The Scorpion's Gate

by Richard A. Clarke

  “Very kind of you, Russell, very kind. We’ve had our share of mistakes, though. We didn’t get Iraqi WMD right either, although we did call the insurgency and the civil war. And Washington isn’t always off the mark. Occasionally, INR, the State Department’s lit

  tle intelligence analysis branch, is spot-on. Little, that’s the common theme. In the analysis business, smaller is better. Fewer people, higher quality.”

  He continued, “Most of the fancy technologically based information, from satellites and whatnot, is American in origin, but thankfully, you share almost all of it with us. We contribute some code-breaking and listening, but mainly our side of the bargain is what the boys and girls over at Vauxhall Cross provide, the good spy work, and we share almost all of that with you. For some reason CIA has just never done very well at the spying bit. When they get one, it’s usually a walk-in, a voluntary, not a recruit.

  “But whoever gets it, it all comes here and to you—all the spy reports, the intercepted communications, the satellite pictures, and the publicly available information. That’s the open source. Often the very best material is the open source, but Washington hasn’t liked it, you know, believes it’s disinformation unless they stole it, bought it, or picked it up in the ether.

  “We have a small in-house assessments staff who see everything that comes in and then draft our estimates—or analyses, as you call them. We often call on someone from the Foreign Office to do the first draft. Depending upon the topic, we even ask a don or two from Oxbridge—all perfectly vetted, of course. Then it’s a free-forall, with the Defense Ministry, Foreign Office, Home Office, SIS, et cetera, all having their whack at it. Finally, it comes before the JIC, and we polish it off and send it through the wall.

  ”Rusty frowned at the last part. “Through the wall?”

  “Oh, yes, literally.” Sir Dennis stood and walked toward the back of his long, thin office. “I am not high-powered like your Director of National Intelligence, but when I wear the hat of Intelligence Coordinator, my number-one client is the Prime Minister.” He pulled a key from his vest and gave a shove to a bookcase on rollers. Behind it was a door, which he proceeded to unlock and throw open. “Ta da!” Sir Dennis exclaimed. “Number Ten.” He then disappeared through the door and could be heard saying, “Penning-Smith here. Closing back up.” No alarms seemed to have gone off, no electronics appeared to be involved.

  When Sir Dennis Penning-Smith reappeared, MacIntyre was still laughing, “You mean you have a secret door that brings you around the corner to Downing Street? What if the Prime Minister is in his silk pajamas?”

  “Not to worry,” Sir Dennis assured him while locking the door and easily moving the bookcase back into place. “They live on the upper floors. The point of this little magic trick, however, Russell, is to be seen by the others around town as having direct access to the PM whenever I want it. I have done that act for every member of the JIC, one at a time.” He clapped his hands to shed any dust and sat back down in the Queen Anne–style reading chair.

  “I do a little magic myself,” Rusty said, smiling. “But it’s strictly on a more amateur level. I do agree with you about the value of open-source intelligence,” he went on, trying to get the conversation back on track. “In fact, we’ve just given out a major contract for an automated system of collection, web-crawling, and cataloguing. If that works, we’ll be glad to share it with you, of course.”

  “Automated crawlers, well...We may have different views of open source, Russell. Tell you a story about our mutual friends, the Israelis. They had a problem once with Libya. Haven’t we all? Seems old Muammar was planning to buy missiles or something from Korea or somewhere, doesn’t matter, and the Israeli Prime Minister wanted to know right away when the bloody things arrived.” Sir Dennis was warming to his own tale.

  “So they assemble their Israeli version of the JIC and task each agency to find out. Next week the Air Force reports that it has flown reconnaissance flights over Tripoli harbor and seen nothing new. The Navy intelligence people have stationed a submarine off the coast and have slipped into the port for a peep, and nothing. Mossad suborned Qaddafi’s tailor, some queen from the Via Veneto, and lined one of Muammar’s flashy robe things with a transmitter, but all they heard was Beatles music. The White Album, by the by.

  “Finally, Russell, the little man from the Foreign Office intelligence staff, Avi something, says, ‘The ship from Pyongyang arrived last Wednesday, unloaded at Pier Twelve, and set sail Saturday.’ How do you know, they all ask. ‘I called the harbormaster and asked him,’ the little bugger says. That, you see, is open source, no crawly worms involved.” Penning-Smith smiled and sat back.

