On the next page was a paragraph labeled Miracle and 13/2nd was again the CS. Now that Falcone assumed the 13 was someone who had access to medical and psychiatric records, he decided that the paragraph looked like a digest of an interview between a psychiatrist and a patient. This was the source of Dake’s mention of Parker’s belief in his divinely inspired destiny in Special Ops.
The longest passage seemed to be potential text:
When the air campaign that launched the Gulf War began in January 1991, Parker was commanding a small Special Air Ops unit attached to a squadron of aircraft called Combat Talons, huge Hercules C-130s especially outfitted for black missions. Talon pilots were a breed apart. They flew low at night—any nights, clear or stormy. “We never thought about weather,” a Talon pilot recalled. “All we thought about was the mission. Get our guys into tough places—and then get them out. We called it a high-speed aerial delivery system.” [CS15]
On a Talon mission, a man who was to be lifted out of enemy territory inflated a helium balloon that lofted a nylon line a hundred and forty feet in the air. At the other end of the line was a harness that the man donned, awaiting the Talon. The plane lined up on the balloon, extended a pickup hook from its nose, and snagged the line. A crewman winched the man aboard through the open rear cargo door.
Parker, then a first lieutenant, volunteered to be dropped into what surveillance photos had identified as an immense minefield about ten miles from Baghdad. He was told that the mines were supposed to explode only under the weight of a tank. So theoretically a man would not detonate one. He was given thirty minutes to land, install a bomb-homing device, and then be extracted.
The bomb was the BLU-82B, better known as the Daisy Cutter. It detonated a mixture of ammonium nitrate and aluminum and was then the world’s most powerful nonnuclear bomb. It weighed 15,000 pounds and was to be dropped by parachute from a Hercules that would follow the extraction aircraft. The bomb was designed to set off mines within a radius of about one thousand feet. Then those mines would detonate more and more mines, clearing the field.
Witnesses of a Daisy Cutter explosion tell of a blinding light and a tremendous shock wave. “You know it’s not a nuke,” a Talon pilot recalled. “But the thought goes through your mind.” [CS15]
Parker, although wounded by a mine that inexpicably exploded, carried out his mission successfully. The Daisy Cutter went off as planned, opening up a path for U.S. tanks, and Parker got the Silver Star. Because the mission was highly classified, it could not be described in the citation for the medal.
The mission established Parker’s career as a courageous warrior in the black battles of Special Ops. And the mission changed his life.
Back at the Special Ops base in Saudi Arabia, Parker told another lieutenant that in the desert night, while he was waiting for the Talons, he had had an epiphany.
“I’ll never forget those moments with Parker,” recalled the lieutenant, who retired as a one-star Air Force general. “We were in his quarters, the day after he came back and had been debriefed. He was very excited. He had a gleam in his eyes, and I suddenly remembered a portrait of John Brown. Parker took a Bible out of his bedside table and opened it up to a place marked with one of those ribbons that hang out of Bibles.
“I don’t know much about the Bible. But I sure remember the name and number. Isaiah thirteen, verses two to four. He held up the Bible, waving it in front of me, and he started talking—talking faster than he usually talked. ‘Iraq. It’s Babylon. Babylon,’ he said. ‘I raised the banner.’ And he started raving about being chosen to be a vessel of prophecy.” [CS15]
Isaiah 13: 2–5 is a favorite of fundamentalists who believe that the Bible forecasts events that climax in Armageddon, the apocalyptic battle between good and evil:
2. Raise a banner on a bare hilltop, shout to them; beckon to them to enter the gates of the nobles.
3. I have commanded my holy ones; I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath—those who rejoice in my triumph.
4. Listen, a noise on the mountains, like that of a great multitude! Listen, an uproar among the kingdoms, like nations massing together! The LORD Almighty is mustering an army for war.
5. They come from faraway lands, from the ends of the heavens—the LORD and the weapons of his wrath—to destroy the whole country.
That night on the desert, Parker says he had a sensation, deep in his subconscious self, that he was being miraculously healed of his wound so that he could live and carry out a mission. He believed that he had been chosen for an epochal role in God’s plan.
