by Tracy Walder
Seven of us crowded into a low, half-circular booth with a round table in the center on which sat several three-foot-high hookahs. The pipes were made of purple or magenta glass on the bottom with silver necks and a burning, smoking dome at the top. We were given our own tubes, which attached to the top of the glass bulb and had a silver tip to suck out the smoke. The pipes were beautifully ornate, like they belonged in a mosque or a church.
I’d never smoked anything in my life. Not even a cigarette. But I was overseas. With a rowdy group of people who needed to burn off the pressure of finding terrorists who were multiplying and reproducing like a metastasized cancer. Between the war, the recent attacks in Saudi Arabia, the intel we’d gotten from the prisoners, and the growing African terrorist cells, I desperately needed that smoke.
It was apple flavored. And it made my head a little spinny.
For a few hours I let go of everything and just let myself sit. Eat falafel. Smoke hookah. And laugh about things simply because it felt good to laugh. It was as if I were floating in a different universe for a while—one without the guys who wanted to kill people like Ben, Randy, Cheryl, and me.
On that very same evening, in an African country, a coordinated suicide bomb attack took place.
It was the deadliest attack in that country’s history.
TEN
MALIBU BARBIE
Africa 2003
The images came at the strangest times. Like when I was looking out at the sea—a robin’s-egg blue canvas, the perfect background for something beautiful and light. But, no. As soon as there was a visual blank space, or a moment of silence, my brain pulled up the heads I had been shown. They floated before my mind’s eye like the bouncing balls in a karaoke video. The eyes were wide, mouths gaped open, necklines like a ragged t-shirt. There were bits of brain spattered on them like the splashings from a dropped platter of spaghetti, and their cheeks were smutted with black debris. It was a like watching a film on a continuous loop. I couldn’t stop myself from seeing them any more than I could stop myself from breathing or sneezing. The suicide bombers probably hadn’t known at the time that when you wear a body bomb, the energy from the blow rolls up and out, popping a head off like a cork. Just as I didn’t know that looking at those unmoored heads lined up on a cart would etch the vision deep into the neural pathways in my brain, forever binding me with these five misguided murderers.
The young men whose heads I had seen had caused much more damage to others than what I was suffering. I had everyday, common-in-war-zones PTSD. But more than a hundred people had been killed or maimed by this group. They hit an African capital with the stated intention to kill Westerners and Jews. Not one Jewish person was among the victims, and most of the people they murdered or hurt were Muslims. No, it never made much sense. Just like the fact that the detached arms I’d seen didn’t haunt me the way the heads did. Each arm was adorned with a Casio watch. The Japanese watch, which sells for less than $20, was—and still is—as commonly found on terrorists as an iPhone on an American teen.
Sometimes, to try to erase the image of those heads, I’d replace it with the faces of the men who had shown them to me. They were operatives from the African country where Ben and I were working for the month. There were no women in this bureau, and I wondered at the time if showing me the heads was revenge for simply having presented myself in their office. One of the first men I met there, a slouchy-looking guy with dark, short teeth, refused to use my proper name. Instead, to the delight of his colleagues, he called me Malibu Barbie. It amazed me at the time that the idea and image of Malibu Barbie would travel all the way across the globe to a passel of operatives in a country where most people didn’t have a working television, let alone a Barbie doll. But these men, boldly macho in their voices and how they took up the space in any room—legs spread wide, arms flailing—knew who Malibu Barbie was. Maybe the only way they could contain me mentally was to equate me to a hard plastic doll with a waist so small that, if she were real, a man could encircle her with his hands. And to show me those heads.
At over six feet tall and with that helmet of perfect, shiny hair, Ben reminded me of a movie star. But they didn’t call him Ken, or Brad Pitt, or, with Ben’s attractive-but-big nose, Adrien Brody. Ben and I both knew this wasn’t about being American, and it wasn’t about being in the CIA. It was about being a woman and their need to assert dominance. They weren’t threatened by Ben. They even appeared to admire him, everyone hushing up each time Ben spoke. But they were terrified of me: a woman doing the same work they did.
