Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  It helps, having him gone. My ops are ramping up, and I need to focus. Most of my classmates are deploying under diplomatic cover, posing as State Department staffers behind the impermeable walls and guard posts of embassies and military outposts. I’m working without immunity and without the comfort or guidance of colleagues around me. Just me and my covcom, through which I receive bare-bones instructions from desk people at HQS, most of whom I’ve never met. And while I’m growing accustomed to that isolation, Dean is getting used to his Afghan forward operating base (FOB), where things couldn’t be more different. Instead of learning how to blend deeper into his cover, he’s learning to clear compounds (euphemism for “kill the men inside”), wearing night-vision goggles and extra rounds for his M4. Once a National Geographic photographer, he’s now sizing things up through a different kind of lens.

  We write each other letters about small things. The trick he’s taught a dog to do in the green zone. The flowers that are taking hold in my yard. There’s something old-fashioned about it. A World War II kind of a romance, contained in words on a page—words that are about nothing, and somehow also about everything.

  Every so often, during those two years of constant operations, he gets a chunk of R&R leave and I schedule a gap between missions and we meet somewhere, in Honduras or the Bahamas, and greedily inhale each other for days of blind release. Then he gets back on a chartered flight to the badlands and I take off for a meeting in some foreign café, and we both look away from the feeling that we don’t know each other much better than we did that first day in the gazebo. Increasingly often every time he returns, he grapples with me violently in his sleep. But his kiss in the morning is kind, and we let each other battle our respective demons in peace.

  12

  Dean is away for three months at a time, calling me at weird sunrise hours, full of stories about the monkeys they’ve adopted on the base or the pranks they’ve pulled while out on patrol. He never mentions the fighting. Never lets slip any suggestion that his life is in danger, out beyond the blast walls that protect his bed from bombs. Once a week or so, the phone line goes dead as we’re talking and my bedroom is plunged back into quiet. Every time, I know it’s probably the satellite. Every time, I wonder if it’s incoming fire.

  He sends photographs by e-mail. An old man asleep beside his market stall, piled with laundry detergent and rifles. A gaggle of boys passing a clay pipe, one inhaling as another doubles over to cough. A secret girls’ school, its rows of hijabed heads bent over their math problems. These are glimpses of life under the Taliban. And glimpses of Dean’s true self, filled with a tenderness he cannot or will not express in words. I love him for seeing these strangers so clearly, even as he fights for survival in their midst.

  Far less often, he sends pictures of his own reflection. The first is in a suction-cup mirror, stuck to the wall of the shipping container he’s assigned to sleep in when he initially arrives on base. He’s tall and rangy, with tousled hair and boyish softness around his eyes. His skin is smooth and clean, his eyes bright, mischievous. He doesn’t send another for nine weeks. Then, suddenly, there he is again, bearded and hunched, Ray-Bans over his eyes and an M4 slung across his chest. He’s standing in a row of other men, each similarly dressed and armed. The boy in him is gone.

  I stare at their masked eyes. They are Dean’s family now. Together, they do their CrossFit. Together, they clock their kills. It’s hard to tell them apart.

  One of the men I know from the Farm. His name is Matt. His girlfriend is a friend of mine. He’s still married to someone else, as it turns out. He says it’s only paperwork. He’ll sort it all out when he gets home from war. Then he sends me a picture of his penis. And before I can decide what to do with my outrage, he gets shot on an evening patrol.

  I’m not prepared for it, not ready for a classmate of mine—even a slimy one—to be gunned down in combat. It’s not the CIA’s job to play special forces, to get into firefights on the soil of foreign wars. CIA operatives aren’t optimized for combat. We have the military for that. Billions of dollars and more than a million men and women, deployed for that very purpose. At their best, Agency officers are charged with a different kind of defense: the act of listening, learning, building relationships, cultivating trust. It’s soulful work, investing in a relationship with the adversary. Only in times of great military strain do graduates of the Farm get asked to forgo that work in favor of the trenches. “The surge,” as this period is now known, is one of those times.

