by John Weisman
He continued past the Versace boutique, crossed the Faubourg, and walked past a cordon of cops who directed him toward a steel barrier funnel that blocked off the entrance to rue Boissy-d’Anglas. A pair of tactical officers stared at him as he approached the barrier.
Tom nodded at them. “Morning.”
They nodded back but said nothing.
He continued down the street. On the left stood the service entrance to the grand Hotel Crillon, built as a palace for Louis XV. Marie Antoinette had taken singing lessons there. The hotel entrance stood facing the Place de la Concorde, where she’d been guillotined. On the right was the old Pullman Hotel, which had been rechristened in the 1990s as the Sofitel Faubourg St. Honoré. The Sofitel was where the embassy lodged mid- and upper-grade diplomat visitors and TDYs. (Supergrades—minister-counselors and career ambassadors—were customarily put up at the Bristol or the Meurice, because as grand exalted pooh-bahs, they rated cars and drivers.)
The bar on the Sofitel’s ground floor was exactly 158 paces from the embassy gate. At least that’s how many steps it had been when Tom worked at Paris station. Now, where the rear of the embassy looked out on the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, there were barriers and armed cops. Tom was shunted to the Crillon’s sidewalk, where he walked past dark stonework and twenty-foot windows, south to the corner. There, at a guard post, two SWAT flics checked his ID then allowed him to pass into a mazelike arrangement of steel barriers that blocked avenue Gabriel.
He slalomed past half a dozen submachine-gun–carrying officers, walking parallel to the Champs-Élysées, scanning the small green park to his left. There were tourists of course—a large clump of what appeared to be Indians or Pakistanis followed a guide carrying a ludicrous fluorescent pink parasol. Their tour had been stopped momentarily at the southeast corner barrier so that at the roadblock across the narrow ribbon of blacktop that led to the embassy gate, a black Mercedes could be checked.
Tom paused to watch as two armed men with mirrors inspected the undercarriage, one working each side of the vehicle. Two others popped the trunk lid and the hood and began poking around inside. The passengers were brought out. Each one was patted down and sniffed—no doubt for explosives—by a Malinois on a short leash while the entire performance was videoed by the Japanese. Tom wondered whether the videographer worked for al-Qa’ida. The AQN was known for its painstaking target assessments and contingency planning.
He resumed walking, scanning the park as he made his way to a second barricade. Even though he perceived nothing out of the ordinary, Tom’s instincts told him there were DST watchers among the trees and on the benches. It had always been the French agency’s practice to surveil the American embassy. And now that the threat level was elevated, they would have increased their vigilance.
Ten yards later, he was stopped by a second pair of tactical officers, who scrutinized his passport, actually holding it up so they could check the picture against his face. He was allowed to pass. But thirty feet on, at the barrier set just yards from the embassy gate itself, he was stopped a third time and his papers checked, this time by one armed police officer and an Inspector Clouseau look-alike in a baggy brown suit.
Tom counted 362 paces from the Sofitel. It was overkill, of course. The entire embassy compound was ringed by Jersey barriers set so that they would keep even the largest of truck bombs a hundred meters—more than a football field’s length—from the structure itself. There was no way any car—even an embassy vehicle—could approach the outer security perimeter without being checked thoroughly.
Tom held his passport in his right hand and proceeded through the gate. To his right were the steps of the old embassy entrance. The first time he’d been in Paris—it was the early 1970s—he and his parents had walked off the Place de la Concorde and straight up the steps into the huge embassy foyer. No guards. No barriers. No ID checks. Not, at least, until they’d come to Post Number One, where a Marine sergeant in a starched tan shirt and razor-creased blue trousers asked to see their passports.
Now the old entrance was out-of-bounds. Tom was shunted along a narrow walkway to a gatehouse whose only door was built of heavy steel and dark-tinted bulletproof glass. A metallic voice with a French accent came through the three-inch speaker on the right side of the doorpost. “May I ’elp you?”
“I’m here to see Adam Margolis.”
“Do you ’ave an appointment?”
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
Tom recited it.
