Direct Action

by John Weisman

  Al-Quraishi made a phone call, and the next afternoon, in the long, narrow bar of the George V Hotel, he introduced Tom to Shahram. The three of them chatted for a quarter of an hour, and then Hosein excused himself, claiming a prior appointment.

  Shahram remained, sipping orange juice and chain-smoking Dunhills as he and Tom played a chess game under the pretext of a perfunctory whom-do-you-know-and-how-do-you-know-them dialogue. After an hour and a half, the Iranian unbuttoned the jacket of his bespoke Givenchy suit, adjusted his narrow dark tie, and put both his hands on the table. “You have to understand my motive for seeing you.”

  Tom looked at Shahristani.

  “Your…organization has a sorry record,” Shahram said. “But that doesn’t matter. My motive has to do with Iran.”

  “Iran?”

  “If it weren’t for the madman Khomeini, Iran would be a prosperous Western country, edging toward its own form of democracy. Instead, it fosters hate and death under the guise of Shia Islam. The mullahs are devils, and despite your organization’s treatment of me, I will do what I have to do to bring them down.”

  Tom started to say something, then realized that silence was his best ally right now. He watched as the Iranian scanned his face, his eyes probing. Finally, after what seemed to Tom to be an interminable period, Shahristani leaned across the table and stage-whispered, “Have the computer at your headquarters run the name Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, born in 1968 in Pakistan of a Palestinian mother. You will discover there will be records in the New York City for Yousef as having obtained a taxi driver’s license.”

  Jerry von Brünwald, Tom’s station chief, had made a sour face when he’d mentioned Shahristani. “The man’s a fabricator,” von Brünwald said derisively. “A double-dealing, lying son of a bitch. Because of him, I was subpoenaed by a goddamn grand jury in 1987—the Iran-Contra flap. I don’t want to see anything with his name attached to it.”

  Von Brünwald’s deputy, Sam Waterman, had been more open-minded. He approved Tom’s cable and backchanneled it to an old friend in the administrative division. Waterman’s contact passed the information up the chain of command. But Shahristani’s name was red-flagged. The Iranian had shown deception in a 1986 polygraph session during which he’d claimed to know the identities of the people who’d kidnapped the American hostages in Beirut. And so, the branch chief at Langley deep-sixed Waterman’s cable and its references to Ramzi Yousef.

  Undeterred, Waterman himself washed Yousef’s name through the database and discovered the terrorist had, in fact, sought political asylum in the United States back in September of 1992. CIA records indicated Yousef had arrived in the company of a Palestinian who was on the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s terrorist watch list. The Palestinian was detained. Yousef, although he wasn’t carrying any documentation and was traveling on an expired Iraqi passport, was—absurdly, Waterman had said to Tom—granted asylum. And within weeks, Yousef had indeed applied for a New York City hack license.

  Even though Shahristani’s information panned out, von Brünwald instructed Tom to give the man a wide berth. It was an order the younger man disobeyed. Indeed, so far as Tom Stafford was concerned, Shahram Shahristani’s information usually turned out to be on the money. He’d been right about Ramzi Yousef. He’d been right the following year, too, when in March he’d told Tom that the Seppah-e Pasdaran was planning a major attack on Israeli interests in South America. Shahram even told Tom the name of the Iranian who was running the operation: a high-level IRGC official named Feridoun Mehdi-Nezhad. The other major player was Talal Hamiyah, a Lebanese terrorist who’d been involved in the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 and the subsequent murder of U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem.

  Tom forwarded both names to Langley. He never received any response.

  Then more than one hundred people were killed on July 18, 1994, when a car bomb exploded outside the Israeli-Argentine Mutual Association in Buenos Aires. Tom recabled Langley, reminding them about Shahristani’s heads-up. Once again, his message went unanswered.

  To CIA, Shahram Shahristani was persona non grata. For Tom, however, the Iranian became a valued source. Sure, Shahristani had a grudge against Tehran—and sometimes his motives were transparent. Sure, he had a soft spot for Israel, but that was because he’d been trained by Mossad. Besides, Tom had learned how to factor Shahram’s prejudices and biases into what the Iranian said. And so far as he could determine, Shahristani had never lied to him.

  Today, Tom was at Les Gourmets under protest. He’d seen Shahram less than two weeks ago. They’d spoken about the war in Iraq. Shahristani—as usual—had warned that Tehran was trying to influence Iraq’s Shia majority to mount an insurrection against the Americans. He claimed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was responsible for the killing of a moderate Shia cleric the previous month. He maintained that the IRGC was not only subsidizing the anti-American newspaper published by a young radical Shia cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr, it was also slipping money to al-Sadr to finance the cleric’s militia, a collection of goons and thugs known as the Al Madhi Army. Tom had nodded politely. He’d heard that song from Shahristani before. Many times over.

  Meeting Shahram today meant rearranging everything. Tom had been up for almost two days now. The retired Delta trooper he’d recruited for Tel Aviv had been murdered in Gaza. The initial reports from AMEMBASSY Tel Aviv was that the bombing had been the work of a renegade Palestinian splinter group intended to embarrass Arafat and derail the American road map.

  Maybe. But maybe not. McGee had sent an e-mail to Tom’s Yahoo mailbox the night of the fourteenth. Attached to the “Hi, how are you” message was a postcard-pretty photo of the Old Jaffa port. Hidden in the picture through steaganography was a short encrypted message telling Tom that within twenty-four hours, McGee would be transmitting a photograph that needed urgent identification and please to stand by.

  Now McGee was dead, 4627’s Israeli office had lost track of McGee’s Palestinian developmental, and Tom couldn’t help thinking that by putting McGee in harm’s way, he’d been complicit in his death. Then there was MJ. She was due to arrive tomorrow morning. And there was his boss. Antony Wyman had called to say he was stopping over in Paris for a day or so on his way back from Moscow. He wanted a thorough debrief on the Gaza fiasco, which had sent Tom scrambling.

  And then last night, just before midnight, Shahram had reached him on the cell phone. “My dear boy, where have you been? I have been trying to contact you for more than a day. I have left messages.”

  This was not true. On Monday, Shahram had left one message—which had been both short and nonspecific. Tom was curt and uncharacteristically frosty. “I am sorry, Shahram. It’s been quite busy.”

  The Iranian hadn’t seemed to notice. “I have been away—self-preservation of a sort. But I have an engaging story to tell you,” he said. “Très provocateur. You will be fascinated. We must meet tomorrow. Must. I will not accept an excuse.”

  Perhaps it was the fact that Tom genuinely liked Shahram Shahristani. The Iranian had suffered financial losses over the past year that sapped both his monetary and emotional resources, and Tom didn’t want Shahram to feel he was letting him down. Or perhaps it was that having spent sixteen years as a case officer, he couldn’t resist the temptation of a juicy piece of gossip. But there was something else as well. He’d sensed an urgency to Shahristani’s voice that belied the Iranian’s chatty tone. So he’d surprised himself by immediately saying yes, then broke another self-imposed rule by accepting the Iranian’s suggestion that they rendezvous chez Monsieur Francis Marie at noon.

  8

  12:14 P.M. Tom watched as Monsieur Marie greeted Shahristani warmly, waited until he’d shed his gloves, then folded the Iranian’s dark blue overcoat and burgundy silk scarf over his arm. The patron’s son Jeff ushered the Iranian to the rear dining room.

  Tom rose, slid out from behind the banquette, and took Shahristani’s hands in his own. “Shahram, bienvenue.” He and
the Iranian kissed each other’s cheeks in the Middle Eastern fashion: right, then left, then right again.

  The Iranian’s hands were cold. Shahram rubbed them together as Tom slid into the banquette, his back against the restaurant’s rear wall. “The winter is coming, Thomas,” he said, pronouncing Tom’s name “To-mass.” “My bones begin to ache. I’ll have to go south again soon.” He smiled fleetingly. “South, like a bird.” He gestured past the restaurant’s curtained front windows with his head. “Too bad for them, eh?”

  “Them” had to be the DST surveillance team that from time to time overtly shadowed Shahristani. Of course the French were interested in knowing with whom the Iranian met. But he’d also been the target of three assassination attempts and the interior minister wanted nothing to happen to Shahram on Chirac’s watch. So they’d assigned Shahristani a regular crew, which had been following him so long that Shahram sent their families presents at Christmas.

