by Jake Needham
“It’s your story,” I shrugged, at least I shrugged as well as a guy lying in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages can shrug. “I’m hardly in any position to throw you out.”
Karsarkis walked over to the couch and sat down, slouching back as if he was settling in comfortably for a long chat. Outside the windows, the dawn looked as if it was further away than I had thought it was a few minutes before, but probably that was only my imagination.
“About eight years ago, a man I knew very well…” Karsarkis paused and cleared his throat. “His name doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I had just bought control of a Hong Kong company that had shipping interests in the South Pacific and he asked me to allow some American intelligence officers to operate a small freighter under the cover of this company. He told me its purpose was to supply some people in the region with whom the Americans had a covert relationship, and he readily admitted the supply process would include weapons. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I gathered it was a CIA operation and they probably wouldn’t tell me the truth even if I asked. So I kept things simple. I agreed. I didn’t ask for the truth.”
“What were you getting out of it?”
“Ah, well…” Karsarkis laced his fingers behind his head and studied the ceiling with what seemed to me to be unnecessary care. “There was a matter of an SEC investigation and some claims of securities fraud—pure horseshit, you understand—and my friend promised they would be dealt with. But I would have been delighted to help my adopted country regardless, Jack. Absolutely delighted.”
“Of course you would have.”
Karsarkis looked at me, but he said nothing else.
“So the CIA used your shipping company as a commercial cover in return for killing off an SEC investigation of you,” I said. “Am I supposed to be shocked? Maybe even morally outraged? I’ve heard worse.”
“That was just the beginning, my friend. The thin end of the wedge. There was another favor after that, and then another and another.”
“And more favors for you in return?”
“Naturally,” Karsarkis nodded without any apparent embarrassment. “When I set up Icon and shifted our group operations to Luxembourg, they suggested I form an entirely separate division to work with them. Technically, it was only another Hong Kong trading company called Global Resources that was controlled by Icon, but it was a lot more than that in reality. You have no idea, Jack, how much of American intelligence operates through perfectly ordinary looking companies like Global Resources. They use commodity brokers, air freight forwarders, oil drillers, all sorts of companies.”
“All part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, huh?”
“I doubt you have any understanding at all of the real scope of it, my friend. Any understanding at all.”
Karsarkis drew a deep breath and stood up. He stretched slightly and walked over to my bed, resting his hands on the rail at its foot.
“I never knew the whole story. Only pieces here and there. Companies operating through Global Resources were used for secret construction projects, selling and shipping arms, money laundering, bribery, extortion, blackmail, disinformation, and plain old espionage. They acquired high-resistance steel and sold it to Pakistan for nuclear weapons research; they traded weapons for information with Abu Nidal; they built the