Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  Day by day, those three letters become a personification of the evil we fight. And KSM’s involvement with Jemaah Islamiyah makes this desk the only place in the world where I want to work. I begin to feel as if the reckoning for Danny, and for Laura and those lost on 9/11, too, somehow, comes down to me—to how carefully I read the incoming cables and whether the follow-up questions I ask uncover some detail that can help prevent another explosion, another beheading, another Tuesday morning in lower Manhattan covered with human ash.

  When the field operatives can’t find answers to my questions, I stare at their cables, my fingers limp on the keys. In those moments, I am powerless, able only to identify threats and the data we need to stop them but incapable of getting on a plane to find the answers myself. I wonder whether this is how some other analyst felt, years earlier, when murmurs of 9/11 rumbled but concrete answers never came. Will I, too, turn on the news to find one of these phantom plots played out in high definition? Will I also know the ache of wondering whether I did enough, here in the sanitized safety of northern Virginia, to counter the threats that bubble daily in my queue?

  I graduate from Georgetown in the humidity of the gymnasium as spring rain pounds the windows and soaks the empty chairs arranged around the flagpole. I’ve managed to get out of here with honors. But I don’t really know the place, I realize, as I scan the pendants and statues that line the walls. I ducked in and out and submitted my papers, but I never stopped processing whatever cable or threat report I had just read long enough to feel that I belonged here, amid the removed academia of the Bulldogs’ blue and gray. I look at the other students who studied alongside me, wonder how many of them are going on to the same career, in some different SCIF in some different unmarked building. Wonder how many of us have felt at home here, or will feel at home anywhere again.

  A few weeks after graduation, my boss hands me a letter. He looks at me with a mix of paternal pride and sadness. “Clandestine Service wants you.” The black folders flash in my mind’s eye. “Bastards were just waiting for you to finish school.” The adrenaline hits me hard as he talks. It’s the scariest invitation I’ve ever been given and the one invitation I’ve most wanted to receive. I got into this business to understand the people who attacked us, so I could make them stop. With this single letter, I might finally have the chance to meet them face-to-face.

  It’s bittersweet, leaving the analysts’ world of synthesis and briefings. I’m trading in my bird’s-eye view for a glimpse of the truth on the ground. I won’t see the whole picture anymore, won’t understand the way the pieces fit together at the top. But at least now I’ll get to try answering the questions myself. No more sending queries out into the ether, hoping blindly that the data we need to stop an attack turns up on my screen in the morning.

  * * *

  —

  I show up the following week, as the letter instructs, at the main headquarters auditorium, a quirky midcentury dome affectionately known as the Bubble. On a table at the back of the vestibule is a pile of black folders.

  “Agency identification number?” the security officer asks. I reel off the seven digits and he riffles through the pile, then hands me a folder. “Welcome to the Clandestine Service, Ms. Tanner,” he says, and I fight the urge to look behind myself for the woman he’s talking to. It’s a training name, used to ensure that even our own classmates don’t know our true identities— an added measure of protection, in case one of us finds ourselves under duress in the field. We’ll be trained to withstand captivity and torture, but not knowing the information we’re being asked to reveal is the greatest protection of all.

  I press through the swinging doors, into the auditorium. Only the first few rows are occupied—by no more than fifty others, with their black folders in their laps.

  “Good morning, Class 17,” a man says from the stage. It seems impossible that there could be so few of us. “You’ve probably heard that you’re this country’s best and her brightest. Well, I won’t comment on that except to say, Don’t expect to be treated with kid gloves. We are facing a multiheaded monster out there, and the nation has never been more in need of your service. It’s not going to be easy, but we plan to prevail. So I hope you’re ready to get to work.”

