The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage

by Francesca Salerno

  “The gold will then be sold on the open market in New York. The dollar proceeds from the sale of the gold, less my five per cent, will be wired to a bank of your choice, to your account.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler to use an offshore bank? I mean, why all this transfer of gold, and so on. It sounds so complicated.”

  “This is completely open and aboveboard, and rather old-fashioned, if I may say so,” Rabia said. “If I were to use a bank in the Caymans, that potentially raises a red flag. This way, you have simply made money in a gold trade, involving real gold, shipped in a vessel that can be traced, with real entry and exit papers. The documentation is authentic. The deal is foolproof. The invoices are real, issued with official stamps by the Government of Uruguay. The customs people in San Pedro harbor will show in their records an actual shipment arriving from South America. In a world of electronic chicanery, this is foolproof and raises no troubling questions. Count on it.”

  “Well, this is your metier, not mine, mon ami,” LeClerc said. “I will contact you within the month to arrange for the consignment of diamonds.”

  “An odd choice of currency by your Russian friend,” Rabia said.

  “Perhaps. He wants to leave Moscow and move to a warmer climate. Russians love diamonds. They can sew them in the seams of their heavy coats. It is possible that he is as old-fashioned as you are.”

  Rabia laughed a dry laugh. It was the sound of windblown leaves on the cobblestones of Paris in November.

  Chapter 8 — Washington, D.C.

  Kate spent a late evening reviewing the file folder Olof Wheatley gave her containing intercepts about nuclear weapons along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border. She expected to meet with Wheatley the following morning, but when morning came Wheatley’s personal assistant telephoned to say that he had been called to an unscheduled meeting at the National Security Council. He would have to get back to her. She was relieved. Loose nukes in Pakistan did not rate as a real threat in her mind, and she did not relish the prospect of arguing a politically unpopular minority point of view with Wheatley.

  “I hear your confab this morning with the boss was called off.” Phillip Drayton was standing in the entrance of her cube. Kate had not seen him approach.

  “Hey, have you been tapping my phone?”

  “Olof called me from his car. He asked me to take you to a seminar at LX1.”

  Washington’s agencies were an alphabet soup of acronyms, but LX1 was not one she recognized. She asked him what the letters stood for.

  “You’ll see,” Drayton said. “Bring a notebook. We’re going for a drive.”

  Drayton took the George Washington Memorial Parkway toward downtown Washington. A mile south of CIA’s Bush campus he turned inland, away from the Potomac on Dolly Madison Boulevard toward Tysons Corner.

  “We’re going to the National Counterterrorism Center at Liberty Crossing,” Drayton said.

  “I thought you said LX1?”

  “That’s an inside joke,” Drayton said. “When they opened the new complex in 2008, it was unmarked on the highway, just the way CIA used to be back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. If you look up Tysons Corner on GoogleMaps and flip the map so that south is at the top, the buildings that make up the center form the letters ‘LX’ and the parking lot looks like a fat numeral ‘1’. So they succeeded in hiding the identity of the buildings from Americans on the ground, but the complex is impossible to miss from a Chinese spy satellite. It stands out like a blinking neon sign. Murphy’s Law.”

  As they were being ID’d through the gates at Liberty Crossing, Kate was stunned at the size of the complex. The three main buildings filled a square a quarter mile per side. The parking lot alone covered six acres. Another forty acres of heavily forested land completely surrounded the secret campus, making it invisible to passersby on the highways circling it. In the years to come, a Washington Metro stop on the Silver Line would connect the NCTC both to Dulles Airport and downtown Washington, via the Orange Line through Rosslyn, to feed commuting staffers and visitors directly into a sub-basement. Kate learned from Drayton that the complex had its own police force and canine unit.

  The NCTC was part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the new intelligence superstructure created by President George W. Bush to coordinate the nation’s sixteen intelligence-gathering organizations. Previously, the Director of Central Intelligence had held that role, but running CIA was a full-time job. If 9/11 proved nothing else, it was that the intelligence services rarely worked cooperatively. That was no longer acceptable in an era of major threats to the homeland.

  The NCTC borrowed staffers from CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), among others, to vet threats against the United States, at home and abroad.

  Phillip Drayton knew the interior geography of the NCTC. Kate followed him to an amphitheater-style classroom. About 60 people filled front rows of seats near the dais. A distinguished-looking man with white hair and a snow-white goatee was in an armchair in the center of the stage.

  “Could that be that Hendryk Warsaw?” Kate asked.

  “The grandfather of American Counterterrorism himself,” Drayton said, “in the flesh. We’re in for a treat today.”

  Hendryk Warsaw was a legendary figure in the intelligence community, a founding father of American national security strategy in the Cold War and part of an elite circle of analysts and thinkers that included such luminaries as Herman Kahn and Paul Nitze.

