The Prisoner

by Alex Berenson

  “Pricks have a Dragunov,” Girol said in his ear. A Russian sniper rifle. “Lucky for us, he can’t shoot.”

  “I’m blind. Get out, Mighty.”

  “Sure. My magic carpet.” Girol laughed, hard and bitter. Batta couldn’t help himself. If they had to die, he was glad they would do it together.

  The Dragunov cracked again, though this time it seemed to come from another direction.

  “Pricks have two Dragunovs,” Girol said. “Ain’t sporting. Second guy can aim a little, too.”

  Two more big thumps from the Hellfires and a single scream carried to them in the night.

  “Yeah, that’ll smart,” Girol said.

  “Guess they knew we were coming.”

  “This one was no good from the start and it’s my fault for not saying so. The tough guy who never talks. Buncha—”

  Both Dragunovs cracked almost at once. Girol sucked in his breath, groaned quietly.

  “You hit, Mighty?”

  Two more Hellfires thumped down. “Looks like they smoked a pickup.” Girol’s voice was a whisper. “Nice.”

  They were fine as long as they had air support. But the drones had fired six of their eight missiles. And once they were out . . .

  “Any ideas, genius?”

  Batta had no ideas, just a question. Who’d set them up? Mahmoud? Abu Ibrahim? Had the man he’d seen even been Abu Ibrahim? He’d die without answers. That uncertainty seemed as bitter as death itself.

  “Gimme the AK, go for the horses,” Batta said. The horses. He wondered what would happen to them. Past his control now, like everything else.

  “Wouldn’t get ten feet. Besides, I never said anything, because I didn’t know if you’d understand, but I always had feelings for you.”

  Batta didn’t know what to say. Girol was the last guy on earth he would have imagined making this confession—

  A whispery laugh.

  “Don’t tell me you believed me. Genius to the end.”

  Batta reached behind his ear and, after a moment of panic, found the pill exactly where it was supposed to be. He tugged at the adhesive, peeled it off.

  “Mighty.”

  “Do what you gotta do. I’ll see you on the flip side, Kareem.”

  The first time in years that Girol had used his real name. Before the fear could paralyze him, Batta popped the pill in his mouth, crunched it between his teeth. A foul-tasting liquid trickled down his throat, burning as it went. Too soon it landed in his stomach and every cell in his body screamed at once, an agony that rose and rose, he couldn’t breathe, what had he done to himself, worse than he could have imagined, he was starving for oxygen, where was the blackness now, the mercy, he tried to beg but he couldn’t speak, where was it, where—

  3

  LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  THE CIA was a gossipy place, not surprising given that its denizens had given themselves the job of knowing the world’s secrets. Almost everyone at Langley had heard of Ellis Shafer, the scrawny oldster with the curly white hair whose pants never fit. The hall reports—agency-speak for rumors—said that Shafer had played a role in the sudden resignation of the prior director, a Marine general.

  But the stories about Shafer went in every direction. In the directorate of intelligence, most analysts thought Shafer was Vinny Duto’s personal spy at Langley. The officers in the directorate of operations had a more perverse view, that Shafer couldn’t stand Duto and refused to retire simply to spite him.

  On the seventh floor of the Original Headquarters Building, the director and his deputies had more information but only slightly more insight. They knew that Duto had used Shafer and Wells for missions where the agency needed not just plausible but complete deniability. But the details remained a mystery. Nor did anyone know why Duto had chosen Shafer and Wells, who both had reputations for being difficult, for those missions. Or what they had received in return.

  Not power—not in the conventional sense anyway. Wells didn’t even have an office at Langley. The CIA kept him on its payroll as a Senior Field Operations Trainer, a title that existed only for him. Once a year, he held a question-and-answer session with new case officers at the Farm. Aside from that, he was a wraith. Shafer had an even more ridiculous title, Director of Quality Assurance. These days, he had a third-floor office, where his neighbors were accountants and auditors who might as well have worked for the Department of Agriculture.