There was a twenty-second pause followed by a dissonant buzzing as the electronic lock on the door disengaged. Tom pulled at it. The damn thing was heavy. He entered a narrow security lock, manned by two French security contractors. They stood inside a bombproof enclosure, behind a chest-high counter and two-inch Plexiglas windows. Six television monitors displayed the area outside the gatehouse.
“Passport, please.”
A tray emerged from the counter. Tom dropped the document into it. The security agent inspected it, then turned and marched six steps to a photocopier. He laid the passport on the bed, closed the cover, and pressed a button. He checked to see that the copy was good, then laid the sheet in the tray of a fax machine. As the photocopy transmitted, he picked up an embassy phone book, ran his finger down a page, then dialed an extension and said, “Mr. Margolis, you ’ave a visitor, a Mr. Stafford.”
There was a pause. “Bien sûr, monsieur.” The guard returned the passport to Tom. “Please ’ave a seat. Mr. Margolis will be with you in a few mi-nute.”
Tom settled himself on one of the three steel chairs lag-bolted to the wall. The gatehouse counter was U-shaped. Behind and above the desk, hermetically sealed from the gatehouse by another layer of bulletproof glass, was Marine Post Number One. Tom could make out a pair of sergeants looking down at him. He gave them a smile and an offhand wave and got one in return.
To the left and right of the counter were two portals—they were, in fact, metal detector–slash–explosives sniffer units—and ramps that led to steel-and-bombproof glass doors. The one on the left opened onto a ramp leading down to a patio. When Tom had worked at Paris station, the patio, which sat in front of the embassy’s west wing housing the USIA library and cultural center, had been a well-kept garden filled with sculptures and stone benches. Now, in their stead, was a makeshift blast wall: a huge blue steel cargo container—the kind you see on oceangoing cargo ships—probably filled top to bottom with sandbags. Behind the container Tom could see that the glass in the big windows of the USIA cultural center had been replaced with thick plastic. The beautiful glass-and-iron French double doors were chained shut.
Under the watchful eye of the two French security guards, Tom panned over to the opposite side of the gatehouse. To the right of the counter was another steel-and-glass door, which opened onto a ramp that ended in what used to be the embassy’s courtyard and now was used as a small parking lot. Behind the lot were the wide steps that led to the old formal entrance of the embassy. The steps hadn’t been altered. But the entrance itself—which had been in use when Tom had worked there—had been replaced by a pair of utilitarian bombproof doors, in front of which were placed a series of squat, ugly concrete planters—more overkill.
Worse, Tom understood only too well that while these precautions might be perfect so far as the security personnel were concerned, they were an absolute disaster for the intelligence-gathering crew. During Tom’s tenure in Paris, there had been dozens of walk-ins who’d come to the embassy and used the gatehouse telephone to ask to speak to an American political officer.
The embassy operators would always shunt those calls to CIA, which kept a small debriefing room off the main entrance, just inside the consular section. The location gave both case officers and walk-ins deniability. The room had audio and video capability, of course—there were even voice-stress detectors wired into the system. It didn’t take long to separate wheat from chaff, either. Even a half hour of talk was sufficient to have the person�
��s name and vitals run through the BigPond computer back at Langley. If it became necessary, the walk-in could be taken out through a series of back corridors, which ultimately led to a common wall shared with the British embassy. There, they’d be escorted through a door, walked down a passageway, and deposited at the Brits’ service entrance on the Faubourg du St. Honoré. It was all very slick.
Now it was so hard to gain entrance to the embassy that no sane walk-in would dream of risking his hide by going anywhere near AMEMBASSY Paris. There were watchers in the street—Tom had no doubt al-Qa’ida, Tehran, and who knows who else had the embassy under constant surveil-lance. The bad guys could use teams of taxicabs driven by their agents—there were six cab stands on the Champs and the portions of avenue Gabriel that hadn’t been closed down. They could man static positions by renting rooms at the Crillon (UBL had the budget to go first class, if necessary). They could tag-team watchers moving back and forth. It was probable that any walk-in who approached the compound would be photographed.
