“David, I’ve arranged some, shall we say, advanced training for you at CIA, at the Farm.” Weiseman had never been to the Farm before. He was a diplomat, not a spook, even though, since Trevor had become DCI, he’d been operating as a virtual agent. But there was a lot about intelligence operations that he didn’t know, and so now Trevor was offering him “advanced training.” The risk level of his work, he realized, was about to rise sharply.
Trevor read his mind. “You’ve done well so far,” he said, “but now things are going to get heavy. There isn’t time for an extended regimen, so you’ll have to focus.”
Weiseman stiffened at the thought of what was to come. He knew how a new Islamist regime would deal with an American plotting its overthrow. He hadn’t forgotten Montana.
And yet, he felt a quickened pulse at the prospect of the culmination of his mission.
“How do I communicate with you?” he asked.
Trevor pulled out a white index card from his top desk drawer. It contained a seven-digit 800 phone number, a special channel cable address, and a code name.
“Memorize this now, David.”
Weiseman absorbed the information and handed the card back.
“Why that code name?” Weiseman asked. “Lone Wolf.”
Trevor smiled tightly.
31
LONE WOLF
THE CIA FARM was just south of Warrenton, Virginia, on I-95, an hour from Washington.
Weiseman missed the unmarked turn, spotted the Mobil gas station, then doubled back and slowly drove up the dirt road to the cluster of redbrick houses. He showed his State Department pass, drove under the raised electronic wire gate, then watched it descend in his rear view mirror.
That night, he was given a volume titled Intelligence Handbook. “Read this and think about it,” his trainer said. It had one page in particular earmarked for him: Beware of people who believe, he read. They aren’t reliable players.
That night he thought about cultivating traitors, and recalled a line from Graham Greene: “Oh, traitor—that’s an old-fashioned word.” Was “traitor” old-fashioned? No. Not according to the values his father had drilled into him after they escaped from Nazi Germany. America is different, Johann had told him. America doesn’t cross redlines. But of course we do, Weiseman knew. Every country does. We do, however, look out for our people.
The hostages would go through hell and then they’d come home, but not before Khomeini had milked them for all they were worth. The more we flagellated ourselves over their release, the longer it would take. Weiseman was convinced of that. And he was sure that Carter wouldn’t send in a serious strike force.
America couldn’t ignore them, of course. Weiseman was realistic, but he wasn’t cynical. That was how he differentiated himself from Trevor. Chris Tyler was in there, a young diplomat who once worked for him, as were many other colleagues and friends. He’d find Iranians to tell him what was going on in the embassy. No doubt it would take a bit of baksheesh to get them to share their secrets; or an appeal to some attachment to America; or a visa or other way out for an endangered family. There would be those who’d sell to both sides, like Daud in the Intercon; those who’d be out for glory; and still others seeking a bit of excitement in a desperate life.
He went over and over the options, searching his mind for the magic bullet. He thought the Israelis could do it; they were masters of the rescue mission. And maybe, now that they’d seen the ayatollahs up close, they regretted the way they had scuttled Ajax Two.
But about the revolution itself. Bringing down the ayatollahs so soon was a nonstarter. The mullahs would have to burn their bridges first, to outrage the people as badly as or worse than the Shah. The middle classes and bazaari and students who clamored for modernization and for a democratic Iran would soon come to see that the ayatollahs’ takeover had been the worst possible outcome. Khomeini’s return meant that they had neither a modern nor democratic Iran. Khomeini and his cronies—Khalaji, Montana, unknown others—were even now imposing a medieval Islamist authoritarian regime backed by thuggish Revolutionary Guards.
Eventually a counterrevolution could start, from within. Maybe Seyyed would lead it.
The Islamists would fall out, begin to cut one another’s throats. It happened in all revolutions. One day these mullahs would take some step—out of indignation, or cold fear and paranoia, that would lead the Israelis to…well, Regev had said it all, when he’d referred to Israel’s nuclear weapons as “insurance.” Hadn’t he?