  Kate and Phillip had walked in on a discussion already in progress, a seminar for staffers with top-secret clearances. The NCTC often brought analysts from all over the Washington intelligence community together for discussions designed to sharpen their skills and help them focus on common objectives.

  “These guys always have something that they value,” Warsaw was saying in reply to a question. His voice was carried by a state-of-the-art sound system that made it seem he was right next to you. He spoke slowly, in a rich baritone. “It’s our job to find out what it is. Often it’s pride. Here’s an example, something that may work for us. Say we’re after a third or fourth tier Al Qaeda operator. We’ve let it be known that our bounty on this guy has been cut back because he’s been wounded, or because his peers think he’s a jackass, or because he’s been demoted. We put that information out on the net. What do you think happens then?”

  “If he takes the bait,” a male voice in the audience answered, “he does something to make the headlines necessary to restore his street cred.”

  “Exactly,” Warsaw said. “Either he’ll just slither into the shadows, or if he’s got some guts he’ll do something to raise his professional profile, to make news, to prove that he’s still a player. So we’ve played him, in effect. He’s doing something in response to something we did. We have successfully manipulated his behavior, and if he’s not careful we catch him in our sights. That’s the benefit of identifying what Al Qaeda leaders value, what they care about. When we know that, we can push their buttons and make intelligent guesses about their responses.”

  The discussion that followed was wide-ranging and a little too theoretical for Kate, but an hour into the meeting the subject of nuclear weapons in terrorist hands came up. Kate listened.

  “The President of the United States has stated that Al Qaeda’s leadership has been—and I think I’m paraphrasing a little here—has been determined ‘to secure a nuclear weapon, a weapon of mass destruction, that they would have no compunction about using.’ Let’s look at this thesis a little more carefully. In the first place,” Warsaw said, “it’s far from easy to recognize a nuclear bomb when you find one. We know Al Qaeda has already been scammed once, maybe more. Few experts can tell a real bomb from a fake bomb. That means that if someone starts searching for a nuclear weapon on the black market, they run the risk of being duped by the Mossad or the Mukhabarat or just some run-of-the-mill con man with more courage than brains.

 
“But even if Al Qaeda acquires a nuclear weapon,” Warsaw continued, “I imagine that, besides me and a few other guys who have spent our lives thinking about deterrence and game theory, by the time Al Qaeda gets a nuclear bomb, they will realize that it’s worth more to them intact than exploded. A nuclear bomb is much too valuable to waste killing people. We already know that’s what they’re thinking—you have seen the phrase we pulled out of the ether last week: ‘we are now the world’s tenth nuclear power.’

  “Think about what that means. Al Qaeda, once it possesses a nuclear weapon, is no longer just a band of desperadoes hiding in caves. Why kill the citizens of New York and earn the undying hatred of most of the world when you could use the bomb to initiate blackmail and start negotiating for real benefits? If they are indeed the world’s tenth nuclear power, then they have more real power than ninety per cent of the world’s sovereign states.

  “I think it’s far more likely, if Al Qaeda ever acquires a nuclear bomb, that they will announce to us that they’ve planted it in one of a dozen major U.S. cities and then they will start telling us what they want. Terrorism is much more about having a pulpit and a lever than it is about killing people. PR is what it’s mainly about, not murder. Al Qaeda is in the business of converting people.”

  A woman in the audience interrupted him. “What about the Twin Towers? AQ did not hesitate to kill three thousand people.”

  “That footage of the second plane hitting Tower Two is undoubtedly the most watched piece of film in the whole history of human communication,” Warsaw said. “Hundreds of millions of people have seen it. The 9/11 disaster was about death, certainly, but it was also about theater. Who knew about Al Qaeda before 9/11? Nobody! And afterwards? Everybody knew who they were. I’m really quite convinced that a nuclear bomb is worth far, far more to Al Qaeda as a political weapon, a threat, than it is as a device they would actually detonate. Above all, terrorists want an audience. Corpses are no good as an audience.”

  ***

  By the time of Kate’s return from Pakistan, Claire Stoppard had worked for the Office of Terrorist Finance and Financial Crimes (TFFC) at the Treasury Department for almost four years. A tall, elegant blonde who enjoyed working in the rarefied world of high finance and banking, Claire’s brief was to uncover and combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and WMD proliferation using the power of the Treasury to force banks, suspect charities, and the informal underground Islamic banking networks known as ‘hawalas,’ to divulge information about money transfers by terrorist groups—information they often went to great lengths to conceal.

  For the past three years, she had focussed on cash transfers out of Kabul International Airport. The amounts involved were staggering. In the most recent 12-month period, $14 billion in cash had been shipped out of Afghanistan, an amount larger than the declared tax receipts for the entire nation. Packed onto cargo pallets like boxed refrigerators or washer/dryers, the cash was largely legal and declared. Some of it was diverted aid—U.S. tax dollars stolen by corrupt Afghan officials. The rest was proceeds from opium sales.

