A Loyal Spy

by Simon Conway

  Miranda and Bakr divided their time between Kuwait City, where the import/export business was based, and Baghdad, where the bulk of the business was done.

  Baghdad terrified her. She loved it at first, though. There was something febrile about it back then, in 1990, before the first Gulf War, like a pulse of blood that made your skin tingle. On the Al-Arasat Road, she could drink and dance all night. It was a new beginning: for her, for Bakr and for Iraq. The eight-year war with Iran was over and Saddam had won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election. He had announced new economic policies, companies were privatized and hundreds of licenses were issued to people to start up construction and other companies. Bakr was flying goods in by the planeload from Kuwait City and delivering them into the hands of this new breed of Iraqi traders, who were intimately linked to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

  They became rich. They had everything: cars, fashionable clothes, a beautiful apartment, a nanny for Omar. But it was not enough. It was never enough. There was always another deal, and with each deal Bakr edged closer to Saddam Hussein’s immediate family. The family were the real prize. That was where the riches were. Cut a deal with a family member—the exclusive provision of Christian Dior suits and Dimple whisky to Saddam’s son Uday, for instance—and you were made. But the Hussein family always extracted a harsh toll for making you rich. And as the deals grew larger in scale, the incentives that must be offered to secure the deals had to increase similarly in significance. Until there was only one thing left to offer.

  “I’m not your whore,” she screamed at him.

  “Then what use are you?” he sneered.

  In Kuwait City, she spent her days at the nomad museum, where she had befriended Bakr’s uncle, Ebrahim. The old man had been more than happy to hand over the day-to-day running of the company, and he was enchanted by Bakr’s young wife and baby son. For Miranda, the low lighting and air-conditioning of the basement museum provided a welcome respite from the heat, a welcome respite from Bakr.

  Ebrahim was a small man, round at the edges; he was always whistling and humming, singing to himself as a he fussed around the exhibits in their glass cases. The museum displayed a large variety of Arab artefacts ranging from ceramics to costumes and textiles. A collection of manuscripts charted the development of calligraphy. Cabinets displayed ornate weapons, silver jewelry and boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Omar crawled along the polished floors.

  Her favorite item was a painting by the Orientalist David Roberts, Lady Jane Digby el-Mezrab, a portrait of a Western woman in Bedouin costume, with Roman columns behind her.

  One afternoon, Ebrahim told her the story of the beautiful and headstrong English woman who scandalized nineteenth-century Europe with a succession of husbands and lovers and eventually married an Arab sheikh of the Sba’a tribe of Syria. His eyes twinkled mischievously as he spoke.

  “From her father, she inherited a taste for that which did not belong to her. He was a pirate, an English privateer who made his money by seizing a Spanish treasure ship. From her mother, she inherited great beauty and desirability. Her lovers included the very best of the nobility of Europe—earls, barons, and counts, Ludwig I of Bavaria and the Greek king. There was even an Albanian brigand, who kept her in a cave and made her queen of his rabble army. At the age of forty-six, she traveled to the Middle East; there she fell in love with Sheikh Medjuel el-Mezrab of the Sba’a tribe. They were married and remained so until her death twenty-eight years later. She adopted Arab dress and learned Arabic in addition to the other eight languages in which she was fluent. Half of each year was spent in the nomadic style, living in goat-hair tents in the desert, while the rest was spent in the palatial villa she built in Damascus.”

  Were you happy, Lady Jane? she wondered.

  “We’re getting on like a house on fire,” Ebrahim said from the bottom of the steps.

  Bakr was standing at the top of the steps, holding the heavy wooden doors wide open so that a blast of heat from the street swept through the vestibule. She felt dizzy and she could hardly breathe. She hadn’t seen him for more than a week. Not since he had punched her outside the National Restaurant in Baghdad. It was July 1990 and he was furious about something. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. There was a tightening around his eyes that suggested a perpetual hangover.

  “Your wife is helping me with the displays,” Ebrahim added, in fearful defiance. “She has a good eye.”