The heavy, layered security itself was another inhibitor. The French police demanded identification before anyone could get within a hundred yards of the place. Anonymity was impossible to maintain. When Tom had been posted here, walk-ins could make their way to the consulate or speak to a Marine guard, not be forced to go through a local rent-a-cop. Now the Marines were hermetically sealed beyond the gatehouse, there was no exterior telephone available, and unfettered entry to the consulate was impossible. Which left French security personnel as any walk-in’s initial contact.
Tom had no doubt that the people behind the gatehouse’s U-shaped desk reported to DST. They’d transmitted a photocopy of his passport on the fax before they’d bothered to call Adam Margolis’s office. And to whom, pray tell, had the fax been sent? Tom was certain the bloody French would have completed a computer check on him by the time Adam Margolis came down from the station. DST would know he was going to meet with a CIA officer named Margolis.
The whole raison d’être of an embassy—to be able to soak up information that allows your nation to make intelligent foreign policy—had been perverted. From the CIA viewpoint, it was crazy. A majority of all successful agent recruitments began with a walk-in. But the embassy compound and its environs had been turned into a zone sanitaire and the obscene level of security made walking in virtually impossible. Indeed, between the barriers, and the watchers, and the ID checks, and the DST informers at the gatehouse counter…it was madness. Sheer madness.
23
3:19 P.M. Tom spotted Margolis as the tall, gangling youngster pushed through the embassy’s front doors, loped down the stairs, and headed for the gatehouse. Margolis was in his late twenties with longish, dark curly hair. His befuddled, deer-in-the-headlights expression was accentuated by a pair of professorial round tortoiseshell eyeglasses with pink-tinted lenses. He wore a baggy blue pinstripe suit, button-down shirt, rep tie, and rubber-soled maroon-cum-brown leather Rockports, all of which pegged him immediately as a junior-grade American diplomat. Margolis’s overall appearance, combined with the awkward gait and pouty lower lip, reminded Tom of the simpleton twit who’d been chief State Department spokesman in the second Clinton administration.
Margolis unlocked the gatehouse door with the pass that dangled around his neck on a long leash and made his way up the ramp, right hand outstretched, to where Tom was standing. “Adam Margolis. Sorry to keep you waiting but it’s been a bear of a day.”
“Tom Stafford. No problem.” Tom looked at the young case officer, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, Tom said, “Adam, can we go somewhere to talk?”
“Talk?” Margolis blinked uncomfortably as if no one had mentioned to him that Tom might want to actually converse. “What about right here?”
Was he insane? Tom nodded toward the two French security guards. “I’d rather go somewhere a little more private.”
“Well, we can’t go up to my office.” Margolis’s head moved birdlike, herky-jerky left, right, up, down. “It’s restricted.”
Tom felt like rolling his eyes. “It’s all right.”
The case officer’s eyes blinked wildly. “How about the commissary?” He looked over at the French security officer. “I can take him to the commissary, can’t I?”
“You will need a pass, Mr. Margolis.” The officer reached under the counter and extracted a laminated blue badge with a huge black V on it. “You must wear this visibly at all times,” he said as he painstakingly annotated the badge’s six-digit number in a ledger. He looked over at Tom. “Your passport, please, monsieur.”
Tom had no intention of passing through the metal detector. He focused on Margolis’s face and winked. “How about we take a walk? I’ll buy you a drink up the street.”
Blink-blink. Tom could actually hear the gears inside Margolis’s head engaging. Then the CIA officer’s head cocked in Tom’s direction. “Okay. But I have to go back and get a pad and paper.”
3:35 P.M. They walked east through the security checkpoints in silence. As they approached the corner of the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Tom said, “So, how do you like Paris?”
“It’s okay,” Margolis said. “French are pretty standoffish these days, given the political situation.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve had a hard time meeting people.”
“How’s your French?”
“About a two.”
That wasn’t anywhere near fluent—it was something akin to high school French.
“Arabic?”
“Here and there.” Margolis shrugged. “But I’m a three-plus in Spanish.”
