THE INCREMENT

by David Ignatius

  5

  WASHINGTON

  Harry Pappas watched the wind rustle the trees outside the old headquarters building. The summer sky was darkening out west, up the Potomac River. The rain would begin soon. He closed his eyes. On summer days like this, he used to take his son Alex out sailing. Harry would leave work early and pick up Alex at home, and they would drive to a marina south of the airport. In July, the thunderstorms would arrive almost every evening. The slack Potomac would begin to churn; the cypress trees by the river would billow and bend. Alex loved it. Even when the bolts of lightning began to spark in the far distance, he would want to continue.

  They would race out of the marina on a strong breeze. When the tide was out, the river was so shallow near the shore that they would have to pull up the centerboard to clear the bottom, so that they could barely tack. But in the deeper water of mid-river, with the board down, a strong puff would make the boat heel over so far they would bury the lee rail, with water spilling into the cockpit. Alex would head the boat off the wind even farther, deeper into the puff, hiking out to keep the small boat from flipping over. Harry would hold on tight to the gunwales, inwardly pleased that he had a daredevil for a son.

  They would watch the rain move downriver toward them, an advancing sheet of liquid darkness. The air would chill a bit just before it came, and the first bolts of lightning would crack. They would race for the cover of shore and scramble up the riverbank while the rain pelted down and the lightning sliced a jagged line to the water. Sometimes Alex would scream, an animal howl of pure pleasure to be out there with his father amid this raw energy of nature. He was a risk taker, always. But he trusted his father to make sure it wasn’t too crazy a risk—to pull him out of the river before the lightning actually hit. That was the worst of it for Pappas. His son had trusted him.

  Pappas opened his eyes. It was a mistake to remember. The only way out was forward. Otherwise he would just give up.

  Pappas moved quickly to create the new compartment in which Dr. Ali would live. The first step was to send an answer to the Hotmail account. The Iranian was waiting. He knew how to hide in the entrails of the Internet—how to send a message from a computer and an ISP that bore none of his fingerprints. He knew all of these things, assuming that he existed at all.

  Pappas prepared the response message. It was one of several the agency had designed to contact virtual walk-ins. The text was a simple email in the recipient’s native language, in this case Farsi. It said: “We received your message. We wish you a happy and peaceful summer.” If anyone was monitoring the line with a packet sniffer, that’s all they would see. But once the Hotmail account was opened with the proper password, it would display another message, with a set of instructions that told the recipient how to establish encrypted communications through what amounted to a hidden virtual private network.

  The agency usually asked its new recruits to wait sixty days before contacting the CIA again, to make sure there was no electronic or physical surveillance. But in this case, the need for communication was too urgent. The Iranian nuclear program was “an imminent threat to global peace and security,” according to the White House. The Iranians supposedly had halted their actual weaponization project a few years before, but nobody was really sure if that was true. There were people in the administration who wanted to go to war, now, to stop the Iranians from making any more progress. Pappas assumed that Fox was a member of this party of war, but he had never asked him, not wanting to hear the response. Policy was for downtown, and for ambitious men like Arthur Fox.

  Where and when will we hold our next meeting? That was always the first question for an agent, virtual or physical. You asked it first because you never knew if contact might suddenly be disrupted. So in his encrypted response message, Pappas asked the basics: Can you travel? Can we contact you in your home country? Where do we reach you? He told Dr. Ali to wait fifteen days before responding to the secure web address using the agency’s encryption system. Fifteen days was too quick. Good tradecraft would have dictated a longer delay, to sanitize contact. But there wasn’t time.

  Pappas summoned Marcia Hill again. He wanted to talk, but not with Arthur Fox or the director or anyone else who could come back and bite him if he said something wrong. Marcia was good that way. She had stopped believing in the institution a long time ago, and now her loyalty was to people only. He wanted one of the kids around, too, so he asked Martin Vitter, Marcia’s operations chief, who had just come back from Iraq and who reminded him, in his deadly seriousness about destroying “bad guys,” of his son Alex.

  They gathered in Pappas’s windowless office. The admin officer had brought some coffee and cookies from the cafeteria to make it seem like a proper meeting. Pappas was edgy. He wasn’t comfortable with good news.

  “How are we going to run this guy?” he began. “We’re going to need him five years from now as much as we do today, but how do we keep him alive? How do we find him, meet him, and train him? Otherwise he’s going to end up a dead man.”

  “Duh! Let’s start with finding him?” said Marcia. “Right now we don’t have an agent, we have an email address.”

  “Okay, so let’s assume Dr. Ali wants to play. He answers my message and tells us how to initiate contact. Let’s think about that. What do we do then? Do we try to meet him in-country?”

  “Negative, sir,” cut in Martin Vitter. “They’ll make us, then they’ll make him. Then he’s dead. Meet him outside. Get him to Dubai or Turkey, where we have some operational control.”

  “But suppose he can’t travel,” said Pappas.

  “Everyone travels at Nowruz, right?” Nowruz was the Persian New Year.

