The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “You see the White House has asked your old friend Peter Rena and his partner to look into Oosay?”

  Gordon looks up at her. He had seen the skeptical Wall Street Journal piece last night on social media, he tells her. He had even made a note for himself about it.

  “I think maybe the Wall Street Journal has it wrong,” Bishop says. “Rather than a cover-up, maybe the White House isn’t sure what happened out there and doesn’t trust their own people to tell them.”

  “Funny,” Gordon says. “I had the same thought.”

  He hunts for something on his desk.

  “And I have a Post-it note here I wrote to remind myself about it.”

  “What’s it say?”

  He lifts it up. Written on it are the words “See Jill Bishop.”

  Part Two

  The Rotten Onion

  Eleven

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Rena can sense at once that they are in trouble.

  As with any crime, they need evidence from the scene, and they sent Walt Smolonsky to Oosay with a forensics team to examine the damaged compound. Even that devolved into controversy. The FBI is angry about an outside group fouling its crime scene. The State Department is angry about jurisdiction in general. The CIA is worried about anyone being inside the new secure American building called “the Barracks.” The trip turns into a group tour—Smolo and two forensics consultants they’ve hired, an FBI team, plus monitors from State, CIA, and DIA. They fill two vans.

  After only a day, Smolo sends an encrypted message saying there are serious questions about the administration’s account. The compound’s gates were clearly detonated by some explosive device, not overrun, which suggests a level of premeditation to the attack.

  They are still trying to track down the Liberty Brigade guards who vanished into the countryside. The five people who had been staffing “the Barracks” that night are also gone. They are private military contractors, and now they are “on leave” in Europe—which is as suspicious as it is frustrating.

  Morat and Washington both teem with rumors—everything from the attack being an accidental U.S. drone strike now being blamed on the Moratians to the attack being a fake, a so-called false flag, to create sympathy for U.S. policy. There are also varying reports of a mysterious “man on the roof.” Some witnesses described the figure as someone with binoculars who appeared to be monitoring the compound before anything began and remained on the roof throughout. Who was he? Had someone found him? There were more questions than answers, and before long the mysterious figure would fade from interest.

  Wiley and Lupsa have assembled all of it, everything they could glean from public records about the incident into different digital files—one each about the protest in Oosay, the political situation in Morat, extremist groups in the region, and the key players who might be hiding something from the president. In the firm nomenclature, these background dossiers are called “Wileys” and are so thorough and nuanced they are considered a unique asset of the firm.

  “Wileys” also fit with Rena and Brooks’s own approach to investigation. At West Point, Rena’s favorite professor was a man named Stanley Atkins, a civilian historian and a Napoleonic scholar whose orations were closer to sermons than class lectures. “To survive in battle,” Atkins would tell students on the first day, “I don’t know if it helps to believe in God. But I know you should believe in preparation.”

  As they prepare for this investigation, Rena and Brooks believe the key is understanding the late General Brian Roderick.

  “There is a good deal known about the general, a lot more than about most one-star brigadiers,” Wiley says, handing out printed copies of her file on the third day of the investigation. “Journalists loved him. He was a prominent character in two major books on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  “Our man was brave,” Brooks says as she reads. “Roderick was deployed in the Middle East longer than any other officer in the U.S. military, much of it on the front lines.”

  “Two and a half years in Fallujah,” Rena says, reading.

  Fallujah was an Iraqi hellhole—the site of a bloody years-long operation to hold the city, taking it, losing it, retaking it, and trying to hold it.

  “And he was a renegade,” says Brooks. Wiley and Lupsa’s file describes how Roderick preferred to stay near the battle’s edge rather than in a commander’s tent and disliked the new method of officers watching battles from drone cameras.

  When he visited primitive combat outposts, he avoided staff officers, who Roderick thought were too eager to please and hence inclined to varnish the truth. He gravitated instead to kids whose body armor bore the insignia of lance corporal, the second-lowest rank. These were the everyday soldiers who did the inglorious work of war and nation building, understood the war better, and were more inclined to honesty.

  He had similarly unusual views about getting close to the local residents whose countries he was trying to liberate or rebuild, the file says.

  Roderick was often out of uniform, in plain clothes or native garb. He spent hours with civilians close to the ground, sitting in cafes and the homes of ordinary people—not high-ranking local officials.

  “He argued we couldn’t help rebuild countries whose people and cultures we didn’t understand,” Wiley has written. Roderick forged widespread relationships with these people, and from these hundreds of hours on the ground began developing his own thoughts about what was wrong with U.S. policy.

  He began to believe both party orthodoxies about the war on terror were wrong. Conservatives—and many Pentagon officials—tended to advocate massive troop presence and staying the course. Roderick thought those policies were doomed to inspire more terrorism.

  Liberals tended to favor keeping a small footprint for as short a time as possible. Roderick thought that would leave the region in chaos.

  He finished a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins while on active duty. In his dissertation he argued that the data proved American policy was failing in the Middle East and Africa. In 2004 there were 21 Islamic terrorist groups in 18 countries, he had written. By 2017, there were more than 40 operating in over 30 countries.

