The Washington Stratagem

by Adam LeBor

  Mr. Hussein is currently on medical leave. His deputy, Caroline Masters, has been appointed acting secretary-general. The revelations about the massacre at Srebrenica have caused shock across the United Nations headquarters. They come just three days before the start of the Istanbul Summit, the UN-sponsored Middle East peace conference. There is concern among Western officials that Ms. Masters lacks the necessary leadership skills to oversee the conference. In a memorandum obtained by the New York Times, James Berger, the deputy chief of the US mission to the UN, accused Ms. Masters of having lost “her sense of judgment.”

  Many Western officials would prefer to see Mr. Hussein in charge of the summit, said Keir Rogerson, a former British diplomat stationed at the UN. Mr. Rogerson now runs Diplomacy Unbound, a research institute based in New York. “The people I have spoken to, in Washington and London, say they wanted Fareed Hussein to take charge of the summit and, once he is recovered, return to run the United Nations.” But this is now seen as unlikely. “I cannot see any way back for Fareed after this. The Srebrenica documents are explosive. They link him personally to the death of several hundred people,” said Mr. Rogerson.

  Ms. Masters planned to leave for Istanbul late on Sunday night. Roxana Voiculescu, her spokeswoman, said that the contents of the documents would need to be verified before the UN could comment, but that they appeared to be “very disturbing,” especially if they did implicate Mr. Hussein in the deaths of those forced from the base. Mr. Hussein could not be reached for comment. His former spokesman, Henrik Schneidermann, died earlier this month, reportedly from a heart attack. No replacement has yet been named.

  Page 3: The leaked memo in full; the long shadow of Srebrenica

  Page 4: What future now for Fareed Hussein?

  Page 12: Op-Ed: A Survivor Remembers

  Yael sat back and breathed out hard, processing what she had just read. Fareed Hussein’s whispering campaign against Caroline Masters had just been vaporized. Yael had heard the rumors, of course, about Hussein and Srebrenica, but nothing had ever been confirmed. Until now. She ran through the likely sequence of events in her head. Sami’s story on Masters had run on Saturday morning. Masters must have arranged for the documents to get to him as soon as the newspaper hit the newsstands. Sami would have needed a day to confirm and verify the material. He must have filed this second story on Sunday evening, to make Monday’s edition. And now Masters and the UN press corps were on their way to Istanbul. Even by UN standards, the contents, the speed, and the ferocity of Masters’s response were breathtaking.

  Clairborne slid the end of the cigar into the cutter. “Are you familiar with the word krysha?” he asked.

  “It’s Russian for roof.”

  Hers, Yael knew, was gone. But far more importantly, so was her best chance of finding out the truth about David’s death. Unless Isis could deliver on her promise.

  21

  Yael’s Nokia mobile beeped again. Another SMS message.

  Sorry for lateness and delay. Meet you taxi stand NW corner Taksim. Y.

  Yael picked up her purse and rummaged inside, looking for her wallet, buried somewhere under her extra Nokia phones, cigarettes, lighter, tissues, crumpled receipts, miniature makeup palette, chewing gum, antiseptic wipes, Swiss Army knife, emergency tampons, and assorted lipsticks. She pulled out a folded square of glossy paper and opened it up: it was a page torn from last month’s Vogue, showcasing a black, off-the-shoulder cocktail dress by Versace. She smiled to herself, folded the paper up again, and slipped it back inside. Her fingers brushed against a piece of thick cloth, trapped in the bottom right-hand corner. Curious as to what it could be, she took it out. It was a napkin, heavy and white. Yael opened it up, her smile vanishing at what she saw. Silver stitching spelled out “Millennium Hotel, Manhattan.” A small shiny square with serrated edges sat in the center of the cloth. The blue lettering said “Durex: Perfomax.”

  It had taken Yael several afternoons to teach Mahesh Kapoor to learn to control his excitement and extend his—and her—pleasure. The condoms had helped. Her affair with Fareed Hussein’s former chief of staff, seven years earlier, had lasted for several months. It had been a fine example of what the French referred to as a cinq à sept—a liaison conducted between five and seven, in the hours after a gentleman’s work for the day is completed, before he is obliged to return home or attend an evening engagement. But Kapoor had tried to kill her in Geneva and was now serving a life sentence for the murder of Olivia de Souza. And the hotel held even darker memories for her: of Jean-Pierre Hakizimani, lying still on the floor of his suite, his eyes unseeing, his skin turning gray.

  Yael banished the vision. She suddenly realized that she was sitting in a café in Istanbul, dressed as a moderately observant Muslim woman, staring at a silver and blue condom wrapper, nicely framed on a clean white napkin. She scrunched the condom back into the napkin, put it in her purse, and finally found her wallet. She looked around for her waitress, who was deep in conversation with two young women on the other side of the café, by the coffee machine. Yael pulled out a ten-lira note and left it under the saucer. It was more than enough to cover the bill, with a generous tip.

  Yael looked out the window once more. The beggar girl was still crawling back and forth along the sidewalk. A jazz trio—saxophonist, drummer, and double bass player—were setting up nearby.

  Yael left the café and stepped into the hubbub, enjoying the buzz of the street. The sky was a deep, bright blue and the Mediterranean sunlight, softer than Manhattan’s harsh glare, cast a golden tint on the buildings. A cool breeze blew down the avenue, bringing the smell of freshly roasted coffee. Three teenage Turkish schoolgirls in white blouses and blue skirts walked by eating ice cream, totally engrossed in their conversation. Two tall, thin African men, Sudanese or Ethiopian, Yael thought, stood in front of a computer showroom, pointing at various tablets and discussing their merits. A gaggle of Arabic women, each dressed from head to toe in a black abaya with a gold trim, sat on a nearby terrace, eating large sticky slabs of baklava. Yael had barely taken a few steps before she heard American and Australian English; Gulf and Levantine Arabic; French, German, and Hebrew. The workday had hardly started, but İstiklal’s passeggiata was in full swing.

  Amid the crowd, Yael did not notice a tall, bald man in a gray hooded sweatshirt step out of an apartment building doorway twenty-five yards to her right. He wore a Bluetooth earpiece in his right ear and followed her.

  Yael walked across İstiklal toward the beggar girl to give her the twenty lira. She was still now, crouching in front of the household-goods shop. Black metal flowers studded with colored glass flowed in and out of each other’s stems across the art nouveau façade. The girl was reflected in a large horizontal mirror on display in the window. A siren howled in the distance.

  Two hundred and fifty yards away, the old-fashioned tram set off from the terminal at Tünel and began its steady trundle toward Taksim Square.

  Ten yards to the left of the household-goods shop a short, fat man, wearing a brown leather jacket, stood in the entrance of a bookshop. He had a moustache like a black caterpillar and also wore a Bluetooth earpiece. He looked at the man in the gray sweatshirt, nodded, and watched Yael cross İstiklal. He touched his earpiece and started walking toward Yael.

  The band started playing, a jazzy version of “Night and Day,” the long clear notes of the tenor saxophone carrying over the bustle of the tourists.

  Yael stopped after a few steps, smiling as a young woman in a loose white slip and baggy pink trousers began to dance in front of the group, her eyes closed as she swayed in time to the music. Yael suddenly remembered her dance with Najwa, the feel of Najwa’s fingers entwined with hers. She had never believed herself to be interested in women. Just the touch of Eli’s hand on her back still triggered a desire she had thought long dormant. Eli was a no-go, but Sami, despite his betrayals, was a much safer option. He was smarter and funnier, and he touched her in different ways. Or he would have,
she guessed, if their dinner date had worked out. And then there was Yusuf. Tall, dark, handsome, enigmatic—and late. Or maybe she should just forget about men completely for now. Her dance with Najwa had left them both quite breathless, and not just from the exertion. What was that term she had read the other day… bi-curious.

  Yael was so absorbed in her thoughts that she failed to pick up the first signals from her sixth sense. She bent down in front of the beggar girl, the twenty-lira note in her hand, her back to İstiklal Caddesi.

  The tram slowly rattled down İstiklal, crowded with excited tourists, street kids hanging off the bumpers, its bell ringing merrily.

  The bald man walked swiftly toward Yael from the right. The fat man with the moustache approached from the left. An ambulance appeared by the Tünel funicular station and drove down İstiklal, scattering tourists and pedestrians, siren wailing.

  Yael dropped the banknote in the bowl.

  “Teşekkür ederim, thank you,” said the girl.

  “Excuse me, miss,” said the bald man.

  Yael was still looking at the beggar girl when the bald man spoke. Yael glanced up, into the mirror of the household-goods shop, and all thoughts of Eli, Sami, and Najwa vanished.

  She saw the bald man bending down toward her from her right side, a small blue aerosol can in his hand. The fat man with the moustache was almost at her left side. He wore brass knuckles on his right hand with a small pointed blade.

  “Excuse me, miss,” the bald man said again, pointing the can at Yael’s face.

  Yael’s sixth sense was screaming now, sending alarm signals down both sides of her body. She had, she knew, a fraction of a second at the most.

  She was vulnerable, already halfway to the ground, and outnumbered. There was no time to turn around and face her attackers—she could only use the mirror.

  The ambulance was just a few yards away now.

  The bald man slowly pressed down on the nozzle, a yard from Yael’s face.

  Just as the first puff of gas escaped, Yael yanked her hijab down from her forehead with her right hand and pulled it over her mouth. She turned her head sharply rightward, down into her shoulder away from the gas, holding her breath.

  Still holding her head scarf over her mouth, she jammed her foot against the bald man’s leg. She grabbed his sleeve with her left hand, using the momentum of his body weight to pull him toward her. He stumbled forward, unable to escape.

  As Yael dropped back on her right foot, the fat man’s fist flew toward her, a flash of skin and metal. She released her head scarf and blocked his hand with her right arm, simul-taneously kicking out with her left leg at the tall man.

  She aimed for the side of his knee, coughing. Most of the gas had dissipated but the fumes still caught in her throat, sapping her concentration. The move should have disabled him, but her foot slipped and hit his upper thigh instead. The blow was still enough to floor him. He collapsed onto the ground, grunting and swearing.

  Yael jumped backward into a fighting stance, left leg forward, her hands up, now five yards away from the fat man.

  The beggar girl scurried away to the corner of the doorway, crying in fear.

  Yael’s vision narrowed.

  The fat man jumped forward, lunging at Yael and slashing his fist through the air, as though trying to slice her open from shoulder to hip.

  Yael jumped back, her head dropped down, shoulders raised, her forearms in front of her neck to protect herself.

  Each time the fat man stepped toward her, Yael leapt away and kicked out at his groin, again and again. But despite his bulk, the fat man was surprisingly agile and dodged her blows.

  The ambulance stopped by the side of the shop with the art nouveau façade, its siren still howling.

  Yael bumped into two elderly French tourists. They scurried away as fast as they could. Yael righted herself instantly but the collision gave the fat man a half-second advantage.

  He jumped aside, wheeled around, and hit Yael’s left shoulder with a left hook. The blow sent her reeling, shooting bolts of pain down her left side.

  Yael staggered back. A crowd was forming around the fight. Several tourists were filming the scene on their smartphones. The tram had stopped a few yards away. A middle-aged Danish couple, oblivious to the chaos around them, were standing in front of the red and white wooden carriage, taking selfies. Two street urchins, boys around ten or eleven, wearing Arsenal soccer shirts, leapt off the tram and stood watching excitedly.

  Yael barged past them and jumped onto the tram’s metal step.

  “Hey,” said the Danish man, “you barged into my wife and now you are in my picture.”

  The fat man walked toward Yael.

  She willed the carriage to move.

  Nothing happened.

  “I’m talking to you,” said the Danish tourist, advancing on her. He was tall, nudging sixty, his blond hair now almost gray.

  The fat man touched his earpiece. “Look over there,” he said to Yael.

  The tram began to pull away.

  Yael did as he bade.

  The bald man had one of the street kids by the neck, the blade of a knife in his hand.

  The fat man reached into his pocket and scattered several leaflets around.

  He walked up to the ambulance and opened the door, still wearing the pointed brass knuckles. The Danish tourist saw the blade, quickly grabbed his wife, and walked away as fast as they could.

  The fat man turned to Yael. “Coming?”

  Yael stepped off the tram as it gathered speed. “Let him go and I will.”

  Yael heard the fat man say something in Turkish.

  The tall man looked up. He lifted his knife from the boy’s neck. He sprinted away as fast as he could.

  The ambulance door opened.

  Yael looked inside.

  A man sat on the ambulance gurney, pointing a gun at her with one hand.

  “Get in,” said Yusuf.

  Clairborne sits at the café table, sipping a warm Coca-Cola, watching lines of Iraqi prisoners trudge toward the trucks taking them to the Kuwaiti border.

  The air is thick, stinking of burning gasoline, so hot it is almost unbreathable. A long plume of black smoke rises over the horizon. The soldiers’ fatigues are filthy, their faces exhausted, covered with grime.

  A young woman walks up to the prisoners and spits on the ground. The Iraqis turn away in shame. Clairborne looks up as a slim man with a neatly trimmed beard walks over, greets him, and sits down.

  “Sobh bekheir, good morning, Salim. Sorry I can’t be there with you. How’s the house?” asked Clairborne, peering at the computer monitor on his desk.

  Salim Massoud was sitting at a Formica-covered table in a small, dark room, a tulip-shaped glass of tea in front of him.

  “Sobh bekheir. Not as comfortable as Montreal. But we will manage.”

  “Good. How long has it been since we last met? Six, seven years?”

  “Baghdad seven years ago, and Kabul five years,” said Massoud.

  Clairborne steepled his hands and rested his chin on his fingertips. It was three o’clock in the morning but he was wide awake and completely sober. He looked briefly at the photograph of his daughter on his desk, wondered what she was doing at midnight in San Francisco, forced himself to concentrate on his conversation.

  He needed to focus. Without Salim Massoud there would be no Prometheus Group. Their relationship reached back more than thirty years. After the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, Clairborne had joined the CIA to train as a spy. His experience in the Phoenix program put him far ahead of the other recruits. He graduated from the Farm, the agency training school, at the top of his class and was sent to Tehran, undercover as the cultural attaché. Salim Massoud had been his liaison with SAVAK, the brutal Iranian secret police. Massoud penetrated the Islamic revolutionaries and passed on vital intelligence to Clairborne. In return Clairborne supplied Massoud with detailed satellite intelligence about the Iraqi military, which was pr
eparing for war with Iran. Clairborne also opened a numbered Swiss bank account for Massoud where he made regular, substantial deposits.

  In early 1979 Clairborne wrote a series of long, detailed reports to Langley, outlining what he had learned from Massoud: that the shah was doomed and would soon be replaced by Islamic fundamentalists. Cooperation and subtle support now for the revolutionaries would pay substantial dividends later when they took power. Clairborne, who had been present at the capture of the US embassy in Saigon four years earlier by the Vietcong, also recommended that the US embassy staff in Tehran be reduced to a bare minimum, including himself, with the rest evacuated immediately. All of Clairborne’s reports and recommendations were ignored.

  Just as Massoud had predicted, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran in February 1979. In April the revolution erupted and the Islamic Republic was declared. On November 4, revolutionaries attacked the US embassy, taking fifty-two Americans hostage. Clairborne had stayed away from work that day. He fled overland to Turkey, on a route mapped out for him by Massoud, his guilt about abandoning his colleagues competing with an even stronger sense of self-preservation.

  Clairborne’s connection to Massoud survived the embassy crisis. Despite all the Iranian denunciations of the “Great Satan,” back-channel links between Tehran and Washington were soon reestablished. Massoud, like many of his colleagues, made a seamless switch from SAVAK to the new Ministry of Intelligence and National Security, known as VEVAK, which was even more brutal than its predecessor. In 1980, the year after the revolution, Iran went to war with Iraq. The conflict lasted eight years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Throughout that time Clairborne continued to supply Massoud with satellite intelligence. In exchange Massoud gave Clairborne information on the inner workings and vicious power struggles inside the Islamic regime.