Direct Action

by John Weisman

  “Thank you. Believe me, I didn’t do anything. It was all Leah.” The Israeli pushed open the ornate wooden front door, and they made their way into a marble-floored foyer. To their left was a wide marble staircase. MJ could see what looked like a living room up the half-dozen steps. At the top of the steps, two huge black Bouviers des Flandres poked their square muzzles around the wall, Totem-pole fashion. They saw the strangers and barked.

  “Sheket, klavim.” Reuven gathered Tom and MJ in his arms and squeezed them close to him. He machine-gunned Hebrew at the dogs, who trotted down the stairs and sniffed the visitors.

  “Let them smell your hands, MJ,” Reuven instructed. “Tom they’ll remember.”

  And indeed, the smaller of the two Bouviers was already standing on its hind legs, forepaws on Tom’s shoulders, licking his face.

  Tom laughed and ruffled the dog’s ears. “This is Cleo, right?”

  “Of course. Your girlfriend.” Reuven made a clicking sound and the dogs sat obediently. He turned to MJ. “Cleo likes to sleep with Tom when he visits.” He looked at Tom reprovingly. “Not that he visits very often. The big male is named Bilbo.”

  Cleo nudged Tom, herding him up against a wall until he scratched behind her ears then transferred his attention to her rump, grinning when her stump of a tail vibrated with pleasure. “How’re the boys?”

  Reuven extracted a treat from his pocket and tossed it at Bilbo, who caught it midair. “Like I said, married. They have their families and big success in business. In the summer, they go to Turkey on the weekends. In the winter, Switzerland to ski.” He glanced at Tom. “Take your bags upstairs—you know where to go—and then come down. I’ll open a bottle of wine. We can sit outside and catch up, and I’ll cook us some dinner later.”

  10:35 P.M. MJ sat on the wide marble balcony, her feet propped on the low wall, and stared westward toward the high-rise buildings that rimmed the coast road. The clouds had blown out to sea and the night was brilliant—the moon huge and golden. At 8:30, Reuven had cooked a simple dinner of omelets filled with onions, goat cheese, and wonderful Russian sausage, along with green salad and an extraordinary red wine. They ate outside, and it was chilly enough for MJ to run upstairs for a sweater.

  Now she drained the glass of mellow red, padded inside to the kitchen, and poured herself another two fingers’ worth. She stared at the label. It was unintelligible—entirely in Hebrew. Well, that made sense because the wine was Israeli. Reuven had said it was a Merlot—he’d called it a Kfira Merlot to be precise. Well, this Israeli Kfira Merlot was as good as any she’d ever tasted. Cleo at her side, she headed back to the balcony. She’d already had three glasses tonight and she was slightly tipsy.

  She sat, sipped, then let her head loll back against the chair while her left hand played with the Bouvier’s rough coat. There’d be time tomorrow to call the office and explain the fact that she wasn’t going to be back for a few more days. But that would be tomorrow. Tonight, she was content to sit and stare into space while Tom and Reuven jabbered at each other in a bewildering mixture of Arabic and French with an English word thrown in every now and then. She guessed they were talking about the materials she’d brought to Paris. So what? No one at Coppermine cared enough to give her work a second thought. Tom had found it valuable enough to bring it here.

  He was a complex man, was Tom. So different. He’d grown up overseas. His mother had died of cancer when Tom was ten. His father, who’d never remarried, worked for the State Department. They’d lived in France, and Belgium, and Germany, and Morocco, and Tunisia, and Italy. By the time Tom was fifteen, he spoke three languages fluently and “got along,” as he put it, in what he’d called kitchen Arabic.

  He’d been educated in a series of French, German, and Swiss boarding schools, and finally at St. Paul’s and Dartmouth. She’d grown up on Long Island and gone to parochial schools. Tom had skied at Gstaad and climbed the Matterhorn. She’d summered on Long Beach, learned to eat steamed clams at Lundy’s in Sheepshead Bay, and ridden the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. Tom’s idea of fun was skiing downhill or riding his motorcycle at some obscene speed. She’d ridden with him—twice. After the first episode, her fingers had taken half an hour to unclench. And yet, when she curled up with the New York Times crossword puzzle, he’d sit and watch her noodle the words, and tease that they’d make love as soon as she finished—which she always did.

