After trying to recall what I heard, I said, “She spoke about Afghanistan. She asked if I knew anything about Afghanistan.”
“Is that all she said? I have to ask again: was there anything about weaponry?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“You’re sure? It’s important if there was.”
“Nadaj became very excited at one point. It had something to do with Afghanistan. But I don’t know anything more than that.” I decided not to mention that he threatened to cut off my nose. “One other thing. I noticed that Nadaj was carrying an MP5 machine pistol. That surprised me.”
“Why?”
“As far as I know, that weapon is only cleared for special ops people in Afghanistan.”
She nodded. “I guess we can assume that’s where he got it.”
When she crossed her legs, her skirt climbed higher. When she became aware I was having a difficult time keeping my eyes away from her legs, she gave her skirt a quick tug. Her eyes flashed. Then she uncrossed her legs.
She said, “Do you have any questions?” She closed her notebook, began fussing with her briefcase.
“Sure? Why is Ramush Nadaj so important? No one ever told us that.”
“I can’t reveal that. Is there anything else?”
“Only one more thing, ma’am. And that is, I am completely through with working for the United States government. When I am back in the States, I guarantee—guarantee—that I will never ever say yes to another contract. Be sure to write that in your report. I don’t want anyone calling me, writing me, e-mailing me, or visiting me. After nearly twenty-five years of this stuff, I have had it—up to here.”
Acting as if she hadn’t heard me, Colonel Frost continued fussing with her briefcase.
Chapter 5
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
“Let’s put it this way,” Buck Romero said. “It was the one thing that under no circumstances was supposed to happen.”
My old partner was referring to the fact that in the course of the Ramush Nadaj rendition, I ended up a prisoner of the very guy we were looking to extract. It was worse than embarrassing. It was disastrous. He was explaining to me in unwelcome detail just what were the consequences of my little screw-up.
Buck and I were talking for the first time since my return to the States three weeks before. Because I’d been ordered to report to Walter Reed and would be in D.C. for a couple of days, I suggested we meet at Arlington Cemetery, where my father is buried. Buck had known where to find me.
“They did a nice job,” Buck had said by way of greeting. He was referring to my face, which the military doctors in Landstuhl and Walter Reed had patched up. “Considering you weren’t exactly a matinee idol to start with.”
Buck was right. Except for a hardly noticeable scar on my left cheek, an indentation in my forehead and the fact that my nose now leaned just slightly to the starboard, my face wasn’t any different from the way it had looked before my arrival in Kosovo.
Earlier we’d stopped by the recently dedicated memorial to the 184 victims of the Pentagon attack. It was a beautiful May day—blue sky and a bright sun making the white headstones seem even whiter and the grass even greener. Now we were wandering through the big cemetery, looking at names and inscriptions and wondering about guys and gals we’d known through the years, both of us in a reflective mood. My close call in Kosovo had the effect, however fleeting, of making me reflect a little more than I normally do on my own mortality.
As we strolled, I said, “Things would have gone down differently if we’d had some backup.” I wasn’t happy about the fact that I seemed to be catching most of the heat because things hadn’t worked out. “Who put the operation together anyway?”
“I’m guilty, but I had an accessory.”
“Colonel Frost?”
“From what I understand, you and she have spoken.”
“I gave her—shall we say, my views of the situation.”
“Not to mention a piece of your mind. By the way, what are your views?”
“That there was too little margin for error. And that it wasn’t that well thought out.”
We nodded hello to two women—one in her twenties, the other somewhat older—who were out here with two youngsters, a boy and a girl, neither of them older than six and both carrying a bunch of flowers. I didn’t want to think about the reason for their visit.
“One of the characters who was in that shack is dead.” When I asked which one, Buck said, “He had on a red bandana, a field jacket, green corduroy pants over boots. On the way in there was a brief firefight, and he made the mistake of getting in Angel’s way.”
“His name was Fadilj.” I recalled Fadilj waving his automatic weapon in front of my nose and pounding me with it while I was flat on the floor. “He wasn’t one of my favorite people. Tell Angel that’s another lunch I owe him.”
“Angel and Scotty send their best. Angel’s out in Vegas.” We both grinned. Angel had a weakness for casinos, where he generally blew the money he made on his government jobs. Larry Scott’s weakness was the opposite sex. Well, none of us are perfect.
I said, “I told Colonel Frost that I’d worked on my last contract.”
Buck nodded. “You did the right thing. By the way, how did it go out at the hospital? You get your chit punched?” He was referring to my visit that morning to the psychiatric section of Walter Reed Medical Center in D.C. One of the military doctors, having mentioned something called post-traumatic stress, had ordered me to see a government shrink. It’s the kind of thing people in our business don’t usually do, except under orders.
I said that my visit had consisted only of an hour-long interview with a female psychiatrist, an attractive blonde woman behind a large desk piled with papers.
“You didn’t hit on her, I hope.”
“I might have, but she had a picture of a guy and two young girls on her desk.”
“I’m impressed by your discretion. By the way, how does it feel to be a civilian again?”
“I enjoyed being Captain Sanchez. All those nice nurses. I don’t think I’ve ever been so spoiled.”
