Wheatley made small talk with the other guests but generally failed to get into the festive spirit. He was preoccupied. He never felt fully at ease when he was overseas. Late in the afternoon he pulled a dining room chair up close to Feldman’s throne, indicating he wanted to talk shop. He handed Feldman another cold Coors, still in the can, and opened one for himself, his first of the day.
“We have a credibility gap with the Pakistanis,” Wheatley told Feldman. “We are working together, but there is no trust there. And now, after this farce, how can we build confidence? The ISI have put themselves beyond the pale. There is a branch within ISI that works night and day to undermine the United States and they have the Director General’s ear. You need to give some thought about how we move the ball forward.”
Feldman smiled, nodding. “As an organization, what you say about ISI may be true. What we need within ISI is a ‘special friend’ at a high level. And now I believe we have one. I think we can work with Mahmood Mahmood. I’m sure I can. He’s a straight shooter. He’s as appalled by my having been grabbed off the street as you were.”
“You are more of a forgiving guy than I would be under the circumstances,” Wheatley said.
“Yeah, but that’s water under the bridge. I got pissed off at him and he took it like a man. And by the way, he respects you a lot Olof. You’re selling Mahmood short,” Feldman said. “Are you aware that it was the road trip he took with you that turned it for him? He felt so strongly about it that he was willing to buck his own command. You’ve got to give him credit for that. He took a risk.”
“He took no risks in public. Your kidnapping has been covered up and we cut them a lot of slack when you went along with that fabricated story for the media. The business about having been captured by a splinter group of Taliban.”
“I never expected ISI to admit their mistakes in public. Would CIA? If helping ISI save face helps me get what I want, I’ll do it.” Feldman spoke emphatically.
“You’re telling me we can turn Mahmood?”
“No, not turn him, he’s not a traitor,” Feldman said. “He’ll always be a loyal citizen and a loyal flag officer. But he has sympathy for our point of view. And we know that ISI is schizophrenic about terrorism. They fight terrorists but they also sponsor terrorists. Everything from the Haqqani bastards to the Afghan Taliban. They collaborate with us but then they work actively to subvert CIA. What does that tell you?”
“That they’re fucking nuts?” Wheatley said.
“It suggests an opportunity to mitigate tension by by-passing the official ISI leadership. We ask to work closely with Mahmood within the ISI apparatus. My guess is that they will turn over the account to him. They will be relieved that we no longer ask to see the DG.”
“Will they allow him to do that? The ISI leadership refused even to meet with me.”
“Maybe. And maybe he won’t care whether he gets permission or not. He’s a flag officer. I think we should take Mahmood into our confidence to see how far we can take it, get him to work with us on this LeClerc arms thing.”
“With the risk being that he will simply spill whatever he learns from us back into his own organization.”
“So what? This is their country. We have to assume that they know far more about what goes on in their backyard than we ever will.”
“A backyard they keep us locked out of. Don’t forget that they wouldn’t give us access to OBL’s compound until they had swept it for evidence. They refused to give us access to Bin Laden’s wives.”
“Can you blame them?” Feldman said. “We publicly made them look like idiots. In Pakistani culture, that’s about the worst thing you can do to a man. Hell, it’s about the worst thing you can do to a man in Texas, too.”
***
Ahead of her on a trail in the Margalla Hills, approaching the village of Murad Gali, Kate Langley could hear the rustle of large animals in brush, possibly the rhesus macaques said to inhabit these slopes. The noises were coming from beyond the wildflowers and butterflies in a tangled thicket flanking the hillside. Behind her was the city of Islamabad, laid out from this high vantage like an architect’s model.
“Hear that?” Kate said, pointing. “Something in the bushes over there.”
Mort Feldman shook his head. They had been hiking for over an hour and he was beginning to feel it. Two weeks of captivity had sapped him of aerobic strength.