  It’s a punch in the gut for a Farm graduate to get surged to a war zone. Too many months clearing compounds in Humvees with air support and night vision begins to erode the subtle training that enables operatives to move from cocktail party to terror-cell safe house without a trace. More than a year or two in combat, and they might as well not have been through the Farm at all. I hate that Dean got chosen. I can see why: his agility and temperament and skill. But it isn’t what he signed up for, these midnight raids and his trigger finger throbbing with kill or be killed.

  CIA operatives lose their lives, too, of course—the stars on the wall are reminder enough of that—but the danger we face is different. It’s our cover and not our weapon that keeps us from being killed. It’s our adversary’s trust and not his scalp we seek. Soldiers see a problem and try to destroy it. Intelligence officers see a problem and try to befriend it. That is, until they get surged to Afghanistan and shot on an evening patrol.

  Matt lives, but it’s a reminder of the incoming fire Dean faces, the danger he tries to mask each time we talk. It’s wearing to care about someone who gets shot at every day. And the only way I know how to cope is by diving headlong into work.

  The focus isn’t hard to muster, given the weekly drumbeat of intelligence suggesting that the threat of a nuclear attack is inevitable, even imminent. For decades, brokers around the world have traded WMD precursors and components, some fueled by a Machiavellian focus on power and money, others driven by the belief that every country should have the same right to a national defense. Nuclear weapons, their argument goes, should be either permitted or banned, with all nation-states abiding by the same rule. It’s a compelling piece of logic, except that leaders who already have the bomb show no sign of disarming, and a world where every country has a nuclear arsenal doesn’t feel terribly secure. Still, many object to the Western world’s “bomb for the rich, no bomb for the poor” approach and, whether in pursuit of equanimity or a comfortable retirement, several have made a healthy business out of hawking black-market and dual-use components to governments seeking a nuclear arsenal of their own.

  As I get settled at the safe house again, the most famous of these networks, led by a Pakistani metallurgist named Abdul Qadeer Khan, is in the process of being dismantled. The reports we’re getting from the resulting debriefings suggest that it isn’t just nation-states his people have been supplying. The Khan network has operated with something close to impunity for over twenty years, masterminding the Pakistani nuclear program before going increasingly rogue to supply Libya, Iran, and North Korea with centrifuge designs and components in exchange for the cash and uranium required to make the Pakistani system tick. Then along came the interception of a ship carrying Khan-supplied technology to Libya, followed by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s offer to unilaterally dismantle his nuclear program to avoid military fallout. All of a sudden, A. Q. Khan is on the defensive and the brokers who’ve been dealing on his behalf are beginning to talk.

  We receive a quickening influx of cables suggesting that Pakistan’s pursuit of the “Islamic bomb” didn’t stop at trade with rogue governments. In enough cases to be worrying, brokers report being approached by al Qa’ida itself.

  With the ramp-up in threat reporting, we get a firehose of funding and personnel. Our CTC/WMD safe house expands to occupy a second floor of the nondescript office building that provides its cover. Like the floor below, this one has a normal
glass-fronted reception area, where visitors are screened for clearance, then sent back down a hallway to drop off phones and other transmitting devices before passing through two SCIF doors and into a floor-sized safe. I move upstairs to focus on the brokers who survived the Khan roundup only to form a spin-off network selling to terror groups instead. We coordinate with the teams dismantling supply to the state programs, but our responsibility is strictly nonstate actors, from al Qa’ida to the apocalyptic end-of-days cults that pop up periodically in a horrific spasm of violence, like the Jonestown massacre or the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.

  I get up to speed on what we know by visiting detainees in Europe and Asia who are awaiting trial for their role in Khan’s reign of global proliferation. I ask them about sales to terror groups. Most avoid the question, but one—a Swede—makes no apologies.