  The best guess on seven was that Duto had used Shafer and Wells on missions that advanced his personal interests. Shafer and Wells played along in return for favors of their own. Over the years, the three had learned so many of one another’s secrets that they were inextricably tied together.

  —

  SHAFER WANTED to dismiss that view as unfair, too simplistic. But he knew it held more than a little truth. Duto had repeatedly outplayed him and Wells, using them in ways they didn’t recognize until too late. Other times, they had outplayed themselves, putting themselves in situations where they had to beg for Duto’s help. Duto always did help. But he inevitably collected on his chits. Sometimes right away. Sometimes later, after Wells and Shafer let themselves believe he’d forgotten.

  For longer than he should have, Shafer had believed that the truth always won. Shafer was an atheist. Truth was as close to a god as he had. Hard, inalienable facts. Don’t tell me you weren’t speeding, I have you on the gun at eighty-one. The CIA pretended to agree. Etched into a wall of its main lobby was a quote from the New Testament, John 8:32—And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.

  A masterpiece of cynicism. The men and women at Langley knew better than anyone the limits of truth. They prayed to other gods. They spent their lives keeping mental ledgers of favors asked and granted, secrets hidden and exposed. No one kept more careful accounting than Duto.

  Duto was on Shafer’s mind more and more. He had realized a couple of years back that he grudgingly respected Duto. Shafer wasn’t physically fearful. The idea of dying hardly bothered him, though he knew to his core that there was nothing on the other side. How could you fear nothing? How could you fear sleep? He wasn’t self-doubting either. He wore his intellect as armor. But more than anything, Shafer was a critic. He second-guessed everyone and everything, including his own motives. He considered himself a professional outsider. But he knew his attitude could be viewed as misanthropy, an unwillingness to lower himself into the trenches where everyone else lived.

  In his old age, Shafer had grown to see that the world needed men like Duto. Men who grabbed what they wanted. Who weren’t afraid to build skyscrapers and cut patients open. If they lost one or two along the way, so be it. And unlike a lot of those guys, Duto was no chicken hawk. He had risked his life to help Wells during their last operation.

  Yet Shafer would never trust Duto, much less like him. Duto was a boss, not a leader. Leaders risked their own power for the people they had sworn to serve. Bosses made deals with other bosses to protect their own interests. Shafer didn’t hate Duto. But at times he hated himself for helping Duto rise to the most powerful office in the world.

  After Duto won the election, Shafer thought about retiring. Nearly everyone his age—fine, drop the nearly—everyone his age had left the agency. Even his old buddy Lucy Joyner. But Shafer was in a unique position. No one could make him quit. And he couldn’t pull the trigger. He told himself he had seen too many guys leave and six months later drop from heart attacks. He told himself he and his wife liked northern Virginia. If he quit, they’d have to move somewhere he wasn’t reminded every day of the job.

  The real answer was that he would never tire of reading the classified traffic, the NSA’s intercepts, the cables—still called that, though they were sent via fiber-optic networks now—from a hundred different stations. The world’s hidden comedy, as seen through the unblinking eyes of the United States government. The truth. He couldn�
��t own it, but he could rent it. No one had better access than he did. Not even the director. The director couldn’t call a desk officer who handled Tibet and ask about the Dalai Lama’s second cousin. Shafer could. Shafer had. In part, to prove that he could. The seventh floor let him, the price for keeping him occupied. After a while, people stopped asking why he was asking and just answered his questions. He might be the agency’s weird old uncle. But he was a weird old uncle that case officers and analysts ignored at their peril.

  So Shafer stayed. The ultimate minister without portfolio. He was in a state of suspended animation. But he knew something would happen sooner or later. It always did.

  —

  THE CRITIC-STAMPED traffic started flowing just past 4 p.m. The Islamic State had trapped two SOG operatives near Raqqa. The agency had drones overhead, giving it a real-time view. The SOG commander in Turkey asked the Near East desk head, who was watching from the Langley drone ops center, for permission to send a rescue helicopter.