  Ebrahim winced at his choice of words. Her right eye was still purple and black.

  Bakr sneered. “You stupid old man. Do you think that any of this is going to matter in a few weeks’ time?” His gaze glided across her and Omar and then away, leaving her feeling that they had been spared.

  Bakr turned and left. The doors slammed closed again. Ebrahim raised his almost blind eyes to the ceiling and whispered words of thanks to his maker. She eased herself down into the nearest chair and held out her arms for Omar to climb into her lap.

  “What does he mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The Iraqi army invaded on August 2. Bakr disappeared into Iraq a week later. She remained in Kuwait City with Omar and helped Ebrahim to box up and hide the museum’s artifacts from marauding Iraqi soldiers.

  Monday, January 15, 1991. It was sunny but surprisingly cold. Heavy rain fell at intervals through the morning, drenching the hapless conscripts in their trenches.

  Miranda had just finished breakfast when Iraqi Republican Guard soldiers surrounded the house. She was given no time to pack her things. She was driven north into Iraq.

  The Allied airstrikes began two days later.

  She remembered lying awake, night after night, in the fluorescent glare, listening to the sounds of the cell blocks, the footsteps of the night guards, the clatter of their keys and the slow breathing of Omar by her side.

  It was her second month in Abu Ghraib. She lived among women who had murdered their husbands or smothered their children. There were junkies and thieves, and dissidents and whores. They lived and breathed by permission of Saddam Hussein, and his emissaries, their jailers’ jailer.

  March 15, 1991. They came into the cell and took her son. Nobody who hadn’t experienced it could possibly imagine what it was like to have your child taken away from you. She relived it in spasms, sudden flashes of memory and nightmares.

  It was a Thursday. The first she knew they were coming for someone was when one of the prisoners began shouting at the far end of the corridor. She turned away from the tiny barred window, from the thorn bush that offered a glimpse of freedom, and walked to the door. She pressed her cheek to the wire-core glass of the viewing pane and watched as the jailers advanced down the corridor. She remembered glancing back at Omar, who was playing on the floor, pushing a small block of wood with bottle-tops for wheels, back and forth on the cell floor. He looked up at her smiled. She turned back to the pane of glass and found herself staring into the eyes of one of the jailers.

  The bolt rattled in the lock. She spun around, gathered Omar up in her arms and backed toward the wall. Two of them stepped into the room, a man and a woman. Others waited in the corridor outside. The man was carrying an electric cattle prod. He was short and stocky, his underarms ringed with sweat, his bald head glistening by the light of the room’s single bulb.

  “Put the child on the bed and step into the corner,” he said.

  She shrank farther against the wall. “What do you want?”

  The woman held out her arms to take the boy. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “No!”

  She tightened her grip on Omar. The man held the cattle prod so that it was just inches from her face. “Give up the child or I will shock you both.”

  “Please, in the name of Allah,” she pleaded, understanding that she had been completely forsaken.

  “Give up the child.”

  The woman stepped forward and pried her fingers loose from Omar’s clothes. Omar shrieked in the woman’s a
rms and Miranda felt his desperation like a punch to the stomach.

  “He is mine,” she screamed. “He is mine.”

  JONAH

  The Sort of the Dark Side

  “We also have to work, through, sort of the dark side, if you will.

  We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world.”

  Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, 2001

  WE’RE ALL NEW YORKERS NOW

  December 2001

  Monteith was worrying the cuffs of his Barbour jacket when a sudden shaft of wintry light cut through the dappled branches of the plane trees and caught him in its corrosive radiance. He stopped, dazzled, and shut his eyes. Beside him, Jonah turned his back on the sun and stared, struck by the unnatural dimensions of Monteith’s shadow on the pathway. Like an ogre from a storybook, something to scare children with. Jonah had heard him called Yoda behind his back by the callow young assistants who fetched and carried for him. More than ever Jonah wanted to tell him to go to hell. The cloud cover shifted and the moment passed. They moved on.

