The Company We Keep

by Robert Baer

  My mentor in all this is Jacob. The first time I worked with him and he saw me in a pair of white Keds, he shook his head as if to say, “Absolutely not.” He pointed at my feet. “Only Americans wear white tennis shoes,” he said. “It’s black, brown, or nothing.”

  He took me shopping that very day, picking out a cheap European-cut black leather coat that would fit in anywhere in the world. In Vienna he helped me find a black wool woman’s bowler with a bow, and a long brown wool bouclé coat. I laughed at it at first. Back home, it would look like I’d shopped at a costume store. But in Vienna I can stand at a tram stop on the fashionable Ringstrasse for hours on end and no one notices me. It took me a couple of months under Jacob’s tutelage to go from posing in Paris as a chic parisienne shopping in Galeries Lafayette to mastering the art of dressing German Gothic, making it look as if I had nothing better to do than hang out in front of Frankfurt’s Bahnhof, the train station.

  Another discipline we learn is living for a long time in a hotel and going unnoticed by management. You can count on the staff of any hotel in Europe reporting to the police. It’s all pretty much common sense. No parties, one person to a room, no equipment left around for the maids to find. And of course nothing with your true name on it. That comes down to no calls home, no letters, postcards, or e-mail, nothing that could in any way link your alias with your true name. There’s no diagonal parking in parallel lives.

  At one point Langley considers telling the Greeks about the 17N house, but just as quickly changes its mind. There’s a real risk 17N has sympathizers inside the police. That leaves us to do everything ourselves, from identifying who lives there to finding out what’s going on inside.

  One thing I learned early on about intelligence is that it’s not so much connecting the dots as it is deciding what’s a dot and what isn’t one. The case in point is that we’re still not sure the house really does belong to November 17. It could just as easily be a bad lead. Until we nail that down, the fertilizer could mean anything. For all we know, someone in the house owns a farm and is just storing it here.

  That’s the first hurdle. The second is that there’s no place to park a van without attracting someone’s attention. There isn’t an apartment for rent anywhere on the street, or even a café for one of us to hang out in. We’re reduced to walking by the house, noting new details, but this gets us only so far.

  It turns out the house is actually a building containing several apartments around an interior courtyard, but there is no panel outside to tell us who lives where. And what did happen to the fertilizer? It doesn’t look like there’s a storage area anywhere.

  One morning I find Jacob working on a small cargo box, the kind that sits over the back wheel of a bike or a motorcycle. He’s making a pin-sized hole in it. When I ask him what it’s for, he says for a video camera to put on a motorbike. When I ask him what happens if someone steals the box, he says we’ll chain it to the motorbike. And if they steal the motorbike? We’ll chain that to a pole.

  That afternoon I go out with Jacob to rent a 65-cc Suzuki, common as dirt in Athens. It’s beat up, the gas tank caved in on one side and handlebars rusted. The glass on the headlight is cracked. This is the last motorbike anyone would ever steal.

  We stand in our backyard and admire the dirty, dented bike now fitted with a camera.

  “So who rides it in?” I ask.

  “You ride, right?”

  Sort of. When I was fifteen my dad and my brother both had dirt bikes, and I often tagged along on their trips to a dry lake bed near our house. When they got tired they’d let me ride around. It’s not going to give me a mastery of Athens traffic, but it’s a start.

  The next day Jacob coaches me, riding the bike in the alley behind our apartment. When I’m more comfortable, I venture out into the street and drive around the block three or four times.

  The next morning I push the bike to the street, put on my helmet, and tuck my hair up inside. I look like any other Athenian on her way to work. And when I hit traffic three blocks away, I start to drive like one too, weaving through traffic to be the first at the signal.

  When I turn onto the 17N house’s street, I deliberately take the sidewalk to get around traffic. Anyone following close on me would have to do the same thing—and I would see them. I park in front of the house, chain the bike to a lamp pole, and walk away. I stop two blocks away at a café for a cappuccino and then make three other stops to make sure I’m clean. Finally I go look for Jacob, who’s waiting on a corner in a car.

