Body of Lies

by David Ignatius

  “This is too expensive,” he said. “My manager will never approve this.”

  “Mr. Scanlon, please. With Al Fajr, you know you will get the best. That is why we have our good reputation. Because our work is high-quality. That is why you came to us. Yes?”

  “Listen, Omar, my friend. Of course we want the best, but we are not building a palace here. You have to understand, we are a bank, and we have to be careful about money or people won’t trust us. And as I said, I could never get this approved, even if I accepted it. It would be the most expensive Unibank branch in the world. We need to negotiate this down.”

  Sadiki nodded, and Ferris thought he had done the right thing. Of course the initial estimate was inflated. Life was a bazaar. If the Americans were stupid enough to pay too much, why stop them?

  “With any design, changes are always possible, sir. We could ask some of the subcontractors in Abu Dhabi to rebid their estimates. You gave us very little time, so the numbers are a little rough. What did you have in mind, when you were thinking about how much to spend for this project?”

  Ferris studied his white legal pad, punched some more numbers in his calculator. He was winging it, hoping Sadiki wouldn’t become suspicious. “The number I could get approved would be about twenty-five percent lower, I think.”

  “You don’t know too much about the construction business, I think, Mr. Scanlon.” Ferris moved uneasily in his chair. There was something in his tone that made him worry that Sadiki was on to his game.

  “What do you mean by that?” said Ferris sharply.

  The Jordanian immediately backed away. “Twenty-five percent is a big cut, Mr. Scanlon. You would have to sacrifice quality. I do not think you would be happy, at that price.”

  “Well, tell you what. You give me your best price. Come as close as you can to my twenty-five percent reduction. I won’t hold you to every penny, but try as hard as you can to make economies. If you can do that and get me a better number, I am sure we will end up happy.”

  Sadiki said he had to call Amman and talk to the general manager. He haggled with him in Arabic for a while, made some notations on the sheets of his bid estimate, then called a number in Abu Dhabi. In the midst of this second call, the muezzin’s call to prayer sounded from a nearby mosque and then echoed from a half dozen other mosques in West Beirut. Sadiki excused himself and went off to pray.

  When he returned, he looked refreshed. He was a believer, no question about that. He apologized for the delay and resumed his telephone calling. After badgering two subcontractors in the Emirates, he went back to his work sheets and a few minutes later he proposed a reduction in price that was about half what Ferris had requested. That was where Ferris had suspected they would end up when the process started, so he agreed, and proposed an additional meeting in two weeks, in Amman, to go over final estimates and construction plans. Meeting in Jordan would violate the operational rules he had established with Hoffman, but it would be just once, and he didn’t want to leave Alice any more than necessary.

  “There’s one more thing,” said Ferris, as they were about to shake hands on the deal. “While you’re in Beirut, I want you to meet our security consultant, Hussein Hanafi. He’s an unusual fellow. I think he used to be involved with the…well, you know, the extremists.” Now Hanafi did consulting for international companies, Ferris explained. He knew everything about firewalls, electronic funds transfer, Internet security. Because he would have to sign off on the final designs, it would be useful to get his recommendations now. Sadiki nodded and smiled. Nothing seemed to bother him.

  The consultant worked in the Fakhani district of West Beirut, long ago the headquarters of Yasser Arafat’s guerrilla fighters and in recent years an informal gathering point for Beirut’s small circle of Sunni fundamentalists. Sadiki seemed slightly uncomfortable as the driver took them deeper into the warren of alleyways—worried not for himself, but for his host. This was bandit country, not a place for an American like Mr. Brad Scanlon.

  When they reached Hanafi’s address, they saw a sign in the second-floor window for his business, “HH Global Solutions.” Sadiki took Ferris’s arm protectively and steered him toward the small office building and up the stairs. Who’s in charge here? Ferris wondered, but he let Sadiki take the lead. The office was brightly lit and recently painted; the furniture was new and clean. At a desk sat a woman in a headscarf. She buzzed the intercom as soon as they entered, and a beady-eyed Arab man with thick glasses emerged to greet them. He introduced himself as Hussein Hanafi and led them back to his inner office, which had several computers and a bookcase filled with technical manuals from Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec.

