Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  “Bob, I’ve gathered information about how the intelligence agencies were in bed with al-Qaeda, how we unwittingly encouraged its growth, and how this led to the mayhem at the Twin Towers! And you aren’t even interested in talking about it?” I stabbed at my meat but didn’t eat it.

  “I can’t remember all the details!” Bob shot back. Bob’s memory was formidable. What was going on? “Call Pat Dugan down in Williamsburg. He tried the Nosair case.”

  So I left the table and called Dugan.

  Dugan confirmed many of my findings. A slow-talking, thoughtful retired ADA, he began by asserting that the Kahane assassination was the beginning of jihad in America. Then he told me more precisely what was in the boxes, claiming he went through seventy-five to a hundred, not the widely printed forty-seven. They included the following:

  • CIA manuals on explosives, military tactics, and the use of significant large weapons. Materials to make a bomb that was later found out to be similar to the bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

  • Audiotapes, both originals and duplicates, that were distributed throughout al-Farouq of lectures by Rahman about holy wars and the destruction of landmarks, including the obliteration of America’s “high buildings.”

  • Photographs of the World Trade Center at every angle. Tourist shots, pictures looking up, some far away, some from Liberty State Park in New Jersey.

  Later, I was to find out that in another of the cartons were instructions for forcible entry into big airplanes.

  I asked Dugan if he thought there was a relationship between the earlier World Trade Center attack and the recent one. “That’s the million-dollar question,” he said, sighing. “The FBI’s behavior in ignoring the Nosair evidence definitely led to the ’93 bombings. But whether it’s possible to then connect the dots to September 11, I just don’t know.”

  I went to the periodical section of the library and found evidence that Nosair, Rahman, and one Ramzi Yousef, who directed the 1993 bombing, and Yousef’s uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, were intimately connected. In fact, Nosair and Rahman were linked to the Kahane killing as well as the subsequent 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Though Yousef and Nosair were in jail for the latter crime and Rahman was imprisoned on other terrorist charges, it was hard not to draw the conclusion that they, along with other al-Qaeda terrorists, knew about plans for the September 11, 2001, Twin Towers disaster. Indeed, a scheme to use fueled planes to explode government buildings—and specifically CIA headquarters—was found in Yousef’s apartment. Rahman, who first urged the bombing of the World Trade Center, had been referred to as the “spiritual leader” of 9/11. A major reason why so many of those conspirators took the risk of communicating with each other is that they knew they could skirt detection by speaking on the telephone in obscure Arabic languages, impenetrable by ill-equipped U.S. intelligence agencies.

  The dots connected all right. At least in my mind. The 1993 bombing of the towers, barely investigated by government intelligence agencies, led directly to the terrorists’ great denouement—the massacre of three thousand innocent Americans and the extinguishing in seconds of one of America’s leading symbols of dominance.

  That Bob seemed to have amnesia or be in denial about this outrage bewildered me. His placid insouciance was beyond frustrating. “You never listen to me. You never concede that I’m right even when you know I’m right!” I said.

  Bob did admit that while the federal government was muddying the waters in the case against Nosair, the CIA was also vigorously blocking his investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), perhaps the biggest case of his career.

  His investigation into BCCI began in 1989 when Jack Blum, an investigator on Senator John Kerry’s staff, tipped off Bob to the crooked dealings of a multibillion-dollar Arab-owned bank with branches in seventy countries. He brought Bob stacks of impossibly complicated records and such allegations against the sprawling bank that even Bob’s best investigations assistants balked at the case. But Bob relished the decoding of this bottomless well of evidence that indicated the most massive bank fraud in history. At first, he was the only one who could understand the labyrinthine trail of documents, but after explaining the broad outline of the fraud, he spelled it out to John Moscow and his special international crime unit. When they got to the bottom of endless layers of money laundering, out flew nests of terrorists and drug dealers.

  They never suspected that people more powerful than Bob were working against him.

  The U.S. Justice Department, it turned out, knew a great deal about BCCI and set out to impede the international probe.