  I do the same thing for a week, every evening picking the bike up and riding it to an underground parking garage where we keep it at night. Jacob pulls out the film, and late that night I hand it off to Tom, who then takes it to the embassy.

  To this day I have no idea whether anything Jacob and I did, any of our film, any of our surveillance, helped bring down 17N a decade later, in 2002. The people in the Koukaki house might well have been innocent. Not knowing is pretty much par for the course. A guy I worked with tracked Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist, in Khartoum for weeks. One day they called him in and simply told him it was time to leave the Sudan. No one said why. Not until weeks later did he read about Carlos’s arrest and realize he had helped pave the way, providing information about his car and his house.

  In my job you soon get used to living with little pieces of the truth. Spying is like keeping a giant accounting ledger. You collect a fact at a time, a name at a time, tiny pieces of insight. Collect enough of them, collate them, and you might end up with a big payoff, or with nothing. Meanwhile, you live on the faith that Washington knows what it’s doing.

  NINE

  When Tajikistan was part of the Soviet Union, the republic’s Committee for State Security (KGB) was an integral part of the Soviet-wide KGB. Neither the administration nor the majority of personnel were Tajik. When Tajikistan became independent, the organization was renamed the Committee of National Security, and a Tajik, Alimjon Solehboyev, was put in charge. In 1995 the committee received full cabinet status as the Ministry of Security.

  —The Library of Congress Country Studies

  Dushanbe, Tajikistan: BOB

  A few months after I get back from Moscow I run into a Russian walking out of the American embassy. He introduces himself as Yuri. With thick folds under his eyes and a slight, gun-dog physique, he looks more Chinese than Russian. His English is cultivated, peppered with distinct Americanisms. We talk for a while about the civil war in Afghanistan. As we say good-bye, he invites me to drop by his place.

  As soon as he’s away, I stick my head into the political officer’s office. “Who’s that?”

  “Yuri. He’s KGB. He’s my contact, so let it go.”

  Three days later in the evening I knock at Yuri’s apartment door. Yuri is in the back, changing out of his suit, but his wife insists I stay. I sit on the sofa waiting for Yuri, watching her set a place for me at the table.

  Yuri comes out in loose-fitting pants, a T-shirt, and a traditional chopan—a stiff, tube-shaped embroidered robe. As he pours me a cup of unsweetened green tea, I ask him about some reports of recent fighting in the Garm Valley, less than fifty miles from Dushanbe. He laughs, shaking his head. “Where do these stupid rumors start?”

  Over dinner we talk family, schools, weather. His two teenage daughters both speak fluent English, and Yuri has to hold them back from overwhelming me with questions about the United States. Both of them want to go to college there.

  I sense Yuri’s reluctance to talk about local politics, and I don’t press him. That can come later. But as I’m ready to leave, I can’t resist asking if it’s wise to drive up to the Garm.

  “Definitely not.”

  “So there is fighting.”

  “I worry about the criminal gangs there.”

  This is a typical Soviet non-answer answer, and we both know it. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the official explanation for every problem was that “criminal elements” were behind it r
ather than people with genuine political grievances.

  “Where’s it safe?” I ask, still hoping to elicit at least something from Yuri.

  “I’ll tell you what. You and I’ll take a trip outside the city sometime.”

  Two days later Yuri and his driver pull up in front of the Oktyabrskaya to collect me. As I climb in the backseat, I see a Kalashnikov assault rifle on the floor beneath Yuri’s feet. He follows my gaze. “Don’t worry. We’re going someplace safe.”

  Instead of the main road out of town through the Hissar Valley, the driver takes the backstreets north of town, through a neighborhood of stale yellow houses and poplar trees. People are starting to close up their metal shutters against the night and the criminals. There’s a murder almost every night in Dushanbe.

  Yuri half turns in his seat. “We’ll have a pleasant dinner. Just friends.” He reaches across the seat with an open pack of cigarettes. I decline, and he lights a cigarette for himself and the driver.

  By the time we find our way back to the main road, it’s dark. There’s almost no traffic. Just outside town we come to the first roadblock. The driver slows, pulls a pistol out of his belt, points it at the side of the door, covering it with his jacket. He shows his KGB ID to the soldier, and we’re allowed to continue.

