Body of Lies

by David Ignatius

  “I’m not leaving. There’s a war on. I have other agents here. I’m not abandoning them just because we fucked up. That’s our problem around here, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “Don’t be sentimental, Roger. It’s not safe. I am not losing my best young officer because he feels so guilty about a dead Iraqi that he decides to commit suicide. Sorry, no goddamn way.”

  “I’m not leaving,” Ferris repeated.

  Hoffman’s voice went cold. He spoke slowly, with barely suppressed anger at the fact that Ferris was challenging him.

  “I want you back in Balad tomorrow, Ferris. That is an order. If you don’t obey it, you can find another job. Assuming they don’t send you home in a bag. Is that understood?”

  Ferris didn’t know how to respond, so he broke the connection. When Hoffman called back, he didn’t answer. That alone was enough to get him fired, but in that moment, Ferris didn’t care. He tried to sleep, and when he couldn’t, he read the dog-eared Charles Dickens novel he had brought along for moments like this.

  BASSAM COLLECTED Ferris the next morning outside his little villa. Ferris was wearing his robe and kaffiyeh—at a quick glance, he was just another scruffy Iraqi man in his early thirties. Bassam had his hair gelled, as usual, but it was obvious he hadn’t slept much, either. He looked hollow-eyed and nervous—no color left in his cheeks. Stoicism in the face of danger was a code of honor for Iraqi men, so he did his best to sound buoyant.

  “Hey, boss-man,” he said when Ferris got in the car. “Everything’s cool.”

  Ferris answered in Arabic. “No English today, Bassam. It’s too dangerous.” He looked in the side mirror. A BMW with three Iraqis had pulled up behind them. “Pull over, let the car behind pass,” said Ferris. Bassam obeyed silently, no chatter now. The BMW idled, and Ferris was about to tell Bassam to gun it and make a run, but at the last moment the Iraqi driver pulled out and passed them. One of the men in the BMW stared at Ferris full in the face. Shit, he thought. They know. They’ve made me.

  “Head south,” said Ferris. “Go to the house Nizar told us about, the one he said is the local headquarters for his cell. If there’s anyone there, I want to call in the Predator and take some pictures. See who’s coming and going.”

  “You sure?” asked Bassam. He was nervous, Ferris could tell. He thought the American was pushing his luck. He was right, but Ferris didn’t care. In that moment, he was determined to finish the job. He was still angry about Nizar, the little fireplug Iraqi who had trusted Ferris and now was dead. They headed south along the banks of the Tigris, a big ugly river that seemed more mud than water.

  Bassam knew the directions—knew the house, even. In these parts, every family knew where every other family lived. Every space on the checkerboard was covered with something. They turned off the main road, past a grove of olive trees and toward a half-finished villa a mile distant. It was spooky—dead quiet in the stillness of the morning, no cars on the road, no birds in the air, even. Ferris got out his satellite phone and checked the GPS coordinates, so he could be sure of the location when he contacted Balad to call in the Predator.

  Ferris saw a little cloud of dust rise next to the villa when they were about a quarter mile off. It was a car coming or going, he couldn’t tell which, but it was motion.

  “Slow down,” he told Bassam. He got on the phone to his base chief in Balad and asked him to dispatch CHILI, SPECK, or NITRATE. He gave the GPS coordinates and told the chief to hurry. This was a live target; the operating base of a confirmed terrorist cell.

  Bassam had slowed the Mercedes to fifteen miles an hour. “Should I turn around now?” he asked.

  “Why?” said Ferris. “We’re almost there. Let’s check it out.”

  “But sir, they are coming at us.” There was a tremor in the Iraqi’s voice Ferris had never heard before.

  Ferris studied the dust cloud in the distance. It was getting bigger, and you could make out the car now. Bassam was right. Whoever was in the car was heading their way. Ferris couldn’t know whether they were coming in pursuit, but he had to make an instant decision.

  “Turn around,” said Ferris, adding in English: “Gun it.” Bassam threw the wheel over, swerved into a quick 180-degree turn and put the pedal to the floor. Bassam’s Mercedes kicked up a plume of dust of its own, obscuring the view of the car behind.

