“Eighteen months ago, Nazir offered to pass us information about IS oil-smuggling routes. We were wary, but everything he gave us was gold. I would say we viewed him as our top asset inside IS. Hard to say no when he asked for an exfil.”
“We sure he’s the guy we just saw?” Shafer asked.
“Good question. The guy on the video matches the photo we have, but we never actually met him,” Crompond said. “We’ve pulled the wire for our connect. So far, nothing from him either.”
Meaning that the Islamic State might have killed the middleman, too. The icing on the cow pie cake.
“Obviously, Daesh may have discovered Nazir, made him ask for an exfil,” Crompond said. “Could also be the smugglers who brought our guys in. Two Syrian brothers. During the firefight, the drones were focused on Batta and Girol. When we looked again, the horses were there, but the brothers were gone. They may have gone to ground in those groves to the west.”
“Or sold our guys to IS for a million bucks,” Pushkin said.
“We worked with them before, paid them well, and their family has lost men to IS.”
“What about the MIT?” Ludlow said.
The letters referred not to the university but to the Turkish intelligence service, the Milli İstihbarat Teşkilati. Just as the Pakistani intelligence agency helped the Taliban, the MIT aided the Islamic State. Twenty million Kurds lived in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. They hoped to carve out their own nation. Turkey saw a breakaway Kurdistan as a greater threat than the Islamic State. But the Kurds were a staunch American ally. Turkey didn’t want to oppose the United States openly. So the MIT played both sides, letting the United States attack the Islamic State from bases in Turkey while passing it money and intelligence.
“What about them?” Crompond said. “We told them we had something going this week, nothing specific. But they know where the SOG base is. I mean, it was a training site for their cops, they gave it to us. If they wanted to play dirty, they could have tipped IS when our guys headed out. But it’s one thing for Turkey to tell IS, Postpone that meeting you have tomorrow if you don’t want it bombed. Getting our guys killed, that’s different. And one more thing. It’s like IS wanted us to know they had advance warning. They could have made a more subtle move, picked up Batta and Girol at a checkpoint. This is broadcasting. You have a leak.”
“We’ve had other close calls, too,” Pushkin said. “That thing by Homs. And the one in Aleppo.”
Shafer would have to look up the thing by Homs. And the one in Aleppo. They’d snuck by him. Probably he’d been catching up on Ukraine or China or the Kashmir. The downside of being a one-man band. He had a long night ahead.
“We need to look at the MIT,” Ludlow said. “And I’m gonna warn DoD about telling the Turks too much. And suspend any deep ops in Syria.”
“What Daesh wants,” Crompond said. “When we’re finally making progress.”
“That what you’d call today? I’m not sending guys to get hunted down for sport.”
Shafer could read Crompond’s mind: Ludlow’s done his recruiting at embassy parties, doesn’t know real fieldwork has risks.
“Director—” Crompond caught himself before he went too far. Reg Green kept a studiously neutral expression.
“Right,” Pushkin said. “As of now, no overnights in Syria. Walter, the commander over there, Durette, I want him on a flight back here tomorrow.”
Reasonable moves. Though they’d missed one possibility, Shafer thought. The most important. He waited for someone to mention it. No one did.
“Shouldn’t we consider one other potential pool of suspects?” Shafer said. “Us.”
They all looked at Shafer as if he’d let out a world-record fart. Even now, past seventy, he loved provoking that reaction.
“Us, as in this room?” Ludlow said. “A blue badge”—the color worn by CIA employees—“passing information to the Islamic State. For money, Ellis?”
“Could be.” Though money was rarely the only driver. The counterintelligence acronym MICE stood for money, ideology, compromise—or blackmail—and ego. The four main reasons that people betrayed their countries. “When we find him, we’ll ask.”
“You can’t think an American would help them,” Crompond said.
“Aldrich Ames.” Ames had betrayed the agency to the Soviet Union, causing the deaths of dozens of Russian agents.
“Daesh makes the USSR look like Santa’s workshop.”
“Those ten million peasants Stalin starved might disagree. Listen, I’m just saying smart detectives look at opportunity first, motive second. And if we look at who had the best opportunity to betray these ops, it’s not the MIT and it’s not smugglers. It’s us.”
“You want to chase this, be my guest.” What Ludlow really meant was I can’t stop you, as Shafer knew. “Do me a favor and find some actual evidence before you embarrass anyone.” Ludlow stood. “Excuse me for not indulging this, but I need to call the families.”
He walked out. The others followed, until only Shafer and Green were left. Shafer couldn’t escape the feeling that Green had taken his time so they would be the last two in the room.
“Never learned that trick, Major.”
“What’s that?”
“Keeping your own counsel.”
Green didn’t answer, proving Shafer’s point.
“What do you think of my theory?”
“I think you’re right, guessing at motive is a dangerous business. You can know everything about a man but what goes on in his head.”
Green winked. And walked out, leaving Shafer alone, wondering what he’d meant.
4
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA
HE looked in the mirror. The traitor looked back.
Traitor.
