In John’s absence, Um did not dare move, although she tried as subtly as possible to scan the room for the camera she had been told would be recording her every move.
John returned without his computer and sat down. He offered her a bottle of water, which she accepted. “Are you taking any medications?” he asked. “There are some anomalies in your chart, and I’m trying to explain them.”
“No. I’m in good health. No pills. I hate pills, in fact.”
“How about ibuprofen or anything like that? Advil? Tylenol?”
“Oh yes, I did take two Tylenols this morning. I had a headache. I didn’t think of Tylenol as real medication.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to do this again. Can you come back tomorrow at nine? We have several issues here unrelated to Tylenol.” He paused, fixing his gaze on her eyes and added, “Unless you want to tell me anything now.”
She shook her head, and John walked her back to the security guard at the front door.
Back in the Mustang, Um sat and took a deep breath. Did she really want to start all over the next day? Why not tell Ahmed she had given it her best shot and move on? Were they asking her to come back in order to arrest her? She sat still for another few minutes and called Ahmed, who reassured her. “This work is important,” he said.” He emphasized that high-level people were depending on her. “By the way,” he added, “Your mother is fine. She is in good health. I wanted you to know.”
The next day, when the guard opened the door to the windowless polygraph room, Um found herself face to face with Bob, who had interviewed her in California. “Salam alaikum. I came by to say hello since I knew you would be here today.” He smiled.
Um was glad that, at Ahmed’s direction, she had worn her skirt, which accented her curves, as she stepped forward to shake Bob’s hand. He was a balding 40-year-old with wide shoulders, a nose that looked broken, and a boyish smile. She was mildly surprised to see him but assumed he was following normal procedures by providing a human dimension to the recruitment process. She tried to watch his eyes, as he guided her to a small, dark-wood roundtable she had not seen the day before, but he was looking elsewhere.
“Let’s get the administrative stuff out of the way.” He opened a file on the small desk and slid a form toward her. “The good news is the CIA is as far removed from the government bureaucracy as possible. The bad news is we still have to account for taxpayer dollars. So when you get home, just fill this in, send it in to the address at the top, and the guys in the green eyeshades will reimburse you for the trip.”
He poured two glasses of water from a silver carafe that had not been there the day before and placed one of the glasses in front of her. “How did your session go yesterday?” He took a sip.
“Alright I guess.” She tried to recall if she had powdered her nose in the car. “Except I had a headache and I took some Tylenol. I guess I wasn’t supposed to.”
“When we met in California,” he said with a slight frown, “you convinced me you would be a good CIA officer. My personal standard in recommending someone is whether I would like to work with that person in the field. I thought you met that standard.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.” Where was this going? She had a feeling Bob was taking her on a different track. She was losing control.
Bob moved his glass revealing a wet ring on the table. “I recommended you, because I thought you had all of the basic qualities I look for in a team member.” He paused again for a second. “In other words, someone I can trust with my life, because that’s what we do when we work together. Someone who will have the common sense to know the right thing to do, even during a fast-moving, unscripted situation. You also convinced me you are serious about wanting to work with us. Are you?”
Um suddenly felt under pressure. She sat forward in her chair, tense. This was like taking an oral exam. “Wait a minute. I am only applying for a translator position.” It was no longer as easy as Ahmed said it would be. She was beginning to think he was not as smart as he pretended to be. Now she felt far from the beach, in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight and no compass. She gave Bob a tentatively flirtatious smile to try to get back on familiar territory.
“That’s true, but with your foreign background and languages, I want you to consider an operations-officer position. Unfortunately, John, your polygraph operator yesterday, thinks we should turn you down, because you’re not telling us everything. If you want this application to go forward—and I’m on your side on this—you need to open up. I don’t know what you’re hiding. It might only be a trivial thing.”
I am not hiding anything. I have broken no American law.“What do you want to do? You can walk out right now. Or I can ask John to come back in the room.
“Or you can talk to me.”
I have broken no American laws. I have broken no American laws, the voice kept repeating in her head. Um felt confused. She wanted to walk out, but that would make her seem guilty. Perhaps she had broken some law after all. Did Ahmed know what he was talking about? The Malik she had visited in Montréal was different from the Malik with whom she had grown up. He had let his beard grow, and he had become an outspoken supporter of radical Muslim clerics. Ahmed had stayed with him only for a few days before going back to Yemen. At least, she assumed he was back there, but their only communications were by telephone, and she couldn’t be sure where he was. Why had he mentioned her mother on the phone yesterday?
“How is your mother?” Bob asked.
Um brought her hand to her mouth to stifle a cry. “What? My mother? Is she all right?”
Bob suddenly stood giving Um the impression the interview had reached a new phase. Um wondered what she had said that seemed to give Bob the information he needed to go forward.
He pushed a folded newspaper aside and, placing his elbows lightly on his desk, he leaned forward.
“I’m asking because you’re obviously concerned about her. Why?”
Um looked to the side toward an imaginary window. “Well, she is in Beirut. Wouldn’t you be concerned?”