  They were so different. And yet so good together. Opposites do attract. Because, underneath it all, they weren’t that opposite. They were both pretty conservative. They both loved their country. For both of them, their lives revolved around public service, something that had been inculcated into them by their parents.

  Even MJ’s father, who was hugely protective of her, had been charmed and impressed with Tom. MJ had been nervous about bringing Tom home. She’d finally been browbeaten into doing it only the previous Thanksgiving.

  Sitting in the Great Neck living room after the turkey, and the two kinds of dressing, and the mash (which is what they called the potatoes in the house of O’Connor)—after the overcooked vegetables, the three kinds of home-baked pie, and the Folgers brewed in an old-fashioned Farberware percolator, Michael O’Connor poured Tom a healthy tumbler of twelve-year-old Jameson and, as the grandkids squalled and played, took the younger man aside and asked what he was doing to dismember al-Qa’ida and defeat Islamist terror against the West.

  “I went to seventy-eight funerals, Tom,” Michael O’Connor growled. “Seventy-eight funerals and seventy-eight wakes. And then I had to stop, because there were no more tears in me. Just rage, Tom. White-hot, searing rage.”

  Tom had looked her father square in the face and said, “I’m going to bring as many of them as I can to justice to avenge the people you lost at the WTC, Chief O’Connor. And believe me, when I can’t do that where I’m working now, I’ll do it somewhere else.”

  “God bless you, then,” Michael John O’Connor had said, and then he’d looked over at his daughter. “Marilyn Jean, the man’s a keeper,” he’d shouted above the din, bringing silence to the room and a blush to her cheeks. “Always welcome in my house he is.”

  She hadn’t understood the significance of Tom’s remark back then. Later, she’d realized it was the first hint that he’d been talking to Tony Wyman about leaving CIA, taking over the Paris office of 4627, and turning their lives—and their relationship—upside down.

  She looked up as she heard Tom’s distinctive laugh. It was good to see him laugh. Those last months at CTC had been hell for him. From the little he’d said, the director had thrown money and people into counterterrorism willy-nilly. There had been no plan. There had been no thought. Tom fought for a comprehensive strategy instead of the Band-Aid approach ordered by the seventh floor. He’d been overruled, and then when he’d protested to his superiors, he’d been increasingly shut out of the decision-making process.

  Of course he had. At George Tenet’s CIA, dissent was not allowed. Hadn’t she learned that only a few days ago.

  Oh boy, had she ever. MJ drained the glass, stood up, wobbled just a little, and looked down at the two men, smoking cigars and conversing in the garden below. “G’night all,” she mumbled, her voice slurring from the effects of the wine. “I’m going to bed.”

  From below, Tom waved offhandedly. “I’ll be up soon.” He tapped his cigar on the edge of the ashtray that sat between him and Reuven and swiveled toward the Israeli.

  Reuven waited until MJ disappeared from the balcony. The guest room faced the street. There was no way for her to eavesdrop—and besides, he and Tom habitually talked business either in Arabic or French and she spoke neither.

  He topped off the Napoleon cognac in the crystal bell glass sitting at his own elbow, did the same for Tom’s, then picked up his cigar, stuck it in his mouth, puffed on it, exhaled a perfect smoke ring that hung in the cool air for almost five seconds. “Ah,” Reuven said. “The perfect combination: a Romeo and Julieta Churchill, and Paul Girau
d’s twenty-year-old cognac from Caves Auge. Merci mille fois, Tom. Shukran. Todah rabbah. Cheinchein. Thank you.” He saluted the American with his glass then sipped.

  He set the cognac down, stroked his beard, and spoke in French. “There is no news on Shafiq, McGee’s Palestinian. He has disappeared. My guess is he’s dead. And the body already in pieces in the Mediterranean. If he was a double, then he was a loose end. And they don’t like loose ends any more than we do. But I’ll stay on the case. I know someone who knows someone who can sniff around the family—see if they’ve been paid off.”

  “Good. And the plastique?”

  “I will check in the morning. I can’t believe Shabak 12 didn’t run anything more than a swab test—at the very least a spectrograph to check the tagants. But if what you say turns out to be correct, Tom, then sooner or later we’re going to have to hunt him down, this Ben Said. He cannot be permitted to continue.”