  A few recruits let out a whoop or a Marine Corps grunt. Most sit rapt but silent. One or two fidget with their folders. I scan the row to either side of me. Trainees have to be under the age of thirty-five, but other than that general youth, there’s no unifying feature. More men than women, more white than non, but not by much. Some drape an arm over their chair with prep school cool. Some wear worn shoes and mended clothes. There are jocks and dorks, poets and mathematicians. I wonder how each of them got to this moment. Somehow, in the strangeness, there is kinship. And I feel oddly at home in their midst.

  The man continues, standing between an American flag and a CIA seal. The Clandestine Service puts its recruits through a year-long training course in field tradecraft, he tells us, much of which is undertaken at a remote military base known as the Farm. But first we’re to do a stint at headquarters, learning the ropes of the operations desks and giving the powers that be a chance to assess us in the wild. He tells us to check our folders for our assignments.

  My breath catches for a beat as I thumb past a page of passcodes to find out where I’ll be spending the next six months. When my eyes fall on the words, I exhale hard. The Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism Center. It’s the center of the fight, just as al Qa’ida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is starting to take his stranglehold on Baghdad and Anbar.

  “Good news?” the man sitting beside me asks.

  “To the extent that car bombs and air strikes can be considered good news, sure,” I say, and he smiles.

  “At least you’re in the middle of shit. I got West Africa.”

  It’s a strange gauge we all use, proximity to death. But in it, we find proximity to the chance that death might be averted. And by that strange, double-edged measure, CTC/Iraq is choice meat.

  It’s emotionally grueling work. My first task is to watch the same beheading video a hundred times in a row, focusing on a different grid square of the image each time to note any overlooked clue it might give to the location of the crime.

  I wade through hundreds of hours of debriefing videos. I build room-sized maps of phone connections between Zarqawi’s lieutenants. I come to know them better than I know most of my friends—to understand what still haunts them about their childhood, how a particular string of numbers holds emotional significance for them, the different reasons each gets up every day to fight.

  Throughout the week, we get pulled out for briefings, alongside the other Clandestine Service trainees, a reinforcing of our group dynamic, a setting apart of our little band from the giant spaceship of people who will support us when we deploy. Between meet-ups, we e-mail one another jokes and gossip and suggestions for weekend plans. We rendezvous for lunch or to run administrative errands in the labyrinth of the headquarters basement.

  There is a stand-alone window in one of the hallway walls down there, deep in the heart of the maze, behind which an old, cranky, begrudgingly beloved secretary named Ruth generates code names for new operations. We’ve learned to tromp down there, rattling freshly approved forms, golden tickets to embark on new, as-yet-unnamed missions. Into Ruth’s hands they go, and down comes the window shutter; a moment later, it flies up again and she hands us, with a sly smile, the name by which our next op will be known. In theory, the names are generated at random. But as every trainee soon learns, they bear an uncanny relationship to just how much Ruth likes you.

  “Guess we shouldn’ta kept her into her lunch break,” my friend says one day, and he holds up a card with OPERATION INCESSANT HUNGER typed in all caps.

  We stop at the hot dog machine on our way back upstairs. As far as anyone can tell, the hot dog machine has existed in the basement of CIA
headquarters since dinosaurs roamed the earth. Nobody knows who put it there. And nobody has ever seen it being restocked. Yet there it sits, at the crossroads of two undecorated hallways, deep underground, spitting out sizzling hot dogs for generations of bleary-eyed spies.

  “Kind of reminds me of the Zoltar machine in Big,” I say as it bangs and chugs its way to producing my lunch.

  “Well, here’s our fortune,” my friend jokes, and he flips a playing card out of his pocket and onto the glass. It’s from one of the decks the Counterterrorism Center has issued its officers to keep track of its highest-priority targets—one card per terrorist it’s tasked to kill.

  “Haji al-Yemeni?” I ask.

  He nods. “Bad dude,” he says. “Chief assigned him to us. Last seen in Algeria.” The hot dog machine lurches with the final efforts of its labor.

