The Unexpected Spy

by Tracy Walder

  There was a working assignment at poison school. Each of us, our minds freshly sparking from what we knew after memorizing the manual, had to try to make what the boys in al-Qaeda were making but on an even smaller budget than what they likely had. We used gloves, masks, and a high-tech laboratory. Also, we had the security of a supervisor to make sure nothing we created left the confines of a test tube. It was reassuring to discover firsthand that nothing they did was smarter or more difficult than something we could do. And in knowing exactly how they did what they did, we also came to understand how to undo what they were doing.

  Upon graduating from poison school, we were each given a certificate that I have saved to this day, not as much for the record of achievement as for the memory of a fun and engaging two weeks.

  * * *

  The CTC Weapons of Mass Destruction office (WMD) was on a lower floor of the CIA headquarters. With this new position, I returned to my routine of driving into work right after the sun was up, procuring a Starbucks dark, bold coffee from the food court, and getting to my desk early. Still, I had a hard time beating Graham Andersson in. No matter what time I showed up, he was already there, striding along the cubicles or sitting in his office with the door open, available to whomever might need him.

  Graham’s official title was chief of the WMD office. He was tall and looked like a Viking. Everything about him—the way he dressed, the way he worded his emails, the way he stood still and upright when he spoke—exuded competence and intelligence.

  Victor was the assistant chief of WMD. He had thick hair that swooped back from his head like he’d just walked in from a windstorm. He was always impeccably dressed, with a handkerchief in his suit pocket.

  Sally usually arrived to work at the same time as I. She was the head of my division within WMD. Sally was a mother, around forty, and was enviably fit. She never joked around or chatted the way other people did, or the way George Tenet did every time I saw him. But I trusted her. We all did. We had a few moments to speak alone in the mornings, before my other two colleagues arrived, and this time proved valuable for me. Sally would check in on what I was doing, give me advice when needed, and praise the advances I was making in tracking WMDs. Often, Sally would tell me that I was the “future of the agency.” The reason I point this out isn’t to broadcast that I was the future of the agency. Rather, it’s to say that a little bit of faith and support from the right person can change your perspective. Even though I was always performing at the highest level, and I knew that, I still often felt like the floppy baby, or the girl with acne and funky teeth who was bullied in school. So when Sally told me that my work was outstanding and that I was an important and integral part of the team, it changed how I saw myself. I know we’re supposed to find our confidence from within. But really, my sense of who I was in the context of the agency took root in how Sally saw me.

  Next into the office was usually Ben. He was in charge of Asia. Ben was tall, slim, a former Marine who had recently married. His clothes were always stylish, current; the guy looked like an Italian movie star. I suspected that his wife picked out his outfits, as he didn’t have the fussy personality of someone so well dressed. He was kind and thoughtful from the first day we met. The more we worked together, the funnier and more fun he got. This was also true for the third person in our Poison Trio, and the last one to arrive each morning, David.

  David was in charge of Russia. He wore a black trench coat into the office, no matter the weather. Until I really knew him, I thought he looked like a serial killer with that coat, his sharp balding hairline, and an equally sharp goatee. Once he took the coat off and relaxed, the guy was as sweet as a stuffed animal. One who spoke Russian and could track down terrorists like a hound dog on a fox. Every morning, David took a newspaper from the stacks of world papers at the front desk on our floor and hid in the bathroom with it, on the toilet, I presumed, for what always felt like a long time. Because of this, I had a hard time ever touching the papers he returned.

  David, Ben, and I were the Three Musketeers. Or maybe we were another version of Charlie’s Angels (if I can be a Musketeer, they can be Angels).