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS after he arrived at the Farm, Weiseman saw a news item. Acting Foreign Minister Ali Amin had been placed under house arrest and replaced by Abolhassan Bani-Sadr. Poor naïve Amin, thought Weiseman, soaking up all those nonsensical nostrums about a technocratic government. Had he been confined to that shabby apartment, or worse, in Evin? It was bound to happen.
But Bani-Sadr? Weiseman called Trevor and asked, “Who’s he?”
“He’s nobody, an adventurer, just the kind of man you should deal with.”
But by the end of the month, Bani-Sadr, too, had been dismissed. The new acting foreign minister was Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who had managed the internal crackdown so far.
Weiseman asked Virginia to send him a dossier on the two men. CIA analysts said they were Western educated revolutionaries, slick and slimy, used by Khomeini to soothe Western concerns. That’s what Amin did, until they got rid of him. Now Bani-Sadr had been cast off as well, after two weeks. And just how would they soothe us while they held our hostages?
Weiseman thought about all this while he was running five miles a day at the Farm, memorizing codes, studying the conceits of tradecraft, and reading CIA biographies of Persians he might be able to use to get the hostages out: Bani-Sadr, nursing grievances over shabby treatment by the revolution; or Ghotbzadeh, who seemed as if he might sell his mother for personal gain.
On December 10, the director of the Farm came to see him. “Mr. Trevor called; he wants you to stop by his residence tonight, at seven.”
* * *
—
CLARISSA TREVOR GREETED Weiseman at the door of their house on Wyoming Avenue in a slim fuchsia dress, her brunette hair done up in an elegant chignon. She was a more mature version of her daughter, the lovely Regina, Weiseamn thought. She led him into the salon, sat with him on a silk sofa, a photo of Justin and herself in Sicily on the end table.
Trevor walked in pipe in hand, shook Weiseman’s hand and got right to business. “We’re trying to get the president out on the campaign trail. While he’s running for reelection, he’ll be out of our hair. The hostage crisis will become a fact of life. Americans will go about their normal lives. We can move beyond this distraction and attend to the important issues.”
Once Weiseman would have been shocked—treating the president like a puppet to be dangled at will, while Trevor presumed to run the country. But it had to be done.
“All options are on the table?” Weiseman asked.
“Yes, of course,” Trevor replied.
“Negotiation, bribes, military action?”
“They always are.”
“As is indifference,” Weiseman added.
“That’s right.” Trevor suddenly sneezed. He took a snow-white linen handkerchief from his back pocket and dabbed at his nose. “Though the American media isn’t making it any easier. Every evening on prime time they toll the number of days the hostages have been held. We might as well send up a white flag and announce to the world America’s surrender to mindless mullahs and their thuggish sidekicks.”
Trevor refilled the glasses Clarissa had arranged upon Weiseman’s arrival. “It’s time,” he said. “Your training is over. You need to get back to Iran.”
* * *
—
BACK IN LANGLEY the next day, Weiseman was shown to the operation center where Trevor introduced him to Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general who was off to Tehran to appeal for the release of the hostages.
Weiseman proceeded to brief him and found him dismissive, a former Austrian foreign minister and now top UN diplomat who thought he knew it all.
Yet, when Waldheim arrived in Tehran a few days later, he found himself surrounded by screaming students every time he stepped in and out of his car. There was a grotesque session with mutilated and deformed victims of SAVAK who waved stumps of missing limbs in his face, demanding to know why he had permitted these war crimes. His visit to the cemetery of the martyrs of the revolution turned into a riot, forcing him to flee under heavy guard. To top it all off, the students rejected his requests to visit the hostages.
Weiseman was waiting to debrief the shaken diplomat on his return two days later to New York. Waldman told him he was glad simply to be back alive. He said, “This Ghotbzadeh, the foreign minister, he’s a sneaky one. He talked tough in front of the Revolutionary Guards, but there was something slippery about him. Perhaps he could be bought.”