  It was December 28, 2001 and they were in St James’s Park, ten minutes’ walk from the warren of windowless cubicles beneath the Old War Office building that constituted Monteith’s office and, with the exception of a few terse footnotes here and there in intelligence reports, the only ostensible evidence of the Department’s existence. Usually, Monteith liked to keep his operatives dispersed or at arm’s length. He often claimed that being a wild card was his strength, but since Jonah’s return from Sierra Leone he had kept him close by his side.

  Jonah had his fists hidden inside the sleeves of his sweater, his fingertips securing the frayed ends. It was bloody cold. Monteith was delivering him on foot to an informal grilling at the hands of the head of the Operations Sub Group (OSG), a super-secret offshoot of the US National Security Council’s Special Situation Group (SSG).

  “A good double’s not pretending, Jonah,” Monteith insisted. He seemed unusually defensive. “He’s playing both ways. When he is with us he is with us. When he’s with them he is with them. The trick is to get the best end of the arrangement. You can’t cast an agent like Nor adrift and expect him not to go native.”

  “Is that what you want me to say?” Jonah asked.

  “Of course I don’t want you to say that. In fact, I’d be bloody careful if I were you. There’s a high degree of paranoia involved. If you’re not with them you’re against them.”

  “So what do you want me to say?”

  But Monteith was just getting into his stride. “They’ve got it into their heads that there is no law but the discretion of the United States. They’re bypassing the regular operations of intelligence, military and law-enforcement agencies and stove-piping raw intelligence to the very top. The politicians are picking and choosing without any realistic evaluation. They’re conjuring threats out of thin air. They’re going to invade Iraq.”

  Jonah wondered briefly whether he had heard him correctly—had he said Iraq? Jonah was not aware of any imminent threat from Iraq. To his mind, Iraq was a can of worms with the lid best left on.

  “We’ll help them too,” Monteith protested. He seemed genuinely outraged. “You’ll see. Down at the Vauxhall Cross they’ve obligingly coughed up a report on one of Saddam’s little helpers shopping for uranium yellow cake in Niger. That’s what your man’s doing here. Come to pick it up by hand—it’ll be on Cheney’s desk by tomorrow morning. Mark my words. We are entering a period of consequences.”

  Behind Horse Guards the London Eye slowly rotated. That morning Al Jazeera had released new videotape footage of Bin Laden in his Afghan cave, claiming that “the awakening has started.” It seemed to Jonah that there were more important things to worry about than Iraq.

  Monteith stopped and tipped a nod toward the tall American who was standing at the center of the bridge and staring intently at the surface of the lake. “It’s impressive, the level of influence they have. They call themselves the Cabal. They’ve convinced themselves that they’re on the side of the angels and everybody else is a fool.”

  “I’m used to being considered a fool,” Jonah told him with some satisfaction. After all, it was Monteith who had taught him that the greatest compliment you could pay to a secret agent was to take him for a fool.

  “Like I said, I’d be careful if I were you,” Monteith replied sternly.

  “I’ll be charming.”

  “That would be a first,” Monteith said, and then, “You’ll have to come clean. Word has come down from on high. We’re all New Yorkers now.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that they’ve seen the files on Nor up until the fall of Kabul in ’96 when we cut him adrift. They know nothing about him getting back in touch with the invitation from the mullah and they know nothing about his involvement in the death of Kiernan. And they won’t learn a thing by poking about in the cupboards because it’s all been shredded. It means that you are to answer his questions truthfully and to the best of your ability, and it means that if necessary you’re to lie through your teeth. And when you’re done you are to come scurrying back to me with a verbatim report. And Jonah …”

  “Sir?”

  “Remember where your allegiance lies.” Monteith nodded in the direction of the Palace, turned on his heel and strode away.

