“You know what.”
Nothing, and he feared he’d pushed too far. Then: “My bureau chief sleeps next door.”
“I don’t care. I want to hear you. Please.”
And she did. So he heard her whispered orgasm before he’d ever kissed her. When he hung up, he told himself it wasn’t an affair, not really. But he knew he was lying. The rule was simple: Can you tell your wife? Would she be okay if she knew?
Yeah, not so much.
He spent the next month trying to find a way for them to meet. He’d long since stopped worrying she was using him for information. She discouraged him from telling her anything classified. I don’t want you to think that’s what this is about, she said.
You’re not a very good reporter.
And finally, at the beginning of June, the agency’s deputy director of operations flew from Virginia to Camp Victory for a one-day flash briefing. Wayne claimed a case of dining hall flu and stayed in his trailer, knowing he’d be alone for once. No one would want to miss the chance for face time with the DDO.
He feared they’d be disappointed, their bodies wouldn’t match the tales they’d told. But he was wrong. The afternoon turned out as close to perfect as he could have imagined. Somehow, they managed both the trembling expectation of first-time lovers and the intimacy of a couple that had been together for years. When she left, he didn’t feel guilty. Instead, for the first time he opened his email and tried to figure out how to break the news to his wife.
—
TWO DAYS LATER, a fine Thursday, one hundred five degrees at 11 a.m., Wayne flew to a Shia militia camp south of Baghdad. He was delivering a paper bag that held one hundred fifty thousand dollars to a sad-eyed Shia militia commander named Bassim. Bassim’s men had handed a dozen Egyptian jihadis to the agency the week before. Twelve thousand five hundred per foreign fighter was the going rate. Considering the damage that a single suicide bomber could cause, the agency was getting a bargain.
A couple hundred feet from the tattered fencing that marked the camp’s boundary, he saw a field full of what looked like oversized matches.
Hold on, come around, he told the pilot.
From a hundred feet up, he saw the rows of corpses. The men’s arms were tied behind their backs. They’d been shot in the back of the head, neat and clean. That morning, maybe, since Wayne didn’t see much bloating. Two men walked up and down the rows, nudging bodies to make sure no one was moving. They wore scarves over their mouths and black gloves despite the heat and stepped as casually as old men out for a morning constitutional. Wayne counted eight rows, twelve to fifteen men each. A hundred men, give or take.
Seen enough? The pilot turned the helicopter away without waiting for an answer.
Bassim ran the camp from a trailer that had once belonged to the State Department and still had Washington Redskins bumper stickers on its walls. After some awkward small talk, Wayne handed over the paper bag. Bassim made a show of not counting it before stuffing it under his desk. “Next time, I want to give you a tour, show you my men. Good soldiers.”
“I’m sure they’re excellent.” Especially at shooting unarmed prisoners. “Before I leave”—Wayne decided he had to ask—“the bodies in that field north of camp . . . ?”
Wayne expected Bassim would deny knowing anything about the field, deny the bodies were dead, deny they existed at all. Three tours had taught Wayne that Iraqis happily told the most outrageous lies imaginable.
Bassim simply nodded. “We killed them. This morning.” He pointed a finger pistol at Wayne, pretended to squeeze the trigger three times. “Three I did myself.”
“Them?”
“A village ten km northeast, forty houses. All one tribe, cousins.”
“Sunni.”
Bassim blinked at the stupidity of the question. Of course Sunni. “They make trouble for a long time, bombs on the Karbala road. It’s our land all around them. We warned them since February, told them to leave. Finally, we took care of it.”
“They were soldiers?”
Another blink. Another question too stupid to answer. Wayne wondered what Bassim planned to do with the bodies. In this heat, they would be a health hazard in hours. He decided he didn’t want to know.
One question left, and this one he did have to ask. “What about the wives, the children?”
“They go to Fallujah, where they belong.”