  MacIntyre was chuckling. “You may have a point there, Sir Dennis. So what concerns you now? What are you looking at?”

  The Joint Intelligence Committee Chair stood again and opened doors that revealed a blackboard, on which he, or someone, had written the plan for the first quarter in red, green, and white chalk. “Next up is ‘Whither Islamyah?’ Who is going to emerge from the Shura Council to run the place, and what will he want to do?

  “Then, staying in the region, what’s the latest in ‘Iran-Iraq Relations’? Can we figure out seams and pressure points so that we can rend apart this entente cordiale between the two great Shiite nations?

  “Moving east, the ever-popular ‘Heroin Production in Afghanistan,’ which is way up again. How do we stop it from showing up in Brixton?

  “To the Orient, ‘Chinese Economic Trends.’ Can they continue to plow money into military modernization and keep every little Chan happy with modern gizmos?

  “Then, oops, you shouldn’t have seen this one, ‘America’s Next Steps: Learning from Failures?’—an examination of how policy problems with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi will affect nearto midterm decision making in Washington. I should, of course, ask you that,” Penning-Smith said, shutting the doors to the blackboard.

  “Seriously? I don’t know if we are learning from failure,” MacIntyre said, not contesting the premise. “Yes, we have had a bad start to the twenty-first century. The Iraq War did not result in the people there loving us and did produce this continuing low-grade Sunni insurgency against the Shi’a government, which does seem more and more aligned with Tehran. At least we are finally out of there.

  “On Tehran, we could never tell when they went nuclear or where they store them, but we are pretty confident now that they slipped that past us successfully while we perseverated in Baghdad.

  “Afghanistan is probably best described as again a borderline failed state, decentralized, but the regime in Kabul is clearly toeing the line of the fundamentalist coalition in Pakistan, which in turn is overtly nuclear-armed. It’s that coalition of military and clergy in Islamabad that worries me most. They’ve stopping hunting al Qaeda, won’t talk to India, and seem to be in bed with that new gang in Saudi Arabia.

  “And then there is Saudi Arabia. We rode that horse too long. Didn’t have our own sources in the country to tell us that the opposition to the Sauds had grown, organized, and coalesced. So now it’s Islamyah, its future too early to tell. I am convinced that if we are not hostile to them, we can still keep them from becoming a threat. Their revolution is still young, malleable. I would love to see what your estimate ends up saying about who will emerge from the pack to lead it,” MacIntyre concluded, holding his two palms open. “Some of these guys were once al Qaeda, or clergy, but most were reformers, democrats, or just disgruntled bureaucrats and military fed up with the stagnation and inbreeding of the House of Saud.

  “Yes,” Sir Dennis said, checking his red Economist Diary appointment book. “Yes, indeed, lots of policy problems. You know, Russell, you are my last scheduled thing today. What do you say we discuss this over a wee dram?”

  The Travellers Club

  Pall Mall, London

  After a short ride through the traffic of Trafalgar Square, the Cabinet Office driver dropped them off at what looked like
a Florentine palace on a quiet dead-end street.

  After depositing their overcoats, they ascended the Grand Staircase together, MacIntyre trying not to appear a country rube as he gaped at the portraits, the chandeliers, and the Greek frieze in the library. “Yes, stole it from the Temple of Apollo. The Greeks want it back, the buggers.” As they sat down in armchairs by a window, Sir Dennis touched a large red button. “Will you do with a Balvenie, Russell?” he asked as a bookcase slid aside, revealing a butler’s pantry and a butler, carrying six glasses on a tray. Three of them had water. None of them had ice.

  Smiling at another door pretending to be a bookcase, MacIntyre said, “Next time you’re in the States, Sir Dennis, I’ll have to take you to a castle I belong to in Los Angeles. It has a number of false doors, too.”

  “Really, a castle? What kind of people belong?” Sir Dennis asked, sniffing the aroma of the single malt.

  “You have to be a magician,” MacIntyre replied.

  “Well, then, Sir Dennis certainly qualifies,” said a man MacIntyre had not noticed approaching.

