BODY OF LIES
ALSO BY DAVID IGNATIUS
Agents of Innocence
Siro
The Bank of Fear
A Firing Offense
The Sun King
BODY OF LIES
A Novel
DAVID IGNATIUS
Copyright © 2007 by David Ignatius
All rights reserved
Manufacturing by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc.
Production manager: Anna Oler
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ignatius, David, 1950–
Body of lies : a novel / David Ignatius. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06670-8
1. Terrorists—Fiction. 2. Europe—Fiction. 3. Middle East—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3559.G54B63 2007
813ae.54—dc22 2006102362
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
FOR EVE
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1 BERLIN
2 AMMAN
3 BALAD, IRAQ
4 BALAD, IRAQ
5 WASHINGTON
6 AMMAN
7 AMMAN
8 AMMAN
9 AMMAN
10 AMMAN
11 LANGLEY / WASHINGTON
12 WASHINGTON
13 LANGLEY
14 LANGLEY
15 LANGLEY
16 CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA
17 ROME / GENEVA
18 ABU DHABI
19 AMMAN
20 BEIRUT / AMMAN
21 AMMAN
22 THE KING’S HIGHWAY, JORDAN
23 AMMAN / WASHINGTON
24 WASHINGTON
25 ANKARA / INCIRLIK
26 ANKARA
27 AMMAN
28 BERLIN
29 WASHINGTON
30 AMMAN
31 AMMAN / WASHINGTON
32 AMMAN / DAMASCUS
33 HAMA, SYRIA
34 HAMA / ALEPPO
35 TRIPOLI, LEBANON
36 NICOSIA / DAMASCUS
CHAPTER 37
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE WAR DESCRIBED IN these pages is all too real, but this book is a work of fiction. The characters, events and institutions are imaginary. I have given my Jordanian intelligence service the same name as the real one, and a bit of its panache, but the rest is invented. I am greatly indebted to friends from many countries, who share my fascination and despair about the Middle East and who, over many years, have tried to point me toward the truth. These brave people, who risk their lives to try to make things better in that part of the world, are the secret heroes of this book.
I owe special thanks to several people: to my friend of forty years, Jonathan Schiller, who generously offered me a desk at his law firm, Boies Schiller & Flexner, where I could hide out and chip away at this book over many months; to Eve Ignatius and Garrett Epps, who read early drafts of the manuscript; to my peerless literary agents, Raphael Sagayln, Bridget Wagner and Eben Gilfenbaum, who kept encouraging and pushing; to Bob Bookman at Creative Artists Agency, who offered wise advice about the book and characters; to my editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, who teaches a master class in writing with his acidulous marginal notations; and finally to my friend and boss at the Washington Post, Donald Graham.
“To mystify and mislead the enemy has always been one of the cardinal principles of war. Consequently, ruses de guerre of one kind or another have played a part in almost every campaign ever since the episode of the Trojan horse, or perhaps even earlier. The game has been played for so long that it is not easy to think out new methods of disguising one’s strengths or one’s intentions. Moreover, meticulous care must be exercised in the planning and execution of the schemes. Otherwise, far from deceiving the enemy, they merely give the show away.”
—Lord Ismay, foreword to
The Man Who Never Was, 1953
BODY OF LIES
It took nearly a month to find the right body. Roger Ferris had very particular requirements: He wanted a man in his thirties, physically fit, preferably blond but certainly and recognizably Caucasian. He should have no obvious signs of disease or physical trauma. And no bullet wounds, either. That would make it too complicated later.
Ferris was on assignment in the Middle East most of the time, so it fell to his boss, Ed Hoffman, to manage the details. Hoffman didn’t trust his colleagues to locate a body without thinking they had to notify a congressional committee or otherwise botching the job. But you could find someone in the military who was willing to do almost anything these days, so Hoffman contacted an ambitious colonel on the J-2 staff at Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida who had been helpful on other matters. He explained that he needed a favor, and an odd one at that. He required a white male, approximately six feet tall, early middle age, muscular enough to be believable as a case officer, but not so muscle-bound that he looked like a trigger-puller. The ideal candidate would be uncircumcised. And he had to be dead.
