The Chameleon Conspiracy

by Haggai Carmon

  “Then go to Iran,” I said. “Or better yet, ask your people in Iran to help us out. After all, this isn’t guarded military or nuclear information. We’re talking about a bunch of Iranian civilians.”

  “Too risky,” said Nicole. “Some of the graduates are now potential suspects under our new theory, but we don’t know which ones. We can make benign-sounding inquiries and hit on some of them. That will immediately trigger the attention of the Iranian security agencies, who’ll wonder why people are asking questions about these men.”

  “Even with a perfect legend?” I asked.

  “Making inquiries about one suspected individual could be a coincidence, but asking about two or three?”

  “I agree that if we limit our inquiries to the suspected group, it will arouse suspicion. But we can broaden the inquiries to include women as well. That might lessen the suspicions.” I paused for a moment and continued. “You’ve just given me an idea. We should have one of the alumni do the inquiries, ideally unwittingly. The end result will be a list of names of the ethnic-Iranian graduates provided by an innocent alumnus or alumna who, even if interrogated, will not be able to show any hidden agenda for the inquiries, just a ‘legitimate’ one. That person can be remotely controlled by your people in Tehran.”

  Nicole was quiet for a minute. “I think it’s a good idea, but I’m afraid it can’t be managed by our people in Iran.”

  “What does that mean? How can something so simple be beyond the reach of the omnipotent CIA?”

  She hesitated. “We’re a little short of assets in Iran these days, as I’m sure you heard during the Giverny conference. It’s all been since the debacle of—” She stopped abruptly.

  I raised my head. “What are you talking about?”

  “A disaster,” she said.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Well, the Iranians know, so I guess there shouldn’t be any reason for you not to know. An officer at Langley mistakenly sent an encrypted secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s foreign-asset network directly to his high-speed personal communications device. The Iranian who received the download was a double agent. He immediately turned the data over to his handler at VEVAK—the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the feared security police—and in no time most of our network in Iran collapsed. Several of our Iranian assets were arrested and jailed, and we still don’t know what happened to some of the others. That left us virtually blind in Iran.”

  “My god,” I said.

  She nodded grimly. “Since then, and until we regroup, Iran is regarded as ‘denied’ territory for us. We’ve got no official station inside Iran and, insofar as human intelligence is concerned, until we redeploy and recruit new assets, we depend on sources outside that country.”

  “What about SDLure?” I asked. “I remember hearing from my Mossad buddies, years after I left, about the CIA successfully recruiting top Iranian government officials.”

  “Gone with the revolution. The mob discovered their names at the U.S. Embassy. SDLure/1 was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first post–Islamic Revolution president. He fled the country. Another former prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, was executed. And now this.”

  “On the bright side, for now we don’t have to limit our search to Iran. Some of our sources could also be in the U.S.,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we’re communicating with alums. The American Overseas Schools in China, Iran, and elsewhere created a special bond and affinity among their students, because they weren’t just places of study, but also cultural and social centers for the children and their families. I’m sure if we interview the American alumni, we can cross-reference everybody in each of the classes. That will do, at least in the beginning.”

  “Do they have alumni associations?”

  “I found several links. They keep photos, yearbooks, and other material that will make our job less tedious than we think. We’d still need to interview hundreds,” I said, but she had already accepted the task.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and find information on more than one student from one alumnus or alumna.”

  We attached the list of all students without listed Social Security numbers to an encrypted file and sent it back to the State Department, asking them to locate any available information on the individuals on the list.

  “So we’re done,” Nicole said breezily. “What should we do now?” There still wasn’t a hint of what do you suggest we do for the rest of the evening? Thus far she hadn’t used anything but coolly professional talk in our interactions. This was the most casual she’d been.

  “Dinner?” asked Nicole, looking at me curiously. All of a sudden there was a personal tone to her question. Did that blonde iceberg have a personal life? Maybe there was lava brewing underneath the cold facade. I wasn’t going to explore it, at least not yet. We went out to a nearby corner bistro to have dinner.

  Still at the restaurant an hour later, I had a glass of 1990 Château Pétrus Merlot in my hand and was feeling pensive. “We shouldn’t rule out the possibility that new aliases have been substituted for the ones adopted twenty-five years ago.”

  Nicole frowned. “Do I understand you correctly? Instead of looking for the Chameleon in a group of a few hundred graduates of the American School in Tehran, we’ll be looking for an unknown number of people in a U.S. population of nearly three hundred million where, on an average day, more than one million people enter the United States legally and thousands more enter illegally?”

  “I understand where you’re coming from,” I said, keeping calm. “But it’s not our job to look for them in the U.S. We’ve got an assignment to find the Chameleon and whoever his comrades are. Now, I hope we get to solve the mystery of whether there are additional members of Department 81 in the U.S., but it’s the FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism sections’ problem, not ours.” I was starting to realize that maybe Nicole enjoyed being the sounding board for my crazy ideas. Her challenging questions were actually stimulants in what had become our mutual brainstorming.

  As they placed our platters in front of us—juicy steak frites for me, buttered mussels for her—my mobile phone vibrated.

  I glanced at its display. “There’s a communication waiting for us at the apartment.”

  “It can wait,” said Nicole, and I couldn’t have agreed more.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When we’d finished our well-deserved dinner, we returned to the safe apartment. Nicole went to the communication room and minutes later handed me a memo from the State Department. It read, “We have cross-referenced all student names without listed SSNs against other databases. The number of individuals matching the criteria you set brought down the number of students whose whereabouts are unknown to thirty-four.” The list was attached.

  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.”
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br />   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 sends 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.