The Ghost War

by Alex Berenson

  At 3:00 A.M. Mark woke up, screaming, a thin red gruel dripping out of his mouth. Janice held him in her arms as they drove to the hospital, the mole running red lights on Arlington Boulevard, using his emergency driving training from the Farm for the first and only time. Even now he could remember the fear in the young emergency room doctor who examined his son. Janice wouldn’t agree, but for him that moment was the worst of all. He’d never seen a doctor look frightened before.

  The rest came as inevitably as an avalanche rolling downhill: intravenous antibiotics, oxygen mask, organ failure, last rites. He would always believe that Mark knew he was dying. Even at the end, even after the boy had stopped moving, his eyes never closed, trying to grab as much of this lousy world as he could. He was dead four days after that first stomachache. A freak bacterial infection, the doctors said. Nothing anyone could have done.

  Sometimes the mole thought Janice had died along with their son. She wouldn’t even try to get pregnant again. After a few months, he asked her to stop taking her birth control. She said she would. But a new tray of twenty-eight foil-wrapped pills kept appearing in their bathroom each month. Eventually the mole stopped asking.

  She stopped working too. Teaching kindergarten was too stressful. All those little ones running around. Instead she stayed home. To catch up on her reading, she said. Two years later, they moved. She said she didn’t care, but he insisted, figuring a new house would be a new start. He pushed her to find a new job, work at the mall in Tysons Corner, anything to get her out of the house. And she did, part-time. But something in her was broken. About then he approached the Chinese.

  Janice wasn’t quite an alcoholic, but when her moods turned black she sat on the couch, watching soaps and sipping the afternoon away. The mole knew he ought to divorce her, but he felt bound to her. She was the price he paid for letting his son die, the price he paid for spying. And she could be sweet. Every so often she reminded him of the woman she’d been, the beautiful girl who took him to the National Gallery and showed him her favorite paintings. But his loyalty didn’t stop him from spending nights at the Gold Club. And his narcissism was so complete that he never wondered if she might be happier without him.

  He poured himself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle and regarded his wife. She gave him a sweet, cockeyed smile. This was sloshed, happy Janice, infinitely preferable to drunk, sad Janice. He sipped his wine, feeling its mellow glow smooth the burn of the Dewar‘s, and sliced off a piece of the roast, slipping it under the table for Lenny. He was suddenly ashamed of his joke downstairs with the Smith & Wesson.

  “This is great.” He chewed the meat heartily and sucked down his wine, then retopped her glass and his until the bottle was empty. Why not? They had cases more in the basement. Jan didn’t like the idea of running short, and he supposed he didn’t either.

  “Not overcooked?”

  “Not a bit. And you look great today, honey.” He tried not to think about the fact that she’d look even better if she lost the forty pounds she’d gained since Mark died. Her stomach had turned as soft as her mind. They still had sex every so often, mainly for old times’ sake.

  “How was work?”

  “Great,” he said sincerely, thinking of the $75,000 the Chinese had thrown him. There was more where that came from, for sure. The Chinks had money to burn from selling all those toys and computer chips. The Chinese were the future. The good ol’ U.S.A. was over. Always best to bet on the come. In his own way he was helping the trade deficit.

  Anyway, he’d played them just right, not giving up too much at once, always leaving them wanting more. Doling out secrets slowly wasn’t just greed—it was self-protection. In the mid-1980s, Aldrich Ames, the worst traitor in the CIA’s history, had almost overnight given nearly all of the agency’s top Soviet spies to the KGB. Then he’d watched in agony as the Soviets arrested them all.

  “You’re going to get me arrested!” Ames had complained to his handlers. “Why not just put up a big neon sign over the agency with the word mole written on it?” Eddie hadn’t made the same mistake, and he didn’t intend to.

  He sipped his wine and smiled at his wife. “Yeah, Gleeson”—his khaki-wearing, infinitely stupid boss—“hinted I might be up for a promotion.” Unlike much of what he told Janice, this was true.

  “Well . . . that’s great. I don’t suppose you can tell me the details.” She smiled like a girl hoping against hope for a pony on her birthday.