The colonel found a body three weeks later in a morgue in south Florida. He had tapped a network of retired officers who were working private security and claimed they could get anything done. The dead man had drowned the previous day while windsurfing off the Gulf Coast near Naples. He was a lawyer on vacation from Chicago. He was physically fit, brown-haired, disease-free and in possession of a foreskin. His name was James Borden, and he was, or had been, thirty-six. The body was altogether suitable, except for one detail: it was due to be cremated at a funeral home in Highland Park, Illinois, in two days. That presented a challenge. Hoffman asked the colonel if he had ever staged a black-bag job, and the colonel said no, but he was game for anything. That was a sentiment Hoffman rarely heard at CIA.
They worked up the body snatcher’s version of a two-card monte. One corpse went into the cargo hold of the airplane in Fort Myers, and another one came off at O’Hare. The coffin was the same, but the man inside was now a seventy-eight-year-old retired insurance executive who had died of a heart attack. The colonel sent an NCO to the funeral home in Highland Park to make sure nobody decided at the last minute on a public viewing. They had prepared a cover story in case something went wrong—about how the airline had made a terrible mistake and confused two coffins in transit, but now it was too late because the other body had been cremated in Milwaukee. But they never needed to use it.
James Borden’s corpse wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough. The upper body was muscular, although the tummy had begun to sag, and he had a bald spot at the crown of his head. It turned out that he had an undescended testicle. The more Hoffman thought about these imperfections, the more he liked them. They were the real, human details that would make the larger deception believable. Perfect artifice includes mistakes.
To this corpse, Hoffman now attached a legend. He became Harry Meeker, not James Borden. They rented Harry Meeker an apartment in Alexandria and got him a home phone and a cell phone. Using the picture from Borden’s Illinois driver’s license, they obtained a Commonwealth of Virginia license, and then a passport, and then a man in Support dummied up the right stamps and visas. For the passport photo, Hoffman’s colleague Sami Azhar surfed the Web site of Borden’s law firm and got a portrait of him that had been used in the firm’s promotional mailings.
Harry Meeker’s cover job would be with the U.S. Agency for International Development, so they got him a USAID identification card. They had business cards made up, too, with Meeker’s private phone extension. It had the right prefix—712—but when you rang the number, the recordi
ng sounded hollow, not quite the voice of a real secretary but more like someone who was covering for Meeker. They gave Meeker a parking space beneath AID’s headquarters in the Reagan Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, with a reminder card for his wallet in case he forgot the number of the space. This was the easy stuff; no more than the agency usually did in building integrated cover. Now they had to make Harry Meeker a real person.
Harry needed clothes. Hoffman was oblivious to fashion and wore whatever his wife picked out at Target, so he was the wrong person to go shopping. Azhar was dispatched to Nordstrom’s; that seemed to have the right upwardly mobile, northern Virginia feel. Stylish, but also safe. The mental picture they had developed of Harry Meeker was of a rising CIA officer on the staff of the Counterterrorist Center at Headquarters, a midcareer guy trying to make his bones—a guy with smarts who had some Arabic and the savvy to handle a sensitive case. They didn’t know yet exactly where the body would end up, but it would probably be somewhere along the northern frontier of Pakistan, where it could get cold. So Azhar bought a medium-weight blazer, a pair of pleated Dockers woolen slacks, a white shirt but no tie, a pair of rubber-soled shoes that would be suitable for trekking and city wear. He took the clothes to the cleaners several times until the sheen was gone, but the shoes were a problem. They looked too new, even when they had been deliberately scuffed. Shoes needed to feel as if real, sweaty feet had been in them. Azhar wore them for a week, with an extra pair of socks so that he wouldn’t get a blister.
