“He flies to Islamabad from Paris. He goes to see the ISI, first thing. We assume the ISI is penetrated, so we’re sending the man in the Harry disguise. He briefs the Paks. But then Harry goes unilateral.”
“He goes to see his Al Qaeda contact in Waziristan.”
“Precisely. He and the base chief in Peshawar and a half dozen Special Forces guys go up into the mountains, supposedly to meet a Pashtu tribal guy named Azzam, who worked with Suleiman when he was in Afghanistan. We’ve been meeting with this guy Azzam for real, paid him some dough, trying to recruit him as an access agent. It hasn’t worked, but the bad guys don’t know that. And Harry is going to be carrying his message for Suleiman, addressed to ‘Raouf,’ which we know from intercepts is the code name Suleiman uses with his people. And the letter is…well, I’ll say it, because Sami wrote it. It is a work of art.”
Hoffman handed him a message, written in Arabic on paper that was so stiff it could only have come from America. Ferris read it aloud, translating it into English. “In the name of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him et cetera, I send you greetings, Raouf, via our good friend and brother Azzam. We ask your help in the matter of a renegade Jordanian brother whose photograph and dossier I am giving to Brother Azzam. We ask that you take appropriate measures, as in the past. Peace and blessings be upon you.”
“Let’s include this photograph.” Hoffman displayed a small picture of Omar Sadiki. Ferris handed the Raouf letter back to his boss, who attached the photo with a paper clip and put it in the metal briefcase, ready for Harry Meeker.
“He won’t bleed,” said Ferris. “You realize that, right? When Harry gets shot in this mountain village, he won’t bleed.”
“Of course he won’t bleed! He’s dead, for God’s sake. But he will ooze. He will seep. We’ve done tests. It will be fine.”
“Are we crazy?” said Ferris, half to himself.
“Maybe, but you know what? When Suleiman’s pals see all this stuff and begin trying to figure out what it all means, they are going to be even crazier. It eats away at people, not knowing what’s true and what isn’t. It makes them wonder whether they believe anything at all. It’s the great destroyer, doubt. It does the devil’s work for him.” Ferris nodded his assent. He tried not to think about the other ways in which Hoffman’s statement might be true.
29
WASHINGTON
THEY RAN HARRY MEEKER through a final checklist, as if they were firing a human cannonball. Azhar stood over the corpse with a clipboard, reading off items while members of the technical staff confirmed the answers, and then said, “Check!” The first concern was body temperature. They had brought Meeker up a few degrees in the last week, to the level at which he would be transported. The agency’s pathologist recommended a gradual process of increasing his body temperature so that it would reach the ambient air temperature a few hours before the body was discovered. They did various measurements with the surgical equivalent of a meat thermometer before Azhar announced, “Check!” and passed on.
They inventoried each pocket. Gum wrappers from London, Paris and Pakistan. (Hoffman had decided that Meeker should have chewing gum in his mouth when the body was found—a natural touch—and had designated Azhar to prechew it.) Some change: Two euros, a fat British two-pound piece and a handful of Pakistani rupees. Check! Then the wallet itself: the credit card receipts from the Exxon station on Route 123 and the laundry in McLean Center, the driver’s license and credit cards, the autographed picture of the imaginary girlfriend, “Denise,” the ticket stubs and matchbooks and condoms that added up to Meeker’s identity.
And then the cell phone: Azhar had already constructed his pastiche of “Received Calls” and “Dialed Numbers.” While they were doing the final review, he decided he wanted to add a string of three “Missed Calls” from Denise. If someone got curious and dialed the number that had made those missed calls, they would hear the breathy voice of a young woman saying, “Hey! This is Denise. Leave me a message or whatever.”
And finally, Harry’s clothes: He had a warm overcoat now; the body would be discovered in the tribal areas between Peshawar and the Afghani border in late December. They had bought a parka with a fleece lining from Lands’ End, and that seemed right—except that it looked too new, even after a half dozen dry cleanings. So Hoffman put out a group e-mail message for Mincemeat Park that said “Clothing Drive” asking for a used size 44 regular men’s outdoor coat, preferably fleece-lined. Two jackets came back: One looked newer than the one they already had; the other was shiny with wear, with a small tear on the sleeve and a lining that was matted from perspiration. Hoffman pronounced it perfect. The wool trousers still worked, and so did the white shirt, and the trekking shoes. During the last check, before they were going to load Harry Meeker into the refrigerated container for his last trip, Hoffman noticed a crease in the trousers.
“Jesus Christ!” he shouted. “Who tramps around the Back of Beyond with a goddamn crease in his trousers? What is wrong with you people?” Azhar, who was prepared for anything, had a steam iron and quickly removed the creases from Harry’s pants.
FROM THE OPERATIONS room at Mincemeat Park, Hoffman and his team were able to follow Harry Meeker’s progress. They monitored the plane’s landing in London, Paris and, finally, Islamabad. While Harry stayed in his box, a real case officer from NE Division in disguise left the plane at each stop and went to the local CIA station and from there to the offices of the friendly services, where he briefed officials on the latest in the Incirlik bombing. A short item appeared in Le Figaro the day after the Paris visit, reporting that the United States had new information about Incirlik implicating a breakaway Jordanian cell of Al Qaeda.
When the plane landed in Islamabad, the Harry decoy visited the Inter-Services Intelligence headquarters and traveled that night to Peshawar. He would return the next day to Islamabad and then, by a string of commercial flights, fly back to Washington. Harry himself—the “real” Harry, on ice—went to Peshawar overnight, stowed in the back of a truck.
Alex Smite, the Peshawar base chief, met the truck. He knew what was coming, but still, when he got his first look at the body, he called back to Hoffman. “You’re sure the director has signed off on this?”
“Relax. It’s going to work, and all the paperwork has been filed,” Hoffman said. He couldn’t blame his man in Islamabad: Life at the agency was about second-guessing.
The corpse was transferred to Smite’s Land Rover, a soft-skinned vehicle with darkened windows. The corpse was propped in the right-hand back seat, the place of honor for the visiting guest. A tight seat belt held the body firm. Hoffman called on the encrypted phone, asking for a check on the body temperature. Smite used an actual meat thermometer, which left a hole but was all he could find. The body was about right. It would approach air temperature of thirty-five degrees in about twelve hours. Another twelve hours after that and the body would begin to decompose. But by then Harry would be “dead.” Or, to be more precise, his dead body would be full of bullet holes and sprawled on the back seat of the Land Rover.
SMITE MET his Special Forces team in the hills outside Peshawar, at a camp that had been used the last several years as a basing point for mostly fruitless efforts to capture top Al Qaeda officials. He didn’t care if the rendezvous was under surveillance. Hell, he wanted to be seen. They formed up a little three-car convoy; there was an armored SUV riding ahead of the Land Rover, and one to the rear. Each SUV carried four heavily armed men from SOCOMM. For the first fifty miles, a Pakistani army escort accompanied the vehicles. But the outriders withdrew when they entered the badlands, and the Americans continued on alone toward Kosa, a village just south of Mingaora in the Northwest Frontier regions. One of Smite’s Pashtu agents had radioed ahead to Kosa to advise Azzam that American visitors would be coming.
The arrival in Kosa was carefully choreographed. Ferris watched much of it in real time, thanks to imagery from a reconnaissance satellite overhead. As the con
voy neared Azzam’s house, gun barrels protruded from the windows of the two SUVs. That was standard procedure in these areas—enough force to intimidate, but not so much that it provoked hostile fire. What wasn’t visible from the overhead camera, or to the Pashtu men on the ground, were the four other Special Forces officers who had been hiding in the mountains and had slipped into town that morning.
When Smite arrived at Azzam’s house, he followed the same routine as on his last visit to the village four months before. He waited in the Land Rover while a village boy fetched Azzam, and the Pashtu emerged after several minutes with his bodyguards. Smite stepped down from the Land Rover and beckoned for Azzam to join him, and the tribal leader came, just as he had previously. He wanted his money.