In other words, Bassim had made a landgrab. He was trying to make the district purely Shia. Before the American invasion, Baghdad and the villages around it had held mixed Sunni-Shia populations. Now the Shia majority was pushing the Sunni west and north. Ultimately, the Shia were preparing for a possible split of Iraq. The Sunni hated the idea because their lands lacked oil. But the Shia had the numbers. The United States could hardly complain. Even with the surge, it barely had enough soldiers to restore order to Baghdad. It needed militias like Bassim’s.
“Want to see them?” Bassim said now. Forcing the issue, showing Wayne he knew the score.
“You pick up anybody else we might want, you let us know.”
“The same price?”
“Sure.”
“The skinny ones, too?”
Funny man. Please don’t tell me you’ve been starving prisoners. “Even the skinny ones.” The CIA was paying a mass murderer. He was paying a mass murderer. What did that make him? To distract himself from the question, he asked another. “Do you think it’s working?”
“What’s that?”
“The surge.”
“Oh yes.”
—
AS SOON AS he stepped off the helicopter in Baghdad, he called Jane. He didn’t care whether telling her what he’d seen would ruin his career, or even land him in prison. Let her have the story. Let the world have it.
She didn’t answer. Weird. She always answered. She wasn’t at the briefing either, though she’d told him the night before she planned to go, after a morning embed in Sadr City. He called her again. Still nothing.
He heard that night. She’d been on her way to the embed when her driver happened across a half-dozen Humvees on a routine patrol. The unit was part of the Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division, which had rotated in only a few days before. Fresh and scared and trigger-happy.
Jane’s driver had panicked, refused to yield, tried to speed by. So the patrol’s commander insisted. Maybe. More likely, the kid on the .50-cal. hadn’t given him the chance.
Two seconds and thirty rounds later, Jane and the driver were dead.
“What she gets for trying to cover this damn war,” the deputy chief of station said.
Wayne felt every cell in his body fissure. Then he was back together. Like he’d been teleported to the end of the universe and sent back a moment later. The same person, but no more.
Worst of all, no one at the station noticed. He’d kept his secret well. Too well. He could barely acknowledge her death, much less mourn it. He made one change, only one. He deleted the half-finished email to his wife. All the guilt he hadn’t felt before swept him now, remorse for cheating and for Jane’s death both.
He knew that it would destroy him if he tried to face it, so he didn’t. He refused to think about Jane, what they were, what they could have been. He spent the last five months of his tour raising his hand for every possible mission, the more dangerous, the better. He was trying to die, so of course he survived.
—
BACK HOME, he read all the books he should have read before, especially histories of the Vietnam war like A Bright Shining Lie. For the rest of his life he would refuse to give himself the solace of honest sorrow, or even to acknowledge what he’d lost. Instead, he drowned himself in a concrete wave of cynicism.
—
EVERY COUNTRY made mistakes, of course. But Vietnam was worse than a mistake. The United States had nearly destroyed another
nation for no other reason than Lyndon Johnson’s ego. For no other reason than that it could. A generation later, the war looked even worse. When it ended, Vietnam was in ruins. Now the Vietnamese had a peaceful society, a fast-growing economy. Amazingly enough, even in the north, ordinary Vietnamese expressed few hard feelings toward the United States. If the circumstances were reversed, Wayne doubted Americans would be so forgiving.
The Iraq invasion was even more unforgivable. At least the war in Vietnam was part of a global conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. America had attacked Iraq even though no one seriously believed that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with September 11. Hussein’s preferred religion was pan-Arab nationalism, not Islam. In fact, the invasion had distracted the United States from its real enemy, al-Qaeda.
Worst of all, the United States didn’t need to guess at the dangers of occupying a country whose people spoke a different language and practiced a different religion. It had already been through Vietnam. Wayne began to wonder if the guys who handed out ink-stained pamphlets on the street were the only people telling the truth. Maybe Blackwater and Halliburton really were pulling the strings. Because who else benefited from these endless wars?
He thought about walking away from the agency. He could have gotten another job. But it would have been with a corporate profiteer. They were the ones who hired guys like him. Anyway, despite everything, he entertained the illusion that maybe a new president would force Langley into a new way of doing business. Maybe he could help change it from the inside, honor the memories he wouldn’t let himself have.
But Obama or Bush, Guantánamo stayed open. The National Security Agency kept up its illegal spying. Obama left Iraq but ramped up in Afghanistan, a move that might have made sense in 2003 but had no chance in 2009. Everyone at Langley knew Hamid Karzai was even more corrupt than the politicians in Baghdad. Everyone knew Afghanistan, a country whose tribal leaders regularly accepted children as payment for debts, was as unfixable as a society could be. Once again, the beneficiaries were the contractors who kept the Afghan war machine humming. And the trauma surgeons, the ones who could practice sewing up soldiers who lost their legs and arms.
The final straw came for Wayne in 2012 and 2013. Iraq went back down the tubes and Syria spiraled out of control. Bush was too busy invading Iraq to fix Afghanistan when he had a chance. Then Obama focused on Afghanistan while Syria and Iraq burned. Wayne didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. When it came to America’s wars, history didn’t just repeat. It looped without end, a Möbius strip. Only the faces of the dead changed.
He knew exactly when he first thought of betraying the United States. In 2014, the Seahawks and Broncos played Super Bowl 48—XLVIII, in the idiotic Roman numerals that the National Football League prefers—in New Jersey. For weeks, the radio hosts talked about how tough the fans would have to be to survive a February snowstorm.
Meanwhile, Wayne was reading the cables and seeing the photos from Syria. Assad’s helicopters dropped bombs on schools as the United States did nothing. A new group called the Islamic State sold women and girls into slavery. A country was dying, and people here were talking about the courage to watch a football game. Jane would have laughed.
Wayne couldn’t tell anyone how he felt. Every morning, he felt a little more alone. His parents were gone. His father had died thirty years before of an alcohol-rotted liver. His mother had died of lung cancer in 2000. Wayne remembered her happily puffing on Virginia Slims. Mass-marketed death, another great American tradition. His wife . . . his wife was a good woman. An elementary school teacher. A loving mother. Pretty to boot. Celebrity gossip magazines were her biggest vice. Is Jennifer Aniston finally pregnant? (Even Wayne knew the answer to that one: No!) He’d chosen to marry someone who wasn’t in his world, someone who would make him leave the darkness at the office. Too late, he realized he could no more leave the darkness at the office than keep the sun from setting. What would he tell her? Honey, I want to burn it down. All of it. By the way, what’s for dinner? He should have divorced her after that third tour in Iraq, but Jane’s death had somehow stopped him and now he couldn’t. The prison might be all his own, but it had trapped him nonetheless.
He tried a couple of times to see if his friends at the agency shared his feelings. Always carefully, always over drinks that for him were more water than whiskey. They mostly complained that the ops rules were too strict, that the White House and Pentagon weren’t doing enough.
“Maybe we’re mistaking what we can do for what we should do.”
“You want those throat slitters to win?” his best friend said. “Obviously, the invasion was a mistake, but there’s no instant replay. We are where we are.”
“Okay, but where are we going to be in five years?”
“Five years? You want me to guess five years ahead? IS barely existed five years ago.”
“Exactly.”
“Whoever’s on deck can’t be as bad as these guys. Take care of them, deal with the next problem next.”
He stopped trying to talk to his friends.
Who, then? A shrink? He couldn’t imagine unveiling his secrets to a little man in a sweater-vest and glasses. A pastor? His faith, never strong, had died as he watched Shia and Sunni butcher one another. He hoped for humanity’s sake that God didn’t exist, because if He did, most of the world was stuck on the downbound train.
He thought about killing himself, a single shot, quick and clean. But suicide was the coward’s answer. Besides, he loved his kids. He loved his wife, too, though keeping his anger from her sometimes made him feel like he was having another affair, hiding his most important thoughts from the person meant to be his soul mate. Could he love hate? Could he cheat on his wife with it?
I can’t do it anymore, he told himself every day as he walked through the lobby at Langley. Yet he did. Despite his torment, he rose, became a star. His success amazed him, until he understood that hate drove it. Hate stripped away his illusions, gave him the strength to ignore the petty jealousies that sucked energy from other officers. Hate made him relentless and focused, a comic-book power he wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t lived it.
“I’m so excited for you,” his wife said when he told her about his newest job. She was, too. She reveled in his promotions, and not because they meant more Beltway prestige. She wanted him to succeed. Not for the first time, he wondered what she would do if he told her the truth of how he felt.
But he couldn’t. He wanted her to have her illusions. His sins shouldn’t blemish her.
—
SO HE decided to act. Betray his country. Give aid and comfort to the Islamic State. The choice wasn’t as irrational as it seemed at first. Despite what the politicians said, the jihadis were hardly an existential threat to the United States. They had no air force, no nuclear weapons. They were noisy and nasty, but Vladimir Putin was more dangerous.
At the same time, the jihadis posed a very real threat to his fellow agency operatives. The Russians and Chinese weren’t in the business of killing CIA officers. They would use what Wayne gave them against their own people, bureaucrats who had let themselves be recruited as American spies. Wayne wanted the punishment he delivered to fall on the CIA itself. On the United States. The Islamic State would be happy to oblige.
Plus, as horribly as the Islamic State behaved, it had sprung up in response to the real threats the Sunni faced. In Iraq, the Shia majority had suspended its war of revenge against the Sunni only until the United States left. Ultimately, they had given the local tribes no choice but to rely on foreign jihadis for help. In Syria, the Sunni faced an equally deadly opponent in Bashar al-Assad.
All this brutality ultimately flowed out of the American invasion of Iraq. The United States was to blame.
So what was the solution? Of course the warmongers wanted yet another invasion. But what if the United States backed off, for once? Let the Islamic
State alone? Maybe the jihadis would settle into a Taliban-type regime, brutal to outsiders but tolerated by the people they ruled.
Everyone at the agency would call him a fool if he dared to mention that prospect. They would remind him the Talibs had let bin Laden plan September 11 from Afghan soil. They would say the West had no choice but to eradicate the regime. But Wayne thought it was time—past time—for a different strategy.
The more Wayne considered the plan, the more it made sense. It would punish the right people—his fellow officers—for the right reasons. Further, his job gave him unlimited access to both CIA and Pentagon operations in Syria and Iraq. Best of all, no one would suspect him. The agency would never believe that a senior officer would betray it to the jihadis.
—
HE QUICKLY realized the flip side of being above suspicion: the Islamic State wouldn’t believe him either. He faced the practical problem of how to pass information. The Islamic State didn’t have intelligence officers in Washington. It recruited almost entirely online. Wayne could hardly set up a Twitter account with the handle @ciaforjihad.
He needed someone who quietly supported the jihadis and would work as a go-between. He focused on the dozen or so lawyers and imams who popped up whenever the United States charged Muslims with supporting the Islamic State. One, a prominent local imam, lived in Virginia. Wayne checked to make sure the FBI wasn’t actively monitoring the man. Then he called. He introduced himself as Wayne Smith, kept his pitch vague. “I work for the federal government on issues of interest.”
“Issues of interest?”
“Better to explain face-to-face.”
The imam agreed to meet at his mosque.
Wayne arrived to find the man walking on a treadmill in his office, watching a DVD of a sermon given at a giant mosque. Tens of thousands of men prostrated themselves in unison. The imam stepped off the treadmill as the video continued to play.
“Do you know Arabic?” He was in his fifties, a handsome brown-skinned man, with deep-brown eyes and a round belly that the treadmill hadn’t touched.
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