  “It would be a transfer within East Asia. More responsibility, more counterintelligence work.”

  In fact Joe Gleeson probably just wanted to get rid of him. But the mole didn’t care. If the move went through, he’d be the senior counterintel officer for all of East Asia, with access to every operation from Tokyo to Tibet. More details for the Chinese, more bo nuses for him.

  “Counterintelligence.”

  “You know, Spy versus Spy, all that stuff. Find their guys before they find yours.”

  “Would we be traveling?” Janice clung to the ridiculous hope that he would get another foreign post. Ridiculous both because she could barely function even in suburban Virginia and because the agency would send him to Mars before it gave him another front-line job.

  “Maybe a little, but it would be based at Langley.”

  “Well, that sounds nice.” She finished her wine and poured herself another glass from a new bottle.

  “How about you?”

  “It was such a busy day.”

  He tried not to smile.

  “I took the car in this morning. You know how the brakes have been squeaking.” Janice brought in her Volvo to be serviced about once a week. The mole sometimes wondered if she was screwing a mechanic at the dealership. He hoped so. “Then this afternoon there was a sale at Macy‘s—I found this great dress I want you to see.”

  “Just buy it, honey.”

  “Really? It’s not on sale.”

  “Do I ever say no?”

  “Umm . . .” He’d meant the question rhetorically. Janice’s requests were usually modest, and his second career meant that he never had to turn her down. He even surprised her with the occasional diamond bracelet, though nothing too extravagant. He didn’t want her showing off to the Knausses or their other so-called friends in the neighborhood.

  Her face cleared as she arrived at an answer. “No, sugarplum. I don’t guess you do.” She stood, tottered over to him, leaned down to give him a sloppy kiss, running her tongue down his cheek until she found his mouth. “You’re the best.”

  LYING BESIDE JANICE THAT NIGHT, the mole wondered what to do with his bonus. Maybe he should give Evie a present, that diamond tennis bracelet she wanted. But he was sick of Evie. When he’d met her at the club, she’d entranced him. Those fine long legs. And she’d seemed smart, at least compared with the other girls. He’d spent months tipping her extravagantly for her lame lap dances, until finally she agreed to have dinner.

  Six months later they were still seeing each other. But her charm had worn off. She never shut up, and she was no genius, though she sure thought she was. Like she was the only stripper ever to go to college. If he had to listen to her talk about Occupied Palestine, as she called it, one more time . . . And the yoga. He didn’t mind that she liked it. It kept her flexible, that was for sure. But she took it so seriously. For a year she’d been training to be an instructor. A year? How much preparation could a yoga instructor possibly need? It was stretching, with a little bit of chanting, for God’s sake. He’d thought she was joking when she told him the classes cost $1,500 a month. He’d laughed out loud and she’d stamped off. He hadn’t even gotten laid that night.

  Okay, forget the tennis bracelet. Forget Evie. Time for a new stripper, one who didn’t have any illusions about being a rocket scientist.

  Somewhere in the night a dog barked. The mole folded his hands behind his head, feeling the rough skin of his scalp. He imagined God looking down on all the honest souls asleep in their beds. And him, awake, his
house a tumor glowing red in the night. Could the neighbors feel it? The mole made sure his lawn was mowed, his gutters cleaned. He and Janice brought apple pie and beer to the neighborhood barbecues. But the neighbors knew, he was sure. They knew something was wrong, though they would never guess what.

  Damn. He’d felt so good a minute before, thinking about the bonus. Now the glow was gone. People thought they understood him when they didn’t understand anything at all. Until the Chinese, no one had respected his talents. The agency had always pigeonholed him as a back-office loser.

  IT HAD STARTED WITH DICK ABRAMS, the old Hong Kong station chief. That snotty Yalie, with his fake half-British accent. “We think you belong back at Langley,” Abrams had said. “You’re too cerebral to be in operations. Take it as a compliment.”

