The Persian Gamble

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  Clarke cut him off and turned to Defense Secretary Foster. “Is that possible?”

  “Time-consuming, expensive, politically risky—the list goes on, Mr. President—but yes, it’s possible,” Foster replied. “Then again, what if the North Koreans have already transferred the warheads to ships flagged by other countries or are unloading them at a port somewhere in Asia and preparing to move them by air? If that’s the case, we’ll be spending time and political capital for nothing.”

  “What if we impose a blockade on Iran?” the president asked. “You know, shut everything down by air, sea, and land—inspect every ship, every plane, every truck.”

  “Well, sir, that would be a logistical nightmare,” Foster protested. “But more important, a blockade is an act of war.”

  “Then call it a quarantine,” Clarke said. “Call it whatever you want. Kennedy did it with Cuba in ’62. He didn’t worry about what he called it. He just made it happen, and it’s a good thing he did.”

  General Evans now stepped in.

  “He did, Mr. President, but that was an island—just forty-two thousand square miles and change, and just ninety miles off the coast of Florida. The Islamic Republic of Iran is, what, about six hundred thousand square miles and half a world away?”

  “Enough excuses,” the president demanded. “Tell me what we’re going to do to stop the Iranians from getting these weapons.”

  “Sir, we’re doing everything we can,” Evans said calmly. “We’ll brief you again in another few hours, and hopefully we’ll have something by then.”

  McDermott watched Clarke’s left hand ball up into a fist. The man was a volcano, roiling and about to blow. McDermott stiffened and braced for impact. And then the president asked two questions McDermott had not expected.

  “Where’s Ryker? What’s he doing to help us?”

  The professional staff assigned to the Senate Intelligence Committee worked out of offices located on the second floor of the Hart Building on Capitol Hill.

  Normally, the place would be nearly empty and certainly quiet at 4:31 on a Saturday morning. But not today. Every staff member was in his or her office or cubicle, fielding calls from senators spread out all over the country asking for the latest updates. The networks were still running the story of a U.S. Navy raid on North Korean and Indonesian ships in international waters off the southern coast of Japan. The Pentagon wasn’t commenting. Nor was the White House. But committee members were demanding answers.

  “Miss Stewart, sorry to disturb,” said one of the young military officers on the overnight shift after knocking on her door. “You have an urgent call in the SCIF.”

  Annie Stewart looked up from the piles of classified cables she’d been poring over and the boxes of half-eaten Chinese food taking up the rest of the space on her small desk. She was surprised to see the officer and doubly surprised by the summons to come to the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, especially at this hour. She’d already spoken twice to her boss, Senator Robert Dayton, who had called from his home in Des Moines. It couldn’t be him, and he wouldn’t be calling into the SCIF anyway.

  Locking her sensitive papers in her safe and leaving her mobile phone behind since she wasn’t permitted to bring it into the SCIF, Stewart followed the officer down the hallway. When they got to the vault-like door, Stewart typed her personal code into the keypad, waited for the LED lights to go green, and then entered the small, drab room as the officer shut and locked the door behind her.

  “This is Annie Stewart,” she said after putting on the headset and taking the system off mute. “With whom am I speaking?”

  “Annie, this is Marcus Ryker.”

  Stewart was stunned to hear his voice. The last time she’d seen him was when she had accompanied the senator to Marcus’s bedside at Walter Reed across the Potomac River in Bethesda. What in the world was he doing calling her and in the most secure fashion imaginable?

  “Marcus,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “Are you okay?”

  He ignored the question. “I need to tell you something, but it’s highly classified and for the moment you can’t tell anyone.”

  “Not even the senator?”

  “No,” Marcus said. “Let me explain.”

  Annie Stewart held one of the highest security clearances in the U.S. government and served as a senior foreign policy and intelligence advisor to the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She doubted Marcus could tell her anything she didn’t already know. She was wrong.

  Marcus proceeded to give her a fairly detailed version of the week’s events. For starters, he had not actually been ill. That was a cover story to throw off the Russians. He had been forced by the president into working for the Central Intelligence Agency and was currently deployed thirteen time zones ahead of her, in the East China Sea, with a team of Navy SEALs. In the last few minutes, he had come across intelligence that might possibly help locate Alireza al-Zanjani, but he was having trouble getting through to the president and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Annie, I’m calling you because, to be honest, I don’t know who else to ask,” he said. “And I need a favor.”

  “Whatever you need,” she replied. “You know you can trust me.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s . . .”

  “It’s what?”

  “It’s a pretty big favor.”

  “You need to get this intel about al-Zanjani directly to the president,” Stewart said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And you want me to call the president.”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “You want me to call Senator Dayton, so he’ll call the president.”

  “No, not that either.”

  “Then what?”

  “You speak Russian, right?”

  “Yes. What do you need, Marcus? Just tell me. I’ll do it.”

  “All right, Annie, here’s the thing—I need you to call Alireza al-Zanjani.”