  Bob complained to me almost every night. “Justice refuses to give us access to informants, evidence, documents,” he said one time during our cocktail hour. “They lied about having taped witnesses. It’s a mess.”

  “No, they’re a mess, not you,” I replied. “You’re the master at finding ways to maneuver around the power structure. Smash them under your feet.”

  But the screws tightened—all over the world. The Bank of England (it later cooperated), the Serious Fraud Office, and other British institutions also closed their doors. One night, before he had even taken off his coat, Bob gave me a little smile and said, “So today I got a call from the CIA liaison in Justice. He was very oppositional. He asked me why a local crime buster was pursuing an international bank case, and I told him that it was because of the drug dealers. He said, ‘I’ll give you one hundred drug cases if you’ll stop your investigation.’ I refused.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up. “Why is the CIA ordering all this opposition, Bob? Maybe it’s coming from the White House.”

  On July 29, 1991, in spite of all the obstacles, the DA’s Office succeeded in indicting BCCI and its two principal Pakistani officers, including the president, Agha Hasan Abedi, for bribery, money laundering, financing illegal Iran-contra operations, and trafficking in arms and nuclear materials. They pleaded guilty and received huge fines. BCCI was forced to close down. Meanwhile, to cover itself, the U.S. Department of Justice jumped in and put out indictments that simply repeated the DA’s. Two other operatives were indicted by the DA’s Office, and more indictments were in the works, but then, suddenly, John Moscow’s team, under pressure from the CIA, was stopped cold.

  Finally, Bob and I were politically on the same page. I even tried to comfort him. “It’s beyond your control,” I said with disgust. “It’s unbelievable that terrorists who are bent on bringing down America and America’s protectors are actually old buddies who’ve joined forces.”

  Bob, to my gratification, was also outraged. “The CIA not only wanted to protect their informants, and yes, some of them were apparently the terrorists we’d targeted,” he said, “they also didn’t want the bank destroyed. It was their bank. They’d been using it to fund their overseas projects.”

  Even the former president Jimmy Carter was guilty of questionable conduct in the BCCI case. The bank’s president, Abedi, had befriended President Carter and become a regular at White House dinners. “After Carter left office in 1981, he flew around the world with Abedi on the BCCI 707 and introduced him to bank presidents in third-world countries,” Bob explained. “Abedi would then bribe them to put their deposits in BCCI.

  “Carter also had a BCCI credit card,” he added.

  * * *

  Although I had finally tired of railing about it, I could never forget finding out that our government allowed a conspiracy by a handful of terrorists at a Brooklyn mosque to grow and finally become U.S. headquarters for al-Qaeda; that the CIA had helped set the terrorist ball rolling so that it couldn’t be stopped; that the cells grew so large and were so accustomed to being given a free pass, it was no surprise the massacre at the Twin Towers went off without a hitch.

  The obvious conclusion in my eyes, in late 2001, was that personnel from many levels of the U.S. government had been implicated in one of the biggest American horrors in a century.

 
Why would Bob, who knew a decade earlier that the CIA had enabled anti-American terrorists, simply dismiss this moral and political, even criminal action?

  There was a fundamental difference between us. Where I still raged against such official Machiavellian perfidy, he seemed to look upon it as just another aspect of life, a construct that held no larger meaning. Did he have greater wisdom than I about the existence of evil, greater acceptance of light and dark and the human failure to change it? Or was it that he simply refused to become emotionally involved or lose his objectivity about any case? Now I think of all he achieved after 9/11 and how he achieved it. If he had kept brooding about what he hadn’t been able to accomplish, he wouldn’t have had the self-confidence to accomplish anything more.

  Just when I had reconciled myself to Bob’s silence, he began to speak: “You know, I was very upset about the attacks. The CIA and FBI knew about terrorist intentions and did nothing! But I don’t talk. Especially about secret national security information with a reporter who happens to be my wife. I just quietly decided that if the big guys are going to look the other way, then I have to work that much harder.”

  I sighed, relieved. Perhaps we weren’t so far apart after all.