  “Do they actually travel with you, Shahram?”

  “No—these poor devils have to stay in Paris. There’s another team waiting for me in Antibes when I go back tonight.” Tom settled himself on his guest’s left. He poured Shahristani a full glass of water from the bottle of Evian, then waited as the Iranian wrapped it in a napkin, took it up, and sipped. Shahram was a prudent man. He was even careful about leaving fingerprints in restaurants. He looked probingly at Tom. “My boy, you look drawn. Is something the matter?”

  “It’s been a busy couple of days, Shahram.”

  “Not Gaza, was it? What a mess the other day, eh?”

  Tom nodded grimly. “I knew one of the casualties.”

  “I am sorry.” The Iranian set the water glass down. “They weren’t 4627 people.”

  Shahram was eliciting. That was uncharacteristic. The Iranian’s habit was to back into the day’s business conversation in the slow-paced Middle Eastern fashion after first inquiring solicitously about the details of Tom’s own life. Today he was all business. Tom decided to follow Shahram’s lead. He poured himself a half glass of the Brouilly and deflected. “No. DynCorp contractors.” Tom stopped talking as a waiter unfurled two starched napkins and offered one to him and the other to Shahram. “But I’d known him, peripherally…before.”

  “In your other life.”

  “My other life. That’s an interesting way of putting it.”

  “What you used to do, my boy, was live in an alternative universe. Everything was nothing, and nothing was everything. It was totally existential. I know this from my own experience.” He paused. “And when it was good, there was nothing like it, eh?”

  “Agreed, Shahram.”

  “And now…” The Iranian gave Tom a sly look. “You are like me. You take information and you turn it into money—like dross into gold. And you do…other things.”

  Tom examined the bemused expression on his old friend’s face. I wonder how much he knows. Shahram had an exceptional talent for sniffing out information. He’d been schooled by Mossad, which in the 1960s and 1970s sent instructors to all of the shah’s intelligence agencies.10 That was why, unlike so many other operatives from his part of the globe, Shahram had never operated in the rigid Soviet style. Instead, he took the more pragmatic and fluid approach to the craft epitomized by the Israelis, the French, and the Brits. A dialogue with him was like a chess game. Tom had to think half a dozen moves ahead to avoid falling into a trap.

  Another element of the Iranian’s success as a spymaster was his appearance. He didn’t look threatening. He was a Persian George Smiley of average height—perhaps five feet eight or so. He kept himself trim by walking no fewer than five miles a day, rain or shine. His olive skin was set off by sparse gray-white hair, which he wore longish, so that it fell over his collar in back. Shahram looked a lot more like the central casting archetype for a semiretired French businessman or bureaucrat’s banker than what he was: a talented intelligence operative; the “gray man” who disappeared into a crowd with a pocketful of secrets.

  Except for his eyes. There was fire in them. Shahram’s eyes betrayed the Iranian’s burning dedication to intelligence gathering and his talents for eliciting information and running intricate, convoluted, elaborate—and often profitable—operations. Those passions had served Shahram well when he’d worked for the shah. In the two-plus decades since, they had made him a multimillionaire several times over.

  Most of the time, Shahram concealed his eyes behind brown-tinted glasses. Still, every once in a while, when he stared at Tom, his eyes bore right into the younger man’s skull—drilled inside his brain, and reminded Tom that Shahram was a world-class player who’d never left the game.

  Shahram sipped water. “Your girlfriend arrives tomorrow, doesn’t she?”

  “Former girlfriend.”

  “Marilyn Jean. You call her MJ, if I am not mistaken.”

  Tom nodded.

  “Then MJ is not quite former if she’s visiting you.”

  Tom deflected the roundabout elicitation of information about his personal life. “Didn’t you mention something about très provocateur?”

  “I must go south—at least for the weekend.” Shahristani smiled paternally as he deflected Tom’s direct question. “But if Mademoiselle Marilyn Jean is still here next Tuesday, allow me return in order to buy the two of you dinner.”