To Parker, the “banner” was the beacon he set up and the “shout” was his radio, which “summoned my warriors,” the crews of the Talon and the bomber that dropped the great “weapon of his wrath.” He was in an army mustering for war, an army made up of “nations massing together.”
In conversations, then and now, Parker even found prophecy in the name of the plane that snatched him. The Law of Talon, an ancient idea of vengeance, says that if you kill my camel, I should kill ten of your camels—or even all of your camels. [CS13]
In Bible study sessions at the House of The Brethren, Parker used his epiphany on the desert as the launching of his own prophecies, defining Iran—not Iraq—as Babylon. (Look at a map of the Babylon Empire of the sixth century BC and you see it encompassed much of both Iraq and Iran. Modern prophets take their choice, depending upon contemporary geopolitics.) [CS13]
One series of Bible sessions was apparently restricted to what appeared to be a Brethren inner circle. Among the men who attended were Senator Mark Stanfield and three members of Congress—Representatives Charles Valeri of New Jersey, Jesse Halloran of Oklahoma, and Gregory Nolan of Minnesota. Nolan gained his two minutes of notoriety by introducing a resolution to impeach President Oxley after the attack on the Elkton. The resolution never got out of the House Judiciary Committee.
Another person at the sessions was Norman Miller, the well-known financier who was a major contributor to Stanfield’s campaign. Miller owns True North, a private equity firm that has made him fabulously wealthy. True North was of the few Wall Street enterprises that was neither battered nor wiped out during the economic crisis that struck in 2008. [CS13/2nd]
Parker did most of the talking, which first focused on the Elkton attack. On the night after he saw the attack on GNN, Parker said, he had had trouble getting to sleep. He dozed off and then awakened in a cold sweat, wisps of a dream or a vision still in his mind: “I was being borne by knights in armor to a cathedral and placed before an altar. I heard the faint echoes of trumpets. I knew that by divine command I had been summoned to lead The Brethren to their destiny, to their crusade. This was my third summons. And I believe it will be my last.” [CS13/2nd]
The first summons, he said, had come in the form of the “miracle” that had brought him back to life after he was wounded at Mogadishu. “My second summons came on a desert night in the Holy Land itself,” he went on. He then recounted his epiphany while waiting for the Talon. Next came the summons of his dream.
A fellow officer, Parker said, had attested to the miracle at Mogadishu because he had heard a medic treating Parker say, “He’s dying.”
The officer, a member of The Brethren, had told Stanfield about Parker. Stanfield then recruited Parker into The Brethren in 2002, when Special Ops was getting more Pentagon attention than ever before. Parker was being groomed for high rank by the few Defense officials and fewer members of Congress who were privy to his secret world of black ops. His sponsors believed that America’s future security would be shaped not by conventional warfare but by back-alley Special Forces and their black ops.[CS13]
Biblical study sessions inevitably were more about modern Mideast politics than about God’s plan. After Blake Oxley’s election, Parker frequently thundered about Oxley’s failure to defend the country from Islamic terrorists. The Brethren’s agenda, which bonded right-wing voters and evangelical Christians to Israel, was strengthening The
Brethren’s political clout. But The Brethren’s focus on Armageddon was beginning to worry some Israelis. [CS13]
Millions of Americans believe that the Bible can predict the future and that they are living in the End Time. These are not thoughts shared by many Israelis, who prefer looking toward a future that does not include their nation’s annihilation. [CS13]
During most meetings at the House of The Brethren, participants do not refer to each other by their names. Instead, they use Old Testament names, such as Amos for Parker and Hosea for Miller. The congressmen had New Testament names: Mark for Valeri, Luke for Halloran, and Paul for Nolan. Sometimes, because these names could be real names, participants got confused about what to call each other. [CS13/2nd]
Stanfield, who does not trumpet his membership in The Brethren, does not seem to have a biblical name. He rarely attended study sessions. Both he and Parker are known to have expressed fears that their Brethren activities were under surveillance by U.S. or foreign intelligence services. [CS13/2nd] (Reliable sources in the U.S. Intelligence Community emphatically deny surveillance of The Brethren, pointing out that there are no legal grounds for making a legitimate religious organization an intelligence target.)