“Easy, baby, easy,” said Hoffman as he watched the image on a monitor and listened to the sound transmissions. It was like sitting in a tree over the village, peering down on the action.
Smite spoke to Azzam in Urdu, loud enough to be heard by the tribal leader’s men, standing twenty yards away. He said he had a special visitor from Washington who wanted to speak to him privately. He had come a long distance to meet the great leader of Kosa and to bring him greetings.
Azzam walked slowly and ceremoniously toward the car. You could imagine him thinking: Why not take the money of these fools from America? Smite held the door for the tribal leader to climb into the back seat of the Land Rover. When Azzam was seated, Smite triggered an electronic lock that prevented anyone inside the vehicle from opening the doors. Then he walked calmly toward the lead SUV and got inside.
When Azzam saw Harry Meeker’s body propped up in the back seat, he must have sensed something was wrong, but it took a few moments to register. Perhaps he was avoiding eye contact, being deferential in the manner of the East to a visitor who was going to give him money. Or perhaps they had done such a good job with the disguise that Azzam just waited for the man in the parka to say something. After about five seconds, it registered: A piercing scream was audible on the circuit transmitting from the Land Rover back to Langley. By then it was too late. Azzam couldn’t get out.
The Special Forces team heard the scream through their earphones. At that signal, their commander shouted to Azzam’s chief bodyguard to put down his weapon. The Pashtu shouted back, and weapons were raised around the clearing. Armed standoffs happened all the time in the frontier areas, and usually the tension was defused with some more shouting and, occasionally, warning shots fired in the air. But this time there was a sudden rip of automatic weapons fire, and two of the Pashtu guards fell to the ground. The other guards opened up on the SUVs, but their small-caliber AK-47 rounds couldn’t penetrate the armored skin. As the barrage increased, the thin-skinned Land Rover was pierced with bullets, and then raked stem to stern. To the Pashtus, it felt like a ferocious battle, but it was a setup.
Azzam’s men couldn’t have known that the initial volley of fire had come from the second Special Forces team behind the SUVs. The hidden Americans had kept the bodyguards in their sights the whole time. One of them carried an AK-47; he concentrated his fire on the Land Rover, spraying a few shots on Harry Meeker’s side of the vehicle to make sure he would be hit, too. Azzam’s body bounced wildly inside the Land Rover as the bullets tore through him. That was also part of the plan. They wanted Azzam dead, so that the documents in Harry Meeker’s briefcase would be the only explanation for what had happened. Harry’s body didn’t bounce, and it didn’t bleed much. But it did ooze.
Smite and the two SUVs retreated under fire back to the main road; the hidden team quickly pulled back into the hills, where their own vehicles were waiting. On the way out, they left behind a battlefield souvenir: an American body, flown out of Afghanistan a few days earlier. The local boys would feel better if they thought they had killed an American soldier in the exchange. Another body would reduce the likelihood that anyone who analyzed the events later would doubt their authenticity.
Smite and his two SUVs roared out of town. Helicopter gunships arrived several hours later, in what seemed a mission to evacuate the American body from the Land Rover—and any sensitive papers he might have had with him. They landed in the village clearing, established a perimeter around the Land Rover and searched the car for twenty minutes. But by that time Harry Meeker was gone. The body and the briefcase had been carried into the mountains by Al Qaeda men, as Hoffman knew they would be. In a few hours, one of the organization’s trusted lieutenants would be breaking open the metal briefcase and trying to make sense of its contents. And then they would begin to wonder.
Wire service reports later that day confirmed the ambush of U.S forces and said that an American soldier had been killed. No mention was made of a second American, in civilian clothes, who had been gunned down in his car while meeting with a local tribal leader in the outer circles of Al Qaeda. But no broadcast was needed for that report. By that night, Azzam’s meeting with the American was the talk of every village in the border region, and it was openly whispered that Azzam must have been working for the CIA. The hook was in.