  Too cerebral. The words were almost twenty years old, but the mole heard them so clearly that he half-expected to see Abrams beside him tonight instead of Janice. He flushed at the memory. They’d been in Abrams’s immaculate office, sitting on the couch that Abrams used for his quote-unquote informal chats. No matter where the mole looked, he couldn’t avoid the photograph of Abrams and Bill Casey, the old director, a legend in the Directorate of Operations. Abrams hadn’t bothered with a picture of William Webster, Casey’s replacement—his way of letting visitors know that he would be around long after Webster was gone.

  The mole sneaked a peek at his watch: 3:15. He was suddenly thirsty. Knowing that this meeting was coming, he had skipped his usual lunchtime scotch-and-soda. Now he wished he’d had a double instead.

  “Is this about the incident?” the mole said.

  “The incident?” Abrams had said, icy and smooth. The mole focused on meeting Abrams’s eyes. As a kid, he’d found eye contact difficult. Over and over, his mother had told him, “Look me in the eye. Don’t be weak.” Her words only made the task harder. But he knew she was right. He practiced, staring at teachers, his friends, even strangers at bars. He pretended they weren’t real, that he was watching television. Now he could look the devil himself in the eye. He raised his head and stared at Abrams.

  “The incident?” Abrams said. “You mean when you got drunk and propositioned the Italian ambassador’s wife?”

  “His daughter, you mean.” Even as the mole blurted out the words, he realized that Abrams had intentionally misspoken to trap him.

  “Right,” Abrams said, drawing out the word. “His daughter. She was sixteen, right?” She didn’t look sixteen, the mole thought. Not in that dress. And maybe I’d had a few too many Dewar‘s, but so what? The CIA, especially the Directorate of Operations, was filled with hard drinkers. In stations like Rome or Hong Kong, where not a lot was happening, getting sloshed at lunch was practically a necessity.

  But trying to justify what had happened would only make matters worse, the mole knew. Abrams didn’t care. He was enjoying himself, enjoying the chance to make sure the mole knew what a flop he’d been. The mole wished he could lean over and lock his fingers around Abrams’s neck.

  “Anyway, we think you’d be better off back at Langley,” Abrams said in that maddening voice of his. “Not in a front-line operational role.”

  SO BACK HE’D GONE to Langley, where he could never outrun what had happened in Hong Kong. Other officers padded their expense accounts, stole petty cash, screwed secretaries. But the comic value of what he’d done ensured it would never be forgotten. He’d become a walking punch line, an object lesson for a generation of case officers. Whateveryoudo,don’t put the moves on the ambassador’s daughter.He’d made matters worse by refusing to bend to drones like Joe Gleeson. He’d never learned how to kiss the right asses. How to play golf. Silly him. He’d figured that intelligence counted for something at the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The mole felt his mood changing again. So what? Forget golf. Without wasting a single Sunday chasing a little white ball around, he’d beaten them all. Today alone, he’d made $75,000. That was a year’s pay, after taxes, for Joe Gleeson. For him it was walking-around money.

  Suddenly he knew how he would spend his bonus. The Corvette. He smiled in the dark. A‘67 Sting Ray convertible, silver. The eBay listing said the car was in Tampa. He could pick it up there, drive it to Miami, garage it with his M5, another beautiful piece of steel. Too bad nobody at Langley would ever see it. The mole could imagine jaws dropping as he cruised through the parking lot with the top down.

  Of course he wouldn’t keep the ‘Vette in his name. Ditto the M5, or the condo in Miami he’d bought a few years back. A Florida company, London Two, owned everything. In turn, London Two’s shares were held by a shell company based in the Caymans.

  From there the trail went to Rycol Ltd, a shell corporation in Singapore that got $25,000 every month from the Fung Long Jack Co. Fung Long was a real business, a shipping company owned by a Chinese businessman in Singapore. If anyone asked, and no one ever would, the monthly payments were commissions that Fung Long paid Rycol for buying fuel for its fleet. Even Fung Long’s owner didn’t know what the money was really for. He just knew that his cousin, a senior Chinese general, had asked him to make the payments, and that $25,000 a month was a small price to keep his cousin happy.

