And now there was the added risk that Mahmood would be given a second bite at the apple, possibly working a conspiracy with the people who had stolen a Russian tactical nuclear bomb. Rather than help Mort Feldman and Kate Langley find the device, what if Mahmood used his relationship with CIA to send them down blind alleys until it was too late? Indeed, what if Mahmood Mahmood was the enemy? That was the gist of it.
The Farm had become so famous—or infamous—in Beltway cocktail conversation that CIA had learned decades ago that it could be used as powerful leverage on Capitol Hill, an important and potent public relations tool. Senators and congressman who sat on intelligence committees, key military officers, and other civil servants whose decisions could affect the Agency, were often invited down to The Farm for weekend briefings and social mixing with senior CIA.
Senior foreign intelligence chiefs from friendly sister networks were likewise also occasional weekend guests. Such invitations were cherished and rarely turned down. ‘Last week I was down at CIA’s secret facility, The Farm, discussing such-and-such with so-and-so...’ made for a highly-desired conversational aphrodisiac.
To wine, dine, and house these VIPs, CIA management built a series of luxury log cabin hunting lodges that were patterned after those at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland. These occupied a sequestered glade overlooking the York River, away from the main training center. The lodges were also used to house senior CIA officials when they overnighted at The Farm.
If a Congressional delegation was at The Farm, then Wheatley would likely be called in to socialize with the guests and help lobby for whatever CIA management needed the legislature to do for it at the moment. Wheatley loathed such PR duty. When he checked into Donovan Lodge, named after the legendary head of the OSS during World War II, he was pleased to see that he would be sharing the facility only with Hendryk Warsaw, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who often gave guest lectures on military theory and strategy to CIA, both at The Farm and at headquarters on the Potomac.
Wheatley went on to his afternoon meetings and lecture in the main administration building. He ran into Warsaw at the end of the workday on the wooded path from the training center back to the Donovan Lodge. Warsaw greeted him enthusiastically.
“I hope my CARE package to Islamabad was useful?” Warsaw said.
“Immensely! That book opened the door to see a very important Pakistani general. I’m so grateful to you. His whole attitude toward me changed the second he saw your book.”
“That must mean I’ve aged well beyond my ‘sell-by’ date,” Warsaw said. “I feel that way whenever I come down here and spar with these young kids who could easily be my grandchildren.”
“I know the feeling.”
“In fact, I remember Mahmood Mahmood, come to think of it. This was twenty years ago, but he impressed me. By his intellectual rigor, especially, and his good manners.”
“I was impressed by him too, though in a different way. This is strictly between you and me, but it was the ISI behind the disappearance of our man in Islamabad, not the pablum you read in the newspapers.”
“And Mahmood was involved?”
“Up to his eyeballs, though he claims not. In fact, he asserts that it was he who convinced the ISI leadership it was a bad move, and that they should end it by releasing Feldman.”
“Perhaps you should consider believing him. If he’s the same man he was when he attended the Air Force War College, then he has an iron-willed intellectual integrity.”
“He spent hours in a car with me from Islamabad to Peshawar then showed me an Al Qaeda camp, yet he never gave me a hint that he knew where Mortie Feldman was being held captive. It was impressive in its own way. He’s a master of the poker face. No tells.”
“He may have felt divided loyalty. His senior command had approved Feldman’s takedown you think?”
“Of course they did! I understand that he was caught between a rock and a hard place. The only reason I’m concerned is that Mort Feldman thinks he’s our best contact within the ISI.”
“But Feldman has worked with the Paks since the ‘80s,” Warsaw said. “Who understands the ISI better than he does?”
“I’m concerned about him ‘going native,’ to use a phrase I haven’t heard in a while. Rather than representing CIA to the Pakistanis, sometimes I think Mort represents the Pakistanis to us! Somewhat like Stockholm syndrome.”
“That’s why it’s a standard procedure worldwide not to let anyone stay at one post too long,” Warsaw said.
“Exactly.”
“But from what you’re saying, it seems to me that its Feldman’s state of mind that you’re worried about, not Brigadier Mahmood.”
***
At nine in the evening, Olof Wheatley found himself deep in a butter-soft leather armchair in the oak-timbered library of Donovan Lodge. He was smoking an excellent—if illegal—Montecristo Edmundo cigar, Havana’s finest, and enjoying a 35-year-old Delamain cognac in the company of Hendryk Warsaw. Earlier in the evening, he had shared a simple but tasty dinner with his lodge-mate: roasted game fowl and vegetables, all freshly culled, including the birds, from Camp Peary grounds.
The cold war strategist had a deserved reputation as a brilliant conversationalist, and Wheatley was swept away for a time in the economist’s masterful verbal constructs, forgetting his worries. At the moment, he was pleased that he had remembered a story that Warsaw found amusing, no easy feat—namely that James Delamain was an Irishman, Dublin-born, who had immigrated to Jarnac in the 18th century to make his highly regarded French brandy. Warsaw was laughing at the joke.