  “Wrong,” said Marcia. “The nuclear people are on a no-travel list now. Even at Nowruz. And besides, that’s nine months off. They don’t give these guys pilgrimage visas, even. I think we have to meet him in Iran.”

  Pappas thought about it for a moment. The right answer was outside, but outside was impossible.

  “I agree with Marcia. If he’s really part of the nuclear program, they won’t let him out. We have to poke him at home. So how do we do that?”

  He wasn’t asking them, really. He answered the question himself.

  “First we get him a cov-comm device in Tehran. Right? We don’t try to meet face-to-face at all. We leave it for him at a drop. In a park somewhere. We get someone who’s totally clean to lay it down. A traveler who has no record with us. Someone with a Turkish passport, maybe Kuwaiti. Someone with balls who will just go into the park, drop the toy, and get the fuck out of there. And then Dr. Ali picks it up, and bingo, we have communication. And then we go from there.”

  “What kind of toy?” asked Marcia. “What does it look like?”

  “I don’t know. A rock. A clod of dirt. A soda pop can. Whatever the tech people say will blend with the drop site.”

  “Sounds kind of dry,” said Marcia. “Iranians like a kiss. Something to tell them you love them.”

  “Okay. As soon as we know who he is, we reach out and touch him. We send something to him, unmarked, that could only come from us. Perfume for his wife. Medicine for his kids. Something that says ‘America loves you.’ Something that says ‘Even right here in the center of fucking Tehran, in the goon capital of the world, we can put something on your doorstep.’”

  Vitter’s eyes were wide as saucers. This was how he wanted the CIA to be. All-powerful, able to navigate every alleyway on the planet.

  Marcia Hill brought them back to reality.

  “We don’t have an address, remember? We don’t know where the guy lives or works. We don’t know if he’s young or old. We don’t know if he has a wife or kids, let alone whether they like perfume or need drugs. As a matter of fact, dear boys, we do not know whether Dr. Ali is a man or a woman. What if she is reading Lolita in Tehran this summer and thinks it’s a turn-on to send messages to the CIA? Consider that.”

  “You’re a pain, Marcia. You know that?” Pappas smiled. “
Let’s start again. This time, let’s assume that our boy doesn’t want to make contact at all. No meet. No address. No cov-comm device. No nothing. He’s too scared. What do we do then?”

  “We let him write the rules,” said Marcia. “He’s going to do that anyway.”

  “No way!” said Harry. “Without a handle on him, we can’t evaluate what he says. He may be playing us. How would we know? We have to find him.”

  “How, Harry?” Her voice was respectful but insistent.

  “I don’t know,” admitted Pappas. “I’m thinking about it.”

  Pappas still had to kill Dr. Ali in the cable traffic. He had to cover the tracks so that people wouldn’t ask questions about the Iranian VW or pass along corridor gossip. And Harry was a good liar: as a young officer, he had felt uncomfortable with that part of the job, until he realized that was the job.

  The CIA had burned too many Iranian agents already. Like the postal screwup, in which the same translator had written the SW letters to the whole string of Iranian agents, all addressed in the same neat script. They spent hundreds of hours finding accommodation addresses all over Germany to receive the “secret writing” correspondence, but somehow nobody thought to wonder if the Iranians would notice so many messages in identical handwriting. And a dozen years later came the dead-drop screwup—in which an agent was told to collect a message from a site in a Tehran park that was so blindingly obvious that officers from MOI—the country’s intelligence service—staked it out and waited for the poor fool to show up. The Iran task force had made so many mistakes over the past twenty-five years, it was astounding that any Iranian still thought of sharing secrets with the CIA. That was the kicker with Dr. Ali: Was he stupid, or reckless? Or was he the most dubious case of all—a spy who just wanted to do the right thing?

  Pappas’s first phony message was to Fox in Counter-

  Proliferation, with copies to the rest of the distribution list, asking if they could advise about the mysterious message from Iran. In the special channel of the new SAP, he sent Fox a prepared response. It said that the CP Division had examined the document and concluded it had been used in a set of Pakistani centrifuge specifications that were widely available on the Internet. That was sent to the full distribution list as well. The implicit message was that the Dr. Ali case, BQTANK, looked like a bust—a promising initial contact that turned out to be a hoax.

  Pappas waited a few days and then had the head of the Information Operations Center send out another message, again to the full distribution list. The computer center had done some technical work inside the Hotmail servers, the message said. The “doktor.ali” account had been opened by a computer in Tehran that had been purchased by the Ministry of the Interior. That was a lie, too. The IOC had tried to establish the precise origination of the message, but they couldn’t. Dr. Ali was too clever.

  That nailed it, in terms of the legend. So far as anyone outside the SAP compartment would know, Dr. Ali was a hoax—worse, even. He was probably an Iranian provocation, created by the MOI. Pappas made it official by sending out a “burn notice” that all agency personnel should avoid any contact, electronic or otherwise, with the Iranian. Any attempts by “Dr. Ali” to resume communication should be reported to Pappas personally. That was it. The Iranian VW was dead and gone, as far as the agency’s official traces would show.