Weiseman pondered the thought in the secretary-general’s private elevator as he descended the thirty-eight floors of the UN secretariat building on the East River, with its breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline. He needed to meet this Ghotbzadeh, he decided, this “sneaky one.”
But first, there was the little problem of how he was to get to Iran and back alive, with Montana lying in wait for him?
* * *
—
EVENTS WERE IN motion, laying new obstacles in the path to a deal with the mullahs. The entire Mideast, Persian Gulf, and South Asian region had become an entangled arc of crisis.
The Great Mosque of Mecca was invaded by terrorists, a sacrilege that summoned up outrage across the Arab world.
Islamist fanatics invaded the American embassy in Pakistan, forcing diplomatic staffers to leap to their death when the embassy became a burning pyre. Two of Weiseman’s friends were among the dead.
Soviet armed forces invaded Afghanistan and began systematically to shell the primitive country with modern missiles carrying high explosive payloads.
In the White House, the president announced a major increase in defense spending.
The next day, Bani-Sadr was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, trouncing Ghotbzadeh 75 percent to 25 percent. Ghotbzadeh was humiliated, and, Weiseman speculated, must be fearful that he might be cast to the wolves.
Yasmine de Rose phoned for her father, telling Weiseman that two shady French lawyers had visited Bobby Beauford in the White House, lobbying on behalf of the new Iranian government that the Shah be extradited back to Iran.
A coded cable arrived from Françoise. In Tehran, the students in the embassy were speaking openly about show trials. There were Iranian proposals for a UN commission to come to Tehran and take testimony about the Shah’s crimes. There was also an idea coming from President Bani-Sadr that perhaps the UN commission visit could somehow lead to release of the hostages and return of the Shah’s assets.
No doubt Bani-Sadr would take a generous cut of those assets.
Well, why not? Weiseman thought, if it would get the hostages home. But Ghotbzadeh, still plotting against Bani-Sadr from the Foreign Ministry, killed the idea.
Weiseman called Trevor on a secure line and told him that Ghotbzadeh might be tempted to undermine his new president.
“Yes, that’s more like it,” Trevor said. “Play them along. It’s the oldest game in the world: tempt them with what you might do for them, draw them close.”
Weiseman called the travel agency in Morristown, New Jersey, that Trevor told him would take care of his arrangements. Next, he called Françoise in Paris. “Meet me at De Gaulle. I’m headed back to Iran.”
“I know,” she said.
The next morning, he boarded a plane for Paris.
* * *
—
PIERRE JUBRIL, THE LEFTY LAWYER from Lebanon, met him at a Corsican bistro in Paris, where they ate omelets and flat peasant bread and drank rough red wine. Weiseman asked about the French lawyers who had visited the White House.
Pierre told him to leave them alone. “They’re adventurers; they’ll talk and talk, lead your government on a fine chase but nothing will come of it.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together. “Except they’ll fatten their pockets.”
“What about Bani-Sadr? Ghotbzadeh?”
Pierre stared hard at him for a moment, then sipped his wine. He rubbed the two digits again. “Perhaps. But one by one, not together. They loathe each other.”
“Do you know them?”
“Oh, yes,” Pierre said. “Bani-Sadr, you might say, is too clever by half. He speaks Farsi in a way that no one in Iran understands where he’s going.”
“Doesn’t he speak French?”
Pierre coughed, a long dirty snort. “Even worse. I rarely understood him.”
“And now he’s president.”
“Yes, constructive ambiguity; it’s a qualification for high office in my country, and in Iran. Also here in Paris.”
Constructive ambiguity—that nice phrase that Weiseman had learned from Trevor.
“Ghotbzadeh?”
Pierre sliced into his omelet, chewing as cheese dribbled down the right side of his mouth. “Ah, that one is the dictator type, and quite the opportunist. I’m told he loves being foreign minister—the perquisites of office, the limousine, the women, photographers and fawning journalists, ordering people around. He’ll make you think you’re talking into the wind.”