He’d say it. Why not? What exactly was he betraying? A country whose people could not have misunderstood themselves more. They imagined they were hardy, God-fearing pioneers. In truth, they were so desperate to self-medicate that, with five percent of the world’s population, they used three-quarters of the prescription opiates. They excused every poisonous choice by bleating about the nobility of their motives. They pretended to want peace but went to war more than any other nation.
In the last fifty years, how many countries had the United States attacked? The man who called himself Wayne could hardly remember them all: Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq . . . That didn’t count the meddling in Latin America . . . The drones that killed at random over Pakistan . . . The idiocy of the endless war on drugs that had made Mexico a graveyard . . .
The United States spread pain all over the world and expected love in return.
The place he worked lay at the center of the madness. The bull’s-eye, the beating heart. The secret chamber in the center of the pyramid where the priests claimed they found the answer to every mystery. No one noticed that they always offered the same solution. Buy off anyone who was for sale. Kill the rest. Do it all on no-bid contracts, the better to fleece the taxpaying sheep. God bless America.
Once, he might have gone to The Washington Post or The New York Times, told them the truth. How the agency wasted billions. How it held innocent detainees in Guantánamo because the White House was too embarrassed to free them. How its drone pilots didn’t even pretend to know their targets. But going public would make no difference. Even if he sent the raw files to WikiLeaks or The Intercept so the world could see for itself, nothing would happen. The agency never held itself accountable. Congress and the White House feared it too much to try. Even the idiot psychologists who’d crafted the torture program after September 11 remained untouched. Forget criminal charges. They hadn’t had to pay back a penny of the eighty million dollars—yes, eighty million dollars—they’d received.
Besides, the White House and Justice Department treated whistle-blowers like traitors these days. If they ca
ught him leaking, he’d spend his life in jail. Why not go all the way?
—
HIS NAME wasn’t Wayne, of course. He called himself that in homage to a man whose legend came from a lifetime of two-hour lies. A man who pretended to be a soldier but had claimed a shoulder injury to duck out of World War II. A man who at the height of the horror of Vietnam made a movie defending that war. The Green Berets. The film famously ended with a scene of Wayne walking hand in hand down a beach with an orphaned Vietnamese boy—as the sun set in the east.
John Wayne, the ultimate American hero.
The traitor was almost embarrassed when he remembered his enthusiasm after September 11. He’d volunteered to be in the first wave of officers going to Afghanistan. Even then he’d had some idea of the sorry history of Americans abroad. His father’s brother had died in Vietnam, an ambush near Da Nang, three months into his tour.
But this time was different. This time, they attacked us. They needed to pay.
He never did catch Osama bin Laden. Instead, he wound up in Iraq. The first tour, in the fall of ’03, the operatives all pretended to be badasses. They rattled around in convoys of white SUVs with antennas sticking off the roofs. Might as well have had CIA painted on the sides. For security, they had Blackwater guards carrying souped-up subbies and automatic shotguns. The private military bros did love their gear.
No matter, the country hadn’t blown apart yet. They screamed down to Najaf to meet with the Shia militias, went to talk to the sheikhs in Ramadi. Everyone told them that they were sitting on a cauldron. Saddam had been a nasty dictator. But he’d kept the streets safe. Now the Iraqi Army was gone. The police didn’t leave their buildings. Ordinary people lined up for hours for basic supplies. Week by week, political and criminal violence was rising, the country inching toward chaos. The Shia saw the power vacuum as a sign that the United States wanted them to settle scores with Saddam’s Sunni Ba’athists. But the Sunni didn’t plan to roll over and die. They were organizing their own militias and terror groups.
All that fall, Wayne went back to the Green Zone and filed reports. His bosses rewrote them to erase ninety percent of the truth. The idiots at the Coalition Provisional Authority, the White House appointees who supposedly ran the country, ignored what was left.
—
BACK IN IRAQ in ’05, he found that everything the sheikhs had predicted had come to pass. The country was a walking, talking slaughterhouse. The agency’s senior officers were cutting their losses. They worried about the optics back home if their operatives were strung up from light posts. Wayne barely left the Green Zone, except to travel to a few streets in central Baghdad where Shia leaders had fortified compounds. He grew to hate those men, Ahmed Chalabi most of all. Chalabi had helped cook the invasion, expecting the United States would put him in power. Now he was too afraid of being assassinated to leave his concrete walls.
But the United States enabled Chalabi. The agency, the State Department, and the military all pretended to take him seriously. Wayne sat in endless meetings where Chalabi promised to improve governance and reach across sectarian lines and rebuild democratic institutions. Everyone knew all he wanted was to grab the Oil Ministry. Meanwhile, car bombs went off in Baghdad twenty or thirty times a week. Sunni and Shia killed one another in an endless cycle, dumping corpses in the Tigris. Gangs kidnapped children walking to school. Ordinary Iraqis blamed the United States for the chaos and joined the jihadis who had come to Iraq to kill American soldiers.