  Roderick began to develop a new theory on how to fight the war on terror, which he gave the clinical name “Multidimensional Global Security.”

  It was built on four ideas. The first was that the United States needed to replace what looked like military occupation to root out extremists with intensive nation building at the local level that would win over local populations. This work should be done painstakingly, he argued, thoroughly reestablishing civil society in one city or area at a time before moving on to the next. “Establish a deep and functioning society in one place. Prove our concept and our sincerity. Then repeat. It will begin to develop its own momentum. Right now we are failing in many places and proving our own inability—however good our intentions,” he wrote.

  The second concept was that this work should be done largely out of uniform. It should look civilian.

  The third concept was about length of commitment. Roderick felt the United States needed to convey to the countries where it was involved that it was there for the long haul, a commitment of at least a decade, to prove we were serious. Anything less, Roderick argued, would be doubted by the people in these countries and worked to the advantage of the jihadists, who are playing the ultimate long game. “These people believe we will abandon them as soon as we can and that the extremists will return and retaliate.”

  It was an impossible commitment to make politically. That was precisely why, Roderick argued, it was so vital a commitment to communicate. “We did in it Europe. We did it in Korea. Why can’t we do it in the Middle East and Africa?”

  The final element of Roderick’s approach was in some ways the most controversial: it leaned heavily on global covert special ops rather than conventional troops on the ground. In effect, at the same time we were building civil societies from the bott
om up, Roderick advocated we use those local contacts to engage in an intense campaign of assassination to cut off the heads of terrorist groups worldwide. His plan for daily military presence was fairly small. He didn’t like carrying on low-level civil war everywhere.

  What some thought paradoxical was that Roderick had come up through special operations—the military euphemism for classified and often brutal secret warfare. In some circles, that background gave his nation-building theories added credibility. In more Machiavellian quarters at the Pentagon, Roderick’s background as a secret soldier raised questions about whether he had gone over a cliff—or whether his civilian nation-building ideas might be a cover story for what was a massive covert war in Africa and the Middle East.

  For all that Roderick had his detractors, however, he was universally acknowledged for his courage and his battle acumen. He was considered one of the bravest leaders in an American uniform and one of the single best leaders of frontline troops and of special operations—a rare combination. That had made him immune to being ignored or entirely put out to pasture.

  “What do you think he was doing in Oosay?” Brooks asks Wiley.

  “He was on the ground. Talking to local people,” Wiley says.

  “But according to the public reports, he was meeting high-ranking Moratians in the Manor House. Not going undercover in cafes.”

  “Maybe those days were over,” Wiley says.

  Rena knew Roderick by reputation. “Or maybe not,” he says.

  Twelve

  MONDAY, DECEMBER 16, 3:10 P.M.

  ELYRIA, OHIO

  It was Hallie Jobe who found the first survivor.

  Media reports usually referred to Adam O’Dowd as a “private contractor.” Jobe thought that made him sound like he worked construction.

  In another era, he would have been called a mercenary. But with so much of the U.S. defense and intelligence budget now obscured through outsourcing to private contractors, O’Dowd was really just an American soldier paid at a higher wage to fight for his own country—with the money harder to trace.

  After meeting him, Hallie Jobe thinks he would have fought for free.

  O’Dowd was part of General Roderick’s five-man personal security detail, and one of only two who survived. He took automatic rounds to the back and shoulder, then picked up another man, Terry Halleck, and carried him across the killing zone to the safety of the Barracks. When he put his friend down again, Halleck was dead.

  It is eight days since the Oosay incident. O’Dowd had spent three in a hospital in Germany and has been back in the United States for five more. Jobe found him through an old Marine contact, recuperating at his aunt’s in his hometown of Elyria, Ohio. His mother, who lived a mile away, claimed she didn’t know where he was. When Jobe finally gets him on the phone, O’Dowd agrees to meet her.

  Elyria is west of Cleveland about forty minutes, down Interstate 80, just past the outer edges of the suburbs. Jobe flies to Cleveland and rents a car.

  Ohio is gray, and the Great Recession clings to it like a smoker’s cough. Off the interstate, there are industrial parks with “for lease” signs and ghostly shopping malls with most of the storefronts and parking lots vacant, save for the clusters of old-model cars outside the Applebee’s and Olive Gardens.

  O’Dowd had agreed to meet at Ruben’s Deli, which turns out to be a coffee shop with faded Formica tables located in a mini mall across the street from a vacant lot.

  He is waiting for her inside on a bench by the door, a bandana sling securing his wounded arm. He is African American, not Irish. He rises from the bench carefully, the shoulder and back still obviously painful. He has a running back’s build, squat, about five ten, thick legged, and strong, with a gentle face that is easy to read.

  They are shown to a booth, and she asks how he is mending.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “It can take a while,” she says. “I took a blow to the head eighteen months ago. More than a year before I was all the way back. But I got there.”

  “In country?” O’Dowd asks, meaning in the Middle East. He can sense she’d been military.

