Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  For anyone planning to make an actual nuclear weapon—to trigger and sustain a nuclear chain reaction—that yellowcake has to go through enrichment before it will pop. First, it’s got to be converted into a gas known as hex—uranium hexafluoride—and injected into centrifuges that spin at twice the speed of sound. Then the laws of physics take over, pressing the heavier uranium 238 to the outside of the drum, while the lighter uranium 235 becomes concentrated on the inside. The levels of 235 get higher and higher with every spin cycle, hitting a concentration of 5 percent for civilian power generation or an ambitious 90 percent before the uranium is useful for a weapon.

  This is where the rubber hits the road for most state programs. It takes thousands of precisely engineered centrifuges, arranged in cascades, a year or more to enrich enough uranium to make one nuclear bomb. Every centrifuge contains upwards of a hundred parts, each carefully engineered to keep the machine from flying apart and destroying the rest of the cascade in the process. It’s no coincidence that the Swiss—known for their precision clocks—are among the world’s best crafters of centrifuges. And the price tag for the equipment pretty much requires a Swiss bank account filled with zeros. For the most part, that kind of expense is the exclusive realm of nations. Some outlier groups might have those huge financial resources and years of engineering time to draw on—Aum Shinrikyo, the apocalyptic cult that choked Tokyo subway commuters with sarin gas in 1995, turned out to have nearly a billion dollars in the bank and a uranium-mining operation in Australia—but most nonstate actors are looking to skip the pesky, expensive enrichment step and purchase a ready-made weapon instead. Short of that, they’re out to buy uranium that’s already been concentrated so they can craft a crude weapon of their own.

  It’s the enrichment that takes time, skill, money. Once a group has the HEU in hand, the bomb making itself is pretty straightforward. The more HEU a group has, the easier that bomb making becomes. The hundred pounds of “material” Jakab’s talking about is enough to fuel the simplest gun-style design—the same kind the United States used in Hiroshima.

  But as Jakab points out, there’s not much chance that any group I’d represent has a hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium burning a hole in their pocket. The less a group has, the more it needs things like the reflectors he’s selling to coax along the nuclear reaction and juice the weapon’s impact. Using the beryllium he’s hocking, a terror cell could make something serviceable with ten pounds of plutonium. About the size of a softball, that’s a much easier quantity to buy, transport, handle, and store. He’s talking al Qa’ida’s language, and he knows it.

  “Beryllium could work,” I say. “Give me the details and I’ll circle back.”

  When we finish, Jakab heads toward the stairs to the street and I walk the other way, to the shared bathrooms at the end of the hall. I scribble notes on index cards in the toilet stall to be sure I’m able to capture everything in my summary cable to headquarters later. Each cable I write, from the moment of first contact, is copied to Jakab’s file and used to assess his suitability for recruitment down the road. If I ever want the chance to actually turn him, his file has to make the strongest possible case. In coded shorthand, I list the items he offered for sale, along with price, source, and any other details he shared about each. Beneath, I write the word “Mary” to remind me of the lamb and the grandfather and Rákosi’s torture goon squad. It will be an important detail come recruitment time, when I’ll have to jump through a series of annoying but well-intended hoops, known as the asset validation system. AVS, as it’s known, involves pointing to cables in Jakab’s file that can demonstrate his sincerity, his access, and sufficient vulnerabilities to make his recruitment possible.

  The word “vulnerabilities” here is a term of art, but I don’t like it much. The Agency uses it to mean any need a source reveals that might make him want to work with us. Sometimes that thing truly is a vulnerability—a crushing debt or medical problem, for example. Some operatives use those inroads to get an asset on their side. I prefer a different kind of vulnerability: the desire to do something that matters. Cheesy as it sounds, I’ve found that deep down, most targets yearn to be a part of saving lives or bringing liberty to their lands. Like anyone else, assets want to be a part of something important, want their lives to have meant something, want to build some legacy, secret or not, to keep the terrors of mortality and insignificance at bay. That’s a vulnerability all humans share. And it’s the one I’ve found propels some of the most courageous and significant work any asset—or person—can do.

  Today, Jakab wears the story of his grandfather’s murder as armor to keep him hard. With some work, I’m hoping he can see it is a family legacy of opposition to fearful forces—a legacy he can honor and carry on. It can’t have been easy for his grandfather to face the dreaded torture squad and hold his ideological ground. Something about the melancholy of Jakab’s folk songs makes me believe that deep down, he shares his grandfather’s idealism. He just needs the opportunity to surprise himself with his own ethical true north.

  I tuck the index cards into the concealment pouch sewn along the inside seam of my bag. Then I return the unused cards to a leather card holder—a graduation gift from my branch chief at the Farm. In the movies, a Glock is a spy’s best friend. In real life, it’s the humble index card, lined on one side for meeting notes, blank on the other for hand-sketched diagrams, schematics, and maps. These three-by-five-inch rectangles of sacred information are our reason for existence. Operatives have killed and died for words written on similar cards pulled from similar holders since the days of the OSS. And those words have saved countless lives, averting nuclear disaster and preventing imminent attacks from Pyongyang to Havana.

  14

  When I get back to the Virginia safe house, I lay out the meeting cards on my desk. Jakab had mentioned that he had a few contacts who used to work at Arzamas-16, one of the most advanced of the former Soviet nuclear labs. That goes some way to corroborating Neil’s conference room map and its tentacle connections between Jakab and a smorgasbord of dealers offering the highest-end nuclear goods. It also suggests that he hasn’t given me his full catalog just yet. Beryllium reflectors and precision inverters are all well and good, but Arzamas-16 is a full-on Aladdin’s cave of destruction. Anyone with the kind of access he described should be able to get their hands on the holy grail of nuclear terrorism: the much-sought-after, man-portable, airline-checkable suitcase nuke.

  Only one-fifteenth as strong as either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima, this tactical weapon would still claim a few hundred thousand lives over a few decades and render an entire city center uninhabitable. These bombs require no codes to operate, and at the very least, we believe that 150 to 200 of them are missing from the former Soviet arsenal. Arzamas-16 was a storage site for suitcase nukes back when the Soviet Union fell and the security layer accountable for tracking its weapons fell right along with it. Many were stashed in rooms secured only with padlocks—the kind that can be dispatched with a pair of garden-variety bolt cutters. Across the former Soviet empire, labs like Arzamas-16 were overrun by confusion and economic hardship. Chains of command crumbled, and entire swaths of the Soviet military complex devolved to every man for himself. Potatoes were better guarded than nuclear weapons. Until workers realized that a bomb can buy a lot of potatoes. And by then, it was too late.

  “Technically, he’s our lowest-level dealer,” Neil says on reviewing my notes. “Given that you seem to be his best customer just now. But in terms of connections, he might be one of our best.”

  I nod. There’s something special about Jakab—that elusive mix of honor and access that gets my adrenaline racing. Sure, he’s not making the most righteous choices at the moment, but the potential is there. I can taste it.

  “He’s ours to lose,” I say.

  “Let him cool his heels,” Neil agrees. “Then draft an e-mail ordering the right
amount of beryllium for a coy little reflector. Should be enough to whet his appetite.”

  It’s a rush, juggling communications with every dealer in the network, keeping straight where each is in our recruitment process, what materials each sells, and, most important, what drives them to sell materials at all. In addition to Jakab, I’m working three others. Neil and Pete have two each. Between us, we have another half dozen in the early throes of e-mail inquiry. And that’s just the brokers. We’re also each handling existing assets in the terror groups themselves in order to find out where they’re sourcing their weapons and add those nodes to the network we’re mapping.

  It’s a different feeling, meeting a source who was recruited by a previous operative. There isn’t a shared history to draw on, except for whatever the handling officer captured in his or her cables. I pore over each asset’s file before I meet them, memorizing the visual and spoken cues we’ll need to exchange to confirm each other’s identity and reviewing their personal histories, searching out every last hint about what makes this person tick. All CIA assets put themselves at risk by working with us, but none more so than these sources, nestled deep inside terror groups that exist to see us dead. Many do it only as a last resort, an ethical emergency-stop button they hit when the plans of their brothers become one step too extreme. Even so, it’s never easy. In many cases, we are still their enemy, and understanding the nuances of their motivation is critical to getting out of each meeting alive.

  One of them—an Egyptian named Karim—triggers a meeting a month or so after I get back from Tunisia. His file says he was a walk-in, a source who turned up at the embassy in Amman one day, asking to talk with the CIA. I cringe thinking about the poor officer on duty. Some walk-ins provide our very best information. Other walk-ins are dangles—bait sent by a terror group or hostile intelligence service to sniff out which embassy staffers are actually CIA. That means the operative assigned to take the meeting has to kit up in light disguise—the wig, glasses, and latex nose debacle issued by the DS&T and better suited to a Saturday Night Live skit than a life-or-death chat with a sworn enemy. I only hope that whoever took this particular walk-in didn’t have hair as long as mine, because the cable says the meeting lasted four and a half hours, and those wigs begin to ride up around the end of hour one.

  When he walked into the embassy, Karim came armed with nothing—no weapons, no documents, no photos to prove what he had to say. Only a wild story of his al Qa’ida cell’s search for nuclear weapons in the backcountry of Chechnya. Methodically, the embassy officer debriefed him, asking him to draw bird’s-eye-view diagrams of each compound or village he mentioned. When compared to satellite imagery, every diagram checked out. He’d been recruited as a low-level courier by an al Qa’ida cell when his parents died. He’d needed a way to feed himself and his little brother. The more responsibility they gave him, the more trapped he became. Until one day, they asked him to meet with a broker about a bomb. He hated us, he clarified that first day. Hated us enough not to become like us. Only the Great Satan deploys nuclear weapons, he told the walk-in officer. Karim went on to become one of our most valuable sources in mapping al Qa’ida’s search for nuclear technology. He is a treasure of national security. But his handling officer quit the Agency unexpectedly last month, so when Karim signals for a meeting, I’m the one who gets on a plane.

  According to the commo plan on file, we’re to meet in the private courtyard of a rented apartment in Erbil, an ancient city in northern Iraq. The war is quieter up here, beyond the moonscape of Anbar. There are still suicide bombings, like the one that killed upwards of fifty people in May, but the local Kurdish militia keeps snipers off the streets. Karim’s been living outside Mosul this last year, half a day’s car ride away, counting the time spent stuck behind oil trucks or facedown at checkpoints. He comes into Erbil periodically for meetings and supplies.

  There’s something about Iraq that strikes my tuning fork. About the whole Middle East, really. The street music, the smell of hummus and lamb, the tradition of hospitality, even from those who have nothing. There is an ancient knowing here, beneath all the blood sport and fear.

  I meander through the souq during the last phase of my surveillance detection route. It’s said to be the oldest continuously operating marketplace in the world, going back some seven thousand years. Dazzling suzanis are piled to the ceiling, their hand embroidery like Technicolor spiderwebs against the dusty walls. Peddlers sell remote-controlled toys and beeping plastic robots. Clothing stalls display knock-off Nikes alongside bedazzled hijabs. An assortment of religious jewelry catches my eye. Amid prayer beads and ayatul kursi scrolls, a small selection of pendants includes a coin that reads “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” They’re the same words that are etched on the wall of the Agency atrium, across from the rows of stars that represent the sacrifice of generations of spies. Funny to see Christian scripture here, in this Muslim land. I wonder how many Americans, how many Iraqis, remember that Jesus is considered a prophet in Islam.

  “How much?” I ask the bent man behind the table, and, after exchanging a few notes, tuck the coin in my pocket as I continue on toward my meeting.

  I find a coffeehouse a little ways down a cobbled road and take a seat, my final timing stop, designed to allow me to approach my meeting place within the specified four-minute window. An old Kurdish woman offers to read my coffee grounds. I ignore her, then tell her thanks but no. She stands there, plump and sincere, as I take my last sip and pack away the drinks and pastries I’ve bought for the meeting. I glance at my watch. Still a few minutes until it makes sense to leave. I’ve already determined that I’m not under surveillance. Might as well consult with the spirits.

  I turn my cup over on the saucer and look up at her. She motions for me to hand it to her as she takes the seat across from me. The road beside us is filled with bicycles. She lifts up my cup and peers at the shapes in the grainy black grounds.

  “A bird!” she exclaims. “Here, look. A bird with”—she flicks her hand like Wolverine—“claws.”

  She’s pointing to a shape in the center of the saucer. It does, in truth, look exactly like a bird with claws.

  “Birds mean the bringing of a message. It is a happy thing. Claw means an enemy. It is a frightening thing.” It feels implausible that my coffee grounds could summarize my upcoming meeting so accurately. For a moment, I wonder if she’s Kurdish intelligence. Then she puts her hand on mine, as though she is giving me a gift. “And here,” she says, “is a broom and a butterfly.” She points to the shapes with her pinkie. It’s inexplicably endearing, this old crone making such an effort to be delicate with her cracked and swollen fingers. “The broom is for questioning what you think you know. And the butterfly is for”—she passes her hands quickly in front of her heart like curtains—“transformation. It is a very lucky reading,” she says. I give her five thousand dinars and stand up. She holds my eye. “Very lucky,” she repeats as I go.

  They’re generic things, I tell myself. Could apply to anyone. Still, her sincerity stays with me as I make the last few turns before the meeting. What would I hope to transform into, I find myself wondering, if that butterfly were me. Someone who doesn’t transform for a living, maybe. Someone who gets to just be.

  I enter the apartment building’s lobby. It’s sparse but clean. The commo plan says to meet in Flat 5. I let myself in and dead-bolt the door behind myself. A pair of shutters opens to the little courtyard, set with a table and chairs beside a small tile fountain. A pair of doors leads to the street. I unlock them and roll an empty oil drum out onto the pavement—the specified signal to indicate that all is safe for Karim to enter. A few minutes later, he does.

  He is slender and taut, the skin pulled tightly over his cheekbones. I lock the street door behind him. When I turn back to him, I notice that his eyes are green.

  “What brings you to Erbil?” I ask h
im, the opening of oral bona fides, an exchange of predesignated sentences to confirm each other’s identities.

  “The call of the mufti,” he replies. Most assets recite their bona fides with boredom or irritation, but he says the words with exquisite feeling, as though they are not only true but urgent.

  “Thanks for coming,” I say and gesture for him to take a seat. I pull out the drinks and pastries and join him at the table. He watches me but says nothing. His breath is slower than mine.

  “Did you run into any problems on the way?”

  He offers a slight head shake, no more than a twitch.

  “Great. And how much time do we have to chat?”