  Forty miles west of Dushanbe we come to a small village without lights. Shadows move between the houses. Yuri and I get out. He points into the sky, and only then do I see it—a monstrous smokestack attached to a giant factory encased in steel scaffolding.

  “It’s our aluminum factory,” Yuri says.

  I realize where we are: Tursunzade, the fourth largest aluminum plant in the world. I’ve never seen it in the dark. Closed for the last two years, it’s now just a carcass.

  I follow Yuri around the factory until we come to a run of stairs down to a sublevel. Scaffolding above drips water. Yuri opens a door that lets us into the guts of the factory. I can barely see Yuri in front of me as he feels his way down a pitch-black corridor until he comes to a padded door, which opens into a room lighted by smoky kerosene lanterns.

  There’s old rattan furniture and a pool table, and what looks like a raised dance floor. The walls are covered in varnished papier-mâché fishes, mermaids, and seaweed. At the far end is a black pool. I walk over to look at it. Scum and a patch of some sort of oil cover the surface. It’s too dark to see how deep the pool extends.

  Yuri pours us vodka in shot glasses, and we down them. “I told you,” he says. “No one will bother us here.” We sit down at a table that has been set for dinner. The driver comes in with an armful of more vodka bottles, fills a large tumbler for himself, and throws his head back, finishing it.

  “You want to know about Tajikistan?” Yuri says. “Here there are no issues. Only ambitions. You people see sides, secularists against Islamic fundamentalists, Communists against capitalists. But you are people who live somewhere else and don’t know.”

  This almost sounds rehearsed. I don’t say anything, and Yuri pours us another vodka. A man I haven’t seen before comes in with a platter of pilaf, rice cooked in cottonseed oil, and pieces of grizzled lamb. Yuri pours us more vodka. I decide I need to start asking him questions before this stuff hits me.

  “What do the Kulyabis want?” I ask. The fortunes of Tajikistan’s charismatic clan are critical because if they fail, the country collapses, throwing it wide open to Islamic fundamentalism.

  “Why do you care about Kulyabis? They’re trash. They’re destroying this country.”

  “You have to wonder if they’re going to hold together through all of this.”

  Yuri turns to his driver. “Would you find someone to get the sauna ready?”

  I’ve lost track of what toast we’re on, but I can hear my words starting to slur. I get up for a walk. “Wanna get some fresh air, a walk outside?” I say. “Let’s take a swim,” Yuri counteroffers. Drunk as I am, I tell him no. Not in a pool I can’t see the bottom of. We compromise on the sauna, and change in the dressing rooms into bathing suits.

  The sauna’s a bagel oven, sucking the air out of my lungs. But rather than sobering me up, it makes me sick. The room spins, and I hold on to the bench. It doesn’t help that Yuri looks sick too. I’m thinking about getting up and leaving when a man I haven’t seen before opens the door and dumps a pitcher of a yellow liquid on the rocks. Billowing clouds of steam engulf us. It takes a second for me to realize it’s stale beer.

  I jump up like the sauna’s caught fire, push out the door, and jump into the pool. Thank God it’s icy cold.

  After our dinner at the aluminum factory, I see Yuri every couple of days. But his diffidence doesn’t wear off, and I’m no closer to finding out what makes him tick, or getting him to answer my questions about Kulyab. He’s seemingly unaffected by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the violence in Tajikistan, the empty markets. I know his KGB salary is small, and getting smaller with inflation. He’s told me his friends in Moscow send him the necessities he can’t find here. But can that be enough? He would like to send his daughters to school in Moscow.

  A lot of spooks believe betrayal isn’t bought and sold. People are led to it for reasons more complicated than money. They may be driven by revenge, or may be psychologically flawed or just stupid. Money is only an afterthought or the justification for what they do. Yes, there are operatives who will tell you they can talk the silver off a mirror, recruit someone with a smile and a few bucks, but I’m not one of them. Anyhow, every important mole I’ve ever known about was a volunteer. They’ve rolled the idea of betrayal around in their minds long before they’ve met their first operative. They’re only waiting for the opportunity to spill their guts.