  80

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Annie Stewart took an Uber back to her town house.

  This was not a call she could make from a Senate office building.

  In fact, the more she thought about it, this was a call that could very well cost her not only her security clearance but her job and perhaps even her government pension. Marcus was asking her to call a man listed first both on the FBI’s most wanted list and on the State Department’s watch list of foreign terrorists. Could she really do it? Was it worth it? What if she did, and al-Zanjani didn’t answer? She would almost certainly still be visited by federal agents. There was even a possibility, though she considered it remote, that she could be convicted of a federal crime and spend time in prison. At the minimum, she could assure herself of weeks of intense interrogations.

  As she stepped out of the car, walked up her rain-drenched steps, and unlocked her front door, Stewart made two decisions. The first was that if she made the call, she would not be doing it for Ryker. Second, if she made the call, she would do so only because she believed it was the right thing to do. She would do so because she believed it could help her country stop what was easily the most serious threat to U.S. national security in her lifetime.

  She locked her front door behind her, threw her keys on the kitchen counter, switched on some lights, and ran upstairs to open the wall safe she kept in the linen closet in the second-floor hallway. Behind a 9mm Glock, several boxes of ammunition, a stash of cash, her passport, and several folders of important papers was a brand-new satellite phone she had bought a year or so earlier in case of emergency. It was still in its original box, unused. She pulled it out, skimmed the directions, and powered it up. This was it. She was about to cross the point of no return.

  She pulled out the piece of notepaper upon which she’d scribbled down the three numbers and dialed. The first call went to al-Zanjani’s mobile number. As she’d anticipated, it went directly to voice mail. Not s
peaking Farsi, she could not understand what the message was and hung up after she heard the beep.

  The second number was for the first of the two satellite accounts Marcus had given her. This, too, went to voice mail after a similar message in Farsi.

  Annie Stewart’s hands trembled as she prepared to dial the last number. There was no reason to hesitate, and yet she did. It was 5:33 in the morning. She figured she had less than fifteen minutes before her entire street was awakened by more sirens and flashing lights than most of her neighbors had ever seen.

  The question was whether the NSA and CIA had al-Zanjani’s mobile and satellite numbers flagged in their databases. Marcus’s operating theory was that there was a chance they didn’t. The Kremlin had the numbers because they were allies with Tehran and had been hosting the senior leadership of the IRGC in Moscow. Oleg Kraskin had them because until just recently, he had been a senior advisor to the Russian president. Marcus now had them because he had successfully spirited Oleg Kraskin and all of his computer files out of Russia. Yes, Langley had the same memos that Oleg had read to Marcus over the phone. But had they read them all? Had they processed their significance? If so, alarm bells would already be going off.

  Her heart pounding, she dialed the third number.

  She had never spoken to a terrorist leader before and wasn’t sure if she could do all that Marcus had asked. With each unanswered ring, her anxiety grew. The call was not going to voice mail. She wasn’t getting a message, in Farsi or otherwise. Maybe this was really going to happen. After twenty rings, however, still no one had answered.

  Stewart ended the call, disappointed. She checked her watch again. It was 5:38 and still no sirens. She peeked out the window of her guest bedroom. The street out front was empty and quiet. She walked over to her safe and closed it immediately. There would be no upside to having a loaded Glock nearby if the FBI really came bursting through her doors, even if she did hold a concealed carry permit from South Carolina and a gun ownership permit from D.C.

  Forcing herself to take several deep breaths, she headed down to her kitchen. She set the phone on the table, filled a kettle with water, and turned on a gas burner. Then she took her favorite teacup and saucer off a shelf and set it on the counter, trying to figure out what to do next.

  81

  The satphone rang.

  Having never heard its high-pitched tone before, Stewart was so startled she almost knocked over the teacup. The phone rang again, vibrating on the kitchen table. Stewart just stared at it. When it rang a third time, she finally reached for it. The incoming number was blocked. It might very well be the FBI. But it didn’t matter. There was no turning back now.

  “Hello?” she said in Russian.

  “Who is this?” came the reply.

  The language was Russian but the accent was unmistakably Persian. Stewart had to fight to maintain her composure.

  “Yes, this is Natasha Kaminsky,” she replied in Russian, following the precise script Marcus had laid out for her. “I am an aide to President Petrovsky. I am calling from the Kremlin and trying to reach General Entezam. Is this he?”

  “No, I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

  “That’s impossible,” Stewart said curtly. “This is the number the general told us to call in emergencies, if we could not reach him at any of his other numbers. To whom am I speaking?”

  There was a lengthy pause, and then the words Stewart had never truly expected to hear.

  “This is his deputy, Alireza al-Zanjani. What can I do for His Excellency President Petrovsky?”

  “Is the general there?”

  “I am very sorry. I regret to say that I am not with the general just now. May I have him call you back the moment he gets back to the office?”

  “When do you expect him?”

  “I am certain it won’t be long.”