  “I understand.” Even though he did understand, Tom still felt a little out of his depth. He was a capable case officer. Which meant he had honed all the talents necessary to spot, assess, develop, and recruit agents to spy on behalf of the United States. He’d had successful tours in Egypt, France, Sudan, and Dubai. In that last post, he’d actually recruited an agent who had access to one of the bankers who helped funnel al-Qa’ida money in and out of the Emirates. Later, as a branch chief at the Counterterrorism Center, he’d specialized in identifying the links between certain members of the Saudi royal family and the private charities that through monetary sleight of hand bankrolled Islamist terrorists around the globe. But when it came to dealing with terrorists—really dealing with them, as in eliminating them—Tom was ill-equipped.

  Reuven was different. Before going to Mossad, he’d served in Sayeret Mat’kal, the Israeli Defense Force’s most elite special-operations unit. A Moroccan-born Jew who’d emigrated to Israel as an eleven-year-old in 1956, Reuven spoke native Arabic, as well as fluent French, German, Turkish, and passable Farsi. As a soldier, he had penetrated terrorist camps in Syria and Jordan, identifying, stalking, and single-handedly killing more than half a dozen of Israel’s most wanted enemies. As Mossad chief in Ankara—his final posting—he had helped the Turks eliminate a score of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) terrorists who had allied themselves with radical Islamist groups and helped attack Jewish targets in Turkey.

  In April 1988, as a senior-level Mossad officer, Reuven spent nineteen harrowing days performing advance reconnaissance on PLO operations chief Abu Jihad’s home in the Tunis suburb of Sidi Bou Said. Working solo, under Lebanese cover, he flew to Tunisia. There, he researched and mapped the infiltration and exfiltration routes to be used by the Sayeret Mat’kal shooters who on the night of April 15–16, would execute the man who’d helped form Black September and was responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths. Six weeks later, Reuven was presented Israel’s second highest award for valor, the Ott Ha’Oz, for his bravery and initiative.

  It wasn’t his only award. On June 8, 1992, as Mossad’s deputy station chief in Paris, Reuven had led a quickly mounted operation to kill Atif B’sisou, the acting head of Fatah’s intelligence organization, as B’sisou drove his brand-new Mercedes SUV through Paris on the way to the Marseille– Tunis ferry.

  B’sisou’s last-minute schedule changes were betrayed to Mossad’s Paris station by Mahmoud Yassin, a Tunis-based midranking PLO intelligence official. Reuven had recruited Yassin in 1990 when the Palestinian brought his wife to Paris for medical treatment. So when Atif B’sisou called Tunis from Frankfurt to tell his office he was going to stop over a day in Paris, Yassin immediately burst-transmitted the news to his Mossad control officer. By the time Atif arrived in Paris midafternoon on June 8 and checked into the Méridien Montparnasse under an assumed name, Reuven was ready and waiting.

  Atif was kept under constant surveillance. He was tracked as he and his Paris station chief, S R,13 drove to dinner at the Montparnasse branch of Hippopotamus, the steak-and-frites chain, in R’s yellow Volkswagen Beetle convertible. And just after 1 A.M., when the VW pulled up under the Méridien’s low-slung marquee, Reuven had watched from two hundred yards away through night-vision binoculars as two of his young paramilitary officers slung B’sisou across the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle, pumped three 9mm bullets into his head from a Browning High Power concealed in a backpack, and vanished into the Méridien’s catacomblike garage.

  Six weeks later, in the Mossad headquarters building that sits across the main highway from the Tel Aviv Country Club, Reuven had been presented with Mossad’s Israel Prize, given only to those few combatants who lead the most successful and high-risk operations.

  Tom could claim no similar background. As a case officer trainee, he’d had a total of three weeks of paramilitary training. He’d jumped out of a plane—from twelve hundred feet. He’d taken a one-week course in land navigation skills. He’d been given the basic explosives course in North Carolina. And he’d had the Agency’s weapons familiarity courses on pistols, rifles, and automatic weapons. But all of that had been before three years of Arabic language training and his first posting, to the consulate in Cairo. He hadn’t touched a weapon in more than a decade.