  25

  In 2003, I sold the proposal for my memoir on Dad, the wartime spy, to Miramax Books. To my good fortune, the new publisher, Rob Weisbach, a respected trailblazer in the book world and a gifted editor, took an interest in my memoir and gave me the reassurance I needed to begin the book in earnest.

  I flew through my youngest years, faint memories taking on color: Daddy and his little girl, our sweet concordance almost too much to bear; watching at the window, my cheek pressed against the glass, puzzles unopened, dolls untouched, just watching, until the sun went down and the sky grew violets and I heard the swish of his trench coat coming through the door. I knew that I alone could put the light back into his somber face.

  Writing so easily, I became cocky, sure that my old blocked creativity was history. And then I came to my adolescence, when I broke with Dad, and my fingers froze. If I was going to write about our breach, I had to know why it happened. So off I went to the National Archives outside Washington; the last resort when you can’t produce is to turn to an activity that feeds your creativity—the soothing exercise of research. At the Maryland facility, I sorted through huge boxes of intelligence reports, travel vouchers, officers’ orders, expecting at any minute to find Lieutenant Thomas E. Franks engaged in a daring mission. But he was nowhere. Not once could I find a mention of his name.

  I went home and listlessly flopped down on our Stickley Morris chair. Maybe he lied; maybe the undercover stuff was a fiction designed to impress me.

  “Don’t give up, he was telling the truth,” Bob said firmly. “Why would a regular navy man, even one attached to the marines, be sent to examine the first concentration camp discovered by the Allies? He was an intelligence agent; he wrote a report that helped convince Eisenhower to finally visit Ohrdruf.”

  “You’re biased, Bob. You didn’t know Dad’s devious personality like I did,” I said with a sigh. “But then again, your bullshit meter is near perfect. You can judge character so quickly; that’s why you have a staff of ADAs who’re the envy of the city.”

  “Look, just pay attention to what your father was like. He was a big, strong man. He spoke fluent German, could pick up any language in a week, was an expert marksman, expert fisherman, expert bird-watcher, expert bridge player, expert pool shark, and on and on. He could master anything in record time. He was a natural to be picked for undercover work.”

  The next day, as though sent by Bob or some divine intervention, a navy buddy who served with him in Guadalcanal finally returned my call and told me Dad used to vanish for days; one time, he showed up in a PT boat with a big hole in the side.

  So I was off and running again, back to my computer, back to the archives, which again yielded nothing. This frustrating cycle of disappointment and hope went on for months as I was blown one way and then another. My father was a spy; my father was not a spy. But Bob kept prodding, even motivating me with clever surprises: he took me to the opening of a special Holocaust exhibit at the museum, leading me through collections of artifacts and original pictures of Nazi atrocities until we reached an oval room where he sat me down. All of a sudden my father’s voice surrounded me. I was startled, panicked, and then I saw him. Big as life, on a screen above, talking of the pits full of blackened bodies. It was the first time I had seen the video testimony that he had given the museum fifteen years earlier. Nearby, inscribed on a silver plaque of Righteous Gentiles, was his name: Thomas E. Franks.

  As I held my husband’s hand, I saw the pleasure in his weathered, stately face, and I was stirred. This man who at eighty-seven was still moving mountains, still making subtle changes in the ethos of the city, was proudest of all that he had made his wife so happy.

  Now I was spurred on by Dad’s image, by my husband, and by Rob, who used a multitude of clever strategies to get me to finish the book. But when my buddy the respected novelist Hilma Wolitzer sent me The Artist’s Way, things really began to happen. Rather skeptically, I did what the author advised: I prayed. I called on God to send me the words. And he did. They began to come faster than I could get them down. Through dinner, at dawn, in the middle of the night, my fingertips kept hitting the keys. I didn’t hear my family’s voices, didn’t feel hunger or fatigue. Nothing could enter my space. No longer was I simply making a book; I was reinventing my childhood—erasing history, living my dream, enjoying the peaceful life I had prayed for. I threw out my hands in bewilderment. Now you’re answering my prayers? Well, apparently. Had I forgotten that God has his own clock and works in his own way? My last months with Dad, I stretched out into a lifetime, experiencing him as the man he would have been without the horrors he had seen and done, without the PTSD and oath of silence that had crippled him.

