The Peregrine Spy

by Edmund P. Murray

  Frank began getting calls, from the accountant in New York who did his taxes, from his former bosses at various newspapers, from his mother, from the literary agent who’d been trying without much success to sell his short stories. FBI agents had been around asking questions about him.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?” his mother asked.

  Pat Rhoden called to ask him how quickly he could wrap up his work at the AFL-CIO and leave for Ethiopia.

  “Well, I’ll have to talk to Mr. Meany.’’

  “He’s wired. No problem,” said Pat in her brisk way.

  Frank held the phone away from his ear and stared at the receiver. Who are these people? he wondered. He heard Pat’s voice. “Are you there?”

  “Right here,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  “You’ll need about ten days’ briefing here at our office in New York. We have you booked out on the twenty-first. You know about the airline strike. Pan Am’s the only American carrier into Europe, but Juan’s a good friend of ours.”

  Juan? Who the hell is Juan? wondered Frank.

  Pat must have read his mind. “Juan Trippe, you know, the president of Pan Am, so that’s been worked out. Then it will be Ethiopian Airlines into Addis.” She hammered out details and schedules, the car that would pick up Frank and Jackie at the airport, the apartment that would be waiting for them in New York. “Oh, you and your wife, Jackie, should both resign your jobs as soon as possible. Decide what belongings you’ll want shipped over, what you want put in storage. We’ll take care of all the arrangements.”

  It all moved rapidly, according to plan.

  On his second day in WWC’s headquarters overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue, Frank went into Pat Rhoden’s office and was startled to see Dan Nitzke bounding up out of an overstuffed easy chair to greet him. “Hi, I bet you’re surprised to see me. And boy, have I got a surprise for you.”

  * * *

  “This is Fairfield coming up now,” said Dan. “We’ll be at Motor Vehicle in five minutes.”

  “I feel like I’ve been shanghaied,” said Frank. “Again.”

  “That day in New York?”

  “That day in New York.”

  “You should have seen the look on your face when I told you I didn’t really work for the State Department.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “Boy, were you surprised.”

  “Yeah,” said Frank. “You surprised me, all right.” And I surprised myself, he thought.

  They raced through the day, pretty much the way Dan had outlined it. There had been a wild, improvisational quality to it all that Frank enjoyed. The professionalism of the Pentagon cover unit impressed him. They were in and out in fifteen minutes with air force documents, including airline tickets and travel papers that identified him as Major Francis J. Sullivan. The photo on his ID card looked just like his unfamiliar, clean-shaven self.

  “Without that beard, you look like a leprechaun,” said Dan.

  “I want my beard,” said Frank.

  “When you retire from the air force, you can grow a beard.”

  “How long before I get to retire from the air force?”

  Dan shrugged. “Don’t ask me. After the war, I guess.”

  Their footsteps echoed down the Pentagon’s endless, rubber-tiled corridors as they left the cover unit. Frank studied his documents. “True name,” he said.

  “What did you expect? We don’t have time for all that other mumbo-jumbo.”

  “We never do.”

  “What’s the diff? You’ve never been blown.”

  Their whirlwind day included an hour at Langley with two Near East Division types he’d never met before and a quick pass at the polygraph, including what Frank by now considered a routine rehash of his years of contacts in many countries with Vassily Lermontov.

  “Flying colors,” said the technician, who looked painfully young to Frank.

  It was Frank’s first time in the headquarters building. All his previous contact had been filtered through the agency proprietary World Wide Communications, the firm that recruited him. The awesome structure, with its multiple rings of security, intrigued him. When he thought of all the odd, messy threads dangling from the edges of his life, he wondered why he had ever been recruited or how he had gotten through the security checks. But he admitted to himself that he’d been surprised by the sophistication of an intelligence agency that had a place for characters like himself—or even Dan Nitzke.

  “Will there be contact with the Shah?” he asked the Near East team.

  “Absolutely not,” said one old Near East hand, who’d identified himself as Joe. They sat on hard-backed chairs around a bare metal table with a top of highly polished fake wood.

  Frank shrugged. “I asked because I spent some time with him when he was on a state visit in Ethiopia in the sixties.”

  “Details,” said Joe.

  “I was writing speeches for Haile Selassie in those days,” said Frank. “At some reception, he introduced me to the Shah. We got along. No big deal. We talked about jazz, weight lifting. When the Emperor came back from that twenty-fifth-hundred anniversary bash at Persepolis, he told me the Shah asked about me, said I should have come along. I wished I had. I heard it was quite a party.”

  “Keep talking,” said Joe. He had close-cropped hair, a ruddy face, thick wrists, and slender hands. “But forget the party you didn’t go to. I want to hear about the Shah in Ethiopia.”

  “He asked me to draft his farewell remarks. It pissed some of his people off, but he used what I wrote. We worked out together a couple of times. He was in pretty good shape in those days.”

  “He’s a dead man now,” said Joe. “Absolutely no contact. You’ll be useless to us if the people you’re working with get the idea you have a pipeline to the Shah. How much you know about what’s goin’ on over there?”

  “I read the papers,” said Frank.

  “Well, not a lot gets in the papers,” said Joe. “Shame you haven’t got time to do some reading in on the intel. What we’ve got over there is a situation.”

  “We and the Brits have been propping this Shah up on his Peacock Throne ever since 1941,” said Jack, another of the Near Easternites. “World War II. His father was pro-Hitler, and you have to remember that besides all that oil Iran has a long border with the Soviets.”

  “And back then,” said Joe, “God help us, the Sovs were our allies.”

  “So we and the Brits kicked the father out and put the son on the throne.”

  “And we had to do it all over again in 1953,” said Joe, “when the Shah’s lefty prime minister, guy named Mosaddeq, tried to nationalize the oil industry. The Shah hit the panic button, ran off to Rome, ready to abdicate. The agency managed to stir up enough trouble to get rid of Mosaddeq and bring the Shah back.”

  “And we’ve propped him up ever since,” said Jack. “Till now.”

  “Now we’ve come full circle,” said Joe. “This guy has lost control. He tries to be tough, but he worries too much about, you know, world opinion. Whatever that is.”

  “The papers make it sound like he’s been pretty ruthless,” said Frank.

  “Fact is, we’ve had a pretty good run with him,” said Jack. “I mean, he may be a mean son of a bitch, but for almost forty years he’s been our son of a bitch, know what I mean?”

  “Up until lately,” said Joe. “I mean he’s still ours, but lately the son of a bitch hasn’t been mean … I mean, strong enough. No matter what all these civil rights crybabies and liberal newspapers say about what a nasty bastard he is, fact is he isn’t nasty enough. What we need is a military takeover that will ease out this guy and put his son on the throne.”

  “Just like we and the Brits did in 1941,” said Jack.

  “It’s that,” said Joe, “or we get a Commie takeover like already’s happened next door in Afghanistan,”

  “What about this holy man I’ve been reading about?” asked Frank.

  “
He can’t amount to much,” said Joe. “Hasn’t even been in the country in a dozen years or so. He’d been holed up in Iraq a long time, but the Shah managed to get the Iraqis to kick him out. So now he’s even further outta the picture, up in Paris.”

  “He may have some following in Iran,” said Jack, “but the real trouble comes from the left.”

  “The problem is,” said Dan, “we don’t get much real intel these days except what Savak tells us, and Savak pretty much tells us what they think we want to hear.”

  “Savak has some of the best interrogators in the world,” said Joe.

  “Torturers, you mean,” said Dan.

  “Interrogators who get results,” countered Joe. “And another thing…”

  “We need some new eyes and ears on the ground,” said Dan, interrupting again. “That’s why we’re sending these jokers over in the first place, am I right?”

  “Is that why we’re sending them over?” said Jack.

  “We’re sending them over because Pete Howard got another bee in his bonnet,” said Joe, looking directly at Frank. “Now he’s a big shot over at Brzezinski’s National Security Council, he’s more high and mighty than ever.”

  “He’s a good friend of mine,” said Frank.

  “So I heard,” said Joe.

  Frank fought down his anger and tried to concentrate on what the two Near East Division men had to say. Covert Action approved the idea. Even the ambassador approved the idea.

  “But we won’t hold that against you,” said Jack.

  “How long?” asked Frank.

  “How long what?” said Joe.

  “How long will we be over there?”

  Joe and Jack looked at each other. Neither showed any expression.

  “As long as it takes,” said Joe. “Just show these military types how to win the hearts and minds. You Covert Action types are all alike. Propaganda, that’s your racket, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes,” said Frank. Sometimes, he thought to himself, it’s intelligence.

  “Covert Action does involve a bit more than propaganda,” said Dan.

  The two Near East men exchanged another glance. “Just be a fly on the wall,” said Joe. “And keep your mouth shut.”

  “Just show the flag,” said Jack. “And don’t stir up any trouble.”

  “Another thing,” said Joe. “You’ve got a limited mandate. Stay away from this KGB thug, this Lermontov. Soviet Division concurs fully with that stipulation.”

  Frank nodded, not quite sure what all this meant.

  “No cowboy stuff, right?” added Joe.

  Frank nodded again.

  “Ergo,” said Jack, “no weapons authorized.”

  “Speak swiftly,” said Dan, “but don’t carry a big stick.”

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Jack. “When you get over there, pay attention to Bunker. He’ll give you your marching orders.”

  “I hear he’s a good man,” said Frank.

  “Damn good,” said Jack. His eyes locked on Frank’s. “Trained him myself.”

  “Balls,” said Joe. “Fred Bunker never recruited a dink in his life.”

  “Don’t start,” said Jack. “Fred Bunker’s one of the best bureaucrats in the business.”

  “Oh, I’ll give him that,” said Joe. He stood abruptly and reached across the table to shake Frank’s hand. “Good luck over there. You’ll need it.”

  * * *

  They rode the elevator to Dean Lomax’s office on the seventh floor. As head of Covert Action, Dean occupied a spacious office close to the director’s. Frank’s old mentor, Pete Howard, was there to greet him.

  He had first met Pete Howard a dozen years before in Ethiopia when Pete took over as chief of station. Frank’s cover job as an adviser to the Ethiopian Ministry of Information put him in close touch with the nation’s news media, all of which were government controlled. His close relations with the minister of information, a favorite of the Emperor’s, had led to several speechwriting assignments for Haile Selassie and an increasingly important role within his government.

  Pete, currently on loan from the agency to the National Security Council, continued to monitor and influence Frank’s career. As usual, he wasted little time in small talk.

  “I suspect our friends in Near East/South Asia told you stay to away from the Shah.”

  “They sure did,” answered Frank.

  “’Course, you’ll have to live with that.”

  “At least with the letter of that,” said Dean.

  “By all means stay away from the Shah,” said Pete. “But if the Shah seeks you out, you can’t very well turn your back on the emperor of a friendly nation, can you?”

  “Somebody will have to say it’s okay.”

  “Frank’s right about that,” said Dean.

  “Yes,” said Pete, “but in the fullness of time these things have a way of working themselves out. The Shah seems to know quite a lot about what goes on in his country. His ambassador here in Washington is very active, knows everyone.”

  “Nothing much we can do about it if word does get back to the Shah,” said Dean. “Word that you’re in Tehran, I mean.”

  “You established such a good rapport with him during the brief time he was in Ethiopia, if the Shah remembers you and seeks you out, as I suspect he will, it would be a terrible waste not to take advantage of what could be a real intelligence-gathering opportunity.”

  Frank studied Pete closely as he spoke. He won’t say it out loud, thought Frank, but I think he just told me to forget what the goons in Near East Division had to say. Just show the flag and be a fly on the wall.