  Hanafi was a computer nerd; that much, at least, was no illusion. The Lebanese Deuxième Bureau had kept an eye on him ever since he returned from Afghanistan in 1998. He ran his little business and did some consulting for jihadist Web sites—which was how Sami Azhar learned about him. If he had any suspicions who he was really working for when Azhar recruited him into his string of covert service providers, he didn’t voice them. He was a valuable catch—a real face and name that people in the movement would recognize. Hoffman’s team had secretly wired the office, installing two tiny cameras and a microphone.

  Hanafi spoke to the architect in a mix of English and Arabic, banging through a list of computer-security issues that were relevant to the design of a new building. Ferris feigned difficulty in understanding, and after ten minutes he excused himself and said he would leave the two of them to figure out what was best for the Abu Dhabi project. After Ferris left in his car, Sadiki and Hanafi talked for another hour, occasionally laughing and joking. It turned out they even had a few friends in common. All the while the tape rolled and the digital cameras made their record.

  FERRIS HAD a new assistant in Amman named Ajit Singh. He was a small, lithe Indian-American, with burnished brown skin and a perpetual, opaque smile. In the manner of people his age, he liked to wear a baseball cap, sometimes backward, sometimes frontward, sometimes sideways. Azhar had sent him to Amman to help with technical details.

  Ajit was an interesting case: His father had made a good-sized fortune in Silicon Valley, initially by creating an inventory management program that he had sold to Wal-Mart, later by investing his money wisely in companies where his Indian engineer friends were working. Young Agit, fresh out of Stanford and heading for some fantastically lucrative career himself, had joined the agency as an act of vengeance. He had spent a family holiday in Kashmir after graduating from university. Six months later, several of his relatives were murdered by an Al Qaeda suicide bomber. After discussing the matter with his father, who was deeply patriotic in the way of successful immigrants, Ajit Singh applied to the CIA. Because of his unusual computer skills—even in his first months, he was one of the agency’s best hackers—he soon came to the attention of Azhar, who lured him into his brainy black hole.

  Ajit Singh could do anything with computers. He had a similar facility with languages, which were just another set of symbols to him, like a computer program. He had taught himself to read and write Arabic in the months after he made payback his life’s mission. Singh could create Web sites, manipulate Web sites, tag Web sites with special “cookies” so the intelligence community could track who went in and out. When he set up shop in Amman, Ferris gave him Francis Alderson’s old office, which was still empty. Singh filled it with servers, flat-screen displays, peripherals of various descriptions. The local NSA listening post had to send over a technical team to get him fully wired up.

  Singh had hung a little sign on his wall that said: “People Are Stupid.” That was the secret of his success. People were stupid enough to type their passwords into computers that had been rigged to monitor every keystroke; stupid enough to forget that when they visited a Web site, they picked up an electronic marker that accompanied them from site to site; stupid enough not to understand that when their computer was online, its hard drive was open for the picking; so stupid, in fact
, that they failed to realize that every laptop or cell phone with a Bluetooth connection was effectively a broadcasting antenna. Best of all, it was in the moments when people thought they were being clever and taking special precautions that they were likeliest to do the stupidest things of all.

  Singh’s job in Amman was to manage the electronic side of Ferris’s operation. He had gathered up all the names and addresses that had been picked up from Omar Sadiki’s hotel room in Abu Dhabi. He had taken the data on the hard drive of Sadiki’s computer and turned it inside out, looking for bits of information that could be manipulated and redirected. His colleagues wondered if he slept on the floor, because he always seemed to arrive before anyone else and still be there when they left. Occasionally, members of the station would see him in the cafeteria, listening to music on his iPod and eating french fries. But otherwise, he was a ghost.