  The desk head kicked the question to the deputy director of operations. Then Shafer knew the operatives were in real trouble. The drone feed must show such overwhelming enemy force that the desk head knew he couldn’t risk the copter. He wanted cover to reject the request. Shafer wished he could see the feed at his desk, but even the director had to go to the ops center to see live drone footage.

  Shafer was debating whether watching the footage would be voyeuristic, exactly the kind of concern that Duto never had, when another round of cables came through. The operatives were dead. The drones had fired their last Hellfires to vaporize their bodies so that the jihadis couldn’t mutilate them. The DDO was calling an emergency meeting at 6:30 in his conference room.

  Shafer wasn’t invited. He called the DDO’s admin, said he’d be there.

  —

  FOR LONG STRETCHES of the CIA’s checkered history, the deputy director of operations had held more power than the agency’s director, his nominal boss. The DCI—or DCIA, as he was now properly known—served at the pleasure of the President. Duto had lasted almost a decade, but the average director survived only three or four years.

  Most directors were outsiders who came in with plans to reform the agency, or at least change it. The ones who pushed too hard learned quickly why the CIA, especially the directorate of operations, had earned its reputation for impenetrability. Wise directors forged bonds with their deputies, who were agency lifers.

  But weak directors—ones who overreached, or couldn’t handle their deputies, or simply had the bad luck to try for changes the agency didn’t like—floundered. Only rarely did a director face open rebellion. The dysfunction was more subtle. He didn’t receive the information he needed to make good decisions in time. He wasn’t given every operational alternative. Case officers followed his orders to the letter rather than the spirit. Ultimately, he was embarrassed before the President and Congress. Sometimes he even faced public humiliation, though the agency played that card less often these days because of the government-wide crackdown on leaking.

  A long list of DCIAs and presidents had learned beating Langley at its own game was impossible.

  But Duto was in a uniquely strong position. Both internally and externally, he was viewed as the best director in the agency’s history. He had led the CIA to success on its most important post–September 11 missions. It had prevented major terrorist attacks on the United States, decimated al-Qaeda, helped kill Osama bin Laden.

  Meanwhile, Duto had taken control of the entire intelligence community. He beat back challenges to the agency’s primacy on secret operations from the Pentagon. A decade after the mess of rendition, the CIA had more money and power than ever. Since ascending to the White House, Duto had given the agency even more responsibility. He might have moved across the Potomac, but he still had a hammerlock on Langley. Infighting hadn’t disappeared, but it had dropped notably. The DCIA, DDO, and section chiefs all played for the same team. Team Duto.

  So as Shafer walked into the DDO’s conference room for the postmortem, he didn’t feel the rancor he had expected. Grim faces all around, of course. But the principals at the table weren’t trying to stare one another down. The attitude seemed to be Let’s fix this.

  Of course no one had said a word yet.

  The room itself was windowless and utilitarian, gray-painted walls and bare wooden floors. Theoretically, the lack of ornamentation made planting bugs more difficult. No picture frames to hide transmitters. In reality, the seventh floor faced little risk of compromise. These corridors were as heavily guarded as any in the world. Getting inside the White House was easier. Most other offices up here had wood paneling and shelves filled with junk. This room’s lack of ornamentation signaled its seriousness. Successful missions were discussed in the DCIA’s conference room. Failures went here.

  A space awaited at the table. Instead, Shafer took a seat against the wall, with the aides. “Ellis,” the DCIA said, without enthusiasm. He was a twenty-year veteran of the agency named Peter Ludlow. He had helped Shafer and Wells on their previous mission. Shafer knew he’d done so only at Duto’s insistence.

  Ludlow had cool blue eyes and lank hair he wore parted low on the right. He’d come up through the agency’s stations in Beijing and Hong Kong and spoke flawless Cantonese and Mandarin. He had the low-key charm of a good college professor. But he came off as thoughtful rather than tough, and he had been only peripherally involved in the fight against terror that had been the agency’s focus since September 11. Conventional wisdom held that Duto had chosen a relatively weak leader as director so that he could rule unchallenged. For once, Shafer agreed with the conventional wisdom.