  Originally, the mole’s handlers had paid him the old-fashioned way, leaving cash at dead drops. But the mole quickly learned that using cash for big transactions was risky. Strange but true: banks hated handling cash. Especially after September 11, they strictly enforced the rules requiring them to report deposits of more than $10,000 to the Treasury Department. So he’d set up this system, which so far had been foolproof.

  The mole had decided even before he approached the Chinese that he wouldn’t spy unless he could enjoy his money, and that meant finding ways to use it legally. He had no interest in stashing a million bucks in his basement. Of course, the paper trail would provide ironclad confirmation of his spying if he was ever caught.

  But he didn’t expect to get caught. The agency had a dismal record of finding double agents. Both Ames and Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who became a mole in the mid-1980s, worked with impunity until their Soviet handlers betrayed them—and Ames and Hanssen had been far less cautious than he was.

  Over the years, the mole had realized that stealing secrets was easier than it looked. Case officers in China, and everywhere else, sent in torrents of reports to justify their existence. They filed everything: contacts with Communist officials, requests for authorization to approach potential agents, gossip about new programs the government was considering. The briefings piled up on his desk. The mole read them all, one reason his superiors valued him, despite his occasional outbursts of temper. His biggest problem was deciding which documents were important enough to steal. For the mole had realized something else since he’d switched sides: The most vital information was the simplest—the names of the agency’s operatives in China and Taiwan, and the spies they’d recruited. If actual names were unavailable, specific information about where the agents worked. The locations of drop points. The objectives of active operations. The agency’s assessment of China’s military capabilities.

  No, the hardest part of being a double agent wasn’t the actual spying. It was resisting the temptation to brag. Destroying the letters George sent him instead of saving them. Never encouraging Janice to wonder why he spent so much time in the basement.

  All these years, he’d kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t always easy, especially at the Gold Club after he’d had too many scotches. He comforted himself with the knowledge that the strippers wouldn’t believe him anyway. The scene was only too easy to imagine: “Want another dance?” Candy, or whoever was working him that night, would ask, after slipping his twenty dollars into her garter. She’d go through the motions of dancing, not even pretending to be interested, as some horrendously predictable song ticked away: Don’t you wishyour girlfriend was a freak like me? Don‘tcha, don’tcha?

  “Hey, Candy, ever wonder where I work?”

  “Not really.” Pause, as
she figured out he wanted her to ask. “Where?”

  “Over at Langley.”

  A genuinely puzzled look from Candy. “Langley? That a hospital?”

  He’d be flattered. “Do I look like a doctor?”

  “Not exactly, no.” By now she would have used the conversation as an excuse to stop dancing.

  “Langley. You know, the CIA.”

  “You work for the CIA. Kidding, right?” She’d be leaning in, looking at his eyes, drunk herself, unable to see him as anything more than a middle-aged groper.

  “Uh-uh. Dead serious.”

  “Serious, huh?” A big stripper smile, then a finger pointed at him in imitation of a pistol. She’d put her hand on his leg. “Well, let’s see your gun, big boy.”

  “Wanna know something else? I’m a double agent.”

  “You go both ways? I thought you might. That’s cool. I got a couple friends—”

  “No!”

  “Sorry, baby. Didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “I mean, not like that. I spy for the Chinese government. Treason.”

  “Treason? What’s that?”

  And the song would end.

  Ugh. Forget it. One day, after he’d retired and Janice had died of cirrhosis and he was living someplace with no extradition treaty, he’d write his memoirs and name every name he could remember. Until then, he would keep his mouth shut. He closed his eyes and imagined Corvettes, a flotilla of shiny convertibles, until sleep took him.

  11

  THE BLACK HAWK’S ROTORS BEGAN TO SPIN, first slowly, then faster and faster. At rest, the twenty-six-foot blades drooped under their own bulk. But they stiffened as they accelerated. In seconds they disappeared into a relentless blur. Wells felt himself instinctively pull his head back, though he stood fifty feet from the helicopter. Those rotors could liquefy a skull.