  Indeed, like most of the case officers of his generation, Tom Stafford had never served in the military. His old boss in Paris, Sam Waterman, was a former Marine who’d served in Vietnam. So had the CEO of the 4627 Company, Antony Wyman. And of course there was Rudy—the paramilitary veteran with whom Tom had recruited Jim McGee. Rudy was a Navy veteran who’d seen combat in Vietnam, too.

  And it wasn’t that Tom felt incapable of violence. Two deaths in less than three days had taken their emotional toll on him. There was a new-found fury in Tom’s gut—MJ’s father had called it white heat and the phrase stuck with him—that burned for revenge. It was simply that CIA had never trained him in the way Israel had trained Reuven. Sure, CIA engaged in what was euphemistically and neutrally termed direct action. But direct action—DA, as it was usually called—was the rare exception to the hard-and-fast rule: thou shalt not kill thy country’s enemies without a Lethal Finding signed by the president, and a ton of paperwork.

  He’d never thought much about it before, but now he realized that the whole goddamn American intelligence community was built around strictures—thousands upon thousands of thou-shalt-nots. There was Executive Order 12333, which prohibited the Agency from carrying out political assassinations. There were still Clinton-era rules of engagement in force that prevented case officers from pursuing Russian targets. There were Kafkaesque guidelines governing the development and recruiting of agents. And there was an ever-expanding catalog of preposterous controls, absurd limitations, and cartoonish constraints imposed by the dithering, idiotic dilettantes of the congressional intelligence oversight committees.

  Even now, when, in the midst of the global war on terror, the Agency needed more flexibility, nimbleness, and lethality than ever, the numbskulls up on Capitol Hill were trying to add new layers of management to CIA’s already top-heavy bureaucracy and dummkopf rules that would, in effect, add hundreds of hours of case officer record keeping for every new agent spotted, assessed, developed, recruited, and run.

  That’s what had made such sense about the 4627 Company: 4627 was built like OSS during World War II. It was lean. It relied on inventiveness and ingenuity. It was mission-driven. At 4627, Tom’s marching orders could be reduced to one biblically simple commandment: “thou shalt not fail.”

  Like the old Mossad. The way Tom saw it, Mossad had historically operated under two succinct rules of engagement. The first was “thou shalt have no limits” and the second was “thou shalt not get caught.”

  Even now, more than two years after 9/11, the American intelligence community leadership was still refusing to think that way. But changing CIA’s modus operandi was like turning a supertanker around. You couldn’t do it overnight. Not without the right personnel. And CIA just didn’t have enough experienced old hands to do the human intel
ligence gathering, fight the global war on terror, and supply the military with the kind of actionable intelligence it needed to fight the two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Indeed, limits, constrictions, and lack of competent personnel were three of the reasons Langley was forced to subcontract such a sizable chunk of CIA’s historic responsibilities to outside firms these days. Some independent contractors, or ICs, provided security for CIA case officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others provided CIA with language-capable interrogators and translators to accompany the junior case officers who’d been pushed through training without the ability to speak anything except Gringo.

  And then there were the black-ops ICs. International Alternatives, one of 4627’s main K Street competitors, for example, was currently running a covert program for Langley and DOD, sending sheep-dipped Delta operators into Iran with teams from the Mujahedin-e Khalq (the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK), a group listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, in the hope of providing eyes-on information about Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. And a precious few ICs, firms like 4627, were paid extravagantly to covertly collect, interpret, analyze, and then disseminate the holy of holies, intelligence product itself, to Langley.

  Intelligence product because CIA lacked the capabilities to fulfill many of its obligations these days. CIA was peopled with so many layers of managerial deadwood it simply did not have enough qualified personnel to get the job done. And then there was the deniability angle. In the politically correct world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, outsourcing gave CIA deniability. That was because the Agency’s major ICs, firms like 4627, were, in point of fact, cutouts.

  ICs operated in the black. More to the point, private contractors were under no obligation to inform the House and Senate intelligence committees about what they did—and to whom. There was huge potential for abuse, of course. Not at 4627, where Tony Wyman, Charlie Hoskinson, and Bronco Panitz maintained a strong chain of command. But other ICs weren’t so well run. Tom had already heard gossip about abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan.