The Faithful Spy jw-1

by Alex Berenson

  A glare was the only response. Evidently this black had some irritations of his own.

  “I’m sorry to bother you. Sir.”

  “Can I help you with something?” The man’s words were polite, but his tone wasn’t.

  “This may seem strange, but I have a favor to ask.”

  The man sneered. “A favor.” The black drew out the word to show his disbelief. The insolence of these people. Khadri reminded himself to stay calm.

  “I will pay.” A flicker of interest crossed the black’s face. Khadri wasn’t surprised. “I need a package picked up.”

  The interest disappeared, replaced with anger. “You got nothing better to do than hassle me?” The black stood up, towering over Khadri. “You know I just got out and now you wanna send me back—”

  The black thought he was with the authorities, Khadri realized. “I’m not a constable — a police officer,” he said. “Please, listen for a moment.”

  “Don’t care who you are,” the man said. “Just get out of my face.”

  Khadri decided to comply. As he walked away, he heard the words muttered at his back: “Fuckin’ raghead.”

  How he hated this country.

  KHADRI FELT DEFEATED as he sat in his motel room in Kingston that night. He had not expected so much trouble finding help. But he had been scorned three times. These people weren’t fools. They could see he didn’t belong.

  He would have to solve this problem by tomorrow. He didn’t want to become known in Albany as the Arab stranger who needed a favor, which was why he had chosen to stay fifty miles from the city in this rundown motel. Of course he could bring his own man to get the package, but doing that would mean risking an operative and compromising the security of an entire cell. He had so few reliable men in the United States. And now he viewed this as a personal challenge. He should be able to dupe an American into doing his bidding.

  Khadri sighed and flicked on the room’s battered television. His mood improved when a rerun of The Apprentice filled the screen. Khadri enjoyed these so-called reality shows, Americans prostrating themselves before their false gods of money and fame.

  The show ended, and Khadri looked at his watch. Time for his evening prayer. He checked his compass, spread his rug toward Mecca, and prayed silently, touching his head to the ground, genuflecting before Allah. When he finished the ritual he felt calm and clearheaded, ready for a night’s sleep and the next day’s work. Then an idea filled his mind, surely placed there by the Almighty. Or perhaps — Khadri couldn’t help but smile — by Mr. Donald Trump.

  These Americans, they knew he didn’t fit in. So he wouldn’t try.

  * * *

  EARLY THE NEXT afternoon, after some research and a stop at a Kinko’s, Khadri returned to the streets of Albany, slowly driving through the battered neighborhood north of downtown. In a rundown parking lot, a chunky man sat on a battered gray Ford Focus, the obligatory paper bag in his hand. His T-shirt was rolled up to expose his heavy white biceps. Good. Khadri was tired of blacks anyway. He didn’t like them, and the feeling seemed to be mutual.

  Khadri, dressed today in a dress shirt and khakis, parked next to the Focus and stepped out of his car. “Hello, my friend.” This time he didn’t hide his English accent.

  The man looked at him suspiciously.

  “May I ask your name?”

  “Tony.”

  “And your last name?”

  “DiFerri.”

  “Tony DiFerri, very pleased to meet you.”

  Khadri stuck out his hand, and after a moment the man shook it.

  “I’m Bokar,” Khadri said. “How would you like to be on television?”

  “Say what?”

  “I’m a talent spotter. I work for a new reality television show that’s searching for contestants.”

  Tony looked at Khadri as if he had announced he was an alien. “Why me?”

  “It’s a British show. We want a mix of contestants. Not the usual Hollywood types. Diversity.” Americans loved that word.

  “You serious?”

  “Utterly, sir. Utterly.” Khadri rolled the word out with the plummiest Hyde Park accent he could muster. He was beginning to enjoy himself. Now the tricky part. “But we need to prequalify you.”

  The man’s face went blank. “Prequalify?”

  “Make sure you’re capable, that you have a realistic chance of winning.”

  “Sure.”

  “There are five tasks you must complete. The good news is you’ll be paid for each, as well as fifty dollars merely to participate. The bad news is that if you fail even once, we’ll be forced to reject you. Are you interested?”

  Tony was more than interested, Khadri could see. He nearly snatched the pen from Khadri’s hands to sign the ten-page contract filled with legal boilerplate that Khadri had printed out that morning.

  The instructions took only a few minutes. DiFerri listened carefully, even borrowing Khadri’s pen to scratch a quick note to himself. Then he took the key to locker D-2471 from Khadri, coaxed his Focus to life, and drove off. His destination was a converted warehouse on Central Avenue that was home to Capitol Area Self Storage.

  OPERATION EARNEST BADGER had begun a week before, after Farouk Khan sobbed out the last of his secrets to his questioners in Diego Garcia. Looking over the transcripts of the interrogation, Exley almost couldn’t believe how much information Farouk had given up: details of bank accounts and e-mail addresses; the location of an al Qaeda safehouse in Islamabad; the names of three al Qaeda sympathizers in the Pakistani nuke program. Farouk had turned out to be the biggest catch for the United States in years.

  Most stunning of all, Farouk revealed that he had bought one kilo — about two pounds — of plutonium-239 and another kilo of highly enriched uranium from a Russian physicist, Dmitri Georgoff. The agency and Joint Terrorism Task Force had moved immediately to find Georgoff, only to learn that he had been murdered three months earlier in Moscow. The crime officially remained unsolved. But Russia’s Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, reported in response to a discreet inquiry that at the time of his demise Dmitri had been deep in hock to the Izmailovsky mafiya, Moscow’s meanest gang.

  Dmitri was a compulsive gambler with a nose for $2,000-a-night whores, according to the Russians. A real charmer, Exley thought. Still, his death was bad luck for al Qaeda, which had surely hoped to do business with him again. And worse luck for the agency, which had hoped that Dmitri could verify Farouk’s confession. Though, having seen Farouk being interviewed firsthand, Exley was inclined to believe him.

  In any case, Farouk’s information had panned out so far. The oversized canvas bag in locker D-2471 in Capitol Area Self Storage was real enough. So were the traces of radiation seeping from the lead-lined aluminum trunk inside the bag. Farouk had told his interrogators that he had bought the plutonium and uranium the previous summer and turned the material over to the mysterious man who called himself Omar Khadri. Farouk had heard nothing further for almost a year.

  Then, just before his trip to Iraq, Farouk had been told by Khadri that al Qaeda had smuggled the stuff through Mexico and into the United States. That route made sense to Exley. The Arizona desert had no radiation detectors, no customs agents, no shipping companies to create a paper trail. The best coyotes had almost a 100 percent chance of crossing the border undetected, and al Qaeda had surely hired the best for this trip.

  Exley shook her head as she pictured al Qaeda’s careful movements. For the thousandth time she marveled at the patience of these jihadis. They were slow and steady and they never gave up. She’d been thinking lately about selling her apartment, heading back to Virginia to be closer to her kids. Now, reading over the report, she wondered again about listing her place, and soon. Logan Circle was barely a mile from the White House, and radioactive fallout couldn’t be good for real estate prices.

  IT WAS TWO P.M. in Diego Garcia when Farouk Khan told Saul where the plutonium and uranium were hidden. Two P.M. in Dieg
o Garcia meant three A.M. on the East Coast. On a Sunday. No matter. Secure phones began ringing at homes all over suburban Virginia less than ninety seconds after the Critic-coded transmission reached Langley and the White House. The president heard the news when he woke four hours later, per a standing order that his sleep not be interrupted for anything less than a full-scale attack on American soil.

  By the time the sun was rising the Joint Terrorism Task Force had begun an investigation, which it named Operation Earnest Badger. Intelligence agencies seemed to have an unwritten rule that the most serious jobs got the most ludicrous names, Exley thought. The name wasn’t the only absurd aspect of that first Sunday morning meeting. The FBI and the agency had argued for an hour over which side should run Earnest Badger. Finally they’d agreed to name coheads: Exley’s old friend Vinny Duto and Sanford Kijiuri, the deputy director of the Feebs. With their fight for bureaucratic glory out of the way, Duto and Kijiuri got down to business, deploying fifty members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team — a.k.a. NEST — to Albany.

  The Department of Energy had created NEST in 1975 after a hoax nuclear warning in Boston showed the need for a specialized task force that could quickly investigate atomic threats. The emergency team now had about a thousand members, though only a few dozen were full-time paid employees. The rest were volunteers, mostly scientists from the government nuclear laboratories in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. NEST even had a few retirees old enough to have seen the power of nukes firsthand during the open-air tests of the 1950s.

  Exley admired the courage of the scientists, whatever their ages. They had taken upon themselves the unenviable mission of searching for nuclear and dirty bombs, and the even unhappier job of defusing any weapons they found. They worked alongside FBI counterterrorism agents, as well as Special Forces commandos authorized by a secret presidential directive to kill on sight anyone believed to possess a nuclear device.

  During the Cold War, only top-level intelligence and military officials had known of NEST. Now the veil had lifted slightly. Still, the government took extraordinary precautions to prevent the public from learning about nuclear threats, hoping to discourage hoaxes and blackmail. NEST and the FBI never disclosed threats, even — or especially — those considered credible.

  The NEST scientists wore civilian clothes on their missions and carried their laptop-sized radiation detectors in briefcases and oversized purses. The detectors could pick up unusual levels of alpha and gamma rays at distances up to forty feet. They sent wireless signals to miniature receivers that the scientists wore like hearing aids. NEST also owned a fleet of trucks that looked like ordinary delivery vans but actually held larger detectors able to pick up radiation from hundreds of feet away. To defuse a bomb, NEST had warehouses full of exotic tools at its headquarters at Nellis Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas: robots that could be controlled from miles away, the most powerful portable X-ray machines ever created, saws that cut with a high-pressure stream of water instead of metal. In fact, all of NEST’s equipment was fabricated from plastic and nonmagnetic metals like aluminum, since strong magnetic fields could scramble the computer chips inside nuclear weapons.

  UNTIL NOW, THE most serious threat ever investigated by NEST had come in October 2001. SISMI, the Italian military intelligence service, had warned the agency that al Qaeda had smuggled a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon — a so-called suitcase bomb — into New York.

  A ten-kiloton bomb is about as small as a nuclear weapon gets, barely half as powerful as the Fat Man bomb the United States dropped on Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Still, the bomb had enough power to obliterate midtown Manhattan and kill 200,000 people. Most civilians simply couldn’t comprehend what nuclear weapons could do, Exley thought. She envied them. Thinking too much about al Qaeda’s desire for a nuke was like envisioning the end of the world, or your own death — an exercise in humility that could become a morbid obsession.

  Exley vividly remembered the search that had followed the SISMI warning. NEST had frantically deployed hundreds of scientists to check every street in Manhattan, every airport terminal, every floor of the Empire State Building. But NEST never found a bomb. And neither the CIA nor any other intelligence agency could ever confirm the initial Italian report. By Christmas 2001 the investigation had wound down. Four months later NEST and the Joint Terrorism Task Force officially declared the report a hoax. Duto, at the time the No. 2 in the agency’s Operations Directorate, flew to Rome to tell SISMI it needed some new sources. Exley wished she could have seen that conversation.

  She also wished that the suitcase-bomb episode had given her confidence in NEST’s ability to find a nuke if all else failed. But she knew better. During the search the NEST scientists hadn’t tried to hide their limitations. Despite their equipment, they had little chance of locating a bomb in a blind search. They faced an almost impossible problem: plutonium and uranium are only moderately radioactive until they detonate. And cities are filled with radioactive hot spots: X-ray machines in dentists’ offices; CAT scanners in hospitals; pacemakers, which are powered by minuscule amounts of plutonium. Even freshly cut granite emits enough radiation to cause false alarms.

  Three days into the suitcase-bomb search, Stan Kapur, a chubby physicist from Los Alamos who threatened to take Exley to dinner whenever he came to Washington, had said something that Exley still remembered. During a meeting, someone, she couldn’t remember who, had asked about the odds that NEST would find the bomb if it existed.

