Direct Action
Page 36
As Wyman snapped the phone shut, Tom said, “I thought you told me 4627 wasn’t in the business of staging coups at the CIA.”
Wyman looked at his young protégé long and hard. “You were the one who told me we should be. You were right. This country’s been deaf, dumb, and blind for more than a decade now, and that’s too goddamn long. Porter may not be the perfect choice—but he’s our guy. He’s all we’ve got these days. It’s time for them to go. All of them. Every last piece of deadwood.” He looked at Tom. “We owe that much to Jim McGee.” He paused. “And to Shahram.”
MJ’s eyes filled up. “When Tom and I marry, I expect you to fly in and stand up for him, Tony.”
“Fly? Moi? Not on the twenty-sixth of December, m’dear.” Wyman caught her worried look in the rearview mirror and laughed. “It’s not so far to Great Neck. I’ll drive, if you don’t mind.”
EPILOGUE
IN THE EARLY EVENING of November 18, 2003, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and his chief counsel held a two-and-a-half-hour off-the-record meeting with three unidentified individuals in HPSCI’s bubble room, which is located in a secure area on an upper floor of the U.S. Capitol building. Left behind after the session was a thick folder of materials, which were secured in the chairman’s personal document safe. The meeting was never logged in any of HPSCI’s formal records, and HPSCI’s chief counsel requested that the U.S. Capitol Police officer manning the security checkpoint directly outside the hallway refrain from checking the identities of the visitors and entering their names in the committee’s sign-in book.
Precisely what was said at that meeting is still unknown. But a string of subsequent events—virtually all of them covered in the media—might serve as an accurate indicator.
• On December 24, 2003, Air France canceled the December 24 Air France Flights 068 and 070, and December 25’s Air France Flight 068—all to Los Angeles. The return flights to Paris, Wednesday’s Flight 069, and Thursday’s 069 and 071, were also canceled.
• That same day, French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin issued a statement explaining that the preemptive measure had been taken “on the basis of information, currently being checked, which was gathered in the framework of Franco-American cooperation in the fight against terrorism.” According to a report on French television and sourced to unnamed security officials, the flights were aborted because intelligence information suggested al-Qa’ida was to bring down multiple civilian aircraft somewhere between Paris and Los Angeles during the Christmas holidays. Some newspapers reported that thirteen passengers were detained for questioning. According to press reports, all thirteen were released.
• A short article in the December 26 Le Matin reported that in an unintended consequence of the increased security at Charles de Gaulle airport, three expensive Louis Vuitton Montsouris knapsacks—one carried by a passenger on Flight 068, another by someone traveling on Flight 070, and a third on Thursday’s Flight 068—were confiscated when French customs inspectors discovered the bags were counterfeits. The passengers, according to the story, were interrogated, and after it had been established that they believed they’d bought genuine Vuitton merchandise, the knapsacks were replaced on the spot by the French authorities with real Montsouris.
• Beginning in early January, Washington reporters who covered the intelligence beat found themselves the recipients of an unexpected trickle of leaks from Capitol Hill sources detailing the sorry state of CIA in general and the Directorate of Operations in particular. By the beginning of March, the trickle had become a torrent, and DCI George Tenet began to realize that someone up on Capitol Hill had painted a huge target on his back.
• On January 19, 2004, Al Jazeera reported in a short tell-story that Moroccan authorities, acting on what was described by Mukhabarat sources as the fruits of a successful interrogation, discovered an Islamist bomb factory in a residential villa on the outskirts of the city of Safi, a hotbed of Islamist activity 250 kilometers southwest of the capital city of Rabat. Six Salafist radicals were killed during the assault. Two Moroccan Special Forces soldiers were wounded.
• At 2:24 P.M. on Wednesday, May 26, 2004, the CIA’s congressional liaison was summoned to the HPSCI offices, where he was handed a single page of language that would be included in the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal year 2005. The officer was instructed to show it to CIA’s top leadership. The page read as follows:
All is not well in the world of clandestine human intelligence collection (HUMINT). The DCI himself has stated that five more years will be needed to build a viable HUMINT capability. The Committee, in the strongest of possible terms, asserts that the Directorate of Operations (DO) needs fixing. For too long the CIA has been ignoring its core mission activities. There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action…If the CIA continues to ignore the experience of many of its best, brightest, and most experienced officers, and continues to equate criticism from within and without—especially from the oversight committees—as commentary unworthy even of consideration, no matter how constructive, informed and well-meaning that criticism may be, they do so at their peril. The DO will become nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success. The nimble, flexible, core-mission oriented enterprise the DO once was, is becoming a fleeting memory. With each day it becomes harder to resurrect. The Committee highlights, with concern, the fact that it took only a year or two in the mid-1990s to decimate the capabilities of the CIA, that we are now in the 8th year of rebuild, and still we are 5 years away from being healthy. This is tragic. It should never happen again.