  As they neared the main highway, Ferris realized they were in deep trouble. The chase car was still behind them, but another car, a faded yellow Chevrolet, lay in wait on the shoulder of the paved road. Ferris popped the glove compartment of the Mercedes, where Bassam kept his gun. He hefted it in his hand. It was a small-caliber automatic pistol, almost useless. They were nearing the intersection.

  “What you want, boss?” said Bassam.

  “Turn south,” said Ferris. “Toward Balad.”

  Bassam surged into the curve, barely missing an oncoming dump truck. The yellow Chevy parked on the shoulder roared to life and took off after them, followed by the car that had been pursuing them on the dirt road. Ferris got back on the satellite phone to Balad.

  “You got that bird up? We have a problem out on Highway One.”

  “Roger that, sir,” answered the duty officer. “SPECK is on the way to the coordinates you gave us. A few minutes away.”

  “Listen, we are in some serious fucking trouble here. I think some bad guys have made me and one of my agents. We are in an old red Mercedes south of Samara, coming down Highway One. We are being pursued by two cars. The lead car is a yellow Chevy. If you can get a gunship in the air you may save a couple of lives.”

  “Roger that,” repeated the duty officer. “Stay on the line. We’re calling down to the flight line for choppers. We’ll see what we can do.”

  Ferris looked back toward the yellow car. He saw a man leaning out from the back-seat window on the driver’s side. He had something big in his hands. It looked almost like a television camera and then Ferris realized: Fuck no, it’s an RPG.

  “Faster,” he said to Bassam. “As fast as it will go.” Bassam revved it all the way, pushing the needle past eighty, then ninety, but there were cars up ahead and he had to slow so that he wouldn’t rear end them.

  And then in an instant Ferris’s world nearly flickered out for good. He didn’t hear the roar of the RPG as it left the muzzle of the launcher. He saw a sudden burst of light to his left, just beyond Bassam, and then the shattering sound of the grenade exploding at the front wheel base, and then everything was white, and things went into slow motion. The car rocked up off its wheels from the concussion of the explosion, swaying once, twice and then settling back down on its tires. He heard a piercing scream in Arabic from Bassam, and saw that he was spurting blood from wounds across his chest. Oh, shit, thought Ferris, and he reached out his arm in a strobe-lit motion and then pulled back in horror. Where Bassam’s stomach had been was a mess of blood and intestines. The shrapnel had carved into his gut like a surgeon’s knife. Bassam was screaming, but somehow his hands were still on the steering wheel and his foot was on the gas pedal. Ferris felt a sharp sting, like he had been bitten by wasps up and down his leg, and only then did he see that the shrapnel of the grenade had hit him, too. His left leg was blood and bone, from midthigh down toward his calf. He put his hand to his balls to make sure they were still there.

  “Can you drive?” shouted Ferris. All he heard back was the screaming, but Bassam managed to steer around the cars that had stopped up ahead because of the explosion and was accelerating into open highway. “Can you drive?” asked Ferris again, but the car was already weaving and he could see the life going out of Bassam’s eyes and in a moment his body slumped over.

  Ferris grabbed the wheel and managed to steady the car, but he couldn’t move his left leg past Bassam’s to reach the gas. The car began to slow. This is how I am going to die, thought Ferris. He thought of his mother, his dead father. He did not think of his wife. The car was slowing and the pursuers were coming faster. He heard a loud noise,
but he was too dizzy to know what it was. The noise was louder still, and then there was an explosive roar, like another missile coming at him, but his vision was dimming and he could no longer process the signals. This is it, he thought. I did it. That was the last thought he had before everything went black: I did it.

  THE NOISE Ferris heard was a helicopter gunship that had been dispatched from Balad when his call to the duty officer had come in. The Apache took out the yellow Chevy in an instant, and then destroyed the second chase car behind. Two more helicopters landed and formed a perimeter by the highway. They put Ferris on a stretcher, and were going to do the same with Bassam until they saw that he was dead, so they put him in a bag. Ferris was back inside the Balad perimeter a few minutes later—safely across the line that separated life from death—and he was in the emergency room of the Balad field hospital twenty minutes after that, where the doctors struggled to save his leg.