I’d arrived back in the States on a military flight from Ramstein, Germany, to McGuire Air Base. Although I didn’t quite kiss the tarmac, I can say it felt great to be back on American soil. I spent nearly three weeks as an outpatient at Walter Reed, where the military doctors and dentists got me squared away. It was now six weeks since Buck, Angel, and Larry had hauled me out of the hole in which Ramush Nadaj and his buddies had me stashed. The last time Buck and I had spoken was back in March at Dulles, just hours before I’d left for the Balkans, when we’d made the final arrangements for the Kosovo rendition. At that meeting he’d given me some currency, the watch and Leatherman with the GPS transmitters, and a few other knickknacks.
It was the transmitter in the Leatherman that had made it possible to locate us. I’m not sure Buck planned it exactly that way, but I couldn’t complain about how things had worked out.
Like me, Buck had been in the military—until someone decided that his talents might be put to more effective use working covertly rather than overtly, with the result that he went from being a captain in Special Forces to being an operations officer in our agency. In the mid-nineties, when things quieted down on the intelligence front, he went to work for a D.C. legal firm which represents the defense industry. His colleagues include a number of former two- and three-star generals and well-connected legal people. The job gives him a certain amount of access and keeps him in touch with old friends. He knows what’s going on, and if he doesn’t know he’s usually in a good position to find things out.
As we walked, I asked Buck about Colonel Cranley.
“Frank’s retired. He spends most of his time fishing and playing golf.”
It was Cranley, an MI officer on a listening post in the Alps, who had first introduced us. That evening Buck and I had traveled up to Munich and had dinner—and learned that we had at least two things in
common: we’d both started off in Special Forces and we liked to drink beer.
Although we would subsequently determine that we worked well together, it was a while before we found that out.
Buck has a mildly forbidding air about him, giving the impression that he disapproves of just about everything and everybody. He’s a broad-shouldered, six two, has dark hair, brown eyes, and a square jaw. He isn’t that easy a guy to get to know, which might be the result of his having grown up in a hardscrabble mining town in Pennsylvania, a place where he once told me people spend all their time “either working, watching football, drinking, or fighting.”
As we wandered through Arlington National Cemetery we were both thinking the same thing, recalling the seven hectic years we’d worked together. Our beat was central Europe, during the Cold War years before the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Those seem like innocent times now, with none of us aware of the vast array of enemies our country has in the world.
Among the people Buck and I recruited were quite a few who turned into wellsprings of information. After a time, we had it down to a science. When the NSA analysts, usually working with electronic intercepts and tidbits of information, identified and built a file on someone in the Soviet bloc hierarchy who could be persuaded to work for us—usually a military officer or a politician—Buck and I would get the file. After figuring our approach, we’d head into the East and close the deal. At some point, I lost track of the number of times I’d gone through the Iron Curtain and the number of different passports I’d carried. Mostly, we went to East Germany, where our cover usually was that we were businessmen traveling to one of the trade fairs or factories. We carried business cards and I had a nice line of patter—usually along the lines of “our firm’s” need for heavy machinery of one kind or another. Besides East Germany, there were forays into Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and even into Russia.
If we could turn the guy, we’d run the agent for as long as possible, which usually meant until he was experiencing psychological melt-down from the stress of leading a double life. When the agent finally came out, he’d have a substantial bank account, a brand new identity—and the opportunity to lead a comfortable life in the United States, usually a far more comfortable life than those of the American taxpayers who were footing the bills for his room, board and, quite often, the payments on his sports car. Mostly, the taste of former Russian officers tended, in cars, toward Porsches and, in women, toward leggy blondes, both of which would get heavy use before being traded in for newer models. When we weren’t reading files or recruiting, Buck and I worked out of the white building near the Tivoli Bridge in Munich’s English Garden and posed as journalists. That cover was always good for a laugh since neither Buck nor I could have typed out a news story if our lives depended on it. Fortunately, they never did.
We had some close calls. One time I had to exit the Workers’ Paradise by way of the Baltic Sea, on a small boat that someone had thoughtfully stashed for me on a beach called Warnemünde and which I only found after a three-hour search. On that occasion, I reasoned that drowning was preferable to five years in an East German slammer, both of which I figured for total career killers. Fortunately, I encountered a Danish trawler before meeting up with a Communist patrol boat.
Another time Buck and I were bringing out a Russian general, a guy who’d given us more information about Warsaw Pact battle plans than even we wanted to know, but who was close to a nervous breakdown and who’d outlived his value as a source. It was a Sunday night in the dead of winter, and we were supposed to rendezvous with a Black Hawk helicopter on a farm northeast of Berlin. First, we got lost. Then someone caught wise to the helicopter parked on the field and alerted the Volkspolizei, who normally weren’t the world’s most efficient police force but who, this time, arrived in short order. As things turned out, I was bringing up the rear and, after taking a header, was a hundred yards behind Buck and the general as they scrambled onto the chopper.
I didn’t know how far the Vopos were behind me, but the shots and the barking dogs sounded awfully close.
As I zigzagged back and forth across the field, I expected to see the chopper go sailing off into the sky. But that’s not what happened. I later learned why they waited. With his weapon trained on the impatient pilots, Buck was shouting over the engine noise, shaking his head and pointing out to the field where I was stumbling and dodging with a platoon of East German soldiers in hot pursuit. Somehow I made it, with lots of hands hauling me up into the chopper with nothing to spare. With the three of us sprawled on the deck of the Black Hawk and holding on for dear life, we made it out of East German air space by flying under the radar at a speed upward of 140 knots.
Buck and I still laugh when we recall that wild chopper ride, careening around and over smokestacks, communications towers and apartment buildings, and the deathly pale expression on the face of the Russian general. “Welcome to life in the West, Yuri!”
We got the “Gold Dust Twins” moniker because we worked so well together and chalked up a few successes along the way.
Looking around at one point, I paused and said, “There are times when I pinch myself just to make sure I’m not imagining things. That I’m still here to take this all in.”
Buck didn’t answer but he knew what I meant.
After leaving the cemetery, we rode out on I-95 in the direction of Alexandria, and Buck suggested a restaurant he knew not far from Fort Belvoir, a place with dark paneled walls, subdued lighting, and what appeared to be a largely government and military clientele, men and women who kept their voices low and hardly ever smiled. Just observing these people was enough to remind me of how happy I was not to be a part of their world anymore.
It wasn’t until after we’d knocked off a couple of steaks and were on our third or fourth beer that we began to kick around what happened in Kosovo. From talking with Angel and Larry, Buck knew the story up until the time Nadaj and his gang grabbed me.
I gave him the rest of the story.
“Who’s this Vickie?” Buck asked when I’d finished.
“We should be able to find out,” I said. “She said she had a green card.”
Buck nodded. “Anything else?”
“I did my best to listen in, but they were talking Albanian all the time, so I couldn’t pick up that much.” I paused, trying to recall the events of those two days, most of which I’d repressed, or tried to. “One thing: Nadaj got very excited about Afghanistan. They kept asking if I knew what happened in Afghanistan.”
Buck looked thoughtful. “So we can assume something happened in Afghanistan that has a lot of people very jumpy, including people on the National Security Council and in the DOD. Something else I know is that Nadaj was the leader of a KLA outfit that went out to Afghanistan. They were in the mountains and fighting with the Taliban. According to what I could pick up, Nadaj’s people were well disciplined and well armed, and they caused our guys lots of problems.”
I said, “How did you get involved?”
Buck shrugged. “I don’t know much more than you do. It began when I got a call to meet a guy out at Rock Creek Park.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact. Jerry Shenlee. You remember Jerry?”
“Of course. Berlin, way back when.”
Both Buck and I had worked for a time with Jerry Shenlee, who was then attached to the 766th Military Intelligence Detachment, helping out with security investigations and whatever else needed to be done. But the big investigation was the one that followed the 1986 bomb blast in the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin. In fact it was Jerry who, in a frantic telephone call that afternoon, first alerted me to the fact that British intelligence had intercepted a message to Tripoli in which the Libyan embassy in East Berlin was predicting a “joyous event.”
“‘Joyous’ for them means anything but joyous for us, Klear,” Jerry had shouted into the phone, and I knew immediately what he meant. When Jerry said we needed to find out what was
going down, I told him I’d do my best.
I spent the twelve hectic hours that followed Jerry’s call racing around the city, checking out bars for suspicious characters, talking to people, and trying to figure out what was likely to happen. It was agonizing having prior notice of some kind of attack but not knowing anything beyond that. Because the intercepted message said something about “maximum victims,” we figured it would be in some public place and was going to be bad—and as we later learned, two MPs were on their way to warn the La Belle patrons and were just three hundred yards away from the disco when the blast went off. The bomb, which had been in a suitcase in the club’s washroom, killed two American GIs, a Turkish woman, and with flying nails doing tremendous damage, injured over two hundred others.
Almost immediately, we zeroed in on the employees of the Libyan Embassy in East Berlin. Because the bomb had been put together with plastic explosive mixed with nails, we were quickly able to ID it as the handiwork of Yasir Shraydi, a Palestinian who we already suspected of terrorist activities. I remember a case officer, one of the first people on the scene, later telling me he could have strangled Shraydi with his bare hands and enjoyed every minute of it.
Moammar Kadafi badly miscalculated when, a few days later, he praised the bomb blast and described its perpetrators as “glorious revolutionaries.” President Reagan ordered Kadafi’s personal compound in Tripoli to be bombed, an action that showed the world that Colonel Kadafi’s enthusiasm for bomb blasts rapidly diminished the closer they came to his home and person. The American government has a long memory, and whether Colonel Kadafi knows it yet or not, his name is on a short list of dictators to be toppled.
I asked, “What’s Jerry up to?”
“Jerry is a National Security Coucil staffer, and I get the impression some important people have a lot of confidence in him, one of them being the deputy secretary of defense. Jerry said they needed to run a rendition, and the person they wanted was this Nadaj. He said the chief of station in Skopje had a reliable informant, who knew Nadaj’s precise location. But he also said the source would only talk to someone on the ground, and only after he got paid.”
The Rendition Page 5