  “Dr. Khan committed his life to leveling the playing field,” he says in precise English. “He saw his country humiliated by India on the battlefield. Then he himself was humiliated by an Indian soldier on a train crossing the Pakistani border. The soldier took his favorite pen. It wasn’t a big thing. But he did it because he could get away with it.”

  “So because someone took his favorite pen, he decided to help terrorists build a nuclear bomb,” I say. It sounds snarky, even to me.

  He cocks his head slightly, as if assessing me. Then he shrugs. “Humiliation is a powerful thing,” he says, without judgment. “Nuclear weapons are just a stand-in for respect. Everyone wants respect, wouldn’t you say? Even the people you call terrorists.”

  We let the silence sit for a minute. He’s not wrong. But the truth doesn’t absolve the crime.

  “They call you terrorists, by the way,” he adds as an afterthought.

  On the way home, at Frankfurt Airport, I watch a boy watch security officers search his mother’s hijab. I think of the time I saw a banker repossessing a home drop a woman’s house keys into the garbage. Her kid had made the key ring. It clanged when it hit the metal base. A few months later, I read a newspaper article about a banker’s murder, and part of me understood. Ants flee the stomping boot of power. Until, one day, they don’t. The Swede leaves me unsettled. Loose nukes combined with humiliated humans doesn’t end well for anyone.

  I get back to the safe house and start mapping the brokers on a conference room wall. The more I flesh out each node, the more I realize that the fall of Khan’s network isn’t diminishing the potential for nuclear terrorism. If anything, it’s intensifying it. Dealers who once sold their wares to Qaddafi and Kim now have space on their dance cards for al-Zawahiri and bin Laden. I present these findings to my boss, and he drops a box of files on the conference room table.

  “No shit,” he says.

  Inside are folders—dozens of credible nuclear threats since 2001. I’d known about the Dragonfire incident—an intelligence report the month after 9/11 suggesting that al Qa’ida had a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon stashed somewhere in New York City. The source, an Agency asset encrypted as Dragonfire, was deemed credible enough that the vice president and an entire shadow government were moved to an undisclosed location for more than a month in case D.C. got vaporized. So far, that hasn’t happened, but given the other folders in this box, it seems it’s not for lack of trying. Report after report refers to “a nuclear reckoning” or an “American Hiroshima.” Al Qa’ida clerics call for the death of four million Americans to pay for the Muslim civilians they claim U.S. policies have killed. Humans have only one technology capable of achieving those numbers, and it’s shaped like a mushroom cloud.

  My boss watches me as I read.

  “Hard to unsee, huh?” he asks. I nod. “We’ve been in triage mode. Focused on preventing attacks once they’re already planned. But we should be playing the long game, too. I just got a couple of newbies from the latest crop at the Farm. Take them, if you want. See if you can’t cut some of this off at the point of supply.”

  At twenty-six, I’m suddenly managing two new operatives and an administrative desk officer, along with a slew of support staff. We’re impossibly young to have the fate of the world in our hands. But such is the way of the Agency. By thirty-five, any operative worth their salt has gone hard enough at their job to erode their cover. My chief explained it to me once in training: “You could sit in a closet for twenty years and your cover would remain pristine, but you wouldn’t have saved a single life. Get out there. Recruit assets. Stop attacks. After a while, someone’s gonna call you out. But that’s better than never doing anything at all.” He raised his coffee like a cocktail. “Remember, kid, if you’re gonna fall, fall forward.”

  Once an operative’s cover is eroded, they can still work. They run our bases and stations around the world or come back to manage branches at home. But the undercover, tip-of-the-spear, real-deal case officers are the youngest of the bunch. That’s us. With our pristine cover, a whole lot of swagger, and zero real-world experience between us.

  We’re tasked with mapping the tentacles of the network and preventing nuclear precursors from actually changing hands. At first, we tackle this by posing as buyers. I ask one of my new guys, Neil, to comb through the message intercepts, ranking each seller’s responsiveness to new customers. Neil’s an MIT PhD—the type of charming genius who would have been equally at home banging out code for the NSA as he is working diplomatic cocktail parties for us. He takes over my upper-floor conference room map, circling known sellers of nuclear precursors in red and ranking buyers by the depth and credibility of their follow-on connections.

  The more qualified buyers a seller has, the better his access to terror groups of interest, but the less he needs new customers and the lower the likelihood that our approach would make it to a meeting. The ideal target is a seller with links to more established brokers but too few buyers of his own. Find a guy like that and we have a shot at setting up a meeting, only to daisy-chain the low-level dealer into contact with a higher-level guy once we get our foot in the door. One seller in particular, a Hungarian named Jakab, has links to the best brokers in the business but still responds to almost every inquiry he receives.

  “Hustlers gonna hustle,” Neil says. “Looks like maybe he’s an apprentice to the big guys trying to go out on his own.”

  We strategize about how best to approach him, taking breaks to hit up Chipotle and Panda Express, down beneath our tower of safety, surrounded by lunch-break shoppers in skirt suits and sneakers.

  “Lucy Stanton?” a rosacea-cheeked woman approaches the mother sitting next to us in the outdoor food court one day. The mom looks uninterested. “I’m a friend of Jen’s,” the ruddy-faced woman persists. “She suggested I talk to you about playgroup.” Suddenly the mom’s face brightens. She picks up her youngest to make room for the rosy-cheeked stranger to sit down. Neil turns to me.

  “That’s it. We need someone to refer us,” he says. “We need a Jen.”

  I nod into my iced tea. Nobody likes a stranger.

  “Do we have any friends who might oblige?” I ask.

  “Maybe Kite Wing.” It’s a risky business, mentioning crypts out here in the open. On the off chance that our safe house cover has been blown, there could be foreign government surveillants around us. Sniffing out CIA operatives is a favorite pastime of our young, hungry counterparts, posted to the Russian embassy across the Potomac in D.C. Even our own security officers have been known to check up on fellow operatives, ensuring that classified information remains in the four walls of a SCIF.

  I give Neil a scowl. But he’s not wrong. Kite Wing is the cryptonym for a longtime asset in the upper echelons of Hizb’allah, the Shi’ite terror group funded by Iran that passes itself off as a community organization in Lebanon and beyond. It’s a shrewd suggestion. Hizb’allah has limited contact with the Sunni groups we’re after, the al Qa’idas and Jemaah Islamiyahs of the world. That means little risk that he�
��d want to blow our cover. If anything, he’d like to see the Sunni groups wiped from the proverbial map. Our objectives are pretty well aligned. And a referral from one of Hizb’allah’s top lieutenants should all but guarantee that Jakab takes us seriously.

  Still, Neil shouldn’t be using crypts in public.

  He smiles back at me, a “Yeah, but am I right” smile that I can’t help but return. It’s a good feeling to have cracked this thing, here at a plastic-coated picnic table between the food stalls and Ross Dress for Less.

  “Okay, okay. Let’s just take it upstairs,” I say.

  “That’s what she said,” he quips back, in case I’d forgotten that we’re only playacting at adulthood.

  “Keep it classy, Neil.”

  He crumples his burrito wrapper and shoots for the garbage bin—slam dunk—then tips an imaginary hat in my direction.

  “Yes, ma’am. Right after I get done saving the world.”

  13

  Neil’s plan works. Kite Wing introduces me as a broker for the “Southeast Asian brothers,” a characterization sufficiently vague to confer credibility while still leaving me enough flexibility to craft the details myself. Like so many of his more connected colleagues, Jakab communicates mostly by using the Drafts folder of an e-mail account. Write a message, save it to Drafts, ensure that your recipient has the account’s e-mail address and password, and wait for him or her to log in and read it. The recipient then leaves their reply in the same folder, all without ever having to actually send a message—a crude but successful attempt to get around the e-mail intercepts dealers fear most.