Wayne couldn’t understand why no one told the truth, told Chalabi, Everything you tell us is a lie. Every change you suggest makes matters worse. President? You’re lucky we don’t arrest you. Go to Teheran, where you belong. Only later did he realize the pressure the White House had put on the agency to stick with Chalabi. Even after two years of chaos, the President and his men couldn’t admit the truth. They let thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis die instead.
—
HE CAME BACK for his final tour two years later, the spring of 2007. The reality on the ground had become so terrible that the United States had only two choices, leave in defeat or double down by sending enough soldiers to bring order to Baghdad. It doubled down. The shift became known as “the surge.”
When historians told the story of the Iraq war, they called the surge a triumph. But Wayne saw its ugliness up close. The CIA played its own part, funneling cash to Sunni tribes and Shia militias, trying to stop them from killing one another—and focus on killing foreign jihadis instead. Paying for murder, more or less.
He was a few weeks into the tour when he met Jane.
Even now, he couldn’t say for sure how real the feeling had been, whether it would have survived the trip home. War heightened all the senses, and what was love if not the inflammation of taste and touch and sight?
But it had felt real, more mad and real than anything else in his life. She was a black-haired Irish girl, painfully thin, the skin tight over her jaw, like she’d stepped out of a Depression photograph. A journalist. He first saw her at a Green Zone press briefing. On slow days he’d developed the bad habit of sneaking into the last row to watch the public affairs officers spin. The worst lies came not from the military but from State, which had the wretched job of pretending the Iraqis were working toward a real government.
She sat near the back, too, a row or two in front of him. She took notes but never asked questions. Soon he realized he was watching her more than the people at the podium, watching her reactions to their most outrageous lies. Her face never changed, but she sat up straighter, arched her shoulders, lifted her long, skinny neck. He fell for her neck first.
Finding her in the database was easy enough. Jane O’Connor, a reporter for The Washington Post.
He started finding excuses to come to the briefings every day. Then she disappeared. For two weeks, she didn’t show up. He pretended to himself he wasn’t disappointed until the day she came back.
That afternoon, she sat next to him. She smelled of sweat and coffee. Her hands shook a little.
“Mr. Back Row. Or do you have a name?”
He shrugged.
“Oh, come on. I can’t figure out why you’re here. You’re not a reporter.”
“Nope.”
“Yet you put yourself through this nonsense. Sit back here scowling like a guy who just stepped in dogshit. In brand-new heels.”
“I only wear heels to the prom.”
She lifted her identification badge. “Unlike you, I have a name. Jane O’Connor. Washington Post.”
“Nice to meet you, Jane.”
“Give me something.”
“I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.” He knew he’d already said too much. Knew and didn’t care.
She took his hand, held it a beat, finally let it go. “What exactly are you doing here, then? Information operations?”
“I just like to know how the war is going.”
She hid her mouth behind her hand and turned to him and grinned, her smile wide and beautiful.
They sat for a while listening to the Air Force colonel who had the job of relaying casualty reports. Three dead in western Baghdad from indirect fire, one at Camp Victory of non-combat-related injuries, a phrase that could mean anything from suicide to heart attack to a traffic accident. The military kept casualty information as vague as possible. Obscuring the details made the deaths less likely to be reported in-depth back home.
“I hate this war,” she said under her breath.
He barely stopped himself from agreeing.
She looked at him, her black eyes demanding an answer: Which side are you on?
“Talk to me.”
“Why on earth would I do that?”
“You’re sitting here waiting for someone to ask.”
“All journalists read minds, or just you?”
She gathere
d her stuff, stood to leave.
“Wait.” He took her notebook, scribbled his name and number. “If you have questions, specific questions, I’ll try to answer.” He didn’t know if he’d made the offer because she was beautiful—though she wasn’t beautiful, not exactly—or because she’d challenged him so directly. He only knew that he couldn’t disappoint her.
They didn’t see each other much. The Post had a fortified house near the Green Zone where its reporters lived and worked. She split her time between street reporting, military embeds, and the Zone. But they could hardly hang out in the Zone; inquiring minds would notice. Meeting outside was even more impossible. So they fell in love like teenagers with overbearing parents, over the phone and email.
He crossed the line first, alone in his office, working late, just a week after they spoke for the first time. A careful instant message. It must be hard for your boyfriend, knowing you’re here, worrying about you every minute and every hour . . . Heck, I worry about you and I hardly even know you.
Maybe you know me better than you think.
All at once, he wanted to hear her voice. It was nearly midnight. He had no excuse. But he couldn’t help himself. So he pulled out his private phone—no sense in letting the agency know about this call—and did.
Within days, they dropped any pretense of a normal source–reporter relationship. She confessed how she had to take Valium before every embed, how she feared she’d panic if they came under fire and get or the soldiers around her killed. He told her that he wished he could ride with her, that being stuck inside the Green Zone made him feel cowardly and a liar. They talked every night, and when they ran out of words, he listened to her breathe.
“What are you thinking?”
“Wishing you were here with me. Lying with me.”
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
The Prisoner Page 7