The Chameleon Conspiracy

by Haggai Carmon

  “With nuclear warheads?” I asked.

  “No. But that’s no consolation. They have a range of eighteen hundred miles, which covers most of Russia, Japan, and of course Israel.”

  “I heard that Iran was developing long-range missiles,” I said. “And that their ultimate goal is to develop transcontinental missiles with a sixty-five hundred mile range that can get to the United States. But they aren’t there yet, so that’s why they purchased ready-made ones. But what have I got to do with it?”

  Hodson ignored my question and continued. “Even now, after that sale, Iran is already the third country in the world, after the U.S. and Russia, to have cruise missiles. This type has a sophisticated navigational system that corrects itself after launch by comparing the terrain it passes with photos of the target programmed into its computer.”

  “But you didn’t answer my question. What have I done in this matter to deserve the letter?” I persisted.

  Casey finally spelled it out. “You identified Hasan Lotfi as a potential defector. We made contact with him. He brought in the information. The Pentagon is pretty pleased. Pressure put on the Ukrainian government led to the dealers’ indictment, and the Iranians will have a difficult time getting spare parts and tech support. Without that, the missiles won’t be operational too soon.”

  I folded the letter and put it back in the envelope. “My grandchildren will be proud of me,” I said with half a smile. “What about McHanna? I was sick like a dog for two days.”

  Hodson briefed me on McHanna’s interrogation.

  “What about the sniper?” I asked.

  “Staged,” said Hodson. “We suspected from the beginning that the event was odd. A pro using a scope missed from fifty-seven yards? No sniper would miss from four times that short distance using such sophisticated equipment. The conclusion was that the shooter didn’t intend to hit McHanna.”

  “He only wanted to frighten him?”

  “We thought of that too. But your initial suspicion of Saida Rhaman, the receptionist, was right. We got to her, and from her to her uncle, Nikoukar Jafarzadeh. Corroborative evidence was found when we discovered that the gun was purchased in Virginia by Nikoukar Jafarzadeh. He and his niece told us that McHanna had asked them to arrange the mock shooting.”

  “Did he give them a reason?”

  “Yes. According to them, McHanna said that his management didn’t appreciate him and was about to fire him, which could lead to Saida’s losing her job as well. Therefore he thought that an attempt on his life would make it difficult for the company’s owners to get rid of him.”

  “Did you buy that story? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?” grunted Hodson. “We’ve leads suggesting that Nikoukar Jafarzadeh was the Atashbon’s local muscle, and the shooting came as a warning to McHanna.”

  “Why didn’t he take McHanna out?”

  “We’ll investigate that. But personally I think that McHanna misread the Iranians. He was too valuable to them, his stealing notwithstanding. Money was not their problem at that point—you’ll soon hear why. McHanna was the only non-Iranian in the operation, and they didn’t trust him completely, but still needed a Yankee in the operation.”

  “I guess they were right.” I scratched my head. “What about Reza Nazeri? He was pushed from the platform of a train to his death. Was McHanna involved?”

  “McHanna confessed that he ordered his death as self-defense. Reza discovered that McHanna was stealing and threatened to turn him in.”

  I wondered why Reza hadn’t just had McHanna quietly eliminated. Had he tried and failed?

  “What about Nazeri’s apartment? I found it too clean.”

  “We haven’t gotten to it yet, but I’m sure McHanna went there personally or sent Jafarzadeh.”

  “So if we have sufficient evidence, why strike a deal?”

  “McHanna told us these details in a proffer, with the understanding that there will be a plea bargain. Life without the possibility of parole. That’s a worse punishment than death.”

  “What about the remaining members of Atashbon?”

  “He said he has details on only six members.”

  “Did he name them?”

  “Yes. Kourosh, our Chameleon; Reza, aka Gonda, now deceased; and Arthur Jenkins, Timothy Williamson, Alec Simmons, Kevin DiAngelo, and Frank Gonzales. These names match the names of American men who went missing in the eighties. These six suspects changed these names to other American-sounding names immediately after they completed the first round of the scam operations. They simply used the good old throwaway cover: one alias was layered on top of another alias. That’s why we couldn’t find them— the string of aliases was abandoned, but the operatives remained here. They are all in custody. They claimed that they had severed their relationship with Iran a long time ago, and are now law-abiding citizens.”

  “Though not, of course, of the U.S.” I said. “Do you believe them?”

  He chuckled. “They’ll be indicted, and tried. If convicted, they’ll be deported after serving their sentences—that is, if they’re still living forty to sixty years from now. Oddly, or not so oddly, some of them claimed to be employees of a legitimate printing-press company. When we checked their story an interesting thing happened. In addition to their racketeering activity in defrauding banks and being covert operatives of Iran, they were operating a much bigger operation, which dwarfed the $300 million stolen from U.S. banks. We’re talking billions of dollars here. Three hundred million is a lot of money, but it cannot collapse the U.S. economy. But hundreds of billions could cause serious damage.”

  “Billions? I saw no reference to it in the files.”