“I don’t hear a fucking thing,” Feldman said, panting for breath. “I’ve never walked up this far, and I’ve been told to avoid the damn monkeys. They’re aggressive and will shake you down for food.”
They continued their way slowly and cautiously up the slope. At the higher elevations, the vegetation grew thicker and greener, a forest of eucalyptus, mulberry, and oaks mixed with shrubs poking from the rocky outcrops.
A troupe of the monkeys became visible in the trees around a hairpin in the dirt track, some swinging from branches, others clambering on the rocky ground. Suddenly, a monkey jumped out from a tunnel in the bush, leaped upon a rock, and began roaring and yapping. It was a female, about 12 pounds and a foot tall, with a pink face and sharp fangs. Though no larger than a small dog, she was aggressive and brimming with confidence. To Kate’s surprise, Mort Feldman raised his stocky arms above his head and charged forward like a wild man, shouting at the tiny beast. It was a passable imitation of King Kong. The macaque beat a hasty retreat.
“Jesus, Mort! You’re going to scare the poor thing to death!”
“Better that than letting her eat my arm for lunch,” Mort said. He was huffing and puffing with the exertion. “I had no idea I’d get winded so fast.”
“OK, let’s take a break,” Kate said. “I’m expecting the Army or the Islamabad police to show up at any moment and arrest me. I was kicked out of the country, remember.”
“I told Mahmood you were coming. He knows. As for the others, I’m sure your cover and alias are strong enough to fool them. Besides, I wanted to hear firsthand about what you were doing for Olof in Bagram.”
Kate opened her backpack and removed a can of soda. She had brought a sandwich, too, but was leery of unwrapping it lest a famished macaque get a whiff of food. Feldman sat next to her on a stony bench. He seemed grateful for the break and the chance to sit.
Kate told him, in bare outline, the BanKoNoKo story in Kabul, including mention of the Zagi and the Shamsi LOTUS spreadsheets linking Minh Kwang to Jacques LeClerc and the $11 million transfer from Kabul to Paris.
“Jacques LeClerc has been a bit player in the international arms game for a couple of decades," Feldman said. “I think he was supplying Kalashnikovs to the mujahideen when they were killing Soviets. Some of those purchases were paid for by yours truly. Do you happen to know who his source was in Moscow for this supposed nuclear device?”
“Not sure yet. The hard drive of the late Simon Wantree’s laptop refers to a ‘Colonel M’ but we haven’t been able to connect the dots.”
“Let’s look back in our own records in the ‘80s and ‘90s. This ‘Colonel M’ is probably someone LeClerc has used before. There may be something in our own archives about him. Who is this Wantree character?”
“Well that’s a good one. He was a technician in the Brit nuclear weapons center at Aldermaston, canned for drug abuse. It appears that he was helping LeClerc locate a nuclear weapon, a sort of scout working on commission.”
“Or making sure he wasn’t getting ripped off,” Feldman said, recalling Hendryk Warsaw’s belief that con men could be as successful as legitimate salesmen when it came to black market nuclear arms. “LeClerc can tell a real Kalashnikov from a fake a mile away, but he doesn’t know squat about nukes.”
“We really have no idea who killed him, or why,” Kate said.
“Maybe he discovered something that was going to queer the sale, and ‘Colonel M’ bumped him off.”
“Maybe,” Kate said. She finished her cola and looked around to see if any of the macaques had returned. They had not. She reach
ed into her knapsack to take out her sandwich.
“Hold off on the grub,” Feldman said. “In a few minutes I think we may do a lot better than those cold cuts in your backpack.”
He pointed down the trail. In the distance, Kate could just make out a tall man in khaki clothes and a canvas hat walking toward them, accompanied by a servant wearing a red tarboosh with a tassel and carrying a large wicker hamper. Feldman waved, and the tall man waved back. Kate strained her eyes to see who it was.
“My new best friend forever,” Feldman said with a chuckle.
***
Brigadier Mahmood Mahmood and his servant showed Kate Langley and Mort Feldman a little-used trail that led to a clearing on a heavily wooded ridge overlooking Islamabad. A gazebo with a cupola of traditional south Asian design sheltered a rough-hewn picnic table. The servant spread a checkered tablecloth on the picnic table and set places for three, with porcelain plates, silverware, and crystal glasses. The muscular young servant wearing the tarboosh did not seemed fazed.
“Raza here has been with me since I was a lieutenant colonel,” Mahmood said. “We have gone climbing together in the Himalayas, very high up in the thin air. He can carry a fifty-pound rucksack up a mountainside at a slow trot.”
Raza broke out into broad grin but said nothing.
“Also, Raza is the soul of discretion,” Mahmood added. “And I trust him with my life.”
Raza served an elegant and tasty lunch, including a light rosé for the two Americans and San Pellegrino mineral water for the Pakistani brigadier.
Mort Feldman reviewed for Mahmood what was known at CTC about the efforts of Al Qaeda and other terrorists to acquire a nuclear bomb.
“We know that Al Qaeda has been fooled by con men more than once,” Feldman said, “starting as early as 1993 when Jamal al-Fadl tried to buy weapons-grade uranium from a Sudanese government minister for $1.5 million.”
“That was the incident of the South African canister of worthless gravel,” Mahmood said. “I recall that Al-Fadl was paid $10,000 as middleman but that he turned over the transaction to others, who then tested the material and found it bogus. Then he defected to America and you debriefed him.”
“But that didn’t deter them,” Kate said. “Because we know about the 25-page monograph titled Superbomb found in the home of Abu Khabab in Kabul. It demonstrated the breadth and depth of Al Qaeda’s research and commitment.”
“The discovery of Superbomb was the work of a cable news channel,” Mahmood said, grinning. “You get no credit for that at all.”
“We’ll take our info wherever we can get it, even CNN,” said Feldman. “I remember reading Superbomb and the comments of a senior American nuclear expert who said that he believed Al Qaeda’s commitment to nuclear terrorism was so strong that he was concerned that, given enough time, they would almost certainly succeed in acquiring a working bomb, or build one themselves.”
“They clearly have the money and the will, but I’ve never believed they had the technical resources,” Mahmood said. “This is my own field, nuclear engineering, and I must tell you that in my whole career, I have yet to encounter personally a terrorist who even remotely seemed capable to me of assembling a nuclear device.”
Mort Feldman was pleased with the relaxed way the conversation with Mahmood was going. The Pakistani general, usually so stiff and formal, seemed almost unnaturally at ease. Was it the pleasant, mountain picnic? Or Feldman’s decision to bring Kate Langley back to Pakistan, at least for a few days? He was not sure.
“What I was hoping we could do today,” Feldman said, self-consciously clearing his throat, “was put our cards on the table when it comes to what we jointly know about this most recent effort, the LeClerc transaction, or the Moscow Bomb, as we have been calling it in-house. I wanted you to hear from our point person on this, Mahmood. Kate Langley has been working this case exclusively since the week she started work in Virigina. She has been Wheatley’s direct report on Moscow Bomb, and she’s collated a lot of material, along with Treasury, about what we’ve been able to learn. Kate, why don’t you take us through it.”
Kate paused to collect her thoughts before beginning to speak. She had reviewed the facts concerning the bomb, they were deeply imprinted on her memory. The only thing missing was where those facts led—and the location of the bomb itself.
“We got wind of bomb chatter the week after Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. Internet chat rooms, random electronic chatter picked up by the NSA—nothing we hadn’t heard before and nothing specific, but enough to get our attention. The first specific piece of real data that we acquired was the report of an $11 million cash package being shipped from Kabul to Paris via Dubai.”
“This is what you learned from your Treasury Department’s informant at Kabul International Airport?” asked Mahmood.
“Exactly,” Kate said. “It was an unusual transaction, given that the hawaladar in Paris to whom the money was shipped usually did not insist on collateral. This told us something extraordinary was being traded for the cash. The cash shipment put us on to Minh Kwang and BanKoNoKo.”
“Then we got lucky with the Moscow police,” Feldman said. “They let us know about a British national named Simon Wantree, and Wantree’s homicide in Moscow.”
“We know that Wantree was an associate of Jacques LeClerc,” Mahmood said. “So Wantree’s death suggests to me that some sort of disagreement arose in Moscow before the bomb left that city. Perhaps that may be significant?”
“We still need a lead as to the source of the bomb,” Feldman said. “We have zip, bupkis. But ISI discovered that Yasser al-Greeb was negotiating with LeClerc months before the OBL takedown. That means that the beginning of this story predates the month of May and Osama’s death.”
“Everything you say ties in with my own working theory,” Mahmood said, “which is that Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb, as an agent of Al-Zawahiri or someone else very high in the Al Qaeda hierarchy, has been working hard for the last year to acquire a nuclear device in time for detonation on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Sheikh Osama’s death may simply have accelerated the planning cycle, or given it additional impetus, especially since world media have suggested Al Qaeda is all washed up.”
“So where is the bomb now,” Feldman said, “or failing that, where is the last place we can put it with a high degree of confidence?”
“That’s the question we have been working on,” Mahmood said. “Here, let me show you. This is where we must direct our efforts.”
Brigadier Mahmood held out his hand to Raza, and Raza handed him a very detailed map of metropolitan Karachi.
Chapter 21 — Camp Peary, Virginia
Halfway between Richmond and the naval port of Newport News, on the verdant banks of Virginia’s sleepy York River, lies a 9,250-acre block of rich Virginia farmland—almost 15 square miles—prized since the days of colonial Williamsburg, itself only three miles to the south.
Known officially as the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, the property encompasses Porto Bello, the private hunting preserve of Lord Dunsmore, the last British governor of Virginia Colony. All but 800 acres of this huge tract is undeveloped prime riverine land, rich in small game, fish, and waterfowl that make their home in pristine marshes, fields, forests, and the river itself, all in much the same circumstances today as at the moment of American independence. In the warmer months, it is a Garden of Eden just an hour or two from downtown Washington.
In World War II, this parcel was used by Navy Seabees as a training facility and given the name of Camp Peary. Late in the war, it was converted to house POWs from a Nazi submarine that had reached American shores. Then, in the early 1950s, the property was secretly deeded to CIA as a training facility. In the sixty years since, it has been known simply as The Farm, serving as the main CIA training base and academic retreat. What goes on there is off limits to the public. Indeed, ‘The Farm’ does not officially exist.
Olof Wheatley was deeply concerne
d at Mort Feldman’s resolve to work closely with Brigadier Mahmood, but the paperwork backed up on his desk when he came back from Pakistan prevented him from giving those doubts his full attention. A week after his return, he made a scheduled twice-yearly trip to Camp Peary to meet with soon-to-graduate recruits and talk to them about the CTC. Away from the office, he had time to think.
In Olof Wheatley’s world, deals were made on a handshake. A sense of personal trust was paramount in forging relationships. Wheatley could therefore not bring himself to renew his confidence in a man who had played him for a fool in Pakistan before revealing, in a bizarre and poorly explained change of heart, that ISI itself had been responsible for kidnapping the CIA station chief in Islamabad.
Mahmood had succeeded in pulling the wool over Wheatley’s eyes only too well. Having briefly trusted him and been deceived, Wheatley would surely never trust Mahmood again. And yet Mort Feldman, CIA’s top man in Pakistan, now proposed to make Mahmood the lynchpin of CIA strategy in that country. As he turned the problem over in his mind on the long drive down from Washington, he could find no way out of this dead end. He would just have to overrule Feldman.
The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage Page 17