“Kamikaze play?”
“Yes, Mr. President. Something you can only do once, and dangerous the first time.”
“Agreed.” Ryan walked to the coffee urn—the White House Office of Signals was mainly a military operation, and they made their own. Jack got two cups and came back, handing one to Major Canon, rather to the horror of everyone else in the room. “Fast work. Send a ‘thanks’ to the guys working this, okay?”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Who do I talk to to get things happening around here?”
“We got the phones right here, Mr. President.”
“I want Adler in here ASAP, the DCI ... who else? State and CIA desks for Iraq. DIA estimate of the state of their military. Find out if Prince Ali is still in town. If he is, ask him to please stand by. I want to talk to him this morning if possible. I wonder what else ... ?” Ryan’s voice trailed off.
“CENTCOM, sir. He’ll have the best military-intelligence troops down at Tampa, most familiar with the area, I mean.”
“Get him up here—no, we’ll do that by landline, and we give him time to get briefed in.”
“We’ll get it all going for you, sir.” Ryan patted the officer on the shoulder and headed out of the room. The heavy door closed behind him before Major Charles Canon spoke again. “Hey, NCA knows his shit.”
“Is it what I heard?” Price asked, coming up the corridor.
“Do you ever sleep?” Then he thought about it. “I want you in on this.”
“Why me, sir, I’m not—”
“You’re supposed to know about assassinations, right?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“Then right now you’re more valuable to me than a spook.”
THE TIMING COULD have been better. Daryaei had been surprised by the information just delivered. Not in the least bit displeased by it—except maybe the timing. He paused for a moment, whispering a prayer first of thanks to Allah, then for the soul of the unknown assassin assassin? he asked himself. Perhaps “judge” would be a better term for the man, one of many who’d been infiltrated into Iraq ages ago, while the war had still been going on. Most had merely disappeared, probably shot one way or another. The overall mission had been his idea, not nearly dramatic enough for the “professionals” working in his intelligence service. Largely leftovers from the Shah’s Savak—trained by the Israelis in the 1960s and 1970s—they were effective, but they were mercenaries at heart however much they might protest their religious fervor and their loyalty to the new regime. They’d proceeded along “conventional” lines for the unconventional mission, trying bribes of various sorts or testing the waters for dissidents, only to fail at every turn, and for years Daryaei had wondered if the target of all that attention might have Allah’s perverse blessings somehow or other but that had been the counsel of despair, not of reason and faith, and even Daryaei was subject to human weakness. Surely the Americans had tried for him also, and probably in the same way, trying to identify military commanders who might like to try out the seat of power, trying to initiate a coup d’état such as they had done often enough in other parts of the world. But, no, this target was too skilled for that, and at every turn he’d become more skilled, and so the Americans had failed, and the Israelis, and all the others. All but me.
It was tradition, after all, all the way back to antiquity. One man, operating alone, one faithful man who would do whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission. Eleven such men had been dispatched into Iraq for this specific purpose, told to go deep under cover, trained to forget everything they had ever been, entirely without contact or control officers, and all records of their existence destroyed so that even an Iraqi spy in his own agencies could not discover the mission without a name. Within an hour, some of his own cronies would come into this office, praising God and lauding their leader for his wisdom. Perhaps so, but even they didn’t know all the things he had done, or all the people he’d dispatched.
THE DIGITIZED RENDITION of the event didn’t change much, though now he had a more professional opinion of the options:
“Mr. President, a guy with a Silicon Graphics workstation could fake this,” the NIO told him. “You’ve seen movies, and movie film has much higher resolution than a TV set. You can fake almost anything now.”
“Fine, but your job is to tell me what did happen,” Ryan pointed out. He’d seen the same few seconds of tape eight times now, and was growing tired of instant replay.
“We can’t say with absolute certainty.”
Maybe it was the week’s sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the stress of the job. Maybe it was the stress of having to face his second crisis. Maybe it was the fact that Ryan was himself still a carded national intelligence officer. “Look, I’m going to say this once: Your job isn’t to cover your ass. Your job is to cover mine!”
“I know that, Mr. President. That’s why I’m giving you all the information I have....” Ryan didn’t have to listen to the rest of the speech. He’d heard it all before, a couple of hundred times. There had even been cases when he’d said similar things himself, but in Jack’s case, he’d always hung his hat on one of the options.
“Scott?” Jack asked the acting SecState.
“The son of a bitch is dead as yesterday’s fish,” Adler replied.
“Disagreement?” President Ryan asked the others in the room. Nobody contradicted the assessment, giving it a sort of blessing. Even the NIO would not disagree with the collective opinion. He’d delivered his assessments, after all. Any mistakes now were the Secretary of State’s problem. Perfect.
“Who was the shooter?” Andrea Price asked. The answer came from CIA’s Iraq-desk officer.
“Unknown. I have people running tapes of previous appearances just to make sure that he’s been around before. Look, from all appearances it was a senior member of his protection detail, with the rank of an army colonel, and—”
“And I damned well know everybody on my detail,” Price concluded the statement. “So, whoever it was, he belonged there, and that means whoever pulled this off managed to get somebody all the way inside, close enough to make the hit, and committed enough to pay the price for it. It must have taken years.” The continuation of the tape—they’d watched that only five times—showed the man crumble after a cavalcade of pistol shots at point-blank range. That struck Agent Price as odd. You damned well wanted to bag such people alive. Dead men still didn’t tell any tales, and executions could always be arranged. Unless he’d been killed by other members of a conspiracy. But how likely was it that more than one assassin had made it that far? Price reflected that she could ask Indira Gandhi that someday. Her whole detail had turned on her one afternoon in a garden. For Price that was the final infamy, killing the person you were sworn to defend. But, then, she hadn’t sworn to defend such people as that. One other thing on the tape got her attention: “Did you notice the body language?”
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“The way the gun came up, the way he took the shot, the way he just stood there and watched. Like a golfer, it’s called follow-through. He must have waited a long time for the chance. He damned sure thought about it for a long, long time. He must have dreamed about it. He wanted the moment to be perfect. He wanted to see it and enjoy it before he went down.” She shook her head slowly. “That was one focused, dedicated killer.” Price was actually enjoying herself, chilling though the subject of the meeting was. More than one President had treated the Secret Service agents as if they were furniture, or at best nice pets. It wasn’t often that big shots asked their opinion of much more than narrow professional areas, like where a bad guy might be in a particular crowd.
“Keep going,” CIA said.
“He must have been from outside, a guy with a totally clean record, no connection at all with anybody who made noise in Baghdad. This wasn’t a guy getting even for somebody taking his mother out, okay? It was somebody who worked his way up the system, slow and careful all the way.”
“Iran,” CIA said. “Best guess, anyway. Religious motivation. No way he’d walk away from the hit, so it had to be somebody who didn’t care. That could also mean straight revenge, but Ms. Price is correct: his people were clean in that respect. Anyway, it wasn’t the Israelis, wasn’t the French. The Brits don’t do this anymore. The domestic angle is probably taken out by their vetting procedures. So it wasn’t for money. It wasn’t for personal or family motives. I think we can discount political ideology. That leaves religion, and that means Iran.”
“I can’t say I’m familiar with all the intelligence side, but from looking at the tape, yeah,” Andrea Price agreed. “It’s like he was saying a prayer, the way he killed the guy. He just wanted the moment to be perfect. He didn’t care about anything else.”
“Somebody else to check that out?” Ryan asked.
“FBI, their Behavioral Sciences people are pretty good at reading minds. We work with them all the time,” Price responded.
“Good idea,” CIA agreed. “We’ll rattle the bushes to ID the shooter, but even if we can get good information, it might not mean anything.”
“What about the timing?”
“If we can stipulate that the shooter was there for a while—we have enough tapes of public appearances to determine that—then timing is an issue,” CIA thought.
“Oh, that’s just great,” the President opined. “Scott, now what?”
“Bert?” SecState said to his desk officer. Bert Vasco was the State Department senior desk officer for that country. Rather like a specialist in the trading industry, he concentrated his efforts on learning everything he could about one particular country.
“Mr. President, as we all know, Iraq is a majority Shi’a Muslim country ruled by a Sunni minority through the Ba’ath political party. It has always been a concern that the elimination of our friend over there could topple—”
“Tell me what I don’t know,” Ryan interrupted.
“Mr. President, we simply do not know the strength of any opposition group that may or may not exist. The current regime has been very effective at cutting the weeds down early. A handful of Iraqi political figures has defected to Iran. None are top-quality people, and none ever had the chance to develop a firm political base. There are two radio stations that broadcast from Iran into Iraq. We know the names of the defectors who use those transmitters to talk to their countrymen. But there’s no telling how many people listen and pay attention. The regime isn’t exactly popular, we know that. We do not know the strength of the opposition, or what sort of organization exists to make use of an opportunity such as this one.”
CIA nodded. “Bert’s right. Our friend was awfully good at identifying potential enemies and taking them out of play. We tried to help during and after the Persian Gulf War, but all we really managed to do was get people killed. For sure nobody over there trusts us.”
Ryan sipped at his coffee and nodded. He’d made his own recommendations back in 1991, and they hadn’t been exercised. Well, he’d still been a junior executive then.
“Do we have any options to play?” the President asked next.
“Honestly, no,” Vasco answered.
CIA agreed: “No assets in place. What few people we have operating in that country are tasked to coverage of weapons development: nuclear, chemical, and so forth. Nobody on the political side. We actually have more people in Iran looking at the political side. We can rattle those bushes some, but not in Iraq.”
Fabulous, Jack thought, a country may or may not go down in one of the most sensitive areas of the world, and the world’s most powerful nation could do nothing more than watch television coverage of the event. So much for the power of the American presidency.
“Arnie?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” the chief of staff replied.
“We bumped Mary Pat off the schedule a couple days ago. I want her in today if we can work the schedule.”
“I’ll see what we can do on that, but—”
“But when something like this happens, the President of the United States is supposed to have more than his dick in his hand.” Ryan paused. “Is Iran going to make a move?”
10
POLITICS
PRINCE ALI BIN SHEIK HAD been ready to fly home on his personal aircraft, an aging but beautifully appointed Lockheed L-1011, when the call came in from the White House. The Saudi embassy was located close to the Kennedy Center, and the ride correspondingly short in his official limousine, accompanied by a security force almost as large as Ryan’s and made up of American Diplomatic Protection Service personnel, plus the Prince’s own detail, composed of former members of Britain’s Special Air Service. The Saudis, as always, spent a lot of money and bought quality with it. Ali was no stranger to the White House, or to Scott Adler, who met him at the door and conducted him upstairs and east into the Oval Office.
“Mr. President,” His Royal Highness said, walking in from the secretaries’ room.
“Thank you for coming over on such short notice.” Jack shook his hand and waved him to one of the room’s two sofas. Some thoughtful person had started a fire in the fireplace. The White House photographer snapped a few shots, and was dismissed. “I imagine you’ve seen the news this morning.”
Ali managed a worried smile. “What does one say? We will not mourn his passing, but the Kingdom has serious concerns.”
“Do you know anything we don’t?” Ryan asked.
The Prince shook his head. “I was as surprised as everyone else.”
The President grimaced. “You know, with all the money we spend on—” His visitor raised a tired hand.
“Yes, I know. I will have the same conversation with my own ministers as soon as my airplane lands back home.”
“Iran.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Will they move?”
The Oval Office got quiet then, just the crackling of the seasoned oak in the fireplace as the three men, Ryan, Ali, and Adler, traded looks across the coffee table, the tray and cups on it untouched. The issue was, of course, oil. The Persian—sometimes called the Arabian—Gulf was a finger of water surrounded by, and in some places sitting atop, a sea of oil. Most of the world’s known supply was there, divided mainly among the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran, along with the smaller United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Qatar. Of these countries, Iran was by far the largest in terms of population. Next came Iraq. The nations of the Arabian Peninsula were richer, but the land atop their liquid wealth had never supported a large population, and there was the rub, first exposed in 1991, when Iraq had invaded Kuwait with all the grace of a schoolyard bully’s attack on a smaller child. Ryan had more than once said that aggressive war was little more than an armed robbery writ large, and such had been the case in the Persian Gulf War. Seizing upon a minor territorial dispute and some equally trivial economic issues as an excuse, Saddam Hussein had attempted at a stroke to double his country’s inherent wealth, and then threatened to double down his bets yet again by attacking Saudi Arabia—the reason he’d stopped at the Kuwait-Saudi border would now remain forever unexplained. At the most easily understood level, it was about oil and oil’s resulting wealth.
But there was more to it than that. Hussein, like a Mafia don, had thought about little more than money and the political power that money generated. Iran was somewhat more farsighted.
All the nations around the Gulf were Islamic, most of them very strictly so. There were the exceptions of Bahrain and Iraq. In the former case, the oil had essentially run out, and that country—really a city-state separated from the Kingdom by a causeway—had evolved into the same function that Nevada exercised for the western United States, a place where the normal rules were set aside, where drinking, gambling, and other pleasures could be indulged a convenient distance from a more restrictive home. In the latter case, Iraq was a secular state which paid scant lip service to the state religion, which largely explained its President’s demise after a long and
lively career.
But the key to the region was and would always be religion. The Saudi Kingdom was the living heart of Islam. The Prophet had been born there. The holy cities of Mecca and Medina were there, and from that point of origin had grown one of the world’s great religious movements. The issue was less about oil than about faith. Saudi Arabia was of the Sunni branch, and Iran of the Shi’a. Ryan had once been briefed on the differences, which had at the time seemed so marginal that he’d made no effort to remember them. That, the President told himself now, was foolish. The differences were large enough to make two important countries into enemies, and that was as large as any difference needed to be. It wasn’t about wealth per se. It was about a different sort of power, the sort that grew from the mind and the heart—and from there into something else. Oil and money just made the struggle more interesting to outsiders.
A lot more interesting. The industrial world depended on that oil. Every state on the Gulf feared Iran for its size, for its large population, and for the religious fervor of its citizens. For the Sunni religious, the fear was about a perceived departure from the true course of Islam. For everyone else, it was about what would happen to them when “heretics” assumed control of the region, because Islam is a comprehensive system of beliefs, spreading out into civil law and politics and every other form of human activity. For Muslims the Word of God was Law Itself. For the West it was continuing their economies. For the Arabs—Iran is not an Arab country—it was the most fundamental question of all, a man’s place before his God.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Prince Ali bin Sheik replied after a moment. “They will move.”
His voice was admirably calm, though Ryan knew that inwardly he must be anything but. The Saudis had never wanted Iraq’s President to fall. Enemy though he was, apostate though he was, aggressor though he was, he had fulfilled a useful strategic purpose for his neighbors. Iraq had long been a buffer between the Gulf states and Iran. It was a case in which religion played second fiddle to politics, which thereby served religious purposes. By rejecting the Word of Allah, Iraq’s majority Shi’a population was taken out of play, and the dual border with Kuwait and the Kingdom was one of mere politics, not religion. But if the Ba’ath Party fell along with its leader, then Iraq might revert to majority religious rule. That would put a Shi’a country on the two borders, and the leader of the Shi’a branch of Islam was Iran.
Executive Orders (1996) Page 23