  Each morning, once everyone had settled in, Graham came into our area, and the three of us, along with Sally and usually Victor, too, stood around one cubicle or another and had a meeting. We took turns telling the group what we’d found, whom we’d followed, and where our leads were taking us. In this way we triangulated our targets—each of us following training camps and watching how the people from within those camps spread out to other areas. We had all the collected data on the terrorists at our fingertips: photos from mapping, intel from agents on the ground and from other agencies around the world. Cables—which are like impenetrable, untraceable emails—were routinely sent between agencies, tracking any particular terrorist’s movement in a route that might start in the Middle East and then go to North Africa before landing in Western Europe. As much as was possible we tried to find where these guys went, who they met there, what they did there. The goal was to figure out where they were going next and what their plan was for that destination. We knew for sure they wanted to kill Westerners and Jews—al-Qaeda openly stated that and even printed it as their goal in their handbook. The only questions were when, where, and how.

  Trying to save the Western world from being poisoned is intense stuff. When you look at a series of pictures of a particular terrorist, then look at more photos of his chemical lab in his dingy little bathroom in Yemen, and then see that he’s bought a plane ticket to London, it’s hard not to feel a burning intensity, a yearning almost, to put a stop to it. And the only way I was able to live with that kind of ongoing intensity was to create lightness, silliness even, in my daily life. In this way, David and Ben continually kept me afloat.

  We’d each decorated our cubicles in ways that matched our personalities. I had a crystal-blinged pink calculator, tape dispenser, and computer mouse, all of which I still use today. On the inside wall of my cubicle was a poster of a smiling American soldier holding a tin cup. Above his helmeted head it said, How about a nice cup of Shut the Fuck Up. On the bottom of the poster it said, Think before you say something stupid. This was a reminder to me as much as to anyone else. As I was being called on to speak every morning at our standing meetings with Graham, I always wanted to be precise, correct, and relevant. In other words, I only wanted to speak if I actually had something to say, and I felt that if I didn’t have something to say I wasn’t doing my job right.

  In his cubicle, David had a nightlight in the form of Jesus’ face, made of glowing plastic. I can’t tell you if David was a believer or nonbeliever; but I can tell you that he found the idea of a nightlight in His image sort of fun. Amusing! Ben’s cubicle, like Ben himself, appeared to have been decorated by his wife. There were tasteful silver-framed pictures of the two of them, and a matching, dark-wood stapler and tape-dispenser set.

  I kept snacks in the top drawer of my desk, fuel to keep me going when I didn’t want to stop what I was doing, even to pee. When I did get up and use the bathroom, however, David and Ben raided my drawer, throwing down Cheez-Its or York Peppermint Patties as if the two of them hadn’t eaten for days. Their goal was to consume as much of my food as possible before I returned to my desk. I wouldn’t discover the looting until the next time I’d open the drawer to find the bag or box completely gone. Usually with just the empty wrappers left behind.

  Oh, there was another poster, a fake magazine cover, which I hung on the inside wall of my cubicle. This one, mocking a foreign city in a clever and funny way, wasn’t tacked up until after I’d had a disagreement with an intelligence agent in that country about a person of interest I’ll call POI. My sources who were in contact with POI had seen that he was working on acquiring the necessary elements to make a nuclear bomb. Once he was into bombing, he was passed on to my friend Virginia. I wanted to keep my eyes on POI, however, just to see this through and make sure he was stopped before he’d created anything dea
dly. It was a Sunday when Virginia and I, both there in the office, discovered that POI would be flying to a certain world capital that day. A cable was immediately sent out to the intelligence agency in the country where he’d land. The cable had his name, a photo, the facts about his bombing ambitions, his flight number, and what time he was supposed to land so that they could meet him and keep an eye on him. The response from the agency came back right away. In English, it said, “Regrets. We don’t do the work on Sunday.” This wouldn’t be the last time I had to deal with people who wouldn’t work on Sunday. But it was my first time, and so it came as a shock to me. As I lost sleep, worked any day or night, burned my eyes out on computer images, all to protect civilization from chemical warfare, the very people I was trying to save didn’t want to make the effort on a Sunday. I know there are many cultural differences between America and the rest of the world. I know that we are one of a handful of countries that don’t think twice about working through the weekend if necessary. But even if you remove my American bias, I can’t help but think that when human lives are at risk, that lovely commitment to rest, church, and family should be put aside for a few hours. I respect all people from all cultures. All good people, that is. But the loss of POI, when he could have been put on the radar that day, infuriated me enough to post that fake cover. The fictional magazine, which I’d found online, was called Soldier of Surrender, The Official Magazine of the ------ Military. On the cover were headlines for articles like “Surrendering Made Easy! Five Great Exercises to Keep Your Arms Up Longer!” I respect the men and women of that particular country. But that day, I was angry enough to let my feelings be known through my cubicle wall art.