Day after day, Ben and I sat in their grungy offices, drinking their thick black coffee and abiding their insults to me, so we could eventually get what we needed from them: information, details, and answers to the many questions we had after having followed a lead to their country’s capital.
Essentially, they weren’t willing to help us until we helped them bring in the people who had planned the attack that gave us the heads. At first they even blamed us for it. Yes, the CIA should have known. But these men should have known, too. This was their country after all.
Blame and unrecognized achievements were part of the job. Anytime a bomb went off, it was a public failure on our part. But every time a bomb didn’t go off, every time a suicide bomber didn’t walk into a restaurant, or community center, or Jewish cemetery, or subway station because we had stopped him—no one heard about it. Most of our successes were kept secret. This was fine by me. But it wasn’t fine by the men in this country who wanted to point fingers at us because their citizens had been harmed.
Also stuck in my mind were the faces of the terrorists I was tracking. A money trail had led us to this city, and we needed names to go with some of the satellite images we had, so we could find every single person involved in the plot. It was enough money to finance something huge—bin Laden style. I felt like a giant clock was ticking in the sky above me, and every second I wasn’t getting closer to finding the terrorists, they were getting closer to executing their chemical plot.
So, yeah. There was a ticking clock. And there were those damn heads.
* * *
The differences between the Middle Eastern country where Ben and I had visited the prison and this African country became apparent to me before I’d even viewed the heads. Before I’d even met the man who dubbed me Malibu Barbie.
I had started tallying comparisons on the flight over when I noticed that most of the women on the plane weren’t covered. In fact, there had been a woman wearing a belly shirt—her flesh flashing out between her breasts and the top of her pants. A few women were in skimpy, low-cut tops. Immediately, I folded my pashmina into a tight square and stuffed it into my backpack. I was happy I’d packed a bathing suit. This new city, I thought, might be a place where I could lie in the sun, in my bikini, on the single half-day I’d planned to take off each week over the next month there.
In the cab on the way to the hotel, Ben pointed out the window at two women jogging in shorts and tank tops. He was as surprised as I to see this here. We could have been in a Florida resort town. I felt like I was on vacation.
That vacation feeling only intensified when we got to our pink stucco hotel with the blue shutters on every window. It looked like an expensive tropical resort. The hotel was intimate and only two stories high. Ben was given a room on the second floor. I was put on the first floor.
And that was when the vacation feeling ended.
You know that slight chill that comes over you when you’re somewhere alone—a cafe, a library, a bus, a grocery store—and you sense someone staring at you? When it happens, you turn in the direction from which you feel that gaze and you catch the person, just for a second, before their eyes dart away. Has it ever happened that you sensed this and turned to find no one? No, probably not. The chances are, 100 percent of the time you felt someone watching you, when you turned to look, voila, someone was indeed watching you. I don’t know how humans feel this. It’s probably a mammalian trait and goe
s back to our ancestors needing to detect predators to survive.
When I entered my hotel room, for the first time in all my travels for the CIA, I felt in my gut, in my mind, and on the surface of my skin that I was being watched. As I have never been wrong when sensing a gaze, I assumed I wasn’t wrong this time either.
I did a thorough search of the room and the bathroom but didn’t come up with anything. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being observed. I called the front desk and asked for a different room. They claimed they were fully booked. I called Ben and asked him to call the front desk and ask for a different room. They told him the same thing: not a vacancy in the place. Ben said he’d switch rooms with me, but we both knew if there were eyes on me, there were eyes on him, too. I called housekeeping and ordered eight towels. The woman on the phone didn’t ask why, which was good since I hadn’t taken the time to think up an excuse. When the stack of towels was delivered I threw one over the TV set, one over the clock radio, one over a decorative bronze camel, one over the painting hanging over the bed, and two on the tiles along the gaping crack between the floor and the wall. The rest I carried with me into the bathroom.