  “There was no reference there,” said Hodson. “Together with U.S. Secret Ser vice we discovered that Atashbon members in the United States were running a printing press of counterfeit U.S. dollars. Iranian agents bought the printing machines from Germany and smuggled them to the U.S. in several shipments, using a front company run by Atashbon members. The sad thing is that Americans trained the Iranians to use these high-end printing presses.”

  “You mean we trained them to print dollars?” asked Bob Holliday.

  “Of course not,” said Hodson. “In the early 1970s the Shah of Iran asked the U.S. to help solve counterfeiting problems that threatened to undermine Iran’s currency. So we sent technical people from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to Tehran to improve the safety of the Iranian currency.”

  “The balls on them!” said Casey Bauer. “We trained them. Now we discover that they had an incredible audacity. Years later these motherfuckers were intending to collapse the U.S. economy.”

  “Good thing the hundred-dollar bill was redesigned,” I said.

  “There are three types of forged dollars,” explained Hodson. “Two are rather primitive and easy to detect, but the third is a real piece of art. Common forgers use offset lithography, which prints dollars that lack the feel of real currency because the ink is flat, unlike the raised ink of genuine bills. Digital forgeries are very common because anyone with a scanner and high-quality printer or a copier can become a forger. But again, unless you use the fabric of genuine dollars, the notes printed are in fact Monopoly money, particularly when they all have the same serial number. But the Iranians managed to produce high-quality notes, using the same intaglio printing presses that the Bureau of Engraving does.”

  “What’s intaglio?” asked Bob.

  “A press that creates miniscule ridges on cotton-linen paper by forcing it at high pressure into the ink-filled grooves of an engraved plate. Now the outcome looks—and better yet, feels—like real currency,” answered Hodson, looking at his notes.

  “How did they get over the biggest obstacle, the material used for U.S. currency?” asked Holliday.

  “It’s difficult but not impossible,” said Hodson. “Currency paper is composed of 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. Red and blue synthetic fibers of various
lengths are distributed evenly throughout the paper. Governments can buy it freely, and we assume Iran had no problem acquiring it. We think they decided to print the currency in the U.S. because it’d be much easier to smuggle the fabric into the U.S. than the final product—bales of billions of forged U.S. dollars. Nonetheless, the Secret Ser vice is still investigating how the fabric entered the U.S. for the Iranians’ local printing needs.”

  “The printing operation here was seized, and that’s what’s important,” concluded Casey.

  Hodson nodded. “I must concede that we knew about the Iranian effort, but never made the connection to the Chameleon cases until we cracked them. As early as 1996 the General Accounting Office reported that a foreign government was sponsoring production of the ‘Superdollar’—a high-quality bill.”

  “How did they distribute that volume?” asked Holliday. “You can get away with a few millions, not billions.”

  “The operative word is slowly. We have evidence that bills printed in the U.S. were introduced into the circulation through their bogus charities and using criminal enterprises that usually launder drug money, to launder much bigger amounts. Some of the money printed in Iran was given to Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad to finance their operations, and they distributed it from Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Soon enough, the money turned up in Hong Kong, Macao, South Korea, Russia, and Latin America.”

  “Has anyone assessed the actual or potential damage to the U.S. economy?” I asked.

  “There are only estimates,” said Hodson. “We have no numbers to mea sure the impact, but this counterfeiting is a clear form of economic warfare that could cause serious inflation in the U.S., and undermine the world market’s confidence in U.S. currency. Now we put the lid on it.”

  I was curious to hear more about the ploy we used to infiltrate me into Iran. “Did the alumni hold the reunion after all?”

  “Yes, we sent Erikka back to complete the arrangements. If the reunion plans were scrapped, a suspicion could arise about whether the plan was just a cover for your activities. We wanted to keep that part of your mission clean.”

  Why would we care? I thought, although I knew the answer. The reunion helped recruit new assets.

  “Was the event successful?”

  “From our perspective, yes. We had to close the circle.” He’d tacitly confirmed my assumption.

  “Any progress in the investigation regarding my Bern hotel-room search? Do you know whodunit?” I touched my head. I’d had enough of unpleasant encounters with strangers in European hotel rooms. Couldn’t my rivals just for once send somebody nice? How come in the thriller movies there’s an attractive woman who is gently confronting the good guy, while in reality I collide with burly men with body odors?

  “We have incomplete results.”

  I sensed that Casey wasn’t telling me everything, but CIA guys tend to be like that.

  “We didn’t clean up the world from all sorts of bad guys, but we’re trying,” he said. “The job at your hotel was carried out by people working for the Iranian security services. We think they were local burglars hired for that onetime job. The Swiss police already have a suspect. Our assumption is that they wanted to know what you found out at the bank. When we realized that, we asked Benny Friedman to find a way to alert Tempelhof Bank to increase security at its ware house. They could attempt to destroy the evidence.”

  I paused. “I hate to dwell on this, but how did they find out I was coming to Switzerland and where I was staying?”

  “Benny has investigated it from the direction of the bank personnel. The Mossad found a bad apple in the bank’s staff, whose duty was to alert Iran whenever there was any outside interest in their clandestine financial activities passing through the bank. That was a very smart move on the Iranians’ part, installing security on both sides of the money-laundering ring.”

