* * *
—
In January, Danny Pearl gets kidnapped in Karachi.
Danny’s been a writing hero of mine for a couple of years now. I scarcely know him, but we’ve crossed paths a few times—in D.C., while I was still in high school and he was just starting out at The Wall Street Journal, and later in Southeast Asia, as I began to cut my teeth and he offered gentle advice on my stories. I’d always been amazed by his easygoing strength of character, an Israeli-American writing compassionately about life in Pakistan. Now he’s bound with a gun to the back of his neck, while his wife—pregnant with their first child—and colleagues work frantically to find him.
He was researching a story on Richard Reid, the Englishman who stuffed his shoes with explosives and boarded an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami three days before Christmas. Danny had a lead. A cleric close to Reid had agreed to meet him at a restaurant in Karachi. When Danny arrived, he was told that the meeting had been moved for security reasons, hustled into a car, and driven into the Pakistani dark.
Then the pictures start appearing: Danny holding newspapers with fresh dates beneath their mastheads and chains around his wrists.
He’s the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, and I take comfort in imagining the paper’s agents working behind the scenes to buy his safe return. The proof-of-life photos are right off the pages of the kidnapping thrillers they sell at the airport, the kind where ransoms get paid and heroes get home before their babies arrive. But days turn to weeks with no word of his release.
Four weeks after the first picture, I walk into our grubby subterranean college bar. I’ve got a winter cold and ask Len, the barman, to make me a hot toddy. On the rabbit-eared TV, the crawl type says Danny’s been beheaded. I feel winded, like I’ve taken a soccer ball to the gut.
In the days that follow, the media outlets play excerpts of the video showing Danny’s head being sawed off his body. The experts argue over whether the hand that did it belongs to al Qa’ida. They show Danny reciting words he was made to memorize, words as far from his compassionate worldview as can be. I can’t watch. I go for dawn walks in the meadows by the river—the same meadows where J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis wandered while discussing Christianity. I ask God out loud to help me understand what is happening and what I can do with my life to make it stop.
In Thailand, I’d be able to throw myself into the familiar, to pretend that the world isn’t being swallowed up by this new kind of war. But the more I walk, the more deeply I realize that hiding won’t help me. I’m going to be afraid of what’s happening until I can answer the question “Why?”
I apply to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. When I get accepted, I call the Thai NGO and tell the director that I’m not coming.
* * *
—
As soon as I get to Georgetown, I put a little plastic bat on my desk to remind me of the time my dad helped me take apart my brother’s toy vampire bat to understand how it worked. I’d woken my parents up crying because the bat had been in my dreams, and so my dad had sat with me on the floor and pulled open the bat’s belly. We’d laid out all the pieces: the battery that made his eyes glow green and the little red rectangle of felt that swirled around inside his giant plastic proboscis to give the look of sucked-up blood. After that, I’d never been afraid of him again.
When it comes time to choose a thesis topic, I decide to give terrorism the vampire bat treatment, take it apart and lay it out on a table. I dig up two hundred years of data on every attack, domestic and international, and look for unnoticed patterns—things like the ratio of hookah bars to madrassas and the percentage beneath livable wage a border guard gets paid. I weigh each factor based on past impact and string them all together into one algorithm, so you can plug in data for any region and, bazam, it spits out the probability that the area will be used as a terrorist safe haven against its will.
It turns out that Georgetown has a CIA officer in residence, a Santa Claus look-alike named Dallas Jones, and this algo piques his interest. He asks me whether I’ll talk with his colleagues. And this time, because of his kind eyes, maybe, or his earnest desire to understand humans, I say yes. I like the group of people he introduces me to. Unlike the men back in Oxford, they are curious and humble and genuinely interested in questions that begin with “Why.”
They ask me how I found the data I used, and I show them my endnotes. They ask me if I feel like I got all the inputs. Of course not, I tell them. I’m missing the most important input of all: sitting with a cup of tea across from someone who trusts me enough to tell me why he’s planning to fly a plane into a building. “That’s what I wish I understood,” I say.
They say, “So do we.”
They give me the address of a hotel in Arlington and a date and time to be there. And so begins a long process of interviews and current affairs exams, recruitment role-playing and language aptitude tests, psych batteries and polygraph machines. Finally, at twenty-two years old, I receive a provisional offer of employment at the Central Intelligence Agency. If I accept, they’ll still have to process me for security clearance, and given my international background, it’s anyone’s guess if I’ll pass.
Throughout the process, I confide in no one except my friend Jim, a fellow Georgetown School of Foreign Service student who’s also applying. Together we lick the envelopes for our security forms. “Well, now they have a DNA sample,” we laugh. We talk about the ethics of this world we’re wading into. Promise to hold each other accountable. He gives me a coin that says, “Speak truth to power.” I put it on my desk, next to the bat.
We decide to use the summer while they’re processing our clearances to take a long trek through Southeast Asia, stopping first in London to visit Anthony. We’re a year into trying our hands at a long-distance relationship, but as a foreign national, he can’t know anything about applications to join the CIA. It’s a tense evening’s reunion. He senses secrets in the air and assumes that Jim and I are lovers. I tell him we’re not, try to explain away the awkward conversational pauses and cover-ups every time the talk veers too close to my prospective work, but he doesn’t believe me and we part ways in tears.