  * * *

  By the fall of 2002, we—the Poison Trio—had created a web of information that flowed in to us from various posts: CIA operatives overseas; the embedded people, called “sources,” from whom overseas operatives got information; sources that we ourselves had in other countries; spies from foreign agencies and their sources; CIA operatives who had debriefed detained terrorists; along with the intelligence collected from overheard phone calls, intercepted emails, and confiscated computers. We were the eye of the web, hoarding it all at our cubicles, sorting it, and making connections until we had unpuzzled a poison network that spread from Pakistan to Afghanistan, the UK, Spain, France, Italy, Africa, and Russia. Starbucks was starting its worldwide expansion around the same time, and I wondered who would proliferate farther: the guys trying to kill us, or the people trying to keep us alert by putting paper cups of coffee in our hands.

  This poison network was led by a man named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Zarqawi was a former pimp and video store worker. He’d also been a mama’s boy who adored his mother as much as she adored him. He’d dropped out of high school, was barely articulate or literate, had multiple tattoos (which is against Muslim law), and was in and out of jail or prison starting at age twelve, when he cut a neighborhood boy in a street fight. His attraction to perverse torture started in his youth, as one of his methods to humiliate those beneath him was to dominate and sexually abuse boys younger than himself. This was and remains a practice that is common in terrorist groups. The men of al-Qaeda don’t classify this as homosexuality—it is all about power and domination. What they view as homosexuality is forbidden by al-Qaeda, and known homosexuals are tortured or, as has been witnessed, thrown from buildings to their death.

  It was Zarqawi’s mother who pushed him toward the Quran as a way of saving her favorite child. It seems she may have pushed too far, as this street thug took religion to a whole new level, one that does not exist in true Islam. He worked on memorizing the Quran and even trained himself to speak differently so he sounded less thuggish and more like a person who had the intelligence to be a leader. In the relentless heat of the Middle East, Zarqawi wore long sleeves to hide his tattoos. Eventually he took a knife and sliced them off his skin, so they were replaced with raised, folding white scars, like worms crawling up his arms. Even with Zarqawi’s newfound devotion and elocution, Osama bin Laden found him too crude. They fought together in the eighties alongside the United States during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But after that, though bin Laden financed many of Zarqawi’s endeavors, the two men rarely interacted and almost never resided in the same country.

  By 1993, Zarqawi was locked up in the Al-Jafr prison in Jordan. Six years later, when the new crown prince of Jordan pardoned 2,000 prisoners, Zarqawi was mistakenly freed. He didn’t go far, though, as he returned the next day to preach to those who remained incarcerated. Prison had provided Zarqawi with hordes of young, angry, frustrated men who easily flocked to his perverse ideology. Zarqawi had gone into Al-Jafr as a ruffian. He came out a guru of mass murder.

  Only someone as perversely sinister as Zarqawi could scheme to engage in chemical warfare. Imagine the mind of someone who wants to spread a lethal mist of ricin powder into the air so that it is inhaled by entire crowds—everyone inside a theater, for example—mothers, fathers, children, grandparents; people of every nationality and faith, including possibly Muslims. At first the victims feel nothing. But within a few hours they’ll have difficulty breathing as fluid builds up in their lungs. Soon, their blood pressure will drop and their hearts might fail. Many will suffer seizures. At this point, the old, frail, and physically impaired will be dead. Those who survive might only survive for another week until they die of shock and multiple organ failure. It’s chilling to think that an entire organization has made mass murder like this its goal.

  At the start of that winter, the Poison Trio had honed in on a single terror plot that had us all worrying about civilians in a European city. When I couldn’t sleep at night, my mind conjured up images of cuddly babies napping peacefully in prams; teenagers playing soccer against an ancient wall; and archetypical happy people drinking red wine and playing cards, all murdered by a few fanatics who couldn’t imagine a coexistence of beliefs.

  Though we were certain about what we’d uncovered, we faced a problem similar to what had gone down earlier in the year in London when the police arrested a team of radicalized Muslims who appeared to be planning to release ricin into the underground subway system there. Raids on their flats and a warehouse found false passports, recipes for ricin, and all the ingredients to make the deadly poison. But as none of the ingredients are illegal, it turned out to be a hard case to prosecute.

  We, too, could see the intentions of the terrorists we were tracking, but they hadn’t yet done anything illegal. We had photos of the men hanging around and observing a crowded public space for hours at a time. We had copies of receipts for purchases of the ingredients to make weapons of mass destruction. And we knew they had been actively recruited and trained by al-Qaeda. In short, we had everything except a definitive statement that said, “We’re going to poison a massive number of people.” Our hope was that a face-to-face visit with the agency in the country where the plot was to be executed would help stress the importance of what we’d found and compel them to do whatever was necessary to make an arrest.

  Graham had decided that Ben and I would go with him to Europe to present our findings. This was the beginning of months of travel. I couldn’t have known it then, but this first trip would turn out to be the most civilized, the calmest, and the least dangerous of all. It was a dignified start to my pursuit of WMDs and the misguided ideologues who create them.

  ~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~~​~ Graham, Ben, and I took a car service to Dulles Airport. In the car, Graham handed me the package of documents of the evidence we’d gathered of this pending attack. None of this information was to leave my side: I was to hang on to it as if it were chained to me, including when we went through security.

  I was already nervous about my ~​~~​~~ responsibilities when we approached the airport. Then, as we marched side by side toward the s
ecurity line, my thoughts went to my belly button. Virginia and I, on our last day off together, had gone to Dupont Circle in D.C. and had our navels pierced. This was the era of Britney Spears with her pierced belly button, and at twenty-three, Britney was not much younger than me. In the spirit of Britney, I got a silver bar with a pink rhinestone running horizontally along my navel. Virginia, being much more reasonable that day, had a simple silver bar. I suddenly feared that this belly-bar would be revealed while I was being hand-searched and Graham would lose all respect for me. I had worked so hard with Ben and David to uncover this plot, I had devoted my life to it for the past several months, and the idea that all that effort would be diminished by an impulsive act on a day off made me feel a little ill. I trusted that Ben would laugh it off. This was a guy who once covered my desk and chair with David’s post-bathroom newspaper. But Graham, a man I admired, respected, and, in a sense, wanted to be, had only seen my serious side. To suddenly flash a silly pink rhinestone on my midriff seemed like a dangerous act considering the dedication I had to my job.

  I saw a sign for the restroom and stopped.

  “I’m going to run in there before security,” I said, the ~​~~​~~ clasped firmly in my hands.

  “You can’t put it down,” Ben teased, “even when you wipe.”

  Graham smiled. “That’s true,” he said.

  “Got it.” I left my rolling bag with them, and rushed into the ladies’ room.

  In the locked stall, I wedged the ~​~~​~~ under my right armpit. Holding it in place, so that I could only move my right arm the way an animated T. rex moves its tiny arms, I quickly unfastened the belly bar and placed it on top of the metal box that holds discarded feminine napkins.

  “So long, Britney,” I whispered.

  I removed the packet from my armpit and then, with it safely in my hands, I exited the stall, leaving the jewelry behind.