That would be helpful…in Madrid. Tom shook his head. And this kid was supposed to keep an eye on Islamists?
“Maybe you should take French classes. Or Arabic.”
“Why?” Margolis’s shoulders heaved once again. “Washington won’t pay. And with the euro so high…” His voice trailed off. “Was it like that when you were here?”
“Not really.” Tom’s small trust fund had made it possible for him to augment his meager CIA housing allowance and rent a decent two-bedroom apartment in a high-ceilinged courtyard building just off the rue de Courcelles in the seventeenth. Plus, he’d spoken four-plus French and four-minus Arabic by the time he’d arrived in Paris. “Where do you live?”
“I’ve got a studio in Cormeilles-en-Parisis.”
Tom winced. That was perhaps a thirty-five-minute ride on the sardine-can commuter trains followed by a couple of stops on the metro every morning. Given the fact that walk-ins weren’t a possibility these days, how the hell were young officers like Margolis supposed to do their jobs properly—their jobs being to spot, assess, and recruit spies—when they weren’t provided with the right tools?
Yes, tools. In this city, a nice apartment in central Paris was a tool of the trade. Because in the style-conscious City of Light, where you lived, how you dressed, and how fluent in French you were all mattered. No self-respecting functionary from the Ministry of Defense was going to take his chicly turned-out wife for cocktails chez Margolis if they had to take two or three metros from their flat in the seventh, then ride the local from Gare St. Lazare twenty-five kilometers northwest to some anonymous suburb, only to sit on a daybed, sip California jug wine, and eat microwaved rumaki bought at the embassy commissary. The French weren’t big on white Zinfandel and pizza rolls.
Worse: if the kid worked the normal embassy hours, which was nine to six, how the hell was he supposed to run a two-hour cleaning route, meet with an agent for a couple of hours, then run a second cleaning route, go back to the office and write a report, then take a cab all the way home because there were no trains to Cormeilles-en-Parisis at two in the morning?
The problem was ubiquitous. CIA spent billions willy-nilly on technical espionage but counted every penny when it came to setting up their clandestine service personnel in a manner that would allow them to operate effectively. CIA’s junior case officers, for example, were regulated by the sa
me draconian rules on housing and expenses as their State Department colleagues. So everyone below the GS-15/FSO-1 level lived on the cheap. Housing was assigned by the number of people and grade. Young Adam Margolis, who was single—the studio apartment was Tom’s evidence—was obviously a GS-10 or perhaps an 11. Income? Seventy thousand dollars. It might sound like a lot, but it wasn’t enough to do the job in this expensive, cosmopolitan city, where each dollar bought only eighty euro cents—sometimes less.
“Got a car?”
Blink-blink. “I only wish.”
“What about a motorcycle?”
The kid looked at him with wounded eyes. “I never learned how to ride.”
Margolis was screwed. Full stop, end of story. Because the bottom line, when you crunched the numbers, was that central Paris was a financial impossibility. Therefore, Adam Margolis, American spy, would be forced to live in roughly three hundred square feet of space at a rent that could not exceed four hundred dollars a month and compelled by further economic constraints to commute by public transportation to and from his domicile. And entertainment? Tom guessed the bean counters at Langley had screamed bloody murder the first time the kid spent eighty-five euros taking a developmental to lunch. Naturellement young Adam Margolis didn’t meet anyone. And just as naturellement, therefore, the intelligence product he produced—if he produced any intelligence product at all—was going to be second or third rate at best.
Sure, you could recruit agents on the cheap in Cairo, Dushanbe, or Kinshasa. And Tom had spent his share of time in the City of Light’s Lebanese and Algerian restaurants, steakhouse chains, and fast-food cafés. You fit the level of entertainment to the lifestyle and social comfortability of the person you were trying to seduce. But there were times when a bottle of champagne at the George V or a meal at La Butte Chaillot were a necessity—and those cost money. So did a car—or even a motorcycle. Without your own transportation, going black became a lot more complicated. By forcing the kid to exist under such incredibly stupid limitations, Langley was dooming him to failure.