  After Singh had been in Amman for about ten days, he asked Ferris for a meeting. He seemed quite excited, and Ferris was curious what he had cooked up. They met in Ferris’s office, late that afternoon.

  “I see the nodes,” announced Singh with an unusually big smile. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Hysterics,” advertising a New York punk band he liked, and a yellow bracelet that made a striking contrast with his dark skin.

  “Good man,” said Ferris. He had no idea what the young Indian was talking about.

  “The nodes,” Singh repeated. He looked disappointed at the possibility that Ferris might already understand what he was going to say. “I’ve found the nodes for this network you’re trying to penetrate. Or whatever you’re doing. Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. The point is, it’s all there. I’ve been working it over with Sami and his people back home, and we totally get it. Your nice architect Mr. Sadiki has visited a ton of jihadi Web sites. We’re inside the servers of about half the ones he has visited, so we know who else is using them. And we know which ones are just day-trippers and which ones are serious. So we have this picture of, like, his community. His virtual community, I mean. Isn’t that cool?”

  “Very cool. But I want you to focus on his fellowship group at the mosque, the Ikhwan Ihsan. Those are the links we have to start with. They’re airtight. He knows those people. They make the legend real.”

  “For sure. I’ve cross-tabbed the people in his group—and their brothers and first cousins—against my list of visitors to jihadi Web sites that we know have received and posted operational messages from Al Qaeda. We’re running their names and credit-card records against our algorithms back home. If they ever bought a souvenir in Karachi or made a call from a pay phone near a Salafi mosque in Birmingham, we’ll know. We have a real network here. Now we just have to light it up.”

  “Cool,” said Ferris again, with genuine appreciation. “But remember, we need to make Sadiki believable as a jihadi. Not just someone who visits Web sites, but someone who is planning and carrying out operations.”

  “Ye-aa-ah.” Singh drew out the word, as kids often did, as if to say, obviously. “So what I’m ready to do now is send messages from Sadiki to some of the people in that community, some of the nodes, who are real jihadis. I’ve created an account for him that he’ll never see. But I need help. What messages do you want me to send? You have to write them. I’m just the technician.”

  Ferris thought a moment. The messages had to be suggestive, but also vague. They had to imply that Sadiki had higher authority from someone, without being explicit. And they had to point toward the operational date he and Hoffman had set, which was December 22, just before the Christmas holidays.

  Ferris thought it over for perhaps 30 seconds, made some rough notes and then wrote out three short sentences in Arabic, which he read aloud to Singh: “The teacher has told me to prepare the lesson. We are looking now for the right place to preach. We send greetings to our brothers and ask for God’s help.”

  “Nice,” said Singh. “The teacher. The lesson. That works.”

  “We’re going to need a couple more, so everybody doesn’t get the same one. And we need some answers, to send the people who write back. Give me a while to think.” Singh put his earphones on and listened to music while Ferris doodled in Arabic.

  “Listen to this,” said Ferris several minutes later, tugging on the cord of Singh’s headphones to take him out of his rock-and-roll reverie. “In the name of God, we thank the brothers who have prepared the path for us. The feast day is coming. God is great.”

  “That totally works,” said Singh.

  Ferris labored for another hour writing messages and follow-ups. Singh took them away and began sending them out as e-mail messages from Sadiki to a dozen or so people they had selected from the virtual community of their virtual agent. To each, Singh attached a message in Arabic that said, “Dear brother, if we meet, you will forgive my silence.” That way, if anyone actually did query Sadiki directly—and heard him protest that he had sent no message—they would assume he was just covering his tracks.