  Harry brought one other intelligence service into the loop, but only at the highest level. By secure encrypted cable, he informed his friend Adrian Winkler, the chief of staff of the British Secret Intelligence Service, that the agency had a new lead that had come in via the website. The new source appeared to have access to the Iranian nuclear program, but the agency was still struggling to confirm his information and discover, if it could, his identity. Harry gave the few other details they had, and asked if they rang any bells in London.

  He sent the cable for two reasons: he wanted to make sure that the British were not running the same agent; and he had a glimmer in the far horizon of his mind that he might need their help at some point in the future.

  Harry took his wife Andrea to the movies that Friday night. It was a “summer blockbuster,” one of those movies that had gotten its start with a character from a comic book, and then had been stretched through so many remakes there wasn’t much left. They sat through the first half, but when yet another tedious special-effects sequence was cranking up, Andrea nudged her husband.

  “I hate this movie,” she said.

  “So do I,” whispered Harry.

  “Then let’s go.”

  They walked out, pissing off all the people who had to miss a second or two of computer-generated nonsense as they stepped past knees and ankles along the row of seats.

  They had dinner at Legal Sea Foods in Tysons Corner. It was the first place Harry thought of, because his agency friends often came there for lunch. Andrea ordered a piña colada, which she usually did only on vacation. Harry had a whiskey, and then another. The two were getting pleasantly plastered. It felt like the first time they had relaxed together in several years.

  Andrea asked Harry a question she wondered about sometimes, especially during the hard times, but would only have asked him when she was a little tipsy. Remind her why had he joined the CIA in the first place? He had seemed happy as an army officer when she first met him in Worcester. Why had he traded that for such a complicated life?

  “My father wanted me to do it,” said Harry, looking at his glass and taking another gulp. “He loved the CIA.”

  “Why?” she pressed. “What had it ever done for him?”

  “Matter of honor,” said Harry. “He thought we owed them. He was a Greek, to a fault. So if he made a friend, that was it, friend for life. Before I was born, when he was still living in Greece, he got involved in the fighting. They had a civil war in the late 1940s. People forget that. My dad was on the side fighting the communists. The Americans helped him. It wasn’t the CIA back then. They called it something else. But they were American spies, basically. They gave him weapons and money, and when he got wounded they helped him come to America. They saved his life. That was what he always told me.”

  “So he wanted you to join up?”

  “The army, yes. And then when I got pitched by the agency, I asked him what he thought. I wasn’t supposed to, but I couldn’t help it. We were Greeks. We didn’t have secrets from each other. I had never seen him so happy. He kissed me. Tears were streaming down his face.”

  “So it’s a chain,” said Andrea. “Father to son, father to son.”

  She didn’t say it bitterly or angrily. It was just the truth.

  6

  TEHRAN

  The young Iranian was in his office in Jamaran, reading back articles from the American Journal of Physics, when they came for him. He didn’t hear the knock because he was listening to his iPod while he read, so they had to push the door open. The young man rose with a start, pulling the buds from his ears. Two burly men entered the room. They wore dark green suits the color of a fir tree. Behind them stood Dr. Bazargan, the laboratory director. He was trying to maintain his dignity, but without much success.

  “Sobh bekheyr, Doktor,” said one of the men in plain clothes, bidding the scientist good morning. He took out an official card and proffered it toward the young man. It identified him as an officer of the Etelaat-e Sepah, the Revolutionary Guard’s intelligence service, which had responsibility for the security of the nuclear program.

  “Salamat baush,” continued the officer. Good health to you. He observed the rituals of Muslim greeting, even when he barged in the door.

  “Alhamdollah,” returned the young Iranian. Thanks God. He felt a moistness glistening on his forehead. He wanted to flee, but that was impossible. Be calm, he told himself. They have come like this before. It is probably nothing.

  “We would like to ask you some questions, Doctor.”

  “Yes, certainly. Please sit down.” He felt naked. He wished he had a beard to hide behind, instead
of showing all this skin.

  “I am afraid your office would not be convenient. I think some other place. We have apologized to Dr. Bazargan.” He nodded toward the director, still standing anxiously just outside the door.

  “My work is important,” said the young scientist. That was his only card of authority.

  “Yes, Doctor. Of course. Thanks God.”

  The officer did not say that it was all routine, that it would be over quickly, that he would be back at work soon. The young man reached in his pocket for his handkerchief and patted his forehead before it got wetter. The handkerchief felt cool on the skin and the sweat stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Perhaps this would be easy. They couldn’t know. He had been careful.

  The scientist reached for his valise, but the officer told him not to bring anything except his passport. The two security men followed him out the door, one on either side, a few steps behind. As they entered the main corridor, faces peered out from the other offices to see who the authorities had summoned. The office in Jamaran was morbid that way. They never talked about security, but every six months or so someone disappeared and never came back. Usually the person resurfaced on some other island of the scientific archipelago—thinner, quieter, more cautious. Nobody ever spoke about what happened. That was part of the price of working on sensitive projects. You never knew when the floor under you might give way, or how far you might fall.

  The young man could hear his own footsteps echoing in the corridor. He walked past several of his friends. One winked and gave a faint wave, but the others looked away.