  “That’s very kind, Shahram.” In point of fact, Tom had no intention of taking MJ to dinner with Shahram Shahristani. The Iranian knew only too well where she worked. More to the point, MJ was subject to a biannual polygraph, and any association with Shahram—a foreign national on CIA’s Do Not Contact list who had connections to God knows how many intelligence agencies—could jeopardize her clearance.

  Jeopardize? Boy, was that an understatement. Tom waited until Shahram put the water glass down. “Shahram, you said you had a story to tell.”

  “You are all business today. Preoccupied, I think, about MJ’s arrival.” Suddenly the Iranian’s eyes flicked toward the mirror on the back wall and he started—like a deer flushed from heavy brush.

  Tom could feel the chill as the front door opened. Then it subsided. Shahram refocused on him. “Yes?”

  “Yes, what?” Tom was confused.

  The Iranian raised his palms in mock surrender and began to speak in Arabic. “Yes, I will tell you. It has to do with what happened in Gaza.”

  Tom focused on Shahram’s face. “Gaza.”

  The Iranian inclined his head and spoke softly. “Yes. The killing of your embassy personnel. I know who did it.”

  Tom’s expression reflected skepticism.

  “I know who did it. And why.” Shahristani paused to arrange the flatware until it was absolutely symmetrical, then fixed his attention on Tom. “The simple answer—which is what your CIA director currently is telling the president—is that it was Fatah. Arafat was sending a message to the Americans through the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Reminding them they are targets of opportunity in a hostile environment; transmitting a not-so-subtle signal that Washington should yank Sharon’s leash every once in a while.”

  “The rationale makes sense to me.” Sure it made sense. The Americans had allowed Israel to keep Arafat a prisoner in the ruins of his Ramallah headquarters for almost two years now. It was logical that the Palestinian would finally strike back. But Arafat also knew he couldn’t break wind these days without half a dozen intelligence agencies catching it on CDROM. So if he’d okayed the hit on the American convoy, it had to have been done through winks, nods, and subtle hand signals. Nothing that could be taken to court.

  Then Tom looked at Shahram’s face. “It wasn’t Arafat, was it?”

  The Iranian’s expression told the story. “No,” he said. “This was Tehran’s doing, albeit with Arafat’s approval and foreknowledge.”

  “Tehran again.” Tom shook his head indulgently. He’d gotten excited over nothing. This lunch was going to be a waste of his time, albeit not his palate. “You always find a way to pin things on Tehran, don’t
you?”

  Shahram’s thick eyebrows cocked warily. “When Tehran is guilty.”

  “And they’re guilty now?”

  “I will tell you the truth, my friend,” Shahristani said, slipping into Farsi-accented English. “All this talk of rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is a facade—every bit of it. A smoke screen constructed by Iran in order to confuse and obscure its real goals and intentions.”

  Privately, Tom agreed. But he wasn’t about to say so. He was there to elicit and absorb whatever Shahram was peddling, finish lunch, make notes, send them on if they warranted forwarding, and get on with his life. He had flowers to buy. He spoke in Arabic. “Do you have specifics, Shahram?”

  The Iranian sipped his water. “I do.”

  Tom waited. Shahram smiled. “You are anxious, Thomas,” he said. “Patience, please.” Shahram reached inside his jacket, retrieved a gold-trimmed ostrich leather cigarette case, and laid it on the tablecloth. From his trouser pocket came a gold-and-tortoiseshell enamel Dupont lighter. Shahristani opened the case, took a cigarette out, closed the case, and returned it to his breast pocket, then lit the cigarette and put the lighter back where it belonged.

  Finally, he exhaled and turned his head in Tom’s direction. “One: while Khameini makes noises about cracking down on terrorism, he gave sanctuary to more than eight hundred of al-Qa’ida’s fighters after they were displaced from Afghanistan. Two: Tehran allows Ansar-al-Islam safe refuge. Three: the Seppah has infiltrated more than a thousand Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel into southern Iraq, where they are organizing the most radical Shia elements to fight an insurgency against the Americans.”

  Tom made a dismissive gesture. “I’ve heard all this from you before, Shahram. Within the past couple of weeks, in fact.”