  In the week after her dinner with Kate, Claire Stoppard got word of a shipment of cash that was unusual, even by the standards of Afghanistan.

  “Here we’ve got a transfer of $11 million in hundred dollar bills that is undeclared,” one of Claire’s colleagues told her. “That’s weird. When the hawalas are moving all this money legally with nobody batting an eye, why the secrecy?”

  “Where is the cash being shipped?” Stoppard asked.

  “Paris, via Dubai, to a hawaladar in the Champs Élysées, a guy who routinely works close to the legal line and probably crosses it. We got wind of this through an informant in the VIP section of the airport. The courier was not searched and was driven straight to his plane.”

  “So how did the informant see the cash?”

  “The courier forgot to add the appropriate diplomatic stickers and do the paperwork to go through customs in France without inspection. When they worked through the red tape at the airport in Kabul, the informant saw the contents of the cargo pallet.”

  The analyst, a man named Mike Hill, pointed to a monitor that showed the name of a well-known Kabul hawala, the sum of $11 million, the intermediary in Dubai, and the final destination, the hawaladar in Paris.

  “I guess I didn’t realize you’d need a pallet for $11 million.” Moving money for Claire usually meant making entries with a computer.

  “In $100 bills, one million dollars weighs about 10 kilograms, so $11 million is 110 kilograms or 242 pounds. It’s more than you could carry in a suitcase.”

  “So we’re talking about a large container here.”

  “Exactly, about the size of two extra large Samsonite suitcases. The couriers are supposed to record their own names and the origin of the money,” Hill said, “but they usually just write down the names of the Afghan hawala initiating the trade and the Dubai hawala that is accepting the cash.”

  Claire quickly realized that there was something about the transaction that did not make sense.

  “Isn’t the beauty of the hawala system that you never have to actually transfer cash?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Usually it’s all just a question of inked notes in a ledger based on the honor system. The routine works sort of like this: The guy who wants to transfer money in City A goes to his local hawala broker or hawaladar and says he wants to send money to his friend in City B and the hawaladar in City A simply contacts his correspondent hawaladar in City B with instructions. Often it’s just done with a text message by cell. The recipient in City B simply goes to the local broker, gives the secret password agreed upon, and gets his money. Voila.”

  “Then the two hawalas settle up accounts at the end of the year,” Stoppard said.

  “Yes. If the same amount of money has moved in each direction, then no actual cash or valuables need change hands. This particular situation is different and that’s why it caught my eye. The hawaladar in Paris was not willing to provide the $11 million himself. He wanted the cash in hand from Kabul first. That suggests on its face that he’s worried that there is something fishy—or illegal—about the transaction. He won’t proceed on credit alone. He wants to see the actual green so he won’t be out a penny if the money is seized.”

  “OK, let’s get more detail on this. I’ll cable the LEGAT in Paris, and you try to work the Kabul angle. This doesn’t sound like a run-of-the-mill drug deal to me. Something more interesting.”

  “I agree,” Hill said. “Probably arms.”

  “Let’s get more info,” Claire said, “Then there’s a colleague across the river that I want to touch base with.”

  Chapter 9 — Islamabad

  Mort Feldman was nearing the end of a 36-year career with CIA. He had served as chief of station at Khartoum and in Riyahd before taking the post in Pakistan.

  His seniority within CIA and the importance of Islamabad in the fight against Al Qaeda entitled him to certain perks, including a nice house in the Diplomatic Enclave section of the city.

  Feldman’s rambling whitewashed villa was on Margalla Road, surrounded by park-like grounds lush with flowering plants and fruit trees. The house and garden were enclosed by a high wall and fronted by a guard post at the gated driveway. Like many of the residences on Margalla Road, the property was patrolled by Pakistani military police as well as a chowkidar, a local night watchman hired by Feldman.

  His neighbors were mainly ambassadors, senior diplomats in Islamabad’s large diplomatic corps, and ministers in the Pakistani government. If any of them had guessed that Mr. Feldman was not really Counselor for Economic Affairs at the American Embassy, they kept that knowledge to themselves, though the subject may have come up as gossip at Islamabad’s endless receptions and cocktail parties.

  Mort Feldman’s anonymity suffered a blow after the capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. An important Pakistani English-language paper with close ties to the ISI published a scurrilous article blaming CIA
for most of Pakistan’s ills, and named one ‘Milton Feldstein’ as the head of the Central Intelligence Agency within Pakistan, alleging also that this individual held more real power than the American Ambassador, (a statement Feldman felt was quite possibly true!).

  The newspaper article was a breach of protocol and trust bound to increase the level of tension, already high, between Islamabad and Washington. It also put the CIA station chief’s life at greater risk than usual. This did not register with Feldman, who felt, quite reasonably, that life in Islamabad was safer than in any of his previous postings, especially Khartoum. His only concession to his newfound and unwelcome public profile was to send his long-suffering wife Florence back to their home in Falls Church, Virginia. She did not object.