The mood was broken by a young Navy Seabee, one of several attendants at the lodge, who came into the library to say that Wheatley had an urgent, secure phone call from Pakistan. Wheatley followed the young sailor to a small office nearby that was only slightly larger than an old-fashioned telephone booth, fitted with a tiny desk, telephone, and a scratch pad headed with the CIA crest.
The sailor closed a heavy, soundproof door, giving him privacy. On the other end of the line was Mort Feldman, speaking from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.
“You’re either an early riser or late to bed,” Wheatley said when Feldman had identified himself. “What time is it down there?”
“It’s eight AM tomorrow morning,” Feldman boomed. “I’ve already had breakfast and gone through half the ladies in my harem!”
“Glad you’ve recovered from your ordeal,” Wheatley said, wishing he had stayed with his cigar and cognac.
“Look, we’ve got a situation down here you will want to know about. I’m going to write it up for CTC, but I wanted to give you a heads up personally before anyone puts you on the spot.”
Wheatley was thankful he had spent as much time as he had with Feldman in Pakistan, much as he found him a bit too larger-than-life. Personal relationships were everything. A couple of extra hour’s notice could mean a lot when bad news hit the wires.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
“It’s about an alert we got from Karachi. You may recall that our Department of Energy provided the Government of Pakistan with a nuclear radiation surveillance system for the port, designed to screen standard intermodal freight containers coming into and going out of the country.”
“I remember,” Wheatley said. “The funds were from the National Nuclear Security Administration, sometime in 2003 or 2004. Money well spent, I said so at the time.”
“ISI reports they got a hit two days ago on an outbound sea can, a high reading that can’t be explained.”
“So what was in the container?”
“That’s the problem. The surveillance unit requires rock-steady voltage and Karachi is notorious for voltage spikes, brownouts, and total power blackouts.”
“Those machines are equipped with UPS units aren’t they?”
“Yes, they have uninterruptible power supply backup,” Feldman said, “but in Karachi, the UPS units have kicked in so ofte
n because of the perennially bad line voltage that they are way beyond the point where they should be taken out of service and replaced. They were designed for Port of Long Beach or Port of Houston conditions, not Karachi. The system just shut down.”
Wheatley thought this was another case that he had seen, both in private industry and now in public service, where a technology fix sent overseas had not been properly thought through. The general idea was a good one, but the implementation was flawed.
“So you’re telling me that the intermodal box just slipped out of the net?”
“I’m afraid so,” Feldman said. “But we can narrow it down to one of about 50 containers that day, by matching the approximate time of the signal to the date and time stamps in the customs office.”
“And are any of those still in Karachi?”
“A few, but some have left port. There are six ships involved, to six different destinations.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Yeah, exactly.”
***
“The problem of asymmetric warfare,” Hendryk Warsaw said, “is well understood by the folks who are trying to move that cargo container, assuming that’s where your nuclear device is located.”
Olof Wheatley had concluded his telephone call with Mort Feldman and returned to his brandy and cigar in the library of Donovan Lodge. Given Warsaw’s security clearances and the help he had provided to a long line of CIA managers before him, Wheatley had had no qualms about telling him of the new predicament he now faced.
“Al Qaeda and these other groups have relatively small numbers,” Warsaw continued. “In the entire world, certainly no more than between 60,000 and 70,000 committed individuals. The leadership is made up of perhaps five per cent of that number. They succeed in part because of the insurmountable odds of finding a few absolutely committed terrorists hiding among six billion ordinary, law-abiding human beings. In a nutshell, that’s the essence of the asymmetry.”
“We’re dealing with tens of thousands of ships,” Wheatley said, “and literally millions of these standardized intermodal shipping containers. We’ll surely track down these fifty boxes Feldman has tagged, but what if it slipped through? There are two hundred million standardized metal 40-foot and 20-foot boxes in the world today, and ten million of them come into the U.S. every year. More than three hundred American ports are equipped to load and unload container ships.”
“I’ve always been haunted by the fear that when—and I say when, not if—the nuclear bomb comes to America,” Warsaw said, “it won’t be dropped from a plane or launched at the pointed end of a missile. Rather, it will be stuffed in an ocean-going container along with a shipment of textiles, plastic, and cheap electronics from some country we’ve never thought of, all wrapped, perhaps, in lead foil. Even a low-yield nuclear device detonated in a big U.S. port, all of which are surrounded by major population centers, would make 9/11 look like a minor event.”
“And I suppose that if terrorists are really willing to push their luck, they will risk unloading the container onto a ‘semi’ and then drive it anywhere they want, even up Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“There is one thing working in your favor,” Warsaw said, “and that’s statistics. You can use statistics to turn the terrorists’ overwhelming mathematical advantage on its head.”
