being stuck in limbo. He never mentioned or checked the e-mail account Khadri had created for him, fearing that if Khadri sent a message the agency would immediately try to set him up. That would never work. Khadri didn’t trust Wells, or he wouldn’t have been so coy about his plans. Wells would have to earn Khadri’s confidence, though he didn’t want to guess what that might take. And Khadri had surely designed the next attack — whatever it was — to work even without him. They would need to roll up Khadri’s network all at once, and only someone on the inside could do that. To beat Khadri, Wells needed some freedom to maneuver, precisely what he didn’t have.