The Shadow Patrol jw-6

by Alex Berenson

  “Nobody seriously thinks that’s possible,” Wells said.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Let me rephrase. I don’t seriously think that’s possible. How could the Taliban turn one of you? What could they offer?”

  “Devil’s advocate, maybe they bought somebody. Money knows no ideology.”

  “Suppose they came to you, Gabe. Would you trust them to pay? And the truth is, money’s not a good motivator for treason. Money is the icing on the cake.”

  “And the cake is—”

  “Ideology or blackmail.”

  “What about Aldrich Ames?” The worst traitor in the CIA’s history. “He did it for money.”

  “Money as ideology. Ames convinced himself it was nothing but a game on both sides and he should get paid while he could.”

  “So there’s no mole, John? You’re just here for your health.”

  “Is there something you want to tell me?”

  Yergin lit a fresh cigarette with his silver-plated Zippo. He flicked the lighter into the air and snapped it shut one-handed. “What if there is?” He sucked down on the cigarette, obviously enjoying the moment. But when he exhaled, he said only, “Course not. We were dealt a bad hand, but all in all I think we’ve played it pretty good. Duto should leave us alone, let us do our jobs. Anything you want to ask me?”

  Wells decided to press. “Suppose you’re wrong. Suppose we’re both wrong. Any obvious candidates? Anybody acting strange?”

  “Everybody’s acting strange. We’re all stressed beyond belief.” As if to punctuate his words, the hollow drum of an IED sounded somewhere beyond the blast walls.

  “Anybody find excuses to get outside the wire without backup?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean much. Somebody senior like me could easily get to Kandahar or a big FOB and then go from there.”

  Wells felt Yergin was almost winking at him, hinting he was guilty. “I’d like to look over your entry and exit logs.”

  “Sure.” Yergin looked at his watch. “I have to figure out this drone that went down. Talk to anybody you like.”

  Wells stood to leave. And played his last card. “What about drugs?”

  “What about them?”

  “Do you monitor the trafficking networks?”

  “Around the edges. We’re not the DEA.”

  “But it’s a source of funding for the insurgency.”

  “You can overstate its importance. The Taliban run cheap. I mean, they literally pay fifty dollars to these kids to plant IEDs. If the drug money disappeared tomorrow, they’d still have cash from the charities, Iran, the ISI. But sure, we try to watch it.”

  “Who specifically?”

  “Right now an analyst named Joanna Frey. She’s been here seven months, leaving next month.”

  “Where’s her office?”

  “On five. She’s quite nice.”

  “I’ll try not to scare her.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  FREY WAS MAYBE FORTY-FIVE, with a corona of long gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She looked like a college librarian. She didn’t look like she belonged at the agency, much less in Kabul.

  “Ms. Frey?”

  “Joanna.” She waved him in. “Sit.”

  “I’m John Wells.”

  “Of course. We got an e-mail you’d be visiting. Said we should cooperate.”

  Another curiously passive-aggressive move. Cooperate somehow implied that Wells was not to be trusted. “So your tour is almost done?”

  “Next month.”

  “Looking forward to getting out of here?”

  “I am. I volunteered to come, but I’m ready to go. Sick of being cooped up.”

  “What did you do at Langley?”

  “Counternarcotics analysis. Mainly stats, estimates of coca planting and refining all over South America. Where the stuff went. How big the business was start to finish. Lots of looking at satellite imagery, reviewing seizure reports and cables from Colombia and Bolivia.”

  “Big picture.”

  “We were interested in the big traffickers, their relationships with the government, the police. A lot of ELINT.” Electronic intelligence could range from wiretaps to cell phone traces to bank transfers. “Though we had trouble getting the NSA’s help. If it’s not terrorism or WMD, it’s not a priority for them.”

  “What about the DEA?”

  “They didn’t always share. Didn’t view us as such a reliable partner. Thought we had different priorities.” Put another way, the CIA sometimes traded information with the same cartels the DEA was trying to break.