“How so?”
“Well, this is just the germ of an idea, but let me tell you a story: Before the USS Cole bombing, a Coast Guard captain was told of a plot to attack one of our aircraft carriers, I think it may have been the USS Yorktown, the next morning when she sailed into Norfolk harbor. He had to devise in a few hours a plan to prevent the attack. How to proceed?
“Chesapeake Bay is full of small private craft,” Warsaw continued. “It would be impossible, from a resource point of view, to check out all these hundreds of boats, any one of which, if suitably armed, could easily blow a hole in the side of an aircraft carrier, a vessel that is very costly and incredibly vulnerable.”
“So what did he do?”
“He turned the problem on its head. The morning the aircraft carrier sailed out of the Atlantic, he stationed coast guard cutters at all five entrances to the lower Chesapeake Bay with orders to bar those sea-lanes to all traffic, including legitimate traffic. He turned the lower bay into a quarantined zone, on the theory that once he had deterred the huge majority of friendly boats, any unfriendly boats remaining would stick out like a lighthouse.
“And of course, in the event, no one attacked the aircraft carrier. There was probably nothing to the plot in the first place, but what I thought was fascinating about the strategy, from a game theory perspective, was how by changing the focus from the near-impossible problem of identifying the single bad actor to the very manageable problem of identifying the large masses of good actors, he turned the puzzle upside down and found a way to do what no one thought could be done.”
“OK, it’s a great story,” Wheatley agreed. “But how do I apply it to my case?”
Warsaw laughed. “I have no idea,” he said. “But it’s a start, don’t you think? And by the way, this may be just the right time for another dram of that very excellent cognac of yours?”
Chapter 22 — Karachi, Pakistan
“Karachi is not merely a city, it is a galaxy of humanity, a self-contained universe of civilization. Twenty millions live in the metropolitan area, occupying an urban port city that was already ancient when Alexander the Great paused here after conquering the Indus River Valley to prepare for his campaign in Babylon.”
The speaker was the British-educated and well-tailored Pakistani administrator of the Karachi Port Trust, an institution established in the 19th century and housed in a domed sandstone palace larger than the capitols of half the American states. The administrator’s office could easily have accommodated a basketball court.
Brigadier Mahmood and Kate Langley had traveled to Karachi the night before in an unmarked Learjet provided by the ISI, Kate using her alias as an American representative of a humanitarian NGO. They were in Pakistan’s largest city with a clearly defined task: to find that malignant radioactive object hiding amid a vast array of benign containers, not unlike searching for that cancerous cell lurking among the trillions of healthy cells in a human patient.
What the self-important Karachi bureaucrat was saying did not give Kate much comfort. His point was that every innovation in cargo transport since the North Carolina trucker Malcolm McLean invented standardized intermodal containers for his aptly named ‘Sea-Land’ company in 1955 was geared toward better speed and efficiency at lower cost. Security was a secondary issue, at best.
The most popular seals for freight containers cost about 50 cents each and were easily opened. They were designed not to prevent theft but merely to record that the container had been breached. Annual loss from cargo pilfering in Karachi alone was upwards of $750 million.
“Do you know, my dear brigadier,” the port administrator was saying, “that only the year before last one of our officers patrolling the container docks in the night heard the sound of singing and laughing coming from a stack of intermodals aboard a ship recently in from Aden? When he summoned reinforcements and opened the sea box, he was astonished to find within a well-dressed Yemeni completely intoxicated on khat! This chap had been at sea in the container for five days. He was equipped with food, water, a laptop computer, satellite phone, bunk bed, toilet, and battery powered electric light and fan—he had made inconspicuous air holes in the corners.”
“That doesn’t say much for port security,” Mahmood said dryly.
“Well, we caught him, didn’t we?” the administrator said. “He was found to have a chart of Karachi harbor, airport maps, security badges from several countries and a certificate as an able seaman.”
“So you arrested him?” Kate asked.
“Of course. But after a hearing in which he claimed that he was escaping political persecution—a doubtful assertion given that he had a valid German passport—our ma
gistrate ordered him released on bail.”
“And?”
“I’m afraid he’s disappeared. Though we’ve sequestered the container. I can show it to you.”
“If something as vulnerable and fragile as a human being can be successfully concealed in an intermodal freight container,” Kate said, “what does that say about the ease with which a weaponized nuke, which is not fragile, could be shipped?”
“The discovery of our stowaway was not a big shock to us, I must admit,” the administrator said. “Smuggling, organized crime, drugs, counterfeits, stowaways—these are the permanent liabilities of our business. We do not care what we ship so much as where it is going, how quickly, and how much it will cost. I am not a policeman, only a businessman. The government is in charge of keeping us safe.”
The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage Page 18