Stanfield, who rarely spoke up at Brethren sessions, seemed to be particularly concerned about the fate of Israel in the End Time. “What of Israel?” he asked. “Won’t Israel be destroyed in Armageddon?” [CS13/2nd]
“Without Judaism there would be no Christianity,” Parker replied. “Israel’s holy sites are Christianity’s holy sites. We are as one, and it is our destiny to die as one.
“God has known from the beginning of time what would happen in the End Time. He kept that knowledge secret from all who came before us. But now, through biblical prophecy, he is revealing his plan to our generation of the Final Days, revealing to us that we will be the warriors in the terrible battle of Armageddon. I have seen a part of the Covenant that says Armageddon will involve nuclear detonations. That’s how specific the plan is.” [CS13/2nd]
“But Israel?” Stanfield persisted. “What will happen?”
Parker gave another vague answer and then suggested that he and Stanfield meet privately to discuss Stanfield’s concerns. Parker changed the subject, shifting back to his denunciation of the Oxley administration’s “traitorous failure to stamp out militant Islam, particularly in Iran.” [CS13/2nd]
Dake had more than hinted that the Mossad had been gathering information on The Brethren, but he had not revealed how he knew. The Dake Donation, as Falcone now thought of the printout, was Dake’s way of giving Falcone information: The real message was in the CS’s. Falcone did not need these notations about sources in order to read the pages. With a couple of keystrokes Dake could have deleted all the CS notations in the copy of the pages that he passed along to Falcone. Why didn’t he?
Falcone poured himself a glass of vodka, sat down at the desk in his office, and went back over the pages, focusing on the bracketed CS citations. He looked at his watch. Twenty after one.
Half an hour later, Falcone looked up and rubbed his eyes. He had decided that CS13 was Dake’s basic Israeli source, providing background and some observations, probably in a series of interviews. Perhaps CS13/2nd was Dake’s shorthand for indicating that Confidential Source 13 had provided him with information “secondhand,” meaning in some way other than in an interview: supplying quotes from, say, the full or redacted transcript of a phone tap or a room bug. Falcone knew that Dake would never have put quote marks around words unless he was convinced that those words had been spoken.
It did not matter who the source was. What did matter was that intel was coming from a CS who apparently had managed to bug the House of The Brethren and perhaps Parker’s phone and the phones of other Brethren, perhaps including Stanfield, now a presidential candidate.
Falcone was far from shocked by the probability that Israel had been collecting intelligence in Washington. There was a working relationship between the intelligence services of the two countries. Surveillance of, say, the Washington residence of Saudi Arabia’s ambassador would be officially frowned upon but tolerated. But there certainly would not be any toleration of an Israeli wiretap on a U.S. presidential candidate.
Dake’s parenthetical remark about an Intelligence Community denial means that Dake had asked somebody knowledgeable in the community about possible foreign surveillance of The Brethren. And that somebody was almost certainly Sam Stone, director of the CIA, whom Falcone had suspected of being a Dake source ever since the time that Dake broke the story on the sultan’s support for the terrorist’s assassination and Stone was in the CIA Clandestine Service, operating out of Lebanon.
Falcone believed that a query from Dake would surely produce some interest and inspire a quiet look at Israeli activities in Washington. But nothing like that had appeared in the President’s Daily Brief or other ultra-secret reports that Falcone regularly saw.
Falcone decided to keep the Dake Donation in the safe in his apartment rather than take it to his White House office. It would be another deposit in his intel bank account. Like all his deposits, he was not quite sure how he was going to spend it.
OCTOBER
13
BY MID-OCTOBER, Stanfield was inching up in the polls. New television commercials appeared in states where he was showing new strength. But his message was not new. He was sticking to his stale slogan, “Bring Back America!” and his campaign seemed to be based on a promise that he would do whatever needed to be done—and would do it better than Oxley.
Stanfield’s running mate, Gregory Nolan, shouted and pounded podiums, surrounded by roaring seas of “Remember the Elkton!” signs. The media largely ignored him. One of his biggest television days came when he appeared for the first time without his mustache, inspiring chatter on the talk shows.
Stanfield and his echo chambers in the media relentlessly charged that Oxley had ignored evidence that Iran had ordered the attack on the Elkton to disrupt America’s withdrawal from Iraq. Stanfield did not offer any evidence of an Iranian connection.
Stanfield was raising enough money to finance a relentless television campaign. Hardly a day passed without a Stanfield or Nolan commercial interrupting popular cable and network shows.
In the most frequently seen commercial, Stanfield stood before rows of veterans wearing blue-and-gold overseas caps and was ending a speech with “Never Again! Never Again!” Then Stanfield’s face gave way to GNN’s image of a speeding boat smashing into the Elkton. A voice chanted in Farsi. Along the bottom of the screen ran the translation: DEATH TO AMERICA. LONG LIVE ALLAH. LONG LIVE IRAN.
*
RESPONDING to Stanfield’s rise in the polls, President Oxley stepped up his television campaign, which was built around a four-word message: “Oxley, Keeping America’s Promise.” To match Stanfield’s sudden surge of commercials, Oxley had to step up his fund-raising. His campaign managers hastily arranged a four-day swing through what Ray Quinlan called Good News Land: New York, New Jersey, and New England. The major Connecticut fund-raiser was at Stonemill, the ancestral home of the Eriksens, one of America’s wealthiest families.
And so came the night when the hostess, Mrs. Harald Eriksen stood, resplendent in a gown of emerald green, on the terrace of Stonemill, making small talk with guests and trying to not look anxious about the first presidential visit to Stonemill. She was waiting for President Oxley, and she was also waiting for her son Rolf.
The party, like all her parties, had begun precisely on time: 6:30, when the sun was low and Long Island Sound was a darkening gray against a black sky. Now it was 7:30, the presidential arrival time estimated by the Secret Service, and Rolf still was not here.
She knew that Rolf, who called himself a libertarian, despised Oxley, and she would not be surprised if Rolf was planning to time his own arrival to coincide with the departure of Oxley. She had a vision of the presidential motorcade and Rolf’s Bentley colliding at Stonemill’s security gate. Yes, she thoug
ht. Rolf will come. He may hate the President but he loves Stonemill.
Stonemill rose from the Connecticut shore, a monument to the Gilded Age, when men of immense wealth saw castles in their dreams and hired architects to bring forth the dreams. Stonemill was one of the fulfilled dreams—a stone mansion of Romanesque style, with massive walls, decorative quoins, arches, turrets, towers, and oriel windows glowing with light on gala nights like this one. East of Stonemill, within the vast, fenced-in estate, flowed a stretch of the narrow, winding river where a mill’s waterwheel once turned. Mrs. Harald Eriksen, better known as Betsy, now stood on one of the mill’s grindstones, set in the terrace as giant tiles.
Harald Eriksen’s father, Trond Eriksen, had built Stonemill in 1878, reading the architect’s plans as easily as he would have read a shipwright’s sketches. He was his own contractor, managing a crew of Italian stonemasons, fashionable New York interior decorators, and Norwegian immigrants he had borrowed from the Eriksen Shipbuilding Company in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Trond had come to America as an orphan in the great wave of Norwegian immigration, when recruiters, sent to Norway by American railroad companies, lured Norwegians to the new state of Minnesota. But, as a biographer wrote, “When Trond Eriksen landed in New York, he turned down the offer of a free railroad ticket to Minnesota. He was a seaman from Bergen, and he wanted to live in a seaport, not in the middle of a wheat field. He made his way to Boston, saw how many Irishmen were looking for jobs there, and traveled on to Gloucester, where he found work in a shipyard. Thus began one of America’s great immigration stories. A dozen years later, barely in his thirties, he owned the shipyard, which became the foundation for the Eriksen fortune and the beginning of the myth of the Eriksen Midas touch.”
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