My plan was to shower before Ben and I started our working day, but as I stood in the bathroom that feeling of being watched intensified. I went back to the room with a towel, opened my suitcase, and took out my bathing suit. With great care—as if I were feeling shy in a public dressing room—I slipped on my suit under cover of the towel. Then I returned to the shower and washed with my bikini on.
Once clean, I dressed under the cover of two towels.
After I’d dried my hair, I rushed out of the room. As soon as I was in the tiled corridor, walking toward the courtyard where I was to meet Ben, the “watched” feeling was gone.
Ben and I took a cab to meet Scott, an agent in the local CIA office we had been trying to work with. In my correspondence with Scott I had found him to be inscrutable, a little laconic, and stingy with intel. I assumed the best, though, and figured he just wasn’t good at communicating through writing. After all, we were from the same country and presumably had the same goals.
Presumably.
As Ben and I stood in Scott’s cubicle, his supervisor only a few yards away in his office, Scott let his feelings be known.
“Sucks here,” he said. “He’s a dick.” Scott nodded toward his boss’s open door. I looked over my shoulder to see if he had heard. It didn’t seem wise to call one’s boss a dick while at work, no matter how far away that boss might be. Which, in this small office, wasn’t far at all.
“Oh, yeah? Bummer, man.” Ben was playing the bro part. I knew where he was going. He would try to find equal ground with Scott so we could get the information we needed out of him and do our job.
“It’s a miserable post. This country? Not my thing, man. I’d rather be back in Langley. I need a Royal Farms store, I need Taco Bell! I mean, when’s the last time you had Taco Bell?”
“I prefer Jack-in-the-Box—” I didn’t finish my sentence. I wanted to yell, Human lives depend on the work we’re doing, so you better be doing your job, not dreaming about a chalupa!
“Dunderhead over there couldn’t make it more miserable. The guy is constantly up my ass.”
I leaned out of the cubicle to get a better view of the alleged dunderhead. He was on the phone, his feet crossed on top of his desk. When I leaned back in, I felt Ben’s arm twitch against my hip. I looked down to see him rubbing his fingers together. A gesture for me. A tiny violin, meaning, cry me a river, dude, and just do your job!
“Hey, we’ll run with anything you got, man,” Ben said. “We need to close in on these guys fast.”
“I got nothin’,” Scott said.
“What about the local intelligence offices?” I asked. “Who’s our best source there?”
“Those guys are a bunch of dicks.” Scott shrugged, and I wondered, if everyone you’re surrounded by is a dick, does that make you one, too?
“Did you follow up on any of our cables?” I asked.
“Everything I know is from what you guys sent me,” Scott said. “Seems like you two are pulling up a lot of shit.”
Ben and I were silent for a moment. I was flabbergasted. And furious. This was the first person I’d met in the CIA who didn’t appear to want to do his job, who seemed to take the task of saving human lives lightly. Yeah, it’s hard to bat 100 percent. But the CIA came pretty damn close as far as I’d seen. This guy, however, was the outlier one would hope to never encounter when working counterterrorism.
Finally I said, “Why don’t we go talk to local intelligence guys together and see what we can get from them.”
“Yeah, right.” Scott threw his chin up, laughing. “You two go. I’m not on the best terms with those guys.”
“Oh, yeah.” I said. “Dicks.”
“Total,” Scott said.
“Not one guy who will help us out?” Ben’s eyes were starting to slit.
“Nah.” Scott was sneering now.
“Wait,” I said, “are you saying you won’t show up in their offices?”
“At the assembly of dicks?” Scott shrugged. “No way. You go ahead and I’m gonna get me some shawarma from the guy on the corner. It’s not Taco Bell, but it’s okay. Oh, and my wife invited you both to dinner tonight.” Scott handed me a folded piece of paper with his address. At least he was following protocol here. It was rare not to spend your first night dining with your counterparts in the host city. The person in charge often was the first to extend the invitation, but he—the alleged dick among many in this country—hadn’t even come out of his office to introduce himself to us. Like it or not, we’d be stuck with Scott that night.
In the cab on the way to the local intelligence headquarters, Ben and I unloaded. We had to speak in code so that our cab driver wouldn’t understand. Ben started with, “My Taco Bell–loving uncle is an asshole.” And it went from there. Talk of a lazy uncle who was bringing the hardworking family down.
I figured no one could be as bad as Scott and maintained high hopes for the work we might be able to do with this country’s counterterrorism officers. Also, the great number of uncovered women on the street implied there was more choice, freedom, here. So, I assumed the intelligence agents would also support women’s individual choice and freedom.
The building was fairly new and looked clean and efficient. My hopes soared even higher: modern building, modern-thinking people. After checking in with the receptionist, I dashed into the restroom. I’d been so eager to get away from Scott that I hadn’t wanted to take time to use the restroom at the CIA office. This bathroom was spotless. It looked like it had just been built and had never been used. After I washed my hands, I used a paper towel to wipe up the water spots along the counter. I didn’t want to leave it any less pristine than it had been when I had walked in.
Ben and I were led into the main office where the agents had their desks in modern cubicles, just like at the CIA. Immediately I knew why the bathroom had looked brand-new. Other than the receptionist who led us down the hall, there were no women. It was disheartening, but I simply had to carry on and do my work. Still, I remained optimistic.
A man with hair slicked back like an eighties TV star approached us and shook Ben’s hand. He reeked of cigarette smoke and had a small gray heap of ash on the lapel of his shiny suit.
“Welcome,” he said.
He barely glanced at me and ignored my extended hand. And then his colleague approached. The one with the blackened corn-nib teeth. He shook Ben’s hand, then looked at me and said, “It’s Malibu Barbie!”
There was laughter from the cubicles nearby, and soon we were surrounded by a group of men, none of whom looked me in the eye, all of whom appeared to think Malibu Barbie was the most clever nickname they’d ever heard.
Only a few minutes later, I saw the heads. Those damn, floating heads.
* * *
Scott’s house looked like it could have been in California.
It was a 1970s tract home with warm wood floors. Outside the office, Scott wasn’t such a bad guy. I was frustrated that, to my mind, he wasn’t doing his job properly but had to forgive him, at least for the night, so I could relax and enjoy myself.
There was a nanny who took care of Scott and his wife’s child during our visit. But there was no guard or other domestic help. I stood in the kitchen and talked to Gina while she finished getting dinner ready. Spaghetti was cooking in a large, deep pot of boiling water, and she was working on a homemade tomato sauce into which she was dropping fragrant crushed cloves of garlic.
“Good for your blood,” Gina said as she added another wet-looking clove to the sauce.
Gina was born and raised in the States. Her parents were both from an island nation. She was a professional who had worked for a few years in D.C. while Scott was in grad school and then at Langley.
“I hate it here,” Gina said as we set the table.
“You do?” I waved a plate in the air toward Ben. It made me angry to see him sitting on the couch having a beer with Scott while I set the table. Ben jumped up and rushed over to us.
“I’ll set the table,” he said.
“No!” Gina said. “You sit. You worked all day.”
“She worked all day, too.” Ben nodded toward me. “You both did.”
“We’ll clean up!” Scott offered from the couch. Ben looked at me with imploring eyes. I knew he was trying to schmooze Scott into doing some work for us. I had to give him a break.
“Okay, you guys clean up,” I said.
Gina’s spaghetti, even with all that garlic, was pretty great. And after traveling for so long, it was nice to eat something that felt like home; something that I knew wouldn’t send me digging through my toiletry kit for Imodium.