The Counterfeit Agent

by Alex Berenson

  Most officers and desk heads regarded the human resources department as useless at best, an impediment at worst. Joyner didn’t try to change their minds. She focused on recruiting, where she did have leverage. After September 11, the agency had hired heavily from the armed forces. Veterans knew government bureaucracy, and many came prequalified with security clearances. But they inevitably contributed to the CIA’s creeping militarization. Joyner was enlarging the pool of civilian candidates by recruiting older employees. She had increased the agency’s presence at elite scientific universities like Caltech and at times pressed for hires with smudges on their background checks.

  Shafer understood her goals, though he worried the experiment might end badly. The Snowden case proved the risks. If one of the new hires went wrong, the CIA’s congressional overseers would howl, and Langley would wind up leaning even more heavily on the military than before.

  Meantime, Joyner was one of the few people Shafer still trusted. Years before, she had seen Duto at his Machiavellian worst, using Wells and Shafer against the Director of National Intelligence. The episode had cemented her relationship with Shafer. They ate together every few months. Shafer was married, Joyner was divorced, but they had reached an age where they could have dinner without misunderstandings. At their last meal, Shafer had made the mistake of suggesting they might even have made a good couple once upon a time. Joyner chortled so loudly that even the waitresses looked at her.

  “What?”

  “My type’s a little more—” She laughed again in big honking hoots. Finally, she broke off, rubbed her jaw. She was a solidly built woman, the type who turned almost masculine in late middle age. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Let’s just say cowboy.”

  Shafer took the cheapest shot he had. “Sure you don’t mean cowgirl.”

  “Completely.”

  —

  Joyner leaned over her keyboard, editing a PowerPoint slide titled Retention Rates at SIS-1 Level by Geography and Subspecialty.

  “Fascinating.”

  “We also serve. How you messing up my life today, Ellis?”

  “As it happens, I also have an interest in retention. Specifically, case officers who served in South America, including TDYs, and who were fired or left under duress between four and twelve years ago.”

  From the timeline that Montoya and Ramos had given Wells, the rogue officer must have left at least four years before. The twelve-year outer limit was arbitrary, but Shafer was short on time and needed to shrink the pool of suspects. For the same reason, he had limited his search to officers who had been fired or forced out. Of course, the suspect might have nursed his grudge quietly, left the agency with a clean record. But the showiness of the planned attack struck Shafer as the work of someone who had flamed out spectacularly and wanted revenge.

  He knew he faced long odds trying to find a traitor this way. The alternative was to sit in his office waiting for Duto to call.

  “You want this why?”

  He handed her the memo he’d concocted. “I want to look at station management techniques. This is the first step.” The story was as far from the truth as possible without technically being a lie.

  She read the top paragraph, pushed the memo back. “Wanna tell me what this really is?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “All those personnel records are TS, and some are SCI, you know that.”

  He did. He also knew that Duto’s departure had cost him his super-duper all-access backstage pass. Why he was reduced to these games. “I’m looking for a name. Someone with a grudge.”

  “And you can’t tell me more—”

  “Better if I don’t.”

  “Define left under duress.”

  The fact that they were still talking gave him hope. “Resignation or retirement after a negative evaluation, a failed poly, referral for alcohol or substance use. Et cetera.”

  She sighed like the sweet San Antonio girl she’d once been. “May take a couple days.”

  “Too long.”

  “I’m liking this less and less.”

  “It’s an active grudge.”

  “This is the only way?”

  “Unless you want me to have to depend on Vinny Duto.” The truth, though he knew she’d read the words as sarcasm.

  “Your piece of short fiction, please.”

  He passed back the memo. She read the whole thing this time.

  “Thinner than an oil slick. And twice as ugly. Let’s hope nobody ever asks about it. Set up in there”—she nodded at her conference room—“so I can keep an eye on you. I’ll have a tech bring in a laptop with the files. You take paper notes only, leave the laptop here whenever you leave. Call of nature, whatever. Everything stays in the room. I’ll handle my assistant. She’s a little bit nosy. Actually, a lot. In fact, it would be better if you just snuck back at lunch, stayed in there the rest of the day.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t screw me on this, Ellis. I still have some things I want to do at this place.”

  “I won’t.”

  “And don’t call me ma’am. You’re even more decrepit than I am.”

  “No cowboy, either.”

  “For sure.”

  —

  That afternoon Shafer hunched over a laptop, scanning personnel records for forty-two case officers. He wasn’t expecting to find anything as obvious as a note explaining that an officer had lost his wife in an intramural three-legged race. He planned a process of elimination, looking for guys who had been thrown overboard in rough seas. He hoped to end the day with a few names worthy of further scrutiny. The agency didn’t usually require ex-officers to register their addresses or new jobs. But the older targets should be trackable through their pensions. As for the rest, Shafer would have Social Security numbers and photos. They ought to be easy to find, unless they were hiding, which would be a red flag in and of itself.

  He knocked out twenty-five names with little trouble. Fifteen had worked only in Argentina, Brazil, or Chile and couldn’t have known Eduardo Nuñez. Ten more had resigned to join other government agencies and had no problems with their records. He assumed Joyner’s staffer had included them by mistake. Seventeen officers were left, a manageable number.