“You’re a terrible liar,” Jim says to me. “Might want to work on that.”
We hitchhike down the Mekong on a fishing boat, befriend homeless kids on the beach in Cambodia, take the night boat from Thailand to Penang. We arrive in East Timor on the first day of its official freedom from Indonesia, and since the government hasn’t yet made the new passport stamps, the customs guy writes, “Hari Merdeka Timor Leste” in each of our passports with a ballpoint pen—Independence Day, East Timor. We stay in a shipping container on a boat in the harbor because the fighting has left Dili without any hotels. The presidential palace is missing its top floor, and a cow wanders across its front walk. We get the guard chatting about the reconstruction, and he furtively gives us a look at the architectural plans for the new presidential compound, security infrastructure and all.
“Amazing what people will show two backpackers,” Jim comments as we walk away.
That night, we sit on a concrete dock beside a loud, dented generator, our feet hanging over the water and empty beer bottles between us. “That guard looked at us and saw clueless backpackers,” I say. “Anthony looks at us and sees star-crossed lovers. Washington looks at us and sees sophisticated spies. Our parents look at us and see kids who still leave laundry on the floor. Do you ever wonder who the fuck we actually are?”
We’re silent for a beat. Then Jim scoops up our empties and says, “We’re two people in desperate need of beer.”
* * *
—
The week after we get back to Washington, my grandmother dies. My mom drives to Jim’s house to tell me, but she can’t. She just sits in the driver’s seat of her Jeep, her face shining wet, m
outhing words I can’t understand, as if the pain is drowning her. I fly to Europe with her for the funeral, stand beside her as we view her mother’s body, small and stiff and pale in its wooden box on a black crepe stand. Afterward, Christian and I smoke cigarettes behind the garage. “I wasn’t the kid she wanted when she signed those adoption papers,” he says. “But she loved me for letting her pretend I was.”
I get home to a cryptic voice mail from an unidentified number and return the call to hear that my security processing is complete. I now have top secret clearance with access to sensitive compartmented information, or TS/SCI, meaning that I’ll be privy to programs so closely guarded, even the top secret crowd can’t see them. I’m to report to CIA headquarters on Route 123 in Langley, Virginia, the following week and, in the meantime, to tell anyone who knows I was applying that I haven’t made the cut.
I meet Jim for drinks. I look him in the eye and I lie.
“Yeah right, I bet they just told you to say that,” he says.
I start to cry. “I wish,” I say.
He seems taken aback. He’s never seen me cry. He comforts me. Believes me. But I’m not crying to make him believe. I’m crying because I’ve lost the last friend who knows my truth.
8
From now on, everyone I love—my mom, my family, my friends—all think I’m consulting for a multinational company, using the algorithm I developed to help its leadership steer clear of instability overseas. It’s a temporary training cover, to be replaced by something more permanent if I actually make it through the grueling months ahead. Until then, I’m ostensibly working a mediocre Beltway consulting gig while I finish up my master’s at Georgetown. The job explains my distraction, my busy schedule, my periodic absences. And it’s boring enough to ensure that nobody asks too many questions.
When I report to headquarters (HQS) the following week, I run my hand along the section of the Berlin Wall in the parking lot as I walk from my car. I stop to read the inscription under the statue of Nathan Hale outside the main door: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Inside, I walk across the giant marble seal and stop at the wall of stars, one for each officer killed in the line of duty. I trace the one lost on the same Pan Am flight as Laura. Across from them, carved into the wall between two flags, is scripture: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”
I check in with the desk officer, a middle-aged woman with a cardigan over her uniform and a hint of sass in her smile. There are two sets of folders in front of her. Some are blue, with names on them, and others black, without. “Clandestine service trainee?” she asks me.
“What’s that?” I ask, and she smiles.
“If you were one, you’d know,” she says and pulls my folder. It’s blue.
I eye the black pile, like the second-class citizen I now know I am.
“Black folder’s where it’s at, huh?”
“Put it this way,” she says. “You see the size of the parking lots on the way in here? All those thousands of people come into these buildings every day for one reason: to support them.” She taps the black folders. “Either to get them overseas safely, to keep them from being killed while they’re out there, or to analyze the information they send back home. They’re the tip of the spear. Rest of us are just plain old wood.” She laughs and leads me off toward the central courtyard, which rises up through the plate glass at the top of the stairs. On the walls are flags from Eastern bloc states, pulled down by protesters as they clamored for freedom. Down one hallway, a car sits behind a rope, cut in half to show the hidden compartment officers used to smuggle refugees across the Berlin Wall.
My black-folder envy melts as we walk the echoing halls, past photographs of war and peace and history itself. Every hundred feet or so, we pass a big metal door with a combination lock in place of a handle. Eventually, we stop in front of one.