  “Very well,” said Stewart, warming to her role. “Tell him His Excellency requests his presence and yours for an emergency meeting here at the Kremlin Monday morning at ten.”

  “Of course, Ms. . . .”

  “Kaminsky,” she sniffed. “Natasha Kaminsky. I am His Excellency’s new chief of staff and cannot stress how critical this meeting will be. Have I made myself clear?”

  “You have, Ms. Kaminsky. I will inform the general of your call and tell him it is of the highest priority.”

  “I would expect no less,” said Stewart. “And one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  She could hear the strain in al-Zanjani’s voice. She knew he was desperate to get off the line, but Marcus had instructed her to keep him on for as long as possible. “Did you receive the package?”

  “Uh . . . I . . . I’m sorry. . . .”

  “The documents we sent by diplomatic courier,” Stewart lied. “The package should have arrived yesterday. His Excellency was expecting a reply, and I must say he was disappointed when there was no response.”

  Al-Zanjani clearly had no idea what to say. Stewart knew he wasn’t in Tehran. Thus, he wasn’t in the office. Thus, he had no idea whether a package of critical documents had arrived. Yet he was acting as if he were at the IRGC compound and ought to be fully apprised of anything that had just arrived from the Kremlin.

  “Forgive me, I just got back to the office this afternoon after meetings outside of Tehran,” al-Zanjani said, obviously improvising. “I am not familiar with the package, but I will check on it and make certain the general is prepared to discuss its contents with you when he returns your call and on Monday with President Petrovsky.”

  “Very well, I—”

  Before Stewart could finish, the transmission was cut. She powered down the phone and collapsed in a chair, praying her trust in Marcus Ryker had been worth it.

  Events were now set into motion on three continents.

  From the moment Stewart had dialed the numbers, the calls—even though they had not been answered—were intercepted by a series of spy satellites operated by the National Security Agency and fed through ECHELON, the agency’s monitoring and analysis protocol. ECHELON’s supercomputers simultaneously routed high-priority alerts to the two NSA ground stations closest to where the calls had originated and been received. This meant that within two minutes of interception, an analyst at NSA’s global headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, as well as one at Misawa Air Base in northern Japan, were on the case.

  The call to the mobile phone triggered the most attention. The number was, in fact, in the NSA’s database and tagged to Alireza al-Zanjani. On a normal day, the thirty-six-year-old senior analyst in Fort Meade might have let the team in Japan figure out the significance of the call while she handled more urgent matters. But this was no normal day.

  The analyst quickly informed her counterpart at Misawa that she would take the lead on running this case to ground. Then she speed-dialed her supervisor and informed him that someone in the D.C. area had just used a satphone to call a number connected to one of the world’s most notorious terrorists. Though the call had not been answered, the caller had tried two other numbers in rapid succession. The bad news, she explained, was that these two numbers were not known to the NSA. The good news was that the third number had called back, and they had a clear recording of a two-minute-and-twelve-second conversation. It was all in Russian, and though the analyst admitted she didn’t speak Russian, she had heard al-Zanjani’s name mentioned. She therefore requested permission to forward the recording to the Directorate of Analysis in Langley for an immediate transcription, translation into English, and voiceprint analysis.

  “Absolutely—do it now,” said the supervisor, who then asked for the precise coordinates of the call’s origins and destinations.

  The analyst not only sent them by secure server but uploaded the coordinates into a GPS mapping system that allowed them to see on their monitors the two locations displayed in graphic form.

  The supervisor was struck by the fact that the final call had originated in the middle of the East China Sea, from
a ship located about two hundred kilometers east of Shanghai. It was not proof positive, but the circumstantial evidence that the calls had been made to and from al-Zanjani was growing. But what chilled him to his core was that whoever was trying to reach the Iranian terrorist had made the calls just blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

  “Who owns this satellite account?” the supervisor asked.

  The analyst entered several commands into her keyboard.

  “Let’s see,” she said. “The phone was purchased almost eighteen months ago by someone named Anne Stewart—she used a Visa card, bought it through Amazon, and—”

  She abruptly stopped talking in midsentence.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t believe this,” the analyst said.

  “What?”

  “She works for the government.”

  “Which government?”

  “Ours—she works for a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.”

  “I need an address—now.”

  “Hold on—okay, it’s coming up. Got it. Four one seven G Street, Northeast, Unit 3.”

  The supervisor immediately hung up on her and speed-dialed the Counterintelligence Division of the FBI.

  82

  CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA

  Stephens was speaking with China’s defense minister when the call came in.

  His executive assistant knocked once, quietly entered the director’s seventh-floor corner office, and slipped a hastily scribbled note under his nose that read, Urgent—line 2. She knew he hated to be interrupted, but the look on her face told him how serious this had to be, so Stephens excused himself and got off the line, promising to call the minister back in a few minutes. Then he punched the blinking line on his desk console and heard the somber voice of Martha Dell, his deputy director for intelligence.