  The first call Ferris received when he woke up was from Hoffman, and he said pretty much the same thing Ferris had said to himself: You did it. It sounded like an ending, but that was really the beginning of their story.

  5

  WASHINGTON

  FERRIS WAS LUCKY: They put his leg back together, got him out of Iraq and found him a private room at Walter Reed. Most of the soldiers in the nearby ward hadn’t been as fortunate. They had lost arms, legs, parts of their faces, pieces of their skulls. Ferris was embarrassed by his good luck. He had come out of Iraq on a C-130 with the remains of a dead soldier—Private Morales, someone said—who had died from a mortar round at a forward operating base south of Baghdad. The box that contained what was left of him wasn’t really a coffin; more like a metal locker, but it had an American flag draped around it. They received the body in Kuwait with a solemn ceremony, they called it the “Patriot Drill,” but after they had saluted the dead soldier’s remains, the honor guard hoisted the metal locker and shoved it into what looked like a meat truck. The soldiers fell out and the truck drove it away.

  The director himself paid a call at Walter Reed soon after Ferris was airlifted home. He looked as sleek and sly as a Venetian aristocrat. Accompanying him was Ed Hoffman, big stomach and spiky crew cut, walking with a stiff-legged strut like a football coach from the 1950s. Ferris was still heavily sedated, and when he awoke, he realized that the director was holding his hand.

  “How are you, son?” asked the director.

  Ferris groaned, and the director squeezed his hand.

  “We’re proud of you. You hear me?” There was no response from Ferris, so the director continued. “I brought you something. It’s a medal for bravery in action. Rarely given. Precious.” Ferris felt something heavy land on his chest. He tried to say thank you, but the words didn’t come out very clearly. The director was speaking again. He was talking about silent warriors. Ferris was trying to compose a reply when the director said perhaps he should be going so the patient could get some rest. He said the last bit in a jaunty voice: Get some rest, old boy. Ferris managed to say, “Thank you,” and then closed his eyes. Before he fell back into his drugged sleep, he saw in his mind the faces of the two dead agents he had left behind in Iraq.

  Hoffman came back a few days later. Ferris was feeling better now. The sedatives were wearing off, which meant his leg hurt more but his mind wasn’t so dull.

  “You did good,” the Near East Division chief said. “Your father would be proud of you.”

  Ferris pulled himself up in bed so that he could see Hoffman better. “My dad hated the CIA,” he answered.

  “I know. That’s why he would have been proud of you. You got some dignity back.”

  And it was true. Tom Ferris had worked in the agency’s Science & Technology Division, laboring on the communications links for several generations of spy satellites—and he had disliked almost every minute of it. After he got fired in the Stan Turner housecleaning of the late 1970s, he had worked for the Washington office of an aerospace company, but he was drinking heavily and screaming at Ferris’s mother late at night. Ferris knew that his father regarded himself as a failure, a once-talented engineer who had wasted his life in the agency’s deadening secret bureaucracy. He would mutter about the CIA when he was drinking. “Mediocrity,” he would say. “Mendacity.” His words would slur. He was spared by an early heart attack from the knowledge that his only son had joined the enemy. Maybe Ferris’s father would be happy to know his boy had gotten a medal out of the people who had tormented him, but he doubted it.

  “I want to go back to Iraq,” said Ferris.

  “No way,” answered Hoffman quickly. “Out of the question. You’re burned. The bad guys know who you are. So forget it.”

  “Then I quit. Send me back in or I’m looking for another job.”

  “Don’t be an asshole, Roger. And don’t threaten me. It won’t work. Anyway, I have another idea for you. How would you like to do something for me here that is a little, shall we say, unconventional?”

  “At Headquarters? Absolutely not. If you try to make me, I won’t just quit. I’ll defect.”

  “It’s not Headquarters, exactly. It’s not even on the organization chart. Like I said, it’s unconventional. You’d like it, I promise. It’s made for a troublemaker like you.”