  “You know that’s not a real name,” I say, watching the machine ooze on the relish. “It’s an honorific, like saying ‘Mr. Doctor.’ It just means someone who’s completed the hajj who comes from Yemen. And most Yemenis are Muslims, and all Muslims are supposed to complete the hajj. So Haji al-Yemeni isn’t one person—it’s basically half the population of an entire country.”

  The machine dings and presents my hot dog with exhausted glee.

  “Yeah, well, it’s on a baseball card,” he says, and hands me the laminated rectangle.

  Back upstairs, I look up the name in our central computer system. He’s not wrong. There’s a huge file.

  Agency cables are almost as anachronistic as the hot dog machine. Typed in all caps, using the same indecipherable routing markers they required back in the punch-card, predigital days, thousands of them arrive at Langley every day, covering everything from administrative expense reports to highly classified intelligence about pending attacks. Among the cryptic symbols hidden within the actual text is a pair of double brackets placed around a person’s surname—a signal to the system that it should log a copy of the cable in that person’s file. Which means that a cable from any CIA station, anywhere in the world, containing the name HAJI [[AL-YEMENI]], will be copied to a single bulging master file. And, man, has the system been busy.

  There are over a hundred separate pieces of intelligence describing plots this phantom name is planning. They come from almost a dozen countries in three different continents, none of which is Arabic-speaking. In the frenzy to count scalps in the Global War on Terror, stations from Reykjavik to Rio have been submitting threat reports from local assets, who themselves have learned that terror tips pay handsomely, whether verified or not. And it turns out that when neither assets nor operatives speak Arabic, the threat reports about generic Mr. Doctors begin to add up fast.

  I flag my chief down as she passes my cubicle on her way back from the seventh floor, where members of the senior leadership have their offices.

  “Are there any safeguards to stop this from happening?”

  She shakes her head. “These guys use so many names,” she says, as if she’s describing the biological advantages of an alien, off-world enemy.

  “No,” I say. “I mean, yes, they do. But this is different. This is our error. It’s like making a list of all the crimes committed by Americans who have a bachelor’s degree and then using it to arrest any American who has a bachelor’s degree.”

  “Nobody said it would be easy,” she says, and nods, like now maybe I understand the magnitude of our burden.

  “No, sorry,” I press on. “I mean, I’m not pointing out that it’s hard. I’m pointing out that we’re doing it wrong. Innocent people are going to get killed.”

  She jerks her head at the poster of the twin towers on the wall and says curtly, “They already have.”

  I sit there dizzy for a minute, as though I’ve been blindfolded and spun around a few times. Innocent people died. That’s why we’re all here, in this building of beige, room-sized safes, trying to stop it from happening again. How does that make it logical to kill every Yemeni who has completed the hajj? On a practical level, killing innocents ties up resources and makes future enemies. On a moral level, it leaves us nothing worth fighting for.

  I start searching out other common honorifics, working off my meager grad school Arabic. I find a cable from an Afghan black site—a secret prison—code-named Salt Pit. They had a man named Khaled al-Masri in custody, it says. The cable doesn’t mention that al-Masri means someone who comes from Egypt. Or that Khaled is the third most common Egyptian name. Or that there are literally over a million Khaled al-Masris in the world. It says simply that Khaled al-Masri was rendered from Macedonia, when his name was found on the list of high-value targets. It goes on to say that the Salt Pit leadership was later satisfied that they had rendered the wrong person and planned to reverse the rendition, releasing Khaled al-Masri with no public admission of error.

  It is not until years later that I learn the full human truth behind that cable. Reading the results of a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) request in the open press, I learn that al-Masri had been on his way home to his wife and two kids when local police officers noticed that his name matched one on the American watch list. Holiday season as it was, the officers were hungrier than usual for American reward money. They locked him in a motel room and called the CIA station in Skopje. The deputy chief coordinated with the Counterterrorism Center back at Langley and, based on nothing more than that honorific, they sent over a team of men dressed in black, their faces covered by masks. The men held Khaled down as he frantically asked who they were, called out for his wife. They didn’t answer him. Just silently cut off his clothes, fit him with a diaper, a jumpsuit, and a blindfold. Injected him with sedative. And flew him to Afghanistan.

  When he woke, he was told he was beyond the law. He was beaten, electrocuted, starved. Every week, a man he took to be a doctor came in to sample his blood and urine. Throughout it all, he maintained his innocence. Eventually, he resorted to a hunger strike. They held him down and stuck a feeding tube up his nose.

  Four months later, someone down the hall from his bound and force-fed body wrote that sterile cable I read on my screen in Virginia: WE ARE SATISFIED WE HAVE RENDERED THE WRONG MAN.

  They dropped him on a dirt road in Albania, instructing him not to look back. He suffered permanent spinal damage. He had lost sixty pounds. His wife thought he had left her and had divorced him. He shook whenever the overhead lights started to hum.

  And nobody ever told him they were sorry.

  Long before knowing all that, still a trainee with a hot dog on my desk, I stare at the Salt Pit cable on my screen. Stare at the name, KHALED [[AL-MASRI]], double-bracketed in all caps, full of the brazen confidence of the overzealous and underinformed.

  “We’ve got an honorifics problem,” I tell my branch chief.

  “Not this again.” She bats a hand, waving me away, without glancing up from her computer.

  “It’s not just al-Yemeni. The same thing happened with Khaled al-Masri.” She recognizes the name but doesn’t stop typing. I continue: “There’re another twenty, maybe thirty, from what I can tell. And that’s just the ones we’ve acted on. And just the ones I’m cleared to see.”

  “Okay,” she says, eyes still glued to her screen. “You’re authorized to fix it.”

  I’m at a loss for what to say. I’m a first-year trainee. How am I supposed to fix it?

  For a second, there’s just the clicking of her fingers on the keys.

  “Fine,” I reply, “but you need to stop the renditions until I do.”

  Now she looks at me. “Are you out of your goddamned mind?”

  “We’re kidnapping random, innocent people—”

  She interrupts me: “You want to answer to Congress, kid? Come another 9/11, I’d rather say we rendered a hundred innocent assholes than tell them we let one fucking terrorist go free.”

  “I think you have i
t backward,” I mumble.

  “What?”

  “The quote. It’s Benjamin Franklin. ‘Better one hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.’ ”

  She locks eyes with me and says, “He was talking about Americans.”

  9

  I take my first trip to meet a detainee in person. I arrive wearing a hijab. He arrives wearing a hood. He gets to take his off. I don’t. We talk about Kafka. He’s surprised when I quote from the Qur’an. I’m surprised when he quotes Malcolm X.

  I ask if he has a window in his cell. He says he does—a little one, though at night, he can see Orion’s Belt. He says he likes that cluster of stars because it reminds him that humans see the same truth but call it by different words. In the West, we call those balls of fire Orion’s Belt, to honor a heroic hunter. In Arabic, the same stars are called the String of Pearls, to honor the wisdom that grows from suffering. It’s not what I expected to hear from underneath that hood, when Mahmoud first shuffled into that room.

  By the time I leave, we’re still military adversaries, but we’re also something like friends. He tells me what he knows about the back room of a furniture store, where men are stashing explosives for a Frankentruck—the Agency’s colloquial term for a truck-borne explosive device, with a suicide bomber at the wheel and sometimes another man on the roof. He doesn’t agree with the target. Too many civilians. It isn’t waterboarding or enhanced interrogation that uncovers the location of those lethal heaps of nails and explosives. It’s slow, hard-won mutual respect. And another few Tetris tiles of understanding fall into place.

  * * *

  —

  As I spend more and more of my hours at Langley, I have less and less time to spend on the phone with Anthony, a problem to which the solution should be breaking up. Instead, he tells me he wants to move to the United States. To Virginia. To my cramped one-bedroom, with its sink full of cereal bowls.