And what of the inner life of Harry Meeker? Ferris had already decreed that he should be divorced; that was the one biographical detail anyone would assume about a CIA officer—that he had dumped his first wife, and now he screwed around. To suggest the divorce, Azhar drafted a letter from a lawyer representing Meeker’s imaginary ex-wife, “Amy,” directing him to send his alimony payments to a new address and warning him not to contact Amy in person. Was Meeker a shit, or had his wife taken up with someone new? It worked either way.
Now Harry Meeker needed a girlfriend. She should be pretty; sexy, even. Everybody had seen James Bond movies, including jihadis, and people would just assume that a real American spy must be banging a hot chick. Hoffman wanted a picture of a blonde with big tits in a bikini, but Azhar said that would be too obvious, the Pamela Anderson thing. They should make her sexy, but someone who could work for the agency, too. Ferris had a clever stroke: The girlfriend should be African-American. That was just unlikely enough to be totally believable. Hoffman suggested his secretary—a cocoa-skinned beauty with a dazzling smile. He asked if she would mind posing for a picture in a low-cut blouse. Her name was Denise, which seemed about right, so when the picture was developed Hoffman asked her to write on the back, “I love you, baby. Denise,” with a little heart.
Ferris wondered about a love letter, but decided that would seem phony. People didn’t write love letters anymore; they sent e-mails. Harry Meeker wasn’t going to be carrying a computer, but Azhar suggested text messages on Meeker’s cell phone, and that seemed perfect. They sent two from “Denise’s” phone. One just said, “sweet sugar.” The other said, “baby come back. i miss u 2 much. xxoo. dee.” Sexy, not slutty. Hoffman said Harry should have a condom in his wallet, to suggest that maybe he was getting a little on the side while he was away from home.
The cell phone was a challenge. Azhar programmed Denise’s number and the headquarters number at USAID, and then added a number for an imaginary other girlfriend he called “Sheila,” and one for an imaginary friend, “Rusty,” whose number was actually Azhar’s home phone. To throw in some raw meat, Azhar called the Meeker cell phone from several different extensions at CIA, with the recognizable 482 prefix. He put some other teasers into “Received Calls” and “Dialed Numbers”—a couple of restaurants in McLean near agency Headquarters, several Pentagon numbers, one from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, another from the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi. Everyone’s cell phone is a digital record of his life. You wouldn’t have to spend much time with Harry Meeker’s phone to suspect that this man was leading a secret existence.
They dressed the corpse one day in late fall in a cold room Hoffman had built specially for the purpose under the CIA’s North Parking Lot. Harry’s skin was yellowing ivory, the color of a fading neon light, ice-cold to the touch. The hair was a little shaggy, so they trimmed it almost to the scalp to give him a Bruce Willis look. Harry lay naked on the gurney, undescended testicle and all.
“Jesus, put some fucking clothes on this guy,” said Hoffman. He suggested briefs, but Azhar cocked his head and said, “I think not,” so they found a pair of well-washed boxers and pulled them up around his waist. They pondered for a minute whether Harry would wear an undershirt, and decided no, too prissy. Putting on the shirt and trousers was easy, but the shoes were difficult: The feet were rigid from death and the cold, and they didn’t bend at the toes or ankles. Hoffman sent a secretary out to buy a portable hair dryer, which he used to warm the feet just enough to make them pliable.
Finally, they added the pocket litter—the little bits of paper in the pockets and the wallet that would make Harry Meeker convincing or give him away. They had a charge slip from Afghan Alley, a restaurant in McLean frequented by CIA officers on their lunch break, charged to Meeker’s Visa card. Hoffman added a second charge from the agency’s favorite expense account restaurant, Kinkead’s Colvin Run Tavern in Tyson’s Corner—nearly $200 for dinner for two. Maybe Harry was getting serious about Denise. Ferris supplied the card of a jewelry store in Fairfax, with the handwritten notation, “2 carat—$5,000???” Harry was thinking about getting engaged, but worried about the money. Azhar suggested a receipt for dry cleaning at Park’s Fabric Care in the McLean shopping center. People always forgot to pick up their laundry before going on a trip. And a receipt from the Exxon station on Route 123, just before the entrance to Headquarters. That was a nice touch. So was the coupon for a free car wash at a gas station in Alexandria, near Harry’s apartment.