  “So then you came here.”

  “Yep. It’s similar to what I was doing back home. Only the politics are even more complicated. Understand, if we wanted, we could kill every poppy plant in Kandahar and Helmand. There’s no technical obstacle to spraying. This isn’t Colombia. No jungle canopy. But if we did that, two million Pashtuns would go to war with us.”

  “Without opium, there’s no economy down there.”

  “Correct. So the DEA mainly tries to interdict a couple of levels past local. It lets the farmers sell the poppies and get paid. But even then, it’s tricky. The Afghan police move a lot of heroin and opium. We’re not touching them. Then some of the tribes in the north, the friendly ones, are in the business, too. And it might be tricky if Congressman X starts complaining we’re in bed with known traffickers.”

  “But what we don’t know—”

  “Correct. When I came here, my predecessor told me my job was, quote, to give policymakers the overall trends in drug trafficking. Not to play detective. End quote. I suspect that on the second floor they may get intercepts that I don’t. Ones with names like Karzai in them. But I don’t ask. I keep my head down and do what I’m told. I’m just a little church mouse, even if I do keep a SIG Sauer in my nightstand back home.”

  “You have a SIG in your nightstand?”

  “A nice little nine. Fits right in my palm. Better safe than sorry. I used to lock it in the closet so I wouldn’t be tempted to shoot my philandering husband, but I live alone now.” Wells’s face must have revealed his disbelief. “I may look like an overage hippie who belongs in the Haight, but as far as I’m concerned the Second Amendment’s the one that pays for all the others. Out of my cold dead hands, mister.”

  She was smiling, but she wasn’t joking. Wells liked her. And he thought that she’d give him straight answers if she had them.

  “You’ll be glad to get home to your SIG.”

  “Got that right.”

  “Ever seen any intercepts about anyone from the agency buying dope from the Talibs?”

  “No.”

  “What about other coalition forces, the military or someone else?”

  For the first time she hesitated. “Not really.”

  Wells folded his hands together and waited.

  “It’s like this. I don’t have to tell you the Pashtuns aren’t just one tribe. There’re really dozens of subgroups, every one controlling a different province or region or village. One that we watch is called the Thuwanis. They also move a lot of dope. Nasty bunch.”

  SUDDENLY WELLS was in Kowt-e ’Ashrow, west of Kabul. The years were blurry, but he thought it was 2000. October, maybe. Somewhere far away, Bill Clinton was president. But in the Afghan hills, summer was over and winter was closer than it seemed. And a Talib named Alaa Thuwani had ordered two Shia prisoners to run through a minefield where rotting goat carcasses lay like the devil’s own mascots.

  Thuwani told the Shia they had a choice. They could run through the field, which stretched about two hundred meters. Or he could shoot them in the back of the head. He promised that if they got through he’d set them free, let them go back to their homes in the north. They were small men, Wells remembered. One had a little belly that poked out of his gown. They didn’t argue.

  Wells wasn’t with the Thuwanis. He’d been riding in a convoy of Talib guerrillas. When they heard about the prisone
rs, the fighters wanted to stop and see the show. The five-tons pulled off the road and everybody jumped off.

  “IT WAS PRACTICALLY a party,” Wells said now, at the Ariana. “We just needed fireworks and a band.”

  “What was?”

  “I TELL YOU APOSTATES, go to Allah and beg for His mercy!” Thuwani fired his AK into the air. The Shia ran. The one with the potbelly got fifty yards before the ground exploded around him, clumps of dirt spraying high in the air. When the dust settled, he lay on the ground, moaning and begging. Thuwani shot a couple of rounds in the air from sheer joy. Then he and the other Talibs opened up with their AKs.

  The other Shia didn’t zigzag or look down or back. He just ran straight through like he expected to levitate over the mines. And somehow he did. He crossed onto the path at the far edge of the field. He dropped to his knees and touched his head to the earth and shouted, “Hamdulillah!” Thanks be to God. Thuwani said something low and dark to the men around him. They laughed.