Pierre broke off a piece of the bread and chewed thoughtfully. “It depends what’s in it for him—a way to gain the upper hand with Bani-Sadr or to show Khomeini he’s the one to trust. But if you mean to use him, you’d best do it soon, before Bani-Sadr does him in.”
“And you can arrange for me to see him, Pierre.”
The lawyer smiled and again rubbed the two digits together, then wrote a number on the back of a Kronenbourg 1664 beer coaster: 10,000 US.
Weiseman passed an envelope across the table. “Half down, with the balance once I see him.” He lifted his wineglass and clincked it against Pierre’s. He drained the glass, shuddering at the harsh taste. “It’s good. I must get to Corsica one day.”
* * *
—
RUE CITÉ DE Varenne, Gramont’s home, where Weiseman had first met Alain de Rose, Jacques, and Françoise.
Gramont was now all business.
“Every day it’s something different. They want the Shah back, they want his money back, his properties, Farah’s jewels. They’ll free the hostages after the election of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, but they insist on an apology by your president.”
“Out of the question.”
Undeterred, Gramont went on. “The Iranian people have been affronted. One day Bani-Sadr is ready to welcome the UN commission and transfer the hostages from the embassy to government control, then release them. The next day, there are conditions. One day, Bani-Sadr says he’s speaking for the Imam; the next day he fears for his life.”
“And the two French lawyers?”
“You won’t believe it. They proposed to Washington that the CIA kill the Shah—‘pull the plug’ was their phrase. Then they said,” he coughed lightly, “you should substitute a dead body for the Shah’s, dispose of it with due public fanfare, and continue his treatment in an undisclosed location.”
They must have been dealing with Beauford, Weiseman thought.
“The pièce de résistance,” Gramont chuckled, deep in his throat, “was that they forged Carter’s signature on a letter on White House stationary apologizing to Khomeini, begging him to help him out of this political jam. They appear to have regular access to the White House, David. Your people must be desperate.”
If he only knew, thought Weiseman.
“And what about Bani-Sadr?”
“We know him well, David. He’s a rogue. He and Ghotbzadeh are your best chance. You’ll have to play them off against each other. See them separately, in Europe. Out of Iran.” Gramont shook his head, as if seeking to expun
ge a bad taste. “I can arrange the meeting with Bani-Sadr. He’ll be traveling this way soon, a state visit to Paris, then down to Morocco.”
“I’ll do it there, Laurent. In Casablanca, after he meets the king, just before he flies home.”
Gramont jotted it down in a leather notepad with his gold-plated Dupont fountain pen.
“Ghotbzadeh?” Weiseman asked.
“Alors, mon vieux, Pierre is taking care of that for you.”
Finally, “Françoise. I called her at the apartment. Where is she?”
“David, she’s in Baghdad,” the puppet master said. “Helping you again. She’s interviewing Saddam Hussain.”
Gramont paused. Weiseman could hear the alcohol coursing down the count’s throat.
“I told her not to. She said she had an idea.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING Pierre came to see him. “Ghotbzadeh is willing to see you.”
That was fast, he thought. Money talks.
“You’ll be seeing him in Iran,” Pierre suddenly added. “And don’t worry about your security. Ghotbazadeh said he’d take care of Montana.”
Easy for him to say, thought Weiseman.
The two digits rubbed together again. “By the way, you owe me 5,000 US.”
32
DESERT ONE
ELI COHEN GREETED WEISEMAN with elevated eyebrows as he entered the terminal of the King Hassan II International Airport in Casablanca. Cohen wore a lime Lacoste polo shirt and khaki pants; a gold Patek Philippe watch was on his wrist. He led the way to his red Jaguar convertible.
Soon they were riding along the coastal highway, en route to the tourist city of Mohammedia. Cohen drove with the top down to invite in the warm sun. Palm trees lined the road; the smell of the ocean and the honeyed scent of bougainvillea filled the air.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” the Moroccan asked, flipping on the radio.
Night in Tehran Page 25