Hoffman wanted to give Harry an iPod, and they debated what sort of music their imaginary case officer would like. But then Azhar had a brainstorm—they shouldn’t download music onto the iPod, but an Arabic language course. Whoever found the body would spend hours puzzling over the phrases—wondering if they were a secret code—and then realize it was just a language lab for spoken Arabic training. That was precisely what an ambitious, self-improving case officer would be carrying with him—so earnestly, annoyingly American. Hoffman had an old ticket stub from a Washington Redskins playoff game, and he put that in one of the jacket pockets, too.
They would add the finishing touches later: the documents Harry Meeker would be carrying to his contact in Al Qaeda; the photos and cables that would explode like virtual time bombs as they made their way up the network—the evidence that the enemy’s cells had been turned and betrayed. What they were constructing with such care was a poison pill, one wrapped so believably and tantalizingly that the enemy would swallow it. The poison pill was Harry Meeker, and he could burst every node and capillary in the body of the enemy. But first, they had to swallow the lie.
1
BERLIN
FOUR DAYS AFTER THE car bomb exploded in Milan, Roger Ferris traveled to Berlin with the chief of Jordanian intelligence, Hani Salaam. The message traffic back at Amman station was a digital blizzard, with the seventh floor screaming for anything on the Milan bombers that the director could take to the president. But they were always screaming about something at Headquarters, and Ferris thought the trip with Hani was more important. In this instance, Ferris turned out to be right.
Ferris had heard stories about the prowess of the Jordanian intelligence service. CIA officers called them “the Hearts,” partly because of their cryptonym, QM HEART, and partly because it fit their style of operations. But it wasn’t until the Berlin trip that Ferris really saw the Hearts in action. The pitch wasn’t anything very fancy. The setup had taken months of planning, but in the moment of time in which
it played out, the operation was simplicity itself. It was a question that had only one answer. Ferris didn’t give much thought then to the complexity that lay beyond his vision: the maze that was so perfectly constructed you didn’t think to ask whether it was perhaps inside a larger maze; the exit path that was so brightly lit that you didn’t think to wonder whether it was really an entrance to something else.
They made their way to an apartment building in the eastern suburbs of Berlin, a district that had been mauled by the Red Army in 1945 and never fully recovered. A pale October sun gave a faint metallic wash to the clouds, and the cityscape was the color of dirt: mud-brown plaster on the walls, oily puddles that filled the potholes on the street; a rusted old Trabant parked along the curb. Down the street, some Turkish boys were kicking a soccer ball, and there was traffic noise from the Jakobstrasse a block away, but otherwise it was quiet. Ahead was a grim block of flats built decades ago for workers in the nearby factory; they were now urban ruins inhabited by immigrants and squatters and a few aging Germans who were too dazed or demoralized to move. The smells coming from the few open windows weren’t of cabbage or schnitzel but garlic and cheap olive oil.
Ferris was just under six feet, with bristly black hair and soft features. His mouth fell into an easy smile, and there was a sparkle in his eyes that made him appear interested even when he wasn’t. His most obvious flaw was a limp, which was the result of an RPG that had been fired at his car on a road north of Balad in Iraq six months before. Ferris had been lucky; his leg had been raked with shrapnel, but he had survived; the Iraqi agent driving the car had died. They say that good intelligence officers are gray men, the people whose faces you forget in a crowded room. By that measure, Ferris was in the wrong profession. He was hungry and impatient, and looking for something he didn’t yet have.
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