  Singh waited for the electronic harvest. A few people didn’t respond at all. Others replied to what they thought was Sadiki’s e-mail account—with their messages instead going to Singh. He responded with the brief, tantalizing responses Ferris had written—which hinted at further details of the Christmas plot. Three of the recipients forwarded Sadiki’s original message to other e-mail addresses with curious comments that said, in effect: Is he ours? Is this real? That gave Azhar’s team more e-mail addresses and servers to monitor, and an electronic path that was moving them closer, byte by byte, to Suleiman.

  21

  AMMAN

  AJIT SINGH AMUSED HIMSELF with a new toy while Ferris prepared for his third meeting with Omar Sadiki. It had become something of a game within the intelligence community to build fake jihadist Web sites, but Singh thought most of them were useless. The graphics were too slick and the Islamist rhetoric over-enthusiastic. Sometimes the bogus sites would even suggest that new users “register” by providing useful data like their cell-phone numbers. Ajit wanted to build an Islamic portal that wasn’t so obvious—that would include militant Muslim material streamed amid lots of other tame stuff about love and life. “Think of it as a cross between Osama and Oprah,” he explained to Ferris. Ferris told Singh to go ahead, so long as it didn’t take much time. But the young man had already been working on the project for days and was, in fact, nearly ready with a “beta” version.

  The name Ajit had chosen was mySunna.com—the “right path” online, in Arabic and English. He built it like a commercial site, not too fancy, but with lots of useful features that would pull traffic. He included a pull-down electronic “Zakat Calculator,” for example, so that devout Muslims could calculate the proper tithe. They would type in their total assets, including cash, bank balances, stocks, investment property and gold and silver, and then hit “Calculate Zakat,” and, Y’Allah! For news with a Muslim tilt, he had RSS feeds from Khaleej Times in Qatar and the Dawn in Islamabad.

  Once Ajit got going, he couldn’t stop. He added a pull-down menu that invited visitors to enter a mySunna store. Inside “mysouk” were framed pictures of Osama, Zawahiri and Zarqawi; there were prayer rugs woven with bin Laden’s image. Another click away was “mymovies,” with a portfolio of videos shot by jihadist gangs across the Muslim world. The titles included Iraqi R.A.W. and Iraqi R.A.W.2, with amateur footage of fighters in Iraq setting off IEDs and firing mortars at U.S. bases. Another Iraq video was The Lions of Fallujah, taken from the insurgents’ side during U.S. attacks. For those wanting jihadist action on another front, Ajit offered compilations from Chechneya—Russian Hell, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. There were bin Laden tapes, too, as originally broadcast on Al Jazeera. A last offering was Riyadh Bombers, a chilling compilation of the video “last wills” of the men who carried out the May 2003 bomb attacks in the Saudi capital. Ajit didn’t bother filling orders—he forwarded traffic to other Islamic Web sites that were offering the same products.

  Ajit was proudest of his Islam
ic advice column. “Talk to mySunna.com—What’s haram and what’s not? Your intimate Islamic questions answered.” Users were invited to send in queries that would be answered online by a real sheik. He tried to make these as personal and tasteless as possible, to draw traffic. “Check it out!” said Ajit proudly when he gave Ferris a tour of the beta version. “This is going to pull some eyeballs!”

  ANAL INTERCOURSE:

  Question: Is a Muslim allowed to have anal sex? Answer: This act is strongly Makrooh (but not actually

  Haram). There is no objection to the couple getting pleasure from the entire body of one another. But it should be taken into consideration that some actions are beneath human dignity.

  Question: When a women is in her period, can she have anal intercourse?

  Answer: If wife is consenting to it, it is permissible. But it would be extremely abominable.

  HAND - SHAKING:

  Question: Is shaking hands with girls allowed?

  Answer: It is not permissible.

  MASTURBATION:

  Question: What about masturbation? Is it okay if there is no wife available?

  Answer: It is not permissible.

  Question: If the wife asks the man to masturbate in front of her, is it permissible?

  Answer: It is permissible, but it is preferable if the wife uses her hands, and not the man.

  MIRRORS: