by John Weisman
You’ve outgrown the place, he said. Left it behind. That’s because you’re one of us. You live for results—to win. You love to steal secrets. I know because that’s how I feel—always have, always will. You get the same rush I do when your guy shows up and he’s holding paper. You love it when a false-flag recruitment produces a twenty-four-karat nugget. There’s nothing like that anymore, is there? He looked straight into Tom’s eyes. When’s the last time you felt like that?
Tom’s expression was neutral. But, of course, Tony was right.
What’s going on at stations worldwide? Nothing. Nobody goes out anymore. They’re all sitting in goddamn fortresses writing memos. So what are the NOCs doing? They’re all using business cover these days. Christ, doesn’t Tenet understand that gringo executives and salesmen won’t penetrate al-Qa’ida’s networks? Why the hell hasn’t CIA set up Islamic charity front groups in Germany and France and Holland and Pakistan, in Indonesia and Qatar and Sudan and the UAE and used them to penetrate the Islamists who want to kill us? We should be running our own madrassas, for chrissakes.
You know why. It’s because we don’t have qualified NOCs. But it’s also because it would be very, very risky, and risk-takers don’t receive performance bonuses these days. You want to be promoted? You stay on the reservation. You play it safe. You keep your head down. Better to spend your days writing e-mails querying about some arcane matter, or dabbling in the stock market, or buying investment real estate than sticking your neck out to recruit some penetration agent who might be a double. Recruiting’s risky, Tom. That’s precisely why the crowd on the seventh floor doesn’t like it. They weigh every single recruitment these days. “How will it look in the Washington Post?” That’s what they ask. Then they take a pass. Tony’s gray eyes bored into Tom’s head. You see it. All around you. And when you do, you’re pissed.
Tom had sipped his wine and said nothing.
I’m right, Tony had said. You can’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. But you know I’m right. Christ—even in Iraq, there are virtually no risk takers. Thirty-day deployments—that’s what they’re doing now. C’mon, Tom, how many recruitments do you think they’re making in thirty days? You know what’s happening in Iraq as well as I do. They’re spending all their time in the Green Zone, or hunkered down behind concrete barriers at CIA’s bases in Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, or Sulaimaniya.
Tom’s eyes dropped. He’d felt exactly the same way. Too damn many of the people going to Iraq were doing it only to ticket-punch. Get the hazard pay. Make sure the powers that be at Langley checked the appropriate box next to their names so they’d be promoted on schedule. The guys doing the real work—the PMs21 and the contractors—were treated like peons.
He looked up. Tony was speaking. Tom blinked. Tried to play catch-up.
I saw the writing on the wall, Tony was saying. So did Charlie and Bronco. We got out. And I can tell you that right now—right at this very second—4627 is doing more human-based intelligence gathering worldwide than you and all of your colleagues at CTC. You come with us, and you’ll get the old feeling back, Tom. The same emotional highs and lows. Now, I’m not talking sinecure, Tom. This ain’t the Agency. We pay for results—not just for showing up. But we love our work. Oh God, do we ever love our work. Wyman sipped his wine. He put the big goblet down on the white tablecloth and shot the cuffs of his brightly striped London shirt to display the blue enamel and gold tooling of White House cuff links. Hunkering down and flying a desk ain’t why you joined CIA, Tom.
Tom drained his wine and waited as Wyman refilled his glass. Useless. That was the word that best described the most recent two and a half years of his career. He’d languished at Langley. Skirted depression. Gotten fat on the junk food in the cafeteria. Felt…unappreciated.
No more. The Rush was back. Tom cast a satisfied, surreptitious look at Reuven’s back as the Israeli pulled a pair of latex gloves out of the dispenser box and stuffed them into his coveralls. God, how incredible it is to be working with a world-class operator again. Tom pulled his own gloves from the dispenser. Then he picked up one of the six prepaid, disposable cell phones that sat on the nicked porcelain counter and dropped it into a pocket. Finally, he clipped the laminated Eurec photo identity card onto his collar. Without a word of warning, he flipped the condom in Reuven’s direction.
The Israeli whirled, snatching the foil-wrapped package out of the air. “Thank you, kind sir. This will be put to good use, believe me.”
The guy’s still got it. Tom made a dismissive gesture. “C’mon, lover boy, let’s get started.”
19
9:27 A.M. Tom let Reuven off the motorcycle. After the Israeli slid a key into the heavy lock and pulled the narrow reinforced steel door open, Tom wrestled the big bike over the threshold into the warehouse, dropped the kickstand, and switched the motor off.
They’d driven north and east along boulevard Victor Hugo into the industrial zone that took up much of the southern portion of the suburb of St. Denis, which sits due north of the eighteenth arrondissement and the Porte de la Chapelle. But they didn’t follow a direct route. Instead, Tom flew between the cars and trucks, backtracking, making random turns, gunning the bike along the railroad tracks that ran through the zone, even occasionally heading the big BMW against traffic on one-way streets to discourage all but the hardiest of followers. So, unless DST was using its aerial assets—which was highly unlikely given the fact that Tom was a relatively low-priority target these days—they reached the 4627 stowage facility clean of surveillance.
The Israeli pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket and shined it on the interior wall until he found the light panel. He opened the box, reached up, and threw the switches that turned the big overhead lights on. It was a cavernous place. Tom could hear birds in the rafters. How they got in without setting off the intrusion devices, Tom had no idea. How they survived, Tom had no idea. But every time he set foot in the warehouse, he could hear birds chirping.
He looked around—there was plenty of room for him to work. It was a good-size facility—sixty meters wide and double that in depth. The ground-floor ceiling was more than thirty feet high, with an industrial staircase along the sidewall leading to an upper-level storage area filled with tools and racks of clothes. The ground floor was cement, which made the warehouse feel cold year-round. In the right rear corner was a walled-off area containing a washroom and an office. Piled against the rear wall were the items he’d need: half a dozen ten-foot-tall scenery bays, holding what looked like prefab modular housing walls, stairways, and exteriors.
Constructing the bays and the units had been Tom’s idea. He’d come up with it after his visit to the Delta Force compound the previous spring.
In a matter of hours, Delta could build full-scale models of its targets so that its hostage rescue teams could rehearse their moves to perfection. There was a warehouse inside the Delta compound that was filled with modular walls, doors, stair units, and other assorted building blocks.
Did C Squadron need a second-floor apartment with two bedrooms and one bath, with the hostage held in the tiny galley kitchen whose narrow casement window looked out onto a fire escape? It would take the Delta logistics people less than an hour to fit the proper pieces together so that the entry team could fine-tune its tactical plan. Need to make entry in complete darkness and rehearse using night-vision goggles? There were ceiling pieces that could be fit together to seal out light. Want to make entry just as the sun is going down? There were spotlights hung from a grid so that every condition from dead of night to dawn’s early light could be duplicated.
Tom appropriated the concept and modified it so that he and his agents could rehearse their moves before making surreptitious entry to plant a listening device or a miniature camera. He’d assembled two dozen different types of doors, each with a modular locking system, so that he and his people could practice their lock-picking skills. There were dozens of variations: dead bolts and intergrip rim locks, ch
ain locks, mortise locks, tube locks, sprung and unsprung latch-bolt locks, and the old-fashioned crenellated locks used on French doors.
There were double-hung windows sitting in frames so their locks could be jimmied. There were horizontal pivoting windows and vertical pivoters, too, sliding windows, sash windows, louvered windows, and jalousies. There were casement windows so the 4627 people could practice easing the glass panes out of the muntins and sash bars. There were sections of different kinds of wall mounted in frames so that he or his people could practice with the soundproof drills they used to insert audio and video devices from one apartment to the next. He had old-fashioned lath-and-plaster walls you found in European buildings, as well as the more modern Sheetrock-and-foam insulation found in the United States. There were marble wall sections, too, as well as the steel-reinforced walls favored by embassies. All in all, it was a remarkable collection. And untraceable. The building materials had been assembled piece by piece from more than three dozen separate vendors. Parked next to the scenery bays were a pair of hydraulic forklift trucks that could position the heavy elements, which fit together like jigsaw-puzzle pieces.
Even the ownership of the warehouse was untraceable. It had been bought through a series of French front companies and offshore banks. It was one anonymous structure among scores of similar buildings, located in the narrow corridor between the A1 highway that ran due north all the way to Lille and the huge Michelin tire complex. Like the tire plant, the 4627 warehouse straddled the St. Denis–Aubervilliers boundary line. That location was no accident. Tom had planned things that way: he knew that if anything went awry, the St. Denis gendarmerie would defer to the Aubervilliers cops, who would, in turn, wait for their brothers in arms across the boundary line to handle the problem. That was one thing about the French: you could trust their bureaucracy always to remain solidly bureaucratic.
The vehicles parked cheek by jowl against the western wall of the place each had legitimate registrations and owners’ certificates for half a dozen separate aliases—aliases that wouldn’t disturb police or intelligence trip wires anywhere in Europe. There were more than half a dozen of them: two Renault vans, a Citroën sedan, a big Audi saloon, and a couple of nondescript Fords. There were also a pair of panel trucks—the less dinged-up truck was a boxy van painted French blue with reflective white and orange stripes on the side panels and rear hatches. It bore the EUREC and GECIR logos, and on the sliding door white letters read ÉCLAIRAGE & SIGNALIZATION. It looked exactly like the panel trucks driven by traffic-light repair crews. The other was equally unremarkable.
Reuven unlocked the Eurec van. Inside, taped to the equipment locker, was a brown manila envelope. Reuven slit the thick paper seal and extracted a compact disk. He eased out of the truck, went to the office, inserted the disk in the graphite-gray computer, and waited until it booted up.
Six minutes later, he was back, a sheaf of papers in his right hand. He whistled at Tom, who was scanning the wall sections in the scenery bays. “Take a look,” he shouted, waving the target-assessment photos in the American’s direction. “Nothing too complicated. We should have the mock-up put together within a couple of hours.”
11:14 A.M. Tom went into the office and entered a six-number combination into a large safe that had been lag-bolted into the concrete floor. When he heard the electronic lock release, he punched a second six-number combination, which rendered the thermite explosive charges inside the safe inert. He pulled the double doors open.
From the top shelf of the safe he extracted a gray, injection-molded, HPX high-performance resin-shell Storm Case slightly larger than a commercial attaché. He sat the case on the floor, opened the twin combination padlocks then the twin latches, and flipped the waterproof lid up. Inside, protected by black plastic foam, were six pinhole audio/video cameras, each one two and a half inches in length. The battery compartment was just over seven thirty-seconds of an inch in diameter—roughly the same as a cut-down rollerball cartridge. And like a rollerball cartridge, the unit tapered into a slender shaft ending with the lens, which was about the same size as the head of a pin. Even so, the field of view was wide-angle, covering more than 106 degrees.
Both audio and video were transmitted to a repeater unit, also in the Storm Case, which amplified the signal before sending it on to the receiver, which could be as much as five miles away. There, the high-resolution digital pictures could be shown on a single television screen—much the same way that multiple security camera images are displayed. Simultaneously, the images were stored on a miniature flash ROM unit for instantaneous playback or transfer into single-frame photographs. The cameras themselves were self-powered by miniature lithium batteries that had a hour life. Once activated, they’d transmit 22
months.
Tom closed the Storm Case and carried it over to where Reuven squatted inside the van, rummaging through a tool chest. “You have the drill?”
Without turning, Reuven gave Tom an upturned thumb. “And the paint. And the Spackle. And the tool kit.” He reached inside his pocket and brought out a small leather case. “What do you think? I go out with just lock picks?”
Although paint, Spackle, and a sixteen-ounce hammer might appear on the surface to be incongruous with the art of spying, intelligence-gathering tradecraft sometimes requires more than SDRs and cleaning routes, spotting, assessing, developing, and recruiting; polygraphs, rabbit holes, or writing the endless series of postrendezvous reports that disappear into the black hole of Langley. Spying is more than flaps and seals—the art of clandestinely opening other people’s mail. It is more than disguise—the ability to change your appearance in plain sight. It is more than microdots and burst transmitters, spy dust, lock-picking, and all the other technically oriented, nimble-fingered sleight-of-hand arcanum arcanorum normally associated with the practice of espionage.
Tradecraft is sometimes dependent on nuts-and-bolts basic handyman skills—a lot more This Old House or Trading Spaces than “Bond—James Bond.” Sewing, photography, carpentry, electrical work, auto mechanics, and painting—they’re all integral to tradecraft, too.
Indeed, a Russian operation against the State Department’s headquarters had provided Tom with an interesting case study in the manual-trades necessities of spycraft.
In 1998, Boris Grumov, a case officer from SVR (the Russian foreign intelligence service) working under embassy cover in Washington, managed to plant an audio transmitter listening device inside a conference room belonging to the Bureau of Oceans and Environmental and Scientific Policy, or OES, on the seventh floor of the Harry S. Truman Building, the two-square-block main State headquarters that sits between Twenty-first and Twenty-third and C and D Streets, Northwest, in Washington, D.C.
In Hollywood movies, bugs are cavalierly applied to the bottoms of tables and chairs or easily screwed into chandeliers or floor lamps. In real life? Not likely, bub.
At the State Department, for example, offices and conference rooms are regularly inspected by Bureau of Diplomatic Security special agents augmented by spit-and-polish U.S. Marines, who look underneath desks, tables, and chairs and inside all the lighting fixtures, make sure that classified materials are properly stored in document safes, and check to see that the removable hard drives from every computer linked to State’s classified network have been locked in special safes. Every night. Violations are taken seriously.
So the Russians got erudite. They installed their listening device by planting it inside the chair molding that ran along the perimeter of room 7835.
Talk about a complicated and sophisticated operation. After all, SVR had had to:
• Take photos and measurements of the chair molding so it could be purchased and matched exactly to the molding in 7835.
• Get a paint sample so the paint could be copied, right down to the patina, nicks, and smudges.
• Cut a section of molding out and replace it with the new section containing the listening device.
• Camouflage the seams
between the old and the new molding to make them invisible.
And finally, accomplish all the work during the hours when the room was not being used by the OES staff.
Intelligence and law enforcement services maintain huge technical departments and break-and-enter specialists to perform such work. But if time and limited access are factors—which they often are—then much of the work has to be done by the case officer him/herself. In this operation, even though the SVR rezident (station chief) in the Russians’ Washington embassy had a five-man technical section at his disposal, the on-site work at State had to be performed either by Grumov or an American agent because penetrating a team of hostile technicians clandestinely inside HST is exponentially more difficult than getting one hostile case officer with diplomatic immunity through the C Street turnstiles. After all, hostile case officers with diplomatic immunity go through those turnstiles all the time. It made one wonder.
Tom examined the wall section Reuven had attached to the forklift truck. On one side, it was stucco-finish plaster about a quarter of an inch thick, set into lath that was fastened to masonry and sheathed in stone. The opposite surface had crown molding made of poplar wood, behind which was lath and plaster, then another layer of masonry and the common stone sheathing. The total width of the two facing walls was just over sixteen inches.
The Israeli stood with his hands on his hips. “Which one do you want to try first?”