  “No. I did two tours. Iraq and Afghanistan, Marine Corps, and never a scratch. I got hurt working as a private investigator.”

  Jobe had been almost killed by the man who had been stalking Judge Roland Madison, but she had probably saved the life of the judge’s daughter, Victoria.

  A pale teenage waitress arrives with water glasses and laminated menus. When she wanders off again, O’Dowd says, “I don’t know how I can help you.”

  Jobe repeats what she’d said on the phone. She is working for the president of the United States. The president wants to know what happened out there. So he hired her firm to find out, outside the usual channels, outside politics.

  O’Dowd gives a quarter smile—maybe he believes a quarter of her story.

  “That’s a lot of investigations,” he says warily. “White House. FBI. I’m sure they got one at DOD, DIA, CIA coming. My first debrief was in hospital in Germany.”

  He is a man caught in the middle of something he wants no part of. But he has agreed to see her.

  “The more complete we make this interview, maybe the fewer of them there can be,” she says, trying to reassure him. But seeing him now, Jobe is eager to be as thorough as she can with this. Memory degrades. The more time passes, the less accurate and useful O’Dowd’s accounts will become. Rather than the event, he will be remembering his recollections. And he is already afraid of something.

  “I need to have a record of this conversation,” she says apologetically. “I can take notes. Or I can use my phone to record as we just talk.

  “The transcript will never become public,” she adds.

  O’Dowd is unsure.

  “Look, Adam, we work for the White House Counsel’s Office. Which means the president’s lawyer. Which means no one can subpoena this. Not Congress. No Freedom of Information Act. No one.” She wonders whether this promise would hold up in court.

  “Okay,” he says in surrender.

  Jobe slides the phone between them and touches the recording app to “on.”

  She starts with easy questions. “Tell me about the compound in Oosay. What was it like inside?”

  He explains they were pouring money into it, upgrading it. “They built a special facility on the property. A Barracks. That’s what we called it. A green zone, you know. A secure space.”

  He is relaxing some.

  “I thought this compound was an old French manor house surrounded by land. Some distance from the city center.”

  Jobe knows better, but she has learned from Rena to suggest confusion over innocent details as a way to get a reluctant witness to open up and begin helping.

  “That old Manor was a soft target. Too close to the outer wall. So they built this new place. They were separated by a little more than one hundred yards of open space in the compound. The Barracks, the new place, was a hard target, very well protected, with its own interior wall.”

  “But Roderick, General Roderick, he died in the Manor? Right? Trapped there when the compound was overrun?”

  “Yeah, that’s where he met with any Moratians. It was like a diplomatic setting.”

  The waitress reappears and O’Dowd orders a Reuben, Jobe a chicken salad. The waitress takes the order on an old-fashioned paper pad. Jobe can see sheets from the pads clipped on a wire that slides in front of the cook, same as it probably was in the 1960s.

  They walk through more easy details, the people on-site, the five contractors who staffed the Barracks—O’Dowd never knew their names—and the five-person security detail with Roderick.

  Then, slowly, she begins to push. Why was Roderick’s security detail so small, just five people?

  “General Roderick wasn’t one for pomp. He liked things low profile.” Jobe doesn’t press the point.

  Did they stay in the Manor all day?

  “We went back and forth between the Manor and th
e Barracks. Like I said, they were about a hundred yards apart.”

  Jobe nods sympathetically. “Let’s get to that night,” she says. She starts slowly. When did they first hear about the protests? Where were they when they began? She is trying to get a chronology of the final minutes.

  “Why was Roderick still in the Manor at midnight? He didn’t have meetings that late, did he?”

  “No. Last meeting probably finished around eleven. Maybe a little before. I guess he stayed making notes, thinking the protest would die down. It was unlucky. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  In Jobe’s experience, good soldiers aren’t that unlucky. They find safe ground instinctively. Unless there is a good reason to stay where you are.

  “Why didn’t you head to the Barracks when the protest began?”

  “I don’t know exactly when the protests began,” O’Dowd says. He is getting tired. The food arrives, giving him some reprieve.

  Men tend to be either drawn to Jobe or intimidated by her. She is a tall and dark-skinned African American woman with high chiseled cheekbones and a strong chin—beautiful and exotic but also imposing.

  “Tell me about your getting wounded. And getting Halleck, Phelps, and Ross back over to the Barracks.”

  Now she has come to the most difficult part.

  O’Dowd takes a deep breath. “Like I said, the Ali Baba breached the zone.”

  He has slipped into soldier slang for Islamic fighters. “Ali Baba.” A pejorative for Middle Eastern combatants. But this was North Africa.

  “They’re inside the wire. And they’re shooting at anything that moves.”

  “Were there fighters on foot in the compound?” Jobe wants to know if all the shooting had come from trucks or if men had come as infantry as well. If fighters were on foot, it was a sign they were trying to track down and kill everyone they could find. Maybe they were even looking for Roderick.

  If there were only trucks, it was more likely they were just trying to shoot the place up, scare people, and flee.