  He paged through, looking at all the ways a CIA career could implode. Seven officers had evaluations no worse than mediocre but had been transferred repeatedly to smaller and less prestigious stations, a sure sign that they had problems with senior officers. Eventually all seven had quit. Six others had resigned or retired after warnings about their failure to recruit agents or general lack of productivity.

  Maybe one of those thirteen was angry enough to decide to assassinate a station chief years later. But none jumped at Shafer. They were second- and third-tier case officers who had been winnowed out. It happened.

  The other four names on the list were more interesting.

  Gabriel Lewis was sent to Johannesburg after a successful rotation in Bogotá. In South Africa, he spent thirty-two thousand dollars on a recruiting trip that turned out to be a ten-day vacation with his mistress. His station chief was angry enough to argue for referring the case for criminal prosecution, though Lewis was ultimately allowed to repay the money and resign. But Shafer saw one immediate problem with Lewis as a suspect. Based on his name, he was probably Jewish. An Iran connection was hard to imagine.

  Ted Anderson had started in Lima and moved to Saudi Arabia, then Spain. In Madrid he flunked a routine five-year polygraph, registering as deceptive on a crucial question: Have you ever had contact with a foreign national that you failed to reveal? He denied committing espionage, and that answer registered as true. But when he was asked why the poly showed deception on the other questions, he didn’t know. Three months later, he resigned.

  The agency reviewed all his files, found no evidence that he’d given up c
lassified information, and quietly closed the case. A one-page note at the end of the file revealed that Anderson now worked for a Geneva hedge fund that specialized in oil trading, which might explain his lie on the poly. Maybe he’d been selling information to the fund all along. Shafer viewed him as a long shot, too.

  Fred Beck had served all over Latin America during the nineties, including temporary assignments to Lima and Bogotá. His career went sideways in 2002 in Nicaragua. Beck accused Steve Antoni, another officer in Managua, of lying about a car accident. Antoni said he’d been alone, but Beck claimed a “female host-country national” was involved.

  Beck was probably right. No matter. Antoni was well connected, popular at the station. Beck wasn’t. After a cursory investigation, Antoni received the mildest of wrist slaps, a loss of three vacation days for failing to report the accident promptly. Beck was snubbed as a troublemaker. Has difficulty understanding the complex realities of recruitment, his station chief wrote the following year. May be better suited as an analyst. About the worst slur the clandestine service could offer.

  Beck quit in 2004. On his way out, he wrote an angry letter to the inspector general’s office about “the rancid cesspool of corruption in Managua—in fact, all over Latin America.” The letter might have gotten more attention if the agency hadn’t been desperately trying to fix Iraq. Of even more interest to Shafer, Antoni was now chief of station in Tunisia.

  Glenn Mason, the fourth of Shafer’s top suspects, had been a solid officer in his first posting in Lima. Then his career got interesting. From 2003 to 2006, he served with distinction in Baghdad. But in fall 2006, he came unhinged. He accused an Iraqi translator of being a double agent for al-Qaeda. A few weeks later, he was found outside his trailer, yelling incoherently and holding a pistol. He claimed not to remember the incident. An agency psychiatrist insisted he be transferred out. The agency gave him several months’ leave and then moved him to Hong Kong, as he requested.

  But his posting there started badly and ended in disaster. He was absent for days at a time. Because of his Iraq commendations, the chief of station was loath to challenge him. He was asked if he wanted to transfer to another station, and he refused. By the end of his second year, he’d used up any goodwill from his time in Baghdad. The station recorded his failures, building a case to fire him. He was written up for drinking at work, offered inpatient treatment for alcohol abuse. The files depicted him as curiously passive. Without ever having met Mason, Shafer could see him apologizing to his chief in a flat, dull voice, making promises he had no intention of keeping. Finally, the station’s security officer insisted he take a poly. He failed questions about cocaine use, consented to a drug test, failed that, too. He was fired.

  Shafer read the file twice. He found himself unsatisfied. Mason’s instability disturbed him. The man had worked impossibly hard in Iraq, then thrown away his career. Why hadn’t he tried to save himself, worked with the agency’s clumsy efforts to help him? Was he a casualty of Iraq, or broken even before Baghdad?

  —

  By the time Shafer finished looking at the files, it was past midnight. Joyner had stayed until eight, then conceded defeat. “I’m trusting you.”

  “Scout’s honor. Nanoo-nanoo.”

  Now Shafer looked at the pages of notes he’d compiled. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worked an eighteen-hour day, but he felt exhilarated. His next step would be seeing what Lewis, Beck, and Mason had been doing since they’d left.

  Shafer had left his phone off all day aside from two short calls home. He turned it on now, found messages from Wells and Duto.

  He called Duto first. “Where have you been all day?”

  “Detecting. You have a name?”

  “Hatch said he’d heard rumors of weirdness in Lima, but he couldn’t remember the details. I’m waiting on the other guys. You have to remember, Colombia back then was crazy. Then 9/11 happened. And this was all a long time ago.”