  “What is it?”

  “I can’t tell you unless you’re in.”

  “Then forget it. I want back to Iraq. Like I said, it’s that or I’m out.”

  “Stop it. And grow up. I told you Iraq is impossible. You’re making a mistake turning down my proposal, but that’s your problem. If you insist on going back in the field, I’m prepared to offer you the next best thing to Baghdad, which is Amman. It’s better, actually, because you can do real operations—as opposed to being hunkered down hoping you don’t get your ass shot off. I’m willing to send you in as deputy chief of station, which is unheard of at your age. So shut up. Actually, don’t shut up. Say, ‘Thanks, Ed. Amman is a plum. I really appreciate your confidence in me.’”

  Ferris scratched his prickly beard. “When do I leave? If I agree to take Amman, that is.”

  “As soon as you can walk without falling over, which they tell me will be in about a month.”

  Ferris looked out the window, across the lawn and down toward the clog of traffic on 16th Street: Pizza Hut delivery boys and FedEx drivers and commuters racing home to catch their favorite shows on television. America was so normal. The bloody mess in Iraq might as well be on another planet. He turned back toward Hoffman, who was obviously waiting for an answer. Despite the Bear Bryant act, Hoffman was like anyone else. He wanted people to tell him good news. Ferris wasn’t in the mood. His leg hurt too much.

  “We’re losing this war, Ed. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do, assuming you mean the little war in Iraq. But we’re not losing the big war, at least not yet. The one that could take down everything from Los Angeles to Bangor, Maine, and make ordinary folks so scared they will be crapping in their pants. In that war, we are still holding our own. Barely. That’s why I want you in Amman. You came up with the real thing in Iraq, before you got your leg blown apart. The Suleiman network is for real. We’ve gotten collateral the past few days from other sources. We have to take him down. Have to. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and get mended. Do your physical therapy. I’m shipping you out as soon as I can—to Amman. Do we understand each other?”

  Ferris offered a wan smile. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Nope.” Hoffman stood up to go, and then reconsidered and sat back down in his chair. He wanted Ferris to understand. This wasn’t a consolation prize. He squinted one eye, as if he were trying to focus on something far away. “Remember the first time you showed up in my office, right after you got out of The Farm?”

  “Sure. You terrified me.”

  “You flatter me. But here’s the thing: From that first meeting, I knew I wanted you working for me. You know why? You had done well in training, obviously. They sent me a report. Yo
u aced everything.”

  Ferris nodded. He had met with Hoffman a few days after graduating from the training facility known as The Farm, perhaps the least-secret covert facility in the world. It was a vast, fenced tract of land in the swampy Tidewater area near Williamsburg, full of snakes and vermin and burned-out case officers who were assigned there as instructors when their covers got blown. Ferris had found it a kind of glorified scout camp, with training in map reading, high-speed driving, marksmanship, even parachute jumping—elaborately disguising the fact that most graduates were destined to spend their time going to embassy receptions. Ferris had excelled in his courses. He was a good athlete, which gave him an advantage in the brawny activities like hand-to-hand combat, and his tradecraft instructor said he was a “born recruiter.”

  “You were a star,” continued Hoffman. “But that wasn’t it. A lot of people who do well at The Farm are disasters as case officers. It’s like high school. There’s a sort of inverse relationship between early success and the real thing later on. No, it was something else that caught my eye. Something so rare, I worried it had disappeared in our line of work.”

  “Okay. I give up. What was it?”

  “You were a natural. That’s the only way I can put it. You hadn’t even started yet, but you already knew what you were doing. You knew there were some scary people out there who wanted to kill Americans. You had studied them. You spoke their language. You knew they were coming at us, which was more than ninety-nine percent of the people in the agency understood back then. And you had that journalism thing. Most people come to us from the Marines or the FBI or someplace like that, where they learn to take orders and conform to the culture. But you didn’t fit the pattern. You were a smart, rebellious kid who had studied Arabic in college and worked for Time magazine, of all things—and realized the goddamn house was on fire, and that you had to do something about it. That was what I liked about you. You understood what was going on. And you still do.”