“Yes, of course. But I sense there’s more to your worry than you are telling me.”
Um looked away again without replying, but Bob waited. “All I want is to live a normal life,” finally burst from her. “We pretended our life in Iraq was normal. Then my father was killed by Saddam Hussein’s soldiers. And we pretended our life in Beirut was normal in the middle of the daily violence from the Hizballah, the Syrians, the Iranians, the Palestinians, the Christians, the Druze, the Israelis...”
She stopped herself. Sitting back in her seat, she seemed more relaxed than she had been, almost relieved. “But I didn’t know what normal meant until I came to America. Frankly, my goal is to earn enough money to bring my mother here. I want to get her away from the violence.”
“I understand and that’s what I would want also. Do you think your mother is in danger now?”
“I don’t know.” She looked to the side again.
“Is there a special threat, other than living in Beirut, which is relatively quiet these days?”
Um did not reply.
“Tell me about Ahmed. He sent you here.” Bob said, gentle as a confessor.
“I don’t know how you know. He is my brother’s friend.”
Bob took a sip of water. “Ahmed Baghdadi is a Jihadist operative responsible for recruitment in North America. He is responsible for continuing the violence in the Middle East by recruiting people who don’t look Arab. Some will be trained as fighters and go to Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Some will become human bombs in San Francisco and Boston. His job basically is to spread violence and terror. Our job is to try to stop the killing. Do you think that is worth doing?”
“Ahmed is a militant? I don’t believe it,” she said without conviction. “Why don’t you arrest him then?” She had suspected there was more to Ahmed than she knew or wanted to know. She did not believe Ahmed would harm anyone even if he believed in the c
ause.
“Do you want to end the violence? You can start by joining us, which is what Ahmed wants you to do, and by helping us learn more about his plans. We know what his goal is: to restore the Islamic Caliphate through jihad. That was a paraphrase. Here’s a direct quote.” He opened the file on the desk and read, “I am acutely aware body parts must be torn apart, skulls must be crushed, and blood must be spilled for our goals to be fulfilled.”
Um touched the gold bracelet that adorned her left wrist. “What about the American violence?”
“Don’t equate terrorism, the targeted killing of innocent civilians, with American military operations that are often canceled for fear of hurting noncombatants. Our job is to stop terrorist operations before they occur. We need to know what people like Ahmed are planning. You applied to the CIA to help him, but helping him only continues this conflict and means more innocent people will get killed. Instead, you can help us to save lives.”
“What about my mother?”
Bob explained the terms of their agreement. A few minutes later, he invited John back in the room. This time the polygraph cleared up the remaining issues.
Bob watched from an upstairs window, as Um drove the red Mustang out of the parking lot. He picked up the newspaper he had been reading before the meeting and studied an article on the front page, below the fold: “Iran hangs CIA spy.” He understood that, with the acquisition of a new double-agent, also came the responsibility to keep her alive.
“It’s a start,” he said to himself and, in his mind, he started to compose the cable he would be sending to the agency’s Beirut station.
3. CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
Pushing a four-wheeled walker, in a slightly hunched-over stance that decreased his six-foot height by a couple of inches, Marshall Church, wearing a green retiree badge, stepped out of the elevator on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. He proceeded past a glass wall, on the other side of which four burly bodyguards watched him warily, and went down the corridor toward the director’s conference room. Thérèse LaFont, the agency’s new director, stepped out of the double doors to greet him.
“Marshall,” she said, placing her hands on his forearms, “I was so sorry to hear about the diagnosis.”
Knowledge of Marshall’s illness, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, had by now spread throughout the intelligence community. Although he hated the situation and the attention, he was beginning to get used to it. He knew he would eventually die from asphyxiation, when his breathing muscles failed, but he resisted thinking too far ahead, preferring to take things one day at a time.
The physician who gave him the bad news had tears in his eyes when he said, “Life expectation is two to five years. There is no cure.” But, when his only counsel was to tell Marshall to go home and think about his situation for a month before coming back, Marshall replied, “Just take care of my body if you can. I’ll take care of my mind.” In the belief that sitting on his hands was never a solution, he found another doctor who was more aggressive.
Gone were the days when men twenty-five years younger would approach him at the gym, asking his age, amazed he could handle heavier weights than they could. Or when he could jack-rabbit around the tennis court, returning serves and covering the sides and baseline with equal agility and quickness.
“Thanks,” Marshall replied. “And who is going to be our audience?” Before she could answer, he quickly added, “Congratulations by the way. I was worried some politician might get the job.”
LaFont was only the third director to have been promoted up from the ranks after Dulles and Helms. She had proven her mastery of clandestine operations, first against Greece’s “17 November” terrorists, later directing Kella and his son Steve from headquarters in an effort that had saved thousands of lives in the Middle East, and then, as head of the National Clandestine Service, overseeing the counter-cyber operation that had saved America’s economic infrastructure from the Ayatollah’s anger.