  “Call Hatch back, see if these names jog his memory.” Shafer read them off.

  “Why those guys?”

  “Just do it, Vinny.”

  “Now? Past midnight?”

  “You want me to read you the names again or can you remember them?”

  —

  Ten minutes later, Shafer’s phone rang.

  “How did you know, Ellis?”

  Almost Retirees 1, All-Powerful Senators 0.

  “Tell me how.”

  Shafer pressed his luck. “It was Mason, right?”

  “Soon as I said it, he remembered. Mason walked in on another officer with his girlfriend, she was Peruvian, this was just before September eleventh, literally the day before, so it all got forgotten.”

  “Who was the other guy?”

  “James Veder. He’s—”

  “Chief of station in Manila. It’s real, Vinny. It’s happening. Now we just have to make Hebley believe it.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  Shafer still didn’t understand how these pieces fit together. Was Mason working for the Iranians? What had he and everyone he’d hired been doing for the last three years? They would have time to answer those questions. Right now they had to make sure Veder knew he was at risk.

  “We’re a hundred percent sure this is real?” Duto said.

  “You’re the one who hooked Wells up with Montoya.”

  Duto was silent for a while. Then sighed. “I still have the emergency numbers for the stations. I’ll call Veder, tell him to watch his back. I’ll call Hebley tomorrow.”

  “Will he believe you?”

  Duto hung up without answering, much less thanking Shafer. No matter. They both understood the truth. Duto would have come up with the name eventually. Someone would have remembered Mason and Veder. But Shafer’s intuition and hard work had saved crucial hours, if not days.

  Neither of them had any way to know that they were already too late.

  11

  MANILA

  ONE HOUR EARLIER

  Like other Pacific Rim megacities, Manila no longer had morning and evening rush hours. Traffic choked expressways and surface roads from dawn until midnight. Men wearing tissue-thin white masks waded between cars, hawking newspapers, water, and buckets of fried fish and rice.

  To James Veder, the traffic was like Manila itself: maddening, though with a certain loopy charm. He almost never drove himself, so he could work or catch up on email. And every so often he saw something that made him wish he could lower his bullet-resistant windows and take pictures. A month before, a fiftyish woman in the next lane had given herself a haircut as she inched along. Not a trim, a full haircut. With shears. Even more amazing, her car was a subcompact. She could barely move her head. She positioned the blades with surgical precision before each cut. Two days ago, Veder had caught a man in an early-eighties Michael Jackson outfit singing full throttle with his windows up. No doubt practicing for karaoke. Veder would never understand the Filipino obsession with karaoke. Even the smallest villages had at least one crude machine for everyone to share.

  His tour here was nearly done. In six months, he’d be on to his next posting. He expected Mexico City, though the move hadn’t been finalized yet. But he would miss the Philippines. The post had drawbacks, not least the twelve-hour time difference from Virginia. At least once a week someone at Langley woke him at three a.m. Still, Manila was a pleasure to run. He’d overseen a successful op aimed at the Chinese navy, which was encroaching on the Spratly island chain. He’d managed counterterror raids against the Islamists in Mindanao. He’d even helped the Pentagon track the pirates who popped up in the Celebes Sea. The Philippines were important enough to merit attention and resources, but not so vital that he had to endure endless visits from seventh-floor managers proving their importance.

  Best of all, Filipino women had shucked their Roman Catholic scruples long ago. As a group, th
ey were the filthiest bedmates Veder had known, and he had plenty of experience. Maybe after he retired, he’d publish his memoirs. He had the perfect title already. Screwing the World: My Life with the CIA. Too bad the censors wouldn’t approve. He would sell a million copies.

  Because of Manila’s traffic, Veder preferred not to leave the embassy during the day. Today, though, he had no choice. He was lunching at a club outside the city with Admiral Juan Fortuna Ocampo, vice chief of staff of the Philippine navy. The navy knew about the meeting, but not the nineteen thousand dollars Veder would leave in the admiral’s golf bag. Veder wasn’t sure the money bought anything that Ocampo wouldn’t tell him for free. The Philippine government was close to the United States. But the CIA liked to pay sources. Friends could walk away. Co-conspirators couldn’t. Analysts took purchased information more seriously than what was freely given. It was as if Langley didn’t believe anyone would help the United States for any reason but money.

  So Veder had a slim envelope filled with hundred-dollar bills in his briefcase. After all these years, Veder still got a charge from carrying cash. He knew some case officers didn’t like the agency. They questioned the work, the bureaucracy, the morality, the drones, the blah, blah, blah. He never argued. Let them whine. But what he wanted to say was: Shut up and man up. Being a case officer is the best job in the world. If you’re too dumb to realize it, we don’t need you. Go ahead and quit.

  Though no job was perfect. Now the agency was having one of its periodic panic attacks about what the security guys called TTP, threats to personnel. The Revolutionary Guard had jerked the agency’s chain with a mysteriously vague threat against a station chief. Veder would bet every dollar he was carrying that the source for this so-called plot was an Iranian plant. Iran had enough problems keeping its own scientists alive. No way would the Guard come head-on at the agency. Instead, it had invented this little threat to gum up ops all over the world.