The Washington Stratagem

by Adam LeBor

  He does not hesitate. He shake hands with Colonel Hewson, packs his bag, and says good-bye to his comrades. An hour later he and Mr. Smith are in a helicopter, flying along the Vietnamese coastline, before crossing over the border to Laos. They land in a training camp run by the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Clairborne is recruited into the Phoenix program, a black-operations campaign designed to decapitate the North Vietnamese Communist leadership—by any means necessary.

  After weeks of training, he is sent on a solo mission into territory controlled by the North Vietnamese Army. He is ordered to return with the documents of an enemy officer of at least a captain’s rank. He brings back the documents of a colonel, the edges brown with the man’s dried blood.

  Clairborne brought himself back to the present. He wiped his hand once more with his handkerchief and checked the time. It was 7:30 p.m. in DC, which meant it was 4:30 p.m. in San Francisco. Today she only taught for a half day and came home after lunch. He looked at the two photographs on the corner of his desk, one of each of his children. A tall, well-built boy with sandy hair and a freckled grin, holding a soccer ball, stared out from the silver frame. Clarence Clairborne IV. A liquor cabinet left unlocked at a teenage birthday party. A life stopped short at the age of sixteen at the bottom of the family swimming pool. The pool had been filled in and bricked over. Clairborne’s wife had never recovered from what they called “the accident.” She spent her days in a haze of gin and tranquilizers, her rictus grin pulled ever tighter after each bout of plastic surgery. Despite his time in Southeast Asia, Clairborne had never believed in what he called that “karma BS.” But every time he looked at the picture of his son, a memory flashed into his mind: his finger tightening on the trigger, a teenage Vietcong soldier spinning backward, the crimson spreading slowly over his uniform. At least the VC soldier had died quickly, in battle. The others, the prisoners they had taken, had not been so lucky. Those images he forced from his mind.

  Clairborne stared at the other photograph, of a plump, pretty teenager, smiling uncertainly at the camera. Daddy’s girl.

  He picked up the telephone and dialed.

  A female voice answered. He felt the familiar sense of being flustered, trapped, of being dropped into a world he did not understand, no matter how hard he tried. He glanced again at the photograph of his son.

  “This is Clarence Clairborne,” he said, scrunching the handkerchief in his palm. “Can I speak to Emmeline, please?”

  “Hello, Mr. Clairborne. This is Abby. Please wait a moment.”

  He heard her put the phone down and walk across the room. He could visualize the scene: the kitchen of the apartment on Sanchez Street, the sun shining in through the wide bay windows, Emmeline asking who it was, Abby telling her, Emmeline’s face set in stone.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Clairborne, she can’t talk to you right now.”

  “Can’t or won’t?” said Clairborne, his agitation barely under control.

  “Either. Both. I’m sorry, Mr. Clairborne.”

  Clairborne felt his world sliding out from under him. Abby’s friendly manner made it worse because he could not even be angry with her. “Abby…,” said Clairborne, his voice calm now.

  “Yes, Mr. Clairborne?”

  “What can I do?” he asked gently, pleading.

  “Wait, Mr. Clairborne. Just wait.”

  The line went dead.

  He stared at the handset as though it could somehow calm the torment inside him.

  How had his life taken these turns? He believed in God, freedom, and the fight against tyranny, and he had proved it, every day, for five years, even when the politicians had turned on him and his comrades. Operation Phoenix had been closed down in 1972 after a series of Congressional hearings in which it was described as a “depersonalized murder program.” Clairborne then spent the next two years training fighters from the Hmong, welding the Laotian hill tribesmen into an anti-Communist army. Clairborne and his Hmong soldiers raided Vietcong bases and disrupted the Ho Chi Minh trail, the main supply route from North to South Vietnam. But when the United States finally left Vietnam in 1975, it also abandoned its proxy militia. Hundreds of thousands of Hmong fled Laos and the vengeful Communists to live in squalid refugee camps in Thailand. Clairborne had combed the camps for his men and their families. He had personally brought more than three hundred Hmong to the United States and arranged for them to be naturalized, including Mahina, the sister of his closest comrade, who now sat on the other side of his mahogany office door.

  But now he was working with the Iranians. A country that hated and despised the United States. A people that called his homeland “the Great Satan.” A regime that wanted to wipe Israel off the map and finish what Hitler had started. His wife’s cousin had been one of the fifty-two Americans held hostage in the embassy in Tehran for 444 days. He had returned home a broken man. No matter how many times the others talked him through the plan, Clairborne still had doubts. He had sinned. He had killed; he had destroyed the livelihoods of his rivals, driven at least one to suicide. He had fornicated and drank alcohol. But throughout he had remained a patriot. He was still a patriot, he told himself. It might look like he was turning on his country, abandoning the values that had sustained him all his life. And yes, sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, sweating with fear, scrabbling for the prayer card that Eugene Packard had personally written out and dedicated to him. But all this was ultimately for the good of America. It would make the United States, once again, the greatest and most powerful country in the world.

  Clairborne remained at his desk, his head in his hands again, letting the emotions course through him. He picked up the photographs of his children and stared at them for several minutes. He kissed each one and put them back in their place. You can’t fight the pain, Eugene Packard had told him, and if we suffer it is because of God’s plan, which only he knows. Clairborne found some comfort in Packard’s words, but there were other comforts as well.

  Clairborne reached for a glass and a crystal decanter on a small bar cart by his desk. The bourbon inside was specially blended for him by a boutique distillery he owned in Alabama. He poured himself a generous measure and swallowed a quarter of the glass. It brought him no pleasure. Instead of the familiar sweet-sour warmth, the bourbon tasted sweet and sickly. He put the drink down, and opened his planner.

  The visitor was arriving Thursday. He was a crack shot and they were going duck hunting. Clairborne was no coward, neither in business nor in combat. He had seen men die around him, built up his firm from nothing. Despite his emotional turmoil he even managed to keep fairly composed when trying to talk to his daughter. But there was something especially unnerving about this man and the look in his eyes, one blue, the other brown. Especially when he had a gun in his hand.

  5

  Yael knelt down and put her backpack on the ground as quietly as she could. She took out two plastic containers and a bottle of Poland Spring water with a paper napkin tied around the neck and placed them near the sleeping man’s shoulder. The larger box contained a portion of chicken and rice and a plastic fork, the smaller one a good-sized helping of fresh fruit salad and a plastic spoon. A yellow Post-it note, on top of the bigger box, said, “Bon Appetit—a neighbor.” The homeless man was a recent fixture at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Monument. Yael had often seen him there on her early-morning runs, standing by the bicycle path, watching the sun rise over Riverside Park and the Hudson River. He was young, in his midtwenties, brawny and healthy looking, and she often wondered how he had come to be living in a park.

  The memorial stood on the edge of Riverside Drive, by West Eighty-Ninth Street. It was an imposing but little-visited architectural gem, built to commemorate the soldiers and sailors who fell in the American Civil War. Twelve Corinthian columns were arranged on a raised, circular base, topped with a marble roof decorated with eagles. The memorial stood in the center of a small plaza, surrounded by low walls that looked over the Hudson Riv
er. A series of stepped terraces and walkways led down to Riverside Park. Despite the hum of traffic running by on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the memorial was a place of grace and tranquility.

  It was barely 6:00 a.m. and the cream stone glowed softly in the early-morning light. The homeless man was ensconced in a corner of the lower level, curled up in an army-surplus sleeping bag on top of several sheets of thick cardboard, his breathing deep and regular. A camping stove, a jar of coffee, and several empty sandwich wrappers lay nearby. He stirred as Yael stood up but did not waken. She smiled ruefully to herself as she walked away. It was not exactly what she had planned for the dinner she had cooked, but at least some of it would go to feed somebody.

  She walked briskly down to the path that ran alongside the river and began her warm-up, touching her toes and bending frontward, backward, and sideways. A silver-haired man in his seventies wearing a Ralph Lauren jogging suit trotted by, nodding to her in greeting, another of the dawn regulars. The Hudson shimmered black and silver as the city awoke, the first rays of sunlight cutting through the overcast sky. Riverside Park, a long strip of green that ran from Seventy-Second Street to 158th Street, was one of Yael’s favorite places in Manhattan. On free days she sometimes cycled from one end to the other and back again. She had been thinking about inviting Sami on a bike ride next weekend—if the dinner date had gone well.

  Yael ran hard and fast as her feet hit the ground, rapidly overtaking the elderly man, hoping that the physical exertion would burn away the hurt, even if only for a few minutes. How could she be such a complete idiot? A woman blessed with a near-paranormal power to read body language, sense others’ emotions and desires, predict with chilling accuracy what they would do, could not see that the only reason Sami Boustani was interested in her was for the information she had.

  Yael kept a steady pace until she passed the clay tennis courts at Ninety-Sixth Street, her legs pumping, her breathing deep and regular. There she sped up and sprinted another ten blocks or so. The morning breeze smelled fresh and clean, carrying a hint of the Atlantic Ocean. She took it deep into her lungs, as if it would somehow cleanse her. She slowed down at 119th Street at the next set of tennis courts, wiped the sweat from her forehead, and slowly got her breath back. Her heart was racing and her legs were aching, protesting at her unusually fast pace, as if to say you are thirty-six now, not twenty-six, and it’s time you took note. Usually, she ignored that inner voice. But today she listened, and she stood by the river for several minutes, watching the colors of the water change from dark gray to green and blue as the city started a new day.

  The man in the sleeping bag waited for a few seconds after Yael had left before he opened his eyes. He sat up, smiling as he saw the boxes of food, but stayed focused on his task. He took out his mobile phone from under his makeshift pillow. The text message was already written. He pressed the send button, then quickly took out a camera with a telephoto lens from inside his sleeping bag. He followed Yael down to the path that ran through Riverside Park.

  Of course, the Sami thing would never have worked out anyway, she told herself. There were two large elephants in the room, both of which she had willfully ignored. The first was that Sami was a journalist, and journalists, she had learned long ago, were usually not to be given any kind of access to her private life. It was not that they were bad or immoral people. It was just that they seemed driven by an inner mania to tell the world things that really were sometimes better kept secret. But Yael really had believed that she could trust Sami. Before the coltan scandal had broken, she had shared various nuggets of information with him over the last year or so about other stories. At first Yael had wondered if he wanted to see her because he liked her, or because she knew something useful. Both, she soon realized. That was OK, people were complicated; they had mixed motives. Sami had respected her confidences, never once even hinting to his colleagues and rivals that she was a source.

  But then he had burned her for the first time. Last year, Sami had somehow got hold of a memorandum Yael had written to the SG, outlining her disgust at the deal she was brokering with Hakizimani. The Hutu warlord, she had written, should be in prison. Instead he would escape justice for “tawdry reasons of realpolitik and commercial interests.” Which was completely true. The memorandum had been encrypted, but Sami, she had later learned, had received a clear copy. She still did not know for sure who had sent it. Sami had written the story; Fareed Hussein had blamed Yael for the leak, ignored her denials, and sacked her. Her life had been turned inside out.

  Eventually, Yael had rationalized Sami’s article. Or maybe she had persuaded herself to rationalize it. Sami was a reporter. Her memo was a major story and he had to use it. In a way she had been using him as well for a while, sending him in certain directions to cover other stories that she wanted to see in print, usually to do with human rights abuses that the SG and P5 were ignoring for political reasons. There was another explanation, one that she did not like to think about. Perhaps, subconsciously, she was attracted to Sami because part of her thought it would never work—which meant she could never get deeply involved and so never get hurt. But that was too depressing to contemplate. After Yael returned to work, she and Sami had spent some time together—a dinner or two, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art—but nothing physical had happened. Their growing mutual attraction was obvious, but Yael did not want a quick fling, nor did she want to jump into anything too quickly, especially with someone who worked in the same building, in case it all went wrong. She thought Sami had understood, that he wanted the same thing and was enjoying the slow buildup. She had certainly been expecting to move to a more intimate connection last night.

  This, in a way, made his betrayal all the more shocking. Yael could still see him on her television screen, sitting next to Najwa, nodding knowledgeably and discussing her—her job, her life—as though she were just another story, which clearly, for him, she was. The other elephant was perhaps even bigger: she was an Israeli and he was a Palestinian. So far, on their coffees and lunches, they had both skirted around this, with an implicit agreement that the topic was best avoided, at least for now. Yael did not care what religion or nationality Sami—or anyone else—was. She spoke Arabic almost as well as Hebrew and felt quite at home in Levantine culture, with its clamorous family gatherings full of vivacious relatives and piles of delicious spicy food. The Palestinians too deserved their own state, she strongly believed. But it would take more than a plate of hummus to bridge the gap between her and Sami. There was no way that he would still want to see her if he found out who she used to work for, and her involvement in the fate of that frightened teenage boy at the Gaza border. Unless, perhaps, she was completely honest, told Sami herself, and explained why she had left Israel and returned to the United States. It was all entirely academic now. And probably for the best. Still something welled up inside her, something she knew she could never outrun, no matter how fast she sprinted.

  Yael turned away from the river and walked into the park for a couple of minutes, picking her way through the trees along a narrow muddy path. The sound of traffic faded away, replaced by the trilling and cooing of birds. The sun had broken through now. The leaves, still wet with morning dew, sparkled in the light. She sat on a heavy branch that had fallen to the ground and leaned back against a tree. Two sparrows landed nearby, chirping happily before they suddenly took off in unison, soaring upward, into the trees.

  She is lying on her back, on a narrow metal bed, naked apart from a green hospital smock. The room is white, spotless. The doctor is a woman in her forties, with a kind face.

  The IV needle slips easily into her arm. She feels the speculum slide inside her, the metal cold against her skin.

  Yael closed her eyes, held her head in her hands, and let the tears flow.

  The gray Post-it note was tiny, barely the size of a stamp. Sami might have missed it if it hadn’t been stuck to the handle of the door to his office. He peeled it off and read the handwritt
en message: “Your dinner is on the table.” He checked the door again, carefully, in case there were any more mini missives. He felt excited and guilty—very guilty. Excited, because he had finally made the front page above the fold, with a story across six columns. “UN Envoy in Mystery Visit to Millennium Hotel” was that day’s lead—and the newspaper had an exclusive on Najwa’s CCTV footage, which was now the most-watched film in the history of the newspaper’s website. Sami’s editors were ecstatic.

  His telephone had been ringing nonstop all morning. Jonathan Beaufort, the veteran UN correspondent for the Times of London had called him at 6:00 a.m. to try and get more details. Beaufort, the doyen of the UN press corps, was Sami’s greatest rival. He had covered the organization for more than twenty years, had seen several SGs come and go, and had an unrivalled network of contacts. Beaufort was usually a day or so ahead of the rest of the press pack, except for Sami. It was already one o’clock in the afternoon in London, and Beaufort’s editors were demanding a follow-up. Sami had eventually agreed to meet him today in the Delegates Dining Room for lunch. The DDR, as it was known, was Sami’s favorite restaurant in the New York headquarters, renowned for the quality of its gossip and intrigue as much as for its food and spectacular views over the East River.

  Guilty, because he knew he had hurt someone who cared about him. Someone smart, beautiful, and brave, who seemed—to his amazement—to be attracted to him. Sami had barely slept that night and not only because of the telephone calls from his relatives scattered across the Arab world who had been thrilled to see him on Al Jazeera. He turned the sequence of events over and over in his head, wondering if he had made the right move in choosing his career over his personal life. And not for the first time. He had burned her, again, and knew that this time there would be no going back. But nobody had forced him to, and so now he would have to live with the consequences.