  “Now come back!” Thuwani yelled. “Then I promise you’ll really be free.”

  The Shia stood and looked across the field. “Back!” Thuwani yelled. Like the Shia was a misbehaving dog. The Shia ran hopelessly away toward a cluster of mud homes. Thuwani and his friends lowered their AKs and sprayed long bursts, one-handed on full auto. They shot so badly that for a few seconds Wells thought the guy might get away. But then one stepped back and took careful aim.

  “THE THUWANIS,” Wells said. “Nasty. The chief’s a guy named Alaa.”

  Frey looked puzzled at his knowledge, but she said only, “Alaa died a few years ago. Replaced by a guy named Amadullah. Cousin or half brother, I’m not sure. Anyway, we’ve been up and down on them.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we have a few phone numbers for them, and Amadullah’s canny. But some of the younger guys aren’t too smart. So we get a ping from them every so often. But I don’t want to overstate their importance, tell you their names come up a ton.”

  “But they are Talibs. They’re connected to the central leadership.”

  “Yes. And they move enough weight to be worth watching. Anyway, a couple months ago a wiretap transcript popped up with one of their old phones. A Pak cell one of Amadullah’s nephews uses. He was calling an Afghan cell and he told the guy on the other end, ‘Tell your men to have twenty packages at the house by the river in the red field. The infidels will pick them up. Tomorrow afternoon. The usual procedure.’ Now, a package usually means a kilo, so that would imply twenty kilos.”

  “That sounds like a lot.”

  “It is. As for a river in the red field, that could be anywhere. They use simple codes for locations. River could mean mosque, red field could mean a specific village. Nothing complicated about it, we just don’t know what it means.”

  “And what did the guy on the other side say?”

  “Just, ‘The same Americans.’ The first guy said, ‘I think so, yes.’ I wondered if the translation was wrong, but translation from the NSA is pretty good, and anyway, American is an obvious word. Then they said good-bye and hung up. Nothing else. It seemed clear they’d done this before.”

  “He said Americans.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And this was when?”

  Frey pulled up a screen on her computer, paged through the wiretap database. “Ten weeks ago today. After I got it, I cross-checked to see if the number on the other end had ever come up. But it hadn’t. It was an AWCC phone, a burner.”

  “AWCC?”

  “Afghan Wireless. Almost all their phones are cash prepaid. Not too many credit cards here. So we had no idea who was on the other end. And the Paki cell never popped up again either.”

  “And no one ever found Amadullah’s nephew.”

  “No. Truth is I can’t even be sure he was the one making the call. Anyway, I’d never heard any reference like that before. I told my boss — that’s Julianna Craig, she’s in charge of all analysis for the station. She agreed it was interesting, told me to chase it.”

  “So there was no interference.”

  “The opposite. Julianna told me the guys on the second floor were interested.”

  “Did she say who, specifically?”

  “No.”

  “Back to the call. Can you check the database, see how many times that Paki cell was used in the year leading up to it?”

  After three quick clicks, she had the answer. “Five,” she said. “But never to that Afghan number. A couple of times to other Thuwanis, and I’m not sure about the rest.”

  “And afterward it was never used again.”

  “Correct.”

  “One last thing. Can you print me a copy of the transcript?”

  “That’s a real no-no.” But she clicked the screen, printed him a copy. It was barely a page long.

  “Thanks.”

  “Do me a favor. Burn it before you leave.”

  “Will do.”

  “And one day when we’re both back home, you can come over and teach me how to use that SIG.” She winked.

  Wells edged out the door. “Your first impression is deceptive.”

  “So they say.”

  WELLS TUCKED THE TRANSCRIPT AWAY, went back to the second floor. He spent the rest of the afternoon talking to Arango, the chief of station, and Julianna Craig.

  Craig confirmed Frey’s story about the wiretap. Lautner and Yergin had encouraged her to have Frey pursue it, she said. Arango was a Marylander from the Eastern Shore, polite, distant, and soft-spoken. He deflected Wells’s questions, swallowed them up in inspirational clichés that offered no hint of what he was thinking.