HOFFMAN KNEW it was working. They picked up the chatter on cell phones and Internet links. Suleiman’s men were struggling to make sense of what they had found, but they were too junior to make decisions. The senior operational leaders in Al Qaeda would have to decide what to do. ISI captured a courier heading to Karachi. The message was an urgent call for a council, a meeting of the ulema, about a matter so serious it might require a decision by the khalifa himself. The NSA began to pick up voices it hadn’t heard in several years. The members of the network had been forced to break their usual operational security. The worst thing that could happen was happening to them.
Luck is the residue of good planning. Hoffman had done plenty of the latter, and he began to get a bit more of the former. The voiceprint of an NSA intercept from a cell phone in Vienna showed a voice that resembled one on the agency’s highest-priority watch list. There was static on the line, but careful technical examination showed that it was the voice of a Syrian-born operative from Hama, Karim al-Shams, who had taken the operational name Suleiman. The master planner was surfacing. The meaning of the call was hard to understand because it was spoken in a private code, but he talked about the martyrdom of Hussein, who was tricked into his death by jealous rivals. Hoffman’s analysts thought they understood the essence of what Suleiman was saying: He had been the victim of a trick.
With the NSA’s help, the Austrian police were given the likely radius from which the cell-phone call had been made. They cordoned off the neighborhood that night and raided a half dozen apartment buildings. Just before dawn they found the phone, but the man who had been using it evidently had fled.
FERRIS WANTED to get back to Amman for New Year’s Eve with Alice, but Hoffman asked him to stay another day. He wanted a celebration. The problem was that the revelers, who knew the secret, were all part of Mincemeat Park. The very fact they worked together was a secret. So Hoffman decided to bring New Year’s Eve in to them. He smuggled booze and food into the office. He designated bartenders from among the analysts, and for DJ, he picked a case officer who had always dreamed of being a hip-hop singer. Ferris tried to lose himself in the drink and the music. He even danced with a drunken young woman who worked for Azhar, who slid up and down against his body as if he were the pole in a strip joint.
But Ferris wasn’t really there. He felt wasted, now that the operation was over. Whatever would happen now Ferris couldn’t control, couldn’t even see. The only thing that filled that void was the thought of Alice. He had sometimes wondered, in the years he was with Gretchen, what it felt like to be in love. Now he knew. It came to him that this New Year’s Eve he needed to make a resolution. He looked for Hoffman, thinking he should say something to him, but he had disappeared.
Ferris had spoken with Alice earlier in the day, as she was getting ready to go to a party at the Four Seasons with some Jordanian friends. She hadn’t tried to make him feel guilty for not being there
. She had passed beyond that, into a silent space. Ferris had called her cell phone at midnight Amman time, but she hadn’t answered, and it had upset him not to be able to say her name as the year turned and to kiss her by telephone, at least. He had left a message; his cell phone didn’t work inside Headquarters, so he couldn’t tell if she had tried to return the call.
Ferris left the New Year’s revelers and walked to an empty office and dialed Alice’s number. Even with the door closed, you could hear the thump-thump of the amplifier. Alice answered on the third ring. She sounded sleepy, a little groggy, even, as if she had taken a sleeping pill.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Ferris said. “I’ve made a New Year’s resolution.”
“What?” she answered. It was obvious she wasn’t really awake.
“I’m ready.”
“What?”
“I’m ready for us to be together. The rest doesn’t matter.”
“Everything matters. When are you coming home?” Her voice was faraway; she sounded almost lost.
“Tomorrow,” said Ferris. “I’ll fly back New Year’s Day and be there late on the second. I’ll make you dinner. I’ll love you. I’ll give you what you wanted.”
“That’s nice.” She was waking up now. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you the truth. I won’t live any more lies. I don’t have to anymore. That’s over.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds sweet.”
“That’s okay,” said Ferris. “I know what I’m talking about.”
FERRIS STAYED in the empty office for a while, thinking about Alice and about what he would do in the New Year, if he was serious about his resolution. He would tell her everything. That meant he would have to resign from the agency. There was no other way. It was getting near midnight when Hoffman banged on the door. He was carrying a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
Body of Lies Page 26