  Four other men and two women sat at the table, but at this meeting only three mattered, all men: Reg Pushkin, the DDO; Vernon Green, the assistant deputy director for counterterrorism; and Walter Crompond, the head of the special unit the agency had created to fight the Islamic State, which was called Gamma Station.

  Pushkin was a big, beefy guy who had the antiterror experience Ludlow lacked. Under normal circumstances, he would have eaten Ludlow alive. But Shafer figured Pushkin had decided to check his ambition and wait for Duto to reward him, maybe as the National Security Advisor.

  Green was the highest-ranking black officer in the agency’s history. He had joined at thirty-five from the Deltas, where he’d been a major, and risen quickly to the top of the Special Operations Group. He had no experience in conventional espionage. His rise testified to the agency’s focus on counterterror, as well as its desire to diversify. Green was now almost fifty. He might have a hard time becoming director, considering his lack of experience outside special operations. But if Duto wanted to make history by appointing the first African-American director, Green would be the guy. He was lean and dark-skinned, with deep-brown eyes.

  Crompond’s relatively junior title hid his importance. He had been the number two in counterterror until a couple of years before, when he moved to Gamma Station. Crompond had a calm, unlined face that made him seen too young for the responsibility he shouldered. He’d gone to Princeton, an unusual pedigree these days. By all accounts he was a hard worker, smart, and devoted to the job.

  Pushkin tapped on the table to start the meeting.

  “A quick recap. Twenty-three fifty local time, two SOG operatives and two locals arrived at an exfil site outside Raqqa. They crossed on horse from Turkey yesterday afternoon, slept near a Kurdish-controlled village, rode the rest of the way today. Kareem Batta and William Girol. Maybe our best guys in Turkey.”

  If Shafer hadn’t already known they were dead, the praise would have told him.

  “The night before, they ran into a pickup truck with six smugglers. They handled the situation, all six red team KIA. After consulting with the SOG chief in Turkey this afternoon, Batta chose to move forward with the mission.”

  “We don’t know if that incident was related to what happened toni
ght, correct?” Ludlow said.

  “Yes, Director.” If the interruption bothered Pushkin, he hid his impatience. “We had two drones overwatching them tonight. As they reached the site, the drones spotted a truck. It passed and their exfil arrived shortly thereafter on a bicycle. I’ll let you see for yourself what happened next. It’s less than five minutes.”

  Pushkin clicked on the screen and an aerial feed came up. In CIA jargon, it was processed rather than time-of-event, or live. Thus, it could be viewed outside the drone room. The new drones had high-definition 4K cameras, and the night had been clear. Even from four hundred feet up, the video was good enough to distinguish faces.

  Which didn’t make what followed any easier to watch. Especially near the end, when Batta put his hand to his mouth, spasmed, and went limp, his lips pulled back from his teeth in an unnatural grin. “We’ve offered L-pills to everyone who operates inside IS territory since 2014,” Pushkin said. Girol took the other way out, putting a pistol between his lips and pulling the trigger.

  When the video finally ended, the room was silent. Losing your own guys was terrible. Losing them on a mission that someone had betrayed and doomed was worse. Two more stars on the lobby wall, the stars that stood for the deaths of CIA officers. There’d be a ceremony. Someone would make a speech about courage and valor. Batta and Girol would still be dead.

  “No question the bad guys knew,” Pushkin said. “The sniper nests were dug in so deep they didn’t give the drones a heat sig. And they had at least fifty guys in the compound at the end of that road. They weren’t taking chances.”

  Green leaned in. “Who was the exfil? And how did we find him?”

  “Nazir al-Habbaya,” Crompond said. “Senior guy in their oil finance department. And he found us. As you know, we have no American assets on the ground there. We handle everything electronically via local contacts.”

  “Not an ideal situation,” Ludlow said.

  These flat statements were high on Shafer’s list of pet peeves. Why did people in charge sum up what everyone already knew? Four aces beats three threes. Taxis are hard to find in the rain. They must have all gone to the same management seminar.