• It has been rumored but not confirmed by CIA sources that shortly after the congressional liaison faxed the page to Langley’s seventh floor, someone in the DCI’s office suite was heard to shout, “I don’t care what you say. That goddamn son of a bitch Tony Wyman wrote that crap.”
• On Wednesday evening, June 2, 2004, George John Tenet called President George W. Bush and informed him he would be resigning as DCI the next morning.
• On Thursday, June 3, 2004, Tenet resigned, effective July 11.
• On Tuesday, August 10, 2004, President George W. Bush nominated Congressman Porter J. Goss of Florida as the new director of central intelligence. Goss would be the second member of Congress to hold the title. Goss was confirmed by the Senate and took office on the twenty-fourth of September, 2004.
About the Author
John Weisman is a bestselling author and former journalist. His CIA stories have been selected twice for Best American Mystery Stories. Weisman’s Black Ops column appears in Military.com. He lives with his wife and their dogs in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
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ALSO BY JOHN WEISMAN
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(with Richard Marcinko)
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Option Delta
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NONFICTION
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Shadow Warrior (with Felix Rodriguez)
ANTHOLOGIES
The Best American Mystery Stories of 1997 (edited by Robert B. Parker)
Unusual Suspects (edited by James Grady)
Credits
Jacket design and illustration by Thomas Tafuri
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. However, voluntary redactions of sensitive materials, sources, and methods have been made in accorda
nce with current CIA Publications Review Board standards and practices.
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4The 1949 armistice line separating Israel from the occupied territories.
5Sayeret Duvdevan, or Unit 217, is an IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Special Forces unit that specializes in counterterrorist snatch operations. Its members speak Arabic and often pass themselves off as Arabs in order to get close to their targets without being noticed. The history of the unit precedes the creation of the Israeli state. In the 1930s and 1940s, Arab-speaking members of the PALMACH (“crush companies” in Hebrew) operated inside Arab villages to gather intelligence, posed as Arabs in order to smuggle weapons, and mounted clandestine military operations against the British.
6Intelligence Support Activity, or ISA, is the former unit designator of the intelligence-gathering component for special operations and black ops. The current designator, , is classified.
7Technical security precautions.
8This officer resigned covertly in 1997.
9 was a covert-operations officer. His name has never been made public. The star that denotes his death on the memorial wall at CIA headquarters is one of the anonymous stars.
10In doing so, Mossad also managed to recruit dozens of Iranians, many of whom even now still report to Mossad case officers on a regular basis.
11Shahristani’s memory is on the mark. On January 22, 1979, a Mossad officer using the alias Erica Mary Chambers remotely detonated one hundred kilos of plastique explosives packed into a Volkswagen parked on rue Madame Curie, a heavily traveled street that runs on an east–west axis slightly southeast of the Ras through the heart of West Beirut, just as Ali Hassan Salameh’s tan station wagon and its Land Rover chase vehicle passed by on its way from Salameh’s apartment on rue Verdun. Salameh and his eight bodyguards were all killed instantly.
12Israeli term for Shin Bet.
13S R , who formerly worked for PLO intelligence chief Abu Iyad as a PLO mole for an international broadcast network in Beirut in the 1980s, was recruited as a penetration agent by R B, a CIA case officer at Paris station, in 1988. When B left Paris, R was handed over to a case officer who spoke neither Arabic nor French. Disillusioned by the new case officer’s lack of sophistication and street smarts, R, over a period of a year, disengaged himself from all involvement with CIA. Currently, he is a successful Paris-based businessman whose associates have no idea about his intelligence background.
14Abbreviation for Israel’s military intelligence organization.
15The FBI’s Special Intelligence Operations Center, located in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on Ninth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., is the nerve center for its current counterterrorism activities.
16The OODA-loop—observe, orient, decide, and act—was a product of John Boyd, the fighter pilot–philosopher. It was Boyd who first realized that it wasn’t the pilots with the best physical dexterity who won dogfights, but the pilots who got inside their opponents’ OODA loops by thinking clearer, faster, and more decisively.
17Annual reserve duty.
18Hebrew for dummkopf.
19The abbreviation stands for Milli Istihbarat Teskilati.
20Train à grande vitesse (fast train).
21The Agency’s paramilitary personnel.
22The actual technical specifications for this family of devices, which are currently in use, are classified.
23Observation post.
24Langley’s seventh floor is the location of the DCI’s office suite.
25Assistant deputy director of operations.
26Gelilot Junction, on the main highway opposite the Tel Aviv Country Club and three kilometers south of Herzlyia, is where Mossad headquarters is located.
27al-Qa’ida Network.
28An orange tab designates a Top Secret document.
29This is a pseudonym.
30This is a pseudonym, too.
31Secret police.