  “So Gordie King left the station a shambles?”

  “I wouldn’t say shambles. But we had to put up our sleeves and get to work and that’s what we did.”

  “It must be difficult for Pete Lautner to work here after what happened.”

  “I wasn’t here for Marburg, although of course I know what happened. Pete came highly recommended. He’s done fine work. I don’t think it’s my place to ask him how he feels about his family. We all have different ways of coping with grief.”

  “Do you think Duto made a mistake sending me here?”

  “I’d never second-guess the director. Of course I’ve instructed everyone to answer whatever questions you might have….”

  And, finally: “Do you remember a wiretap that indicated U.S. military forces might be purchasing large amounts of heroin from the Taliban?”

  Arango didn’t hesitate. As if he’d expected the question. Wells wondered whether Frey or Craig had tipped him. “Yes. Lautner mentioned it. This was a couple months ago. I asked him if the intercept had any actionable details. He said no. I told him to keep me informed.”

  “So you had a particular interest in it?”

  “I imagined it could be a sensitive issue for the military. I wanted to be sure that if it progressed further, I’d know, so I could inform the right people. But no, it wasn’t of particular interest. As far as I know, there’s been nothing since then.”

  A sensitive issue. And Wells thought of a question he should have asked before.

  “Did you ever pass the intercept to military intel? Or tell them about it?”

  “I don’t believe so, no.”

  “Or the DEA?”

  “You can imagine how many intercepts this station sees in a month, Mr. Wells. Not to mention HUMINT and surveillance reports. This was vague, didn’t touch on our ongoing operations. As far as I can recall no one even suggested to me that we make it an action item.”

  After ninety minutes of this thrust-and-parry, Wells begged off. You need anything, you let me know, Arango said, as Wells left.

  I’ll be sure to do that.

  BACK IN HIS ROOM, Wells lay on his bed and tried to make sense of everything he’d learned. He hadn’t expected the officers here to treat him like a hero. But their unconcealed hostility surprised him. He wouldn’t want to be first through the door with only La
utner or Arango behind him. The conversation with Yergin perplexed him, too.

  In truth, Wells much preferred having a trail to chase. Instead he was looking for an enemy who might not even exist. So he did what he had done before at these moments. He called Shafer.

  From outside, on the Ariana’s helipad. On his own sat phone. He wondered whether he should have left the compound entirely. The sun had set and the floodlights outside the blast walls were up. Diesel smoke smudged the stars. Wells hadn’t liked Kabul a decade ago and he didn’t like it now. During the civil war, the city was overrun more times than anyone could count. By 1999, half its houses were rubble. Amputee children begged on every corner, surrounding any Westerner foolish enough to have stayed. In the mountains Wells saw flashes of a gentler — and certainly more beautiful — Afghanistan. Never here.

  Now NATO and Western donors had rebuilt the city. But the new offices and houses looked cheap and tacky. Billions of dollars in reconstruction money had been siphoned to bank accounts in Dubai and Lebanon. Why bother to rebuild it properly? the Afghans seemed to be asking. When you leave, we’ll just have to destroy it again.

  Only the mosques had survived. Wells wondered when the calls to prayer would sound. He wanted to get into a mosque and tip his head to the floor and see whether his faith could find him. Behind these blast walls he felt divorced from Islam. On the flight over, he’d looked forward to coming back to Afghanistan. Now he saw that he hadn’t returned, not really. The Ariana wasn’t the United States, but it wasn’t Afghanistan. It was purgatory.

  He called Shafer. “Ellis.”

  “John. How’s it feel to be home?”

  “Kabul was never home.”

  “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

  “They’ve all gone native, Ellis.” Wells explained what he’d found so far, finishing with the intercept. “It doesn’t add up. They said the right things about investigating it, but they didn’t, as far as I can tell.”

  “You have it? Can you read it to me?”