  “This is a Covert Action assignment,” said Dean, “and what we expect of you may not be quite the same as what Near East wants. The station in Tehran already provides the intelligence Near East wants.”

  Frank felt like a motorist, adrift in strange territory, afraid to sound dumb but needing a road map and directions. “I’m lost,” he confessed. “You have to remember I’ve always worked outside. I’d heard about Covert Action because I knew you two guys, but I never knew what Covert Action was all about.”

  “And that’s the way it should have been,” said Pete. “As an agent, you had no need to know about our inner workings, but you’re in the process of becoming something more than an agent. You might say we’re bringing you in from the cold. We don’t have time to explain everything to you now, but let’s try some quick points of reference.”

  “Try to think of it this way,” said Dean. “In terms of geography. Covert Action is global. It involves everything from clandestine propaganda operations to special forces military operations anywhere in the world. But always undercover, always set up in a way that the U.S. government can deny, at least plausibly deny involvement.”

  “Near East is quite different,” said Pete. “Pretty much regional, Egypt, Israel, and that part of the world the British used to describe as east of Suez. Soviet Division is something else again. Regional, yes. All of the Soviet Union, yes, but also with a stake in the recruiting of hard targets, Soviet intelligence and military officers, diplomats, academics, scientists, agents of influence, in short, important Soviets, wherever they may be, anywhere in the world.”

  “Including Tehran?” said Frank.

  “Including Tehran,” answered Pete.

  “And including your friend Lermontov,” said Dean.

  “I know Lermontov,” said Frank. “He’s not my friend.”

  “You do go a long way back,” said Pete, “and that’s part of the problem. You work for Covert Action, reporting to Dean. And you’ve known Lermontov a long time. But right now Lermontov operates in the Near East Division’s territory. And Soviet Division considers him one of their hard targets. So both want you to stay away.”

  “And you have to remember, this is the Central Intelligence Agency,” said Dean. “Intelligence gathering is central to all our divisions, Near East, Soviet, Covert Action. And in terms of Iran, we have some prob
lems with our intelligence.”

  “Petty much throughout the intelligence community,” said Pete, “people believe a Communist takeover of Iran is a distinct possibility. A military coup is seen as the only way to prevent the country from becoming another Soviet satellite. And what we keep looking for, and I have to include the National Security Council in this, we keep looking for field intelligence that supports this idea.”

  “I think it’s fair to say,” noted Dean, “that NSC depends on the agency. It has no resources of its own on the ground in places like Iran.”

  “If there’s going to be a military coup in Iran,” said Pete, “it’s going to be hatched out of the building you’ll be working in. Supreme Commander’s Headquarters. You’ll meet daily with a committee of midlevel military officers. The top brass have offices in that same compound.”

  “It won’t be easy,” said Dean. “And you may have problems with your chief of station. Someone you know from your assignment in Rome.”

  “Rocky Novak,” said Pete.

  “Oh, yes,” said Frank. “We know each other.”

  “But you worked out your problems before,” said Pete. “I’m sure you can again.”

  “I’m glad you’re sure,” said Frank.

  “And of course there’s that other opportunity,” said Pete. “I’m sure you were told to avoid your old friend Vassily Lermontov at all costs.”

  “That, too,” said Frank.

  “Of course, targeting Soviets in Tehran is Near East’s turf. But you and Lermontov have been locking horns for so long it would be a shame not to give you another crack at him.”

  “But if I do see him I’ll start hearing the same old story about how he’s recruited me.”

  “Best way to put that nonsense to bed would be for you to recruit Lermontov, wouldn’t it?”

  “You think I can?” asked Frank.

  “I don’t think you should miss a chance to try,” said Pete. “Tehran’s a very small town, at least the foreign community in Tehran. I don’t see how you could not run into each other.”

  “The Sovs have a pretty wide intel apparat in Tehran,” said Dean. “Lermontov sees you on an airline passenger manifest or a visa list, you know he’ll come looking for you.”