  My problem with Yuri is that I can’t detect the slightest inclination that he’s prepared to betray his country. He doesn’t express the kind of systemic doubt that would give me something to grab hold of. This leaves me with the default position, the one I don’t have a lot of confidence in: find Yuri’s price.

  At our meetings I try to get him to talk about money, how the collapse of his world affected him. I tell him it has to hurt. As a KGB officer he was at the top of the nomenklatura, the Soviet Union’s elite, with all the money he needed. Then one day he finds himself a poor civil servant, surely an incomprehensible fall. But Yuri only laughs at my questions.

  I decide my best chance to close the distance between Yuri and me is to get him out of Tajikistan, give him a chance to let his hair down away from his KGB comrades. I cable headquarters to arrange an all-expenses-paid trip for him to the United States.

  TEN

  Super sleek, slick and cosmopolitan, Geneva is a rare breed of city. It’s one of Europe’s priciest. Its people chatter in every language under the sun and it’s constantly thought of as the Swiss capital—which it isn’t. This gem of a city superbly strung around the sparkling shores of Europe’s largest Alpine lake is, in fact, only Switzerland’s third-largest city.

  —www.lonelyplanet.com/switzerland/geneva

  Geneva, Switzerland: DAYNA

  In the van’s rearview mirror, I watch a woman come down the sidewalk. She’s in a cream linen pantsuit and crocodile mid-heeled sandals. She’s accompanied by a black Labrador retriever on a retractable leash. When the two come to the Hilton grounds, she gives the dog slack, and it bounds over a low hedge and onto the lawn. After a couple minutes the woman tugs the leash, the dog jumps back across the hedge, and they continue down the street. Who walks her dog in a cream linen pantsuit at seven in the morning? I wonder how it is the Swiss are so put together.

  I’ve been sitting in this van every morning for a week now. The shops all open precisely at eight-thirty, not a minute before or after. Unerringly, the owners come out with a bucket of soapy water and a stiff broom to wash the sidewalk. They follow it by a quick polishing of the window, and then a stepping back to check the window displays.

  Swiss orderliness would just be a curiosity, but it’s a bane for anything we try to do here. A couple
of months ago we put a concealed camera in the suit pocket of a man’s jacket hanging in a car. It worked fine parked in a two-hour zone for a couple of days. But then one day we were thirty minutes late getting back to feed the meter, only to find the car had been towed. A 200 Swiss franc fine later we had our car back. The police didn’t find the camera, but we learned our lesson about the Swiss.

  It’s hotter and more humid today than it was yesterday, a soupy haze rising off the lake. You can’t even see the mountains. I never guessed it could get so muggy in Geneva. Every other time I’ve worked here, it was either fall or winter, when the place can really turn on the charm. There’s that cosmopolitan allure combined with the feel of a small town on a beautiful lake.

  Frankly, the tediousness of the job is starting to get to me—moving the van from parking place to parking place, sitting and watching. It doesn’t help that I’ve yet to see the Russian mobster we’re supposed to be on. Our inside officer assures us he’s in Geneva, working out of an office at 14 chemin du Petit-Sacconex. But I’m starting to question whether he really exists. The only thing I can think is that if the Russian leaves his office, he’s doing it in the middle of the night after we stop watching him. We’ve thought of testing that hypothesis, but the Genevois police would notice someone sitting in a van at night when most people are off the street.

  I get to drive the van for the same reason I got the motorbike in Athens: girls are less threatening. They can sit in a car all day, adjusting their makeup, exploring their purses, fiddling with the radio, and no one thinks twice about it. Alan, an ex-Marine from Texas, was going to spot me this morning, but showed up in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops. Jacob sent Alan back to the OP, the observation post, because the way he was dressed, he wasn’t about to go unnoticed. So Alan gets to spend the day in an air-conditioned suite on the seventh floor of the Hilton. Not that he’s doing anything a whole lot more interesting than watching the street through a pair of binoculars.