  In the fall of 2006, four years after I had begun researching and writing it, I put the last period on the last sentence in My Father’s Secret War. I had hardly gotten out of my chair for months, and now, with a rush of well-being, I rose—and couldn’t stand up straight. A lumbar disk, in protest against my endless immobility, had tightened around a nerve, pinching it, painfully and perilously. There was the rush to the hospital, the walk through the halls bent over like an old lady, the emergency surgery to free the nerve.

  I was on crutches for three months, and when Christmas came, Bob, my true love, surprised me when I shouldn’t have been surprised. Knowing I had inherited my mother’s love of making a festival of the holiday, the one time when everyone was good to each other, he went out and got me a big Fraser fir. The kids hung it with the sequined felt stars and bells made by my grandma Franks, but since they were now a sophisticated twenty-two and sixteen, they sniffed at the little Victorian women in muffs skating on an oval mirror and the china carolers with hoopskirts singing round a tea shop, as well as the other beloved tableaux that I relished imagining myself into. Sadly, my children, in some ways miniature Bobs both of them, thought the joyous winter scenes excessive. “Mom, you’re being too dramatic,” one of them said with a sigh. Thankfully, our devoted Nerissa, the Caribbean housekeeper who had replaced Renia when she retired, put them out herself.

  While we would always miss Renia, Nerissa had her own strengths, with her loving nature and quiet dignity. She was nanny to the whole family and had her own zany charm. She was in her thirties, energetic, and liked to break out in a little jig, limbs akimbo, while vacuuming. She was unflaggingly loyal to us, stepped up to a crisis, was brilliant at doing errands, and never missed a day of work. She liked to spend her time shopping and talking to vendors who, to her delight, called her “the black Mrs. Morgenthau.”

  * * *

  On November 11, 2001, Renia had died of complications from diabetes. We had all gone to see her during her long ordeal in the hospital, but when she finally slipped into a deep coma, Amy lingered outside her roo
m until we all had said our goodbyes. Amy was the last child Renia had helped to raise. She wanted to have the last conversation with her. I could see my daughter from outside the door, talking animatedly and lifting her hands as though she could raise up her beloved nanny. She was recounting the latest happenings in her life and the family’s, as though the two were cuddled up together as always, as though Renia were listening to her with all her heart. And maybe she was.

  I told Renia’s son and grandchildren not to spare any expense for her funeral. I wanted Renia’s little Brooklyn church to be filled with flowers of their choice. I requested only one flower: a white lily, to represent the one that I had given her on an Easter long ago, the strange ever-blooming plant that had prophesied I would become Mrs. Morgenthau.

  When I walked into the church, I was stunned at the sight of a hundred big snow-white lilies tied with white ribbons to every pew in every row. My eyes filled, and then I couldn’t stop the tears from streaming down when I saw the extended family—my stepchildren as well as Josh and Amy—squeezed together in the second row. Even Barbara, with her small daughter, Mimoh, had flown in from her home in San Francisco.

  Bob was the first one to speak to the congregation: “After my wife died, I wasn’t much use to my two youngest, Bobby and Barbara … Renia knew that and she took over. I remember passing her room, seeing Barbara sitting there with her tattered pink blankie … I don’t know how we would have gone on without her.”

  After his moving eulogy, he sat beside me and whispered, “I’m sorry I didn’t mention you. I know how close you were.”

  I squeezed his hand. “You didn’t need to talk about me.” Renia had stood by me, taught me. The love we shared was private. “You said exactly the right things.”

  Josh told how he would mischievously splash water on Renia in the bathtub: “She would say, ‘Careful, child, trouble don’t start like rain.’ I don’t think I knew what it meant … but it stopped me in my tracks … Renia made you feel like the glass was not half-empty or half-full, but overflowing.”