  “Looking for one of these in New York, it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. A haystack made of needles,” Kapur had said. No one had wanted to hear that. But Kapur, who was now leading the NEST team in Albany, had told the truth, Exley thought. Without accurate intelligence, all the physicists on earth couldn’t find a bomb. Getting inside the enemy’s head was the only way to win.

  EXLEY FELT A strange frisson as she looked at photographs of the duffel bag on the floor of D-2471, which was called a locker though it was really about the size of a one-car garage. On the Sunday after Farouk’s confession came in, the president had considered ordering Albany evacuated. That step had turned out to be unnecessary after the NEST scientists reported that the trunk inside the bag was too small to hold a nuclear weapon.

  After inspecting D-2471 with a pulsed fast neutron scanner and a modified CT scanner, NEST’s best guess was that the trunk held about eight pounds of C-4 explosive, packed around two small lead-lined steel cases that contained plutonium or uranium. In other words, the trunk was a miniature dirty bomb, capable of killing hundreds of people around Albany if the wind blew the wrong way. But NEST could not estimate exactly how much radioactive material the bomb held, because its lead linings blocked almost all the alpha and gamma rays the material emitted. Meanwhile, the army’s explosive-disposal teams reported that the trunk appeared booby-trapped, wired to detonate if it was moved or opened without the proper key.

  After two days of debate, the president decided to leave the bomb where it lay and signed an executive order nationalizing the storage center on the vague grounds of a “national security emergency.” Not even the White House Counsel’s Office believed the order was legal, and Joey O’Donnell, the owner of Capitol Area Self Storage, had balked at giving up his property. But Kijiuri, the FBI deputy director, had not-so-politely explained to Joey that he had an easy choice. He could be a good American and accept the $1 million the government was offering, twice what the place was worth. Tax-free, too. Or he could protect his constitutional rights by filing a lawsuit and pissing off everyone from the FBI to the president himself. “You just won the lottery, Joey,” Kijiuri said. “Take the check and take a vacation. You want us looking at your taxes?”

  Joey took the check and a vacation. Even before he signed over the building, a combat engineering team had arrived to reinforce the walls and ceiling around D-2471 with six-inch-thick lead-and-steel plates. By the end of September the entire building would have a new roof and walls thick enough to
trap the fallout from an explosion.

  ALONG WITH A new ceiling, Capitol Area Self Storage got a new workforce. None of the previous staff complained about being fired; they had all received severance checks bigger than they’d expected. The Delta Force commandos who replaced them were unfailingly polite to customers, though their mid-South accents didn’t quite fit in upstate New York. Meanwhile, FBI and CIA technicians engaged in a not-very-subtle competition to see who could install fancier surveillance equipment in the center. Because of the rules preventing the CIA from operating on American soil, the agency should have left the job to the Feebs. But that restriction had been lifted by the presidential order that created Earnest Badger, or so Duto insisted.

  The dueling teams of techies had locked up Capitol Area Self Storage tigher than — tighter than any cliché imaginable, Exley thought. Four hundred cameras, heat sensors, and motion detectors had been installed in and around the building. A roach couldn’t get within twenty feet of the bomb without setting off silent alarms. And God help the person who opened, asked about, or even looked too long at locker D-2471.

  Too bad the Joint Terrorism Task Force had no idea who that person might be. The room had been rented two months earlier by a man who had called himself Laurent Kabila, the name of the late and unlamented former president of the Congo. “Laurent” had paid in advance and in cash for a three-year rental. He hadn’t come back since his initial visit. Not surprisingly, neither the locker nor the bag had revealed any fingerprints or traces of DNA. Anyone capable of smuggling nuclear material into the United States was presumably also capable of wearing gloves.

  So Duto and Kijiuri had decided that whoever came for the bag would be arrested only if he removed it from the center. Otherwise he would be allowed to leave and would be tracked. Of course, by allowing the courier into D-2471 instead of arresting him immediately, the task force ran the risk that he would blow up the bomb inside the storage center. But if they arrested the courier right away, the trail to the rest of the cell would end. And they desperately needed more information about al Qaeda’s operations in the United States. On the other hand, they couldn’t risk allowing the bomb outside the center.