Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  Loose Lips is a work of fiction. The characters are entirely imaginary creations of the author, and any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Claire Berlinski

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berlinski, Claire.

  Loose lips : a roman à Claire / Claire Berlinski.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-291-9

  1. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction.

  2. Women spies—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3602.E758 L6 2003

  813′.6—dc21 2002068212

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  For the memory of my beloved grandfather

  Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust: Whether it’s a Japanese businessman giving you some technical information that his company has entrusted him with; whether it’s an official of another government who obviously has a position of trust within that government; whether it’s the wife of a military officer whom you’ve induced to betray the trust placed in her by her husband, in order to get information that might enable you to recruit him. There’s a betrayal of trust. Espionage revolves around the many different forms of betrayals of trust …

  —Aldrich Ames, convicted traitor

  That’s no righteousness where there is no truth. That’s not the truth which leads one to deceit.

  —Mahabharata

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  I will never know the truth.

  My friends thought I was a budget analyst who worked for the Department of Agriculture. It wasn’t my choice for a cover. In fact, it would have been just about my last choice, but it was what the Agency told me to tell them. I had business cards that said SELENA KELLER, PLANNING AND ACCOUNTABILITY DIVISION, USDA, and if someone called the number on the card, he would reach a bank of sterile phones at the Central Intelligence Agency. In principle, a CIA flack would deftly look up who I was and who I was supposed to be on an electronic Rolodex. In practice, callers were likely to receive a “Selena? Selena who? You said Keller? Does she work here? Are you sure you have the right number? Selena … hold on … Department of Agriculture, right? Um … oh, okay … yeah, she’s still in a meeting. Yeah, still there. No, no idea when she’ll be done. Can I take a message?”

  I wonder if any of my friends ever thought it odd, my abrupt change of careers. I’d spent most of my adult life in India, studying Sanskrit literature. When I joined the Agency, I’d just received my doctorate from Columbia University, and what I knew about budget analysis, or agriculture, for that matter, could have been inscribed inside a matchbook. After I’d been in Washington for six months, the head of my thesis committee called to invite me to the annual Ramayana Conference in DeKalb. I declined, telling him that I was up to my elbows writing a report on the industrial pet feed sector. If he suspected anything, he never let on.

  I got the job at the CIA the way you get a job anywhere: I answered an ad on the Internet. That spring I was living in Manhattan, and nine major university presses had recently declined to publish my dissertation, The Dialectic of Manjusri: Monasteries and Social Welfare in Northeastern India, A.D. 600–800. To support myself, I was teaching an undergraduate section in multicultural studies at NYU as I sent out applications for postdoctoral fellowships and tenure-track positions. It was beginning to dawn on me that I might spend the rest of my life teaching at some godforsaken Midwestern university—a place with a name like Mongeheela State—writing articles that would be perused by no more than six geriatric scholars.

  I found the ad while surfing the Drudge Report. Bernard Lewinsky was denouncing the treatment of his daughter, issuing an appeal for assistance with her legal bills. An article beneath this linked to the CIA’s website, which in turn connected me to a section called “Employment.” The text read:

  For the extraordinary individual who wants more than just a job, we offer a unique career—a way of life that will challenge the deepest resources of your intelligence, self-reliance, and responsibility. It demands an adventurous spirit, a forceful personality, superior intellectual ability, toughness of mind, and a high degree of personal integrity, courage, and love of country. You will need to deal with fast-moving, ambiguous, and unstructured situations that will test your resourcefulness to the utmost. The accompanying photo displayed a black man, a black woman, and an Asian woman, all in their late twenties. The women conveyed rangy athleticism underneath their sensible professional clothes; the man wore no tie, and his collar was open beneath his blazer. Their expressions were alert and serious. All three were staring intently at a piece of paper I imagined as the order of battle for the Russian Mechanized Infantry Brigade.

  I had a stack of copies of my résumé in front of me on my desk. On an impulse, I folded one into thirds and sent it to the CIA’s Department of Human Resources. I never really expected that I would hear from them.

  A few months later I was still only barely employed. I had all but forgotten the CIA when a woman who identified herself as “Martha from the federal government” began leaving messages for me on my machine. I had deducted all of my income on my last tax return on the grounds that I had been living in India for most of the fiscal year. I feared that I was about to be audited. Finally, Martha caught me at home. When she announced that she was from the CIA and not the IRS, I was relieved.

  “Your résumé is a bit unusual for us,” she said on the phone, “but you have overseas experience and a great education, and that’s something we like to see. And we’re always looking for people with foreign languages. I see you speak Sanskrit and Pali?”

  “Well …” I coughed. “Well … yes.”

  She described the position she had in mind for me: “You would work overseas, probably under diplomatic cover. Your job would be to spot, assess, develop, and recruit human sources of intelligence for the United States. It’s a job that requires good judgment and a lot of people skills. Is this something that would interest you?”

  “Yes, I think it is …” I thought about Mongeheela State University. Go, Heela Monsters! “Yes, it definitely is.”

  She scheduled me for an interview in the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan. She told me I would be asked some tough questions about current events, and if the interview went well, I would be invited to Washington for further evaluation. Before placing the phone in the cradle, I stared at the receiver for a few moments in astonishment. It seemed to me that her call was nothing less than an act of divine intervention.

  I prepared for the interview as if it were a set of grueling graduate boards. I read the major texts on the theory of espionage, memorized the names
of all the Directors of Central Intelligence since the passage of the 1947 National Security Act, and pored over decades of testimony before the House and Senate intelligence-oversight committees. I studied the language of tradecraft: Only amateurs referred to CIA operatives as secret agents, evidently. They weren’t agents; they were case officers; the foreigners they handled were the agents. An agent was also called an asset, like a country house or a fiduciary instrument. Promising targets for recruitment—assets in cultivation—were called developmentals. I committed the terms to memory and practiced using them, speaking aloud into the air.

  I read about the Intelligence Cycle and about the Church and Pike committees. I found a tattered copy of Philip Agee’s Inside the Company at a bookstore in the Village called La Lutte Finale. The passages on Guatemala were underlined in indignant red ink; someone had written state-sponsored terrorism! in the margins. When the day for the interview came, I could have delivered a nuanced discourse on the history of espionage from the Babylonians to the present.

  I arrived at the federal building early, smoked a cigarette outdoors, scrubbed my hands in the ladies’ room, shpritzed breath spray in my mouth, and took the elevator to the unmarked conference room to which I’d been directed. I knocked firmly. A man who introduced himself as Carl opened the door and shook my hand. He was about my age, and he wore a dark, baggy suit and sunglasses. I had brought my sunglasses, just in case, and when I saw that he was wearing his although we were indoors, I put mine on too. We sat down at the conference table, straining to see each other.

  Carl warned me again that he was about to ask me some tough questions. “Ready?” he asked.

  “I’m ready.”

  He began by asking me if I knew the name of the prime minister of Canada. By luck, I had read an article about Canada just that morning on the subway.

  “Jean Chrétien,” I replied, relieved that I knew.

  “Good. Amazing how few people know that.”

  “Really? That’s too bad. You know, Canada is the United States’ number one trade partner, too.”

  He peered at me curiously, and I worried that I might have sounded overly eager to impress, too academic. I tried to look serious and alert, like the case officers in the photo on the website.

  He asked me a few more questions about world leaders and geography. Who were the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council? Which former Soviet republics had nuclear weapons? I knew the answers and felt pleased with myself for knowing. He made notes that he shielded from my view, but when he set the pad down, I could see that he was filling out a form. He had placed all his check marks on one side of a ledger.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to tell you about a hypothetical situation. There are no right or wrong answers—I’m just trying to get a sense of how you think. Okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Let’s imagine you’re working for us in Nigeria. You’ve just arrived, it’s your first assignment, and you’re undercover as the agriculture guy from the USDA. That’s someone really low on the diplomatic totem pole, by the way. And the first thing the Chief of Station tells you is that he’s really glad you’re there, because they have no one in the station who’s deep enough below the local radar to meet a really sensitive asset—the Nigerian foreign secretary. So you’re going to be the one who meets him. Okay?”

  “I get it.”

  “So you drive out to pick up this guy, out on the edge of town, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And everything goes fine—he gives you the intel and you give him the money, and you’re driving him back, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And then, you’re out on the edge of town, and all of a sudden a dog runs in front of your car. And—splat!—you hit the dog.” He smacked his right fist into his left palm.

  “Splat.” I nodded.

  “Yeah, you hit the dog—splat! And an angry mob of villagers runs up and starts pounding on the window of your car. Kids, teenagers. And they’re screaming and pounding and the foreign secretary is terrified. He’s all pale.”

  “He’s Nigerian?” I was suddenly worried I’d misunderstood something.

  “Well, it’s all relative. He’s not looking so good.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “What do I do?”

  “Yes. What do you do?”

  I thought for a few seconds. What the hell would I do? Cry? I asked: “Is there any plausible reason for me to be out with this guy?”

  “Not at all. The Nigerian foreign secretary, some junior American agriculture officer—there couldn’t be any plausible reason.”

  If there were no right answers, why was he asking this question? Of course there was a right answer. I tried to think through all the angles. “Well,” I said finally, “I lived in India for a long time. And a few times, I got into a little trouble. I always found that the best thing to do was stay cool and try to grease my way out of it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well … we’re talking about Nigeria,” I said.