“The usual suspects,” she smiled. In her forties, she had the figure of a younger woman, and she still attracted glances, admiring from the men and envious from the ladies. Ever since Congress had downgraded the CIA, when it created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, LaFont had taken down the seals of the other fifteen intelligence agencies from the walls of her conference room and replaced them with four large, flat-screens monitors, which could show overhead imagery from satellites or drones, or display video conferencing with the White House or any government agency capable of encrypting its signal.
Several uniforms, stars and decorations glittering, greeted him, as he and LaFont entered the room. As they did, Marshall’s experienced gut sorted them out. General Jack Hopkins, Joint Special Operations Command, was not yet a friend and wouldn’t be unless his special operators were part of whatever the CIA was planning. Tom Nortsen, chief of the Clandestine Service’s Near East division, was probably a friend if he could be in charge. The sight of his son Steve, representing the White House Intelligence Staff, brought a relieved smile to his face.
He had learned about the attempt on Steve’s life a few minutes after it happened, and before it generated headlines both in the nation’s capital and across the country. Then, when Steve called his father from a secure phone, they discussed the implications of the act. General Yosemani, the Quds Force commander, they agreed, must be feeling extremely confident in his organization’s defensive capabilities to have ordered such a brazen hit on American soil. If he was trying to bring attention to himself, he had succeeded. And Marshall had begun thinking about retaliation.
“Marshall, this is Dan Cleave,” LaFont said, as a civilian in an unobtrusive gray suit stepped up to him. “He’s Deputy of the TSG.”
Marshall knew the Technical Survey Group had been established as a hybrid between the National Clandestine Service and the National Security Agency. While the NSA intercepted communications from U.S. territory, the TSG did the same thing overseas, sometimes breaking into foreign installations to do so. “Dan is on loan from the NCS,” she added.
“Yes, we take turns,” Cleave said. “One year the TSG chief is from NSA and the next he’s from the CIA.”
“Meaning next year you’ll take over?” Marshall asked. Cleave’s fine, almost transparent blond hair, combed straight back, contrasted with his thick, black-rimmed glasses. With elbow patches and a pipe he could have been mistaken for a professor.
“That’s right,” he said. “That is, if there’s any money in the budget by the time I take over. We live on hand-outs from our two sponsors.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” LaFont said. Standing at the head of the table, she glanced at the mostly military audience that filled less than half of the seats. “As some of you know, we’re meeting at the behest of President Tremaine. Basically, he wants another option to the three-week campaign and the four hundred airstrikes the DOD secretary proposed last week to stop Iran’s nuclear program.”
She paused an instant and took stock of the knowing glances around the table, some annoyed and others pleased, all glancing at Steve, the White House representative, who kept a poker face.
“Since our Red Cell unit has been working on the problem, I would like Marshall to share his thoughts of what a Plan B might look like.”
Marshall, sitting on LaFont’s right, stood for an instant before sitting back down. “I think you can all hear me if I sit,” he said, as he scanned the faces at the table. “First, you may not know about our Red Cell, so let me give you the executive summary. After Israel’s intelligence failed to predict the Egyptian attack across the canal in 1973, their military intelligence created a “Devil’s Advocate” group. Its job was to challenge the consensus and, based on the same intelligence as everyone else, come up with other plausible conclusions and recommendations. We could have used Red Cell thinking on the way to Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Challenging the establishment, of course, does not make us very popular.
” He saw a couple of understanding smiles and continued.
“We’re approaching the problem of stopping Iran’s military nuclear ambitions from a different perspective than the DOD. Instead of selecting all nuclear-related installations for destruction, we’re trying to identify the key installations or processes that, if malfunctioning, could stop their entire program—not forever, but for six to twelve months. Second, we’re designing our attack to go undetected. Well, until it was too late.”
“So I take it we’re not talking bombs here?” The speaker was General Philip Seymour, the assistant to the chairman of the joint chiefs, a usually taciturn three-star from Missouri.
“No, sir. We think we have a way of decaying their enrichment process...”
“You ‘think?’ Bombing them is not so uncertain,” Seymour interrupted.
“You will be more positive when you hear the details,” LaFont urged, turning toward Marshall.
“Instead of bombs, we want to encourage the core of the enrichment process, the centrifuges, to self-destruct,” Marshall said, looking around the table. “The IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, built a power station about ten miles from the Fordow Enrichment Center near Qom. Its only purpose is to provide electricity to Fordow. The normal electric grid is much too unreliable, too inconsistent, for the exacting requirements of the centrifuges.”
“So we bomb the power station?” Seymour asked.
“No, we capture the station computer’s regulating software, and we control the speed at which the centrifuges rotate. Too fast and they fly apart. It will take at least a year to replace 3000 centrifuges.”
“So, this a repeat of Olympic Games and STUXNET, the joint program we ran with the Israelis?”
The puzzled looks around the table prompted Marshall to add, “By capture, I mean control, which we can probably do without stepping on Iranian soil.”
The Red Cell Page 3