  “How did Benny catch the mole, without having any official or formal connection to the bank?”

  “Benny never said it in so many words, but I think he pulled out an old trick for smoking out your enemy. He spread a rumor at the bank that on that very day the Swiss police were about to raid the bank seeking evidence of ‘private’ deposits made at the bank by members of the current Iranian regime. One employee was monitored leaving the bank in haste during office hours and was photographed making a call from a pay phone just outside the bank. Benny had anticipated it and bugged all public phones in the area.”

  “Shrewd move,” I said in appreciation.

  Just as I thought we were done, Hodson gave me a folder.

  “Pack your bags, you are going to Australia to get the Chameleon.”

  “Again? Why? Hasn’t the telephone number in McHanna’s address book been decoded? The Australian Federal Police can find him easily.” I just didn’t feel like leaving again.

  “It was decoded. It belongs to an Australian woman. She told the police that Norman McAllister has rented a small apartment from her but took off just about the same time you gave us the number. He still owes her two months’ rent. So far, the Australian Federal Police have no clue. Since you know what the Chameleon looks like and you have the most ‘Chameleon hours,’ we thought that your presence there could help.”

  “Did you try to trace the Chameleon through the $3,000 wire transfer McHanna said he made?” I asked. Maybe not all bases were covered, and I’d be spared that long haul.

  “It was just another lie. There was no such transfer to anyone by that name in the past month. McHanna was bullshitting you.”

  I thought it was strange. McHanna didn’t lie regarding the Chameleon’s phone number, but lied on the money transfer. I wondered why. But said nothing.

  “When am I leaving?” I asked, accepting the travel folder. “To night.”

  Two days later I landed at Sydney’s airport and Peter Maxwell, the curly-haired Australian federal agent, picked me up.

  “Any news?” I asked anxiously as he escorted me through immigration.

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “We searched his rented apartment, but nothing was found. His landlady said he was a quiet tenant and had no visitors, but he was always behind on his rent. She said he left a few short days ago without any luggage, together with two men who came with a late-model Japanese car.”

  “Any more details?”

  “Nothing, she just saw them from the back. All she could say was that the car was white.”

  “Did you get his phone records?” I was hoping for a clue there.

  “He never used the apartment’s phone for outgoing calls, only incoming. She said he had a cell phone, but she doesn’t know the number.”

  “Did you trace it through other means?”

  “No,” said Maxwell apologetically. “There were no listings for any of the names we had.”

  “Including Norman McAllister?” I asked with a shred of hope.

  “Yes, but there’s nothing. It’s quite possible he used a stolen phone or one of these ‘pay as you go’ phones that require no registration.”

  I was exhausted, but after only a few hours of sleep I forced myself to start working. I’ll rest in my old age, I promised myself. I had a hunch where to start looking for the Chameleon.

  I called Sheila Levi, the legal secretary that the Chameleon almost managed to marry.

  She sounded very surprised, but glad to hear my voice. “I was hoping you’d call,” she said in a soft voice. “In fact I wanted to call you, but I didn’t have your number.”

  “I’m here now. Is there something you wanted to tell me?” “Yes. I told you last time we met that I gave Herb Goldman jewelry I’d inherited from my grandmother.”

  “Yes.” I remembered how disgusted I’d been to hear how the Chameleon, posing as Herbert Goldman, had used Sheila.

  “Well. He sold them to a jewelry shop near the Rocks. About two weeks ago I looked at the window of that shop and was happy to see on display a necklace and a ring that I gave Goldman. They were not sold yet.”

  “If
you want to get them back, you’ll probably need a good lawyer.” I said.

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I entered the shop. I know the owner. He’s a member of the Jewish community—he’s a nice person. I asked him if I could pay him over time for the necklace, hoping to retrieve at least one piece from my grandmother’s gifts to me.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He agreed immediately. I’m paying him $10 a week for sixty-five weeks, and it will be mine again. He was kind to let me have the necklace immediately. The interesting thing is that he said that Goldman came by his shop last week to sell him more jewelry.”

  If I was still tired, I forgot all about it. “Tell me more.”

  “The reason I wanted to call you was that I knew you were looking for him. You see, the shop keep er told me that he refused Goldman’s offer to sell him that jewelry until Goldman could prove ownership. He became suspicious.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Goldman asked for $500 for jewelry worth at least $1,500.”

  “Did Goldman tell the shop keep er he’d be back with proof?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I called Maxwell and gave him the information.

  “It’s a start,” he said. “We have an additional lead. A person answering Goldman’s description has attempted to purchase a forged passport.”

  “Any leads from there?”

  “No, it was an anonymous tip to our hotline. We assumed he was unable to leave Australia because his Goldman passport became useless ever since you exposed his Goldman identity.”

  I ran the facts through my mind. It was possible that the Chameleon had unilaterally severed his relationship with the Iranian intelligence services and had no way of getting another passport. Otherwise he’d have been out of there a long time ago. The fact that he’d tried to get a passport independently both locally and from McHanna only supported my hunch. Active agents of foreign countries can be sure that in time of distress, their handlers will extricate them. When that didn’t happen, the only conclusion was that the Chameleon didn’t contact the Iranians.