  Carl nodded.

  “Life expectancy in the rural areas … probably not much higher than forty-five? Infant mortality is what—one in six? one in five?—and I’ve just hit a dog. That’s just not such a big deal. A dog’s life doesn’t count for quite as much in these parts of the world as it does here.” I decided from his encouraging expression that I was on the right track.

  “I guess here’s what I’d do. I don’t think hitting a dog in Nigeria is such a big deal, and I think if I’m okay with this, well, maybe they’ll be okay. I guess I stop the car, get out calmly—no, wait, I just roll down the window—and explain that I’m so sorry, I love dogs, have a dog at home, actually, so I understand why they’re upset, and I want to compensate them for their loss by passing around all these twenty-dollar bills. Twenty-dollar bills and American cigarettes—no, wait, they’re just kids—American candies.” He nodded approvingly.

  “I think if I pass around enough money, they’ll forget they ever had a dog.”

  It must have been the right answer. The wrong answer, I later found out—and a surprisingly common one—was shoot them all.

  We went through a few more of these problems. What would I do if I were out with a developmental who knew me as Angela, and I ran into an asset who knew me as Mary? His question put me in mind of that unfortunate time in college when Richard, my boyfriend, and I ran into Chris, my, um, other boyfriend. “Chris,” I said warmly. “Have you met Richard? Rich, honey, we’re going to be really late.” When Richard said, “Who was he?” I said he was some guy from my Comp Lit class, which was perfectly true. When Chris asked me why I called Richard honey, I said that I called everyone honey, honey.

  I said to Carl: “You know, from my experience, the only thing that would give you away there is if you got flustered. I mean, really, people get confused about names all the time. You just get the two of them away from each other as quickly as possible, and if they ask any questions, you say, ‘Gosh, I don’t know. Did he really call me Mary?’ ”

  Carl nodded sagely.

  He asked me how would I convince an American businessman in Rio to let the CIA use his apartment as a safe house. I told him it would depend what I made of the businessman; perhaps I would appeal to the man’s patriotism, if he seemed the patriotic sort, or play to his vanity, if he seemed eager to think of himself as the kind of man the CIA would trust. I answered Carl’s questions as sensibly as I could, trying to look serious and responsible, but when I heard myself talking about assets and safe houses I felt a delicious frisson.

  Then Carl placed his hands on his knees and leaned forward, fixing me with a serious gaze. “Selena, would you feel comfortable convincing another human being to commit treason?”

  I knew this was the moment to convey my character: He was looking for depth, maturity, moral compass. “Well,” I said slowly, “that would depend which government and it would depend why it was necessary.
” I hoped I sounded authoritative but thoughtful. But perhaps that response was too brief, too passionless? “Of course I could convince someone to commit espionage,” I added, “if the information would be used to avert a war, or to prevent a hostile regime from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, or to prevent a terrorist attack. I would have no hesitation at all.”

  Of course I didn’t have the first fucking clue what I was talking about.

  Carl and I kept talking, using up far more than our allotted time. When I said that he must be hungry and suggested we go out for a slice of pizza, he accepted. Over lunch he told me what to expect from the rest of the application process. “When you talk to the shrink,” he said, “be sure to wrap everything up in the American flag. Don’t say you’re in it for the thrills or the James Bond thing. I mean, of course that’s why you’re in it, that’s why everyone is, but when you talk to the shrink, it’s all about how you love the red, white, and blue.” He also told me that he woke up every morning eager to go to work. I hadn’t heard many Sanskritists say the same thing.

  On the subway ride home, amid the chatter and babble of the city at rush hour, I fantasized about clandestine assignations, imagining myself spiriting away the secrets of the Iranian missile program, alone on a train to Marrakech, a desert sirocco whipping up the scent of jasmine in the hot night air. I was so involved in my fantasy that I missed my stop. I thought I might walk back, but when I exited the subway, the glares of the crack dealers suggested that this might not be a good idea. “Lady, you’re lost,” a pleasant Rastafarian observed politely. “You gotta get back on that train right away before something bad happens to you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I guess I should pay more attention.”

  Three weeks later, I received a letter from the Agency inviting me to an office in the suburbs near Langley, Virginia, for a medical and psychiatric examination. I took the Metroliner to Washington and then a taxi to a motel the letter recommended. I spent the evening walking around Tyson’s Corner, an ugly cluster of strip malls about half an hour from the Capitol. It was an overcast evening in late summer, and even when the sun went down, the air was close. I tried to go to sleep early because my appointment was at six forty-five in the morning, but stayed awake with nerves, smacking the motel wall repeatedly in an unsuccessful attempt to kill a mosquito.