“Well, Miss New Girl, here we are. Southeast Asia Division. Your branch chief’ll take it from here.” She opens the door to a giant room-sized safe, filled with desks and the tapping of keys. My new boss is waiting, a bearded, gentle, clever-looking man in corduroys and socks. He looks old enough to be nearing retirement. He explains that we are standing in something called a SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, and that no classified material can be taken out the door without advance clearance.
“That includes the cafeteria,” he says. “Remember, just because everyone else has clearance, they don’t get to see what you got and you don’t get to see what they got. If you’re eating in the cafeteria, your lunch conversation better be about your love life. And none of us has time for one of those. So you might as well just eat here.”
I’ve been assigned to cover Jemaah Islamiyah, the al Qa’ida affiliate in Southeast Asia, reading hundreds of classified cables a day from foreign governments, U.S. diplomats, and our own covert operatives in the field, then synthesizing the intelligence into actionable briefs for congress and the president. It’s analytical; it’s difficult; and I love it. The hours don’t allow for much of a life, though. The president’s briefer leaves Langley for the White House every morning before dawn, so I drive my choking old Jeep across the Key Bridge in the dark to brief the briefer on Southeast Asia threats at three-thirty a.m. Then I walk outside to watch the sun rise before the heat of the day sets in.
I’m juggling work with full-time graduate school across the Potomac at Georgetown. I stay in the campus library late and get to my desk at Langley early, making up for the lack of sleep with stale cafeteria coffee. Fatigue becomes a badge of honor. Half-open toiletries kits and makeshift overnight cots abound. My boss has a Lufthansa sticker on his office door that says “Wake for meals.”
I fall hard and fast into the world of the Agency. We speak in cryptonyms—“crypts”—and three-letter acronyms. We feel the weight of the world on our shoulders. We get called in at all hours to deal with this crisis or that one. It’s as though anything that happens anywhere on the planet is happening to us. As though our every move is important. As though we are important. And it’s addictive.
Southeast Asia threats hit especially close to home. Jim and I walked the island of Bali in the aftermath of the 2002 bombings, heard shopkeepers describe the limbs strewn outside their stores. At the time, all I could do was wonder if that was how Laura’s limbs had looked, when they hit the ground in Scotland. Now I can work to stop the next attack. Now, a year later, I sit down every morning, enter the numeric code from the digital fob around my neck, and open a list of cables, each of them detailing some new plot. One by one, I scan them and sort them by urgency, aware of what a lapse in concentration might cost. Overlook a credible threat and more limbs end up on the sidewalk. Shut one down too early and lose the chance to arrest the leaders. Harm an innocent bystander and become no better than the men we hunt. It’s exhausting and exhilarating, a daily mix of adrenaline and caffeine that lands screeching at the nine a.m. all-hands meeting, where we highlight the most imminent threats for the Clandestine Service to stop before they gather too much steam.
The black-folder, tip-of-the-spear gang doesn’t come to the meeting themselves. They send representatives I think of as gray folders—spook look, spook jargon, but stuck here at HQS when they’d rather be out in the field. Some of them tried and didn’t make the cut. Others are still training. The worst are the has-beens: former field officers cooling their heels back here at Langley while they do penance or dry out. Like B-list movie stars, they have more attitude than the real-deal operatives. There is an erratic energy about them. They are people with something to prove.
In a nondescript conference room, we take turns outlining the shrillest threats from the morning’s cable traffic. For each potential attack, we list what more we need to know before we can write a complete assessment for the president. The gray folders scribble notes to turn into taskings for their field operatives onc
e they get back to their desks. As if by magic, the answers to those questions sit waiting in our queue of cables the following day.
I have some sense of how the questions become answers: field operatives reach out to clandestine sources, moles within terror organizations or foreign governments, and ask them for clarification during late-night car meetings or walks down back lanes. But the Ian Fleming drama of it all seems far removed from the analysis cycle we run through in our Langley cubicles. Here, the focus is on pulling the threads from those different sources together and answering enough of the who, what, where, when, and how for the president to authorize the forces he needs in order to prevent an impending attack.
In the case of Southeast Asia, the biggest threats come from Jemaah Islamiyah, the al Qa’ida offshoot whose leader, a man known as Hambali, has claimed responsibility for the Bali bombings and is an old pal of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (known in Agency parlance as “KSM”). That link to KSM shoots Jemaah Islamiyah to the top of U.S. concerns, for reasons even more deeply rooted than the destruction of the World Trade Center. KSM’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef, is currently cooling his heels at ADX Florence—America’s most secure prison—for executing the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He was caught after fleeing to the Philippines, but not before planning a subsequent attack in which eleven airliners would simultaneously be hijacked, with one plowing into a skyscraper in Manila, killing the pope during his visit from Rome, and another crashing into our very own headquarters building here in Langley, Virginia.
The plot was foiled after Yousef’s apartment caught fire and emergency workers discovered his plans, but the possibility of using commercial airliners as missiles had been lodged in his uncle KSM’s brain. That idea led to the deaths of 2,996 people on 9/11, and possibly, one more a few months after that. The veins and freckles on the hand that sawed Danny’s head from his body turn out to match KSM’s.
Life Undercover Page 7