  “Russell MacIntyre, may I present the scoundrel Brian Douglas, from another clan, the SIS. Our man in Bahrain, on a brief trip home, is Brian,” Sir Dennis said, shaking hands and handing a glass to a man who looked twenty years younger and tanned. “I asked young Brian to drop by to meet you, as, from what Sol Rubenstein tells me about you, Russell, you and Brian have similar interests, including the three I’s—Iraq, Iran, and Islamyah. And Brian is about to become a traveler; I can say that to Russell, Brian, and he will not report it back to Langley or Foggy Bottom, will you, Russell?”

  “He means I’m flying to Tehran under alias,” Douglas said softly over his Balvenie, looking uneasy.

  “And who is it this time, just in case I read about you in the papers?” Sir Dennis persisted in pressing the younger man to reveal more than he appeared to be comfortable discussing.

  “Ian Stuart, a South African rug dealer from Joburg. It’s a new legend, but well supported by our office there,” Douglas vamped, not wanting to tell the American the true cover, “and let’s hope you won’t be reading about me, at least not in the press.”

  “Russell, Brian asked me something this morning that I couldn’t answer and thought you might,” Sir Dennis said, crossing his legs and turning toward the American. His manner was different now, brisker. “What was the Pentagon Under Secretary, Kashigian, doing at Christmas, meeting with the Rev Guards in Tehran? That’s not on the approved travel list for Defense officials, I would have thought. His legend was credible, Brian—an Armenian diplomat, was it not?”

  Now Russell MacIntyre understood this meeting a bit more. It was a test on several levels. Could he be trusted not to report back to Washington that SIS was sending a senior officer into Iran under cover? Would he prove his bona fides by explaining a recent secret mission by a senior U.S. official, also to Tehran? The problem was, MacIntyre had not known about Ronald Kashigian’s going to Iran. Now he had to persuade his hosts of that without immediately appearing to be inconsequential.

  “If Kashigian was in Iran at Christmas, I will tell you truthfully, I was not cleared to know that. Nor was Sol Rubenstein, I’m confident. Are you sure it was Kashigian and not really an Armenian diplomat?” MacIntyre said, trying to sound as honest as possible.

  The two Brits looked at each other for a second. Sir Dennis nodded to Brian Douglas. “He flew in on a Pentagon Gulfstream, without markings,” Douglas said flatly. “His trip was arranged and coordinated by the U.S. defense attaché in Ankara.”

  “Shit,” MacIntyre said, furrowing his brow. “Why would they— we—do that?”

  “Precisely what we were wondering, Russell. Odd time to be doing an opening with the Persians, after forcing Old Europe to join in antinuclear sanctions just a few years ago,” Sir Dennis almost mumbled as he pushed back in his chair.

  MacIntyre quickly replayed what had been said. “Wait a minute. The only way you could know this is if you’re tapping or spying on the U.S. defense attaché in Turkey. I thought we had an agreement in place that the U.K. and the U.S. didn’t spy on each other.”

  “We don’t spy on America, Russell,” Sir Dennis said slowly. “As you do, we listen to others who sometimes report on what America is doing. Some such NSA reports do not always leave Fort Meade,” he added, referring to the Maryland headquarters of U.S. signals intelligence, the National Security Agency, “but they do get distributed to a few of us by our signals intelligence unit, GCHQ, which see everything NSA sees. It’s been that way since 1943.” Russell wondered who had the authority to tell NSA to sit on a report. Somebody evidently did.

  “We’re convinced Iran is behind the hotel bombings in Bahrain, maybe even the hijacking of this LNG tanker, although those found on board were Iraqi of some sort,” Brian said quickly to MacIntyre. “I’m going back in there to rekindle a few embers quickly, because every bone in my body tells me the Iranians are up to something.

  “The point is, MacIntyre, that if some people in Washington are talking to some people in Tehran, I would be at risk if anyone in Washington knew I was going in clandestinely.” Douglas spoke with his hand covering half of his mouth.

  “So why tell me?” MacIntyre said, shaking his head. “I don’t get it.”