  Jonah was taken aback. It was unlike Monteith to invoke allegiance. Jonah wondered what it meant. Jonah didn’t much believe in the monarchy, or for that matter the nation-state. As a general rule, he held to Dr. Johnson’s view that patriotism is the last resort of scoundrels. He had come to the conclusion that intelligence was an attribute of individuals and that groups—clans, tribes, nations—were intelligent in inverse proportion to their size and influence: the bigger the stupider, the stronger the dumber. In fact, if he had to label himself, he thought the term disbeliever fitted him best. He disbelieved in New Labour, in the Taliban, in Defense Planning Guidance and the Operations Sub Group.

  Richard Winthrop IV’s hair was parted on a knife edge and his shoes were polished like conkers; Jonah guessed by his own hand. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and his suit was gray, some sort of subtle check that Jonah did not recognize. His nose was as sharp as a compass and he had a fat signet ring on—he was Yale Skull and Bones, and after that Georgetown Law School and the American Enterprise Institute—according to Monteith, his family dated back to the Massachusetts Bay Company, to the founding myth of America; a perfect sanctuary—New Jerusalem—built on virgin land. He burned with brash intensity. His grip was earnest. It was what Jonah had come to expect of the new breed in power in Washington.

  “Walk?” Winthrop suggested.

  “Fine by me,” Jonah replied.

  They passed the swamp cypresses, heading in the direction of the Palace.

  “When I first meet people, I like to share with them a saying from the Pirke Avot, the Hebrew book of ethics,” Winthrop said. “It goes like this: It is not for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to withdraw from it.”

  His pale, almost colorless eyes focused on Jonah. “Are you a believer?” he asked.

  And Jonah thought that, although he was a disbeliever, he didn’t much believe in that either. “I was raised a Roman Catholic,” he responded reflectively, wondering whether that counted in some way. But he knew it didn’t. The behavior of the priests responsible for his school education had ruled out taking it seriously.

  “We are vassals in a shared endeavor, Jonah,” Winthrop told him. “We face an enemy that targets and kills innocent civilians. They lie in the shadows, they don’t sign treaties. They don’t owe allegiance to any country. They don’t fight according to the Geneva Conventions. They do not cherish life. Every day they are manufacturing small amounts of nuclear materials.”

  Jonah frowned and wondered whether he had heard right—nuclear materials?

  “Tell me, are we supposed to wait passively, like the Kurds did in Halabja, for Saddam
to rain chemical weapons down on us?” Winthrop demanded. Jonah remembered vividly the footage of the bodies of women and children lying in the streets of Halabja, taken by an Iranian TV crew a few hours after the Iraqi air force used gas on the inhabitants. It formed a part of the reasoning behind his abhorrence for the murderous activities of Saddam’s regime. But then again, he could reel off a list of loathsome states, and it was quite a leap from gassing your own people to a chemical assault on the most powerful nation on earth, especially on the back of a decade of sanctions, but Winthrop was clearly at ease with the leap. “Are we supposed to wait for more planes to plunge out of clear blue skies?” he demanded. “Or should we act decisively now, utilizing our military advantage, and like a boa constrictor squeeze out the terrorists and the regimes that support them? You want to know why we were attacked. I’ll tell you why: because we were weak. We didn’t see how we had failed and how our enemies had seen us fail. We didn’t see the pattern. How we failed to rescue the embassy hostages in Iran, how we lost Marines in Lebanon and Rangers in Mogadishu, the 1991 ceasefire against Iraq, Lockerbie, the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center, the 1998 attacks in Dar Es Salaam and Nairobi. We face a unique convergence of tyranny, terrorism and technology, and in response to it there can be no room for half-measures. We cannot repeat the mistake of 1991 in not going far enough. We cannot rely on consensus. We cannot allow our actions to be dictated by weaker partners.”

  For Jonah, who had participated in the rout of the Iraqi army in 1991 and witnessed first-hand the carnage of the Mutla Ridge, the first Gulf War could not have ended a day sooner.

  Winthrop was in his stride, punctuating his remarks with short jabs of his forefinger. “Since 1991, Saddam has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capacity and his nuclear program. He is building centrifuges. He has mobile bio-weapons labs and unmanned drone delivery systems. He has given aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.”