  “We’re telling you this, Russell,” said Sir Dennis, “because Sol Rubenstein and I have been exchanging thoughts these last few months—very securely, of course—about our mutual concern that the Iranians are getting too assertive, exercising their mobile nuclear missile launchers, conducting amphibious maneuvers with tanks, enforcing their way in Baghdad, even inserting their people into the Iraqi government there under thin cover.

  “And the situation in the Gulf is very fluid right now. Sol says you believe that we should not yet write off Islamyah, says you’re one of the only people in Washington to believe that, forcing old Sol to defend you with the Director of National Intelligence, SECDEF, and the White House crowd,” Sir Dennis went on, telling MacIntyre things that he had never heard from his boss.

  “Well, we happen to agree with you, you see, despite some lower levels in Vauxhall Cross and elsewhere who may not. So this coincidental bumping into Mr. Douglas in the library at the Travellers is really an agent recruitment attempt of a sort.

  “While Sol has you out of town cooling off, as it were, we thought we would place some intelligence collection requirements with you as a traveler. See if any of the U.S. diplomats or spooks or sailors in the Gulf will tell you more than we are getting out of them. See if some of the Bahrainis will open up to you, since your lot is paying much of their tab these days, not us anymore.”

  Sir Dennis was no longer a pleasant, slightly distracted don. He had just revealed a personal transatlantic alliance with MacIntyre’s boss, Sol Rubenstein, that MacIntyre had not even guessed existed. He had also revealed that Rubenstein was spending time deflecting criticism of MacIntyre, without even letting the object of that criticism know about it.

  Now Sir Dennis Penning-Smith revealed himself as a Brahmin executive, a tough, realistic British intellocrat. “What are the Iranians up to? Not that I doubt for a minute that Brian will reveal all upon his return from the Persian carpet stalls. How stable is Bahrain if the Iranian Rev Guards want to topple the King? If you’re right about the window of opportunity in Islamyah, what do we do with it? With whom do we speak? Who exactly is the Dr. Castro of this revolution in Islamyah? What do we say or do to prevent this Castro from becoming a nuisance now that his revolution has just succeeded, as it were? I don’t think we have much time before the window closes in Islamyah. If Douglas is right, we may not have time before the Iranians try something across the Gulf in Bahrain.” Sir Dennis rose and pulled a book off a shelf labeled only “By Members” and gave it to MacIntyre.

  “It’s called Arabian Sands, written by a Traveller named Thesiger over half a century ago. Dressed up like a Bedouin, lived with them, loved the place. Laments the discovery of oil, says
it ruined everything,” the JIC chairman said, apparently preparing to leave. “And I guess it did, too, unless, of course, you like to drive automobiles, fly aircraft, et cetera, et cetera.

  “You two have a good bonding dinner downstairs. I am off to a dreadful dinner for my visiting Australian counterpart. Don’t worry about the book. I shall replace it.” With that, and with quick handshakes, he was gone, leaving the newly introduced Brian Douglas, Britain’s top spy in the Gulf, and Russell MacIntyre, the apparently controversial deputy director of America’s fledgling intelligence analysis agency, sitting amid the bookshelves with empty glasses.

  As the waiter appeared from the butler’s closet with another round, Douglas seemed somewhat less gung-ho than he had in the presence of Sir Dennis. “These trips don’t always work, of course. There was another Travellers Club member, fellow named Tomkison, went to Socotra, island off the Yemen, to do research for a treatise on the strange accent and ancient version of Arabic he was told was spoken on that lovely isle.”

  “What happened?” MacIntyre asked. “They behead him?”

  “No.” Douglas smiled, tasting the Scotch. “None of them said anything—not one single word—till he left.”

  “Something tells me you will do better than Tom-whatever,” MacIntyre said, toasting his new acquaintance’s prospective travel.

  “It will be a quick trip. Has to be. Can’t give them time to recall my face from dusty bins. And the source will either talk or not. Either be alive or not. No need to wait around a week to find out,” Douglas said, more to himself than to MacIntyre. “I’m coming back through Dubai, allegedly to change planes for Durban. Could we meet there to compare notes on the tenth at eight, in the old city? It’s a very small curry place,” Douglas said, passing a small card across the table. “I will have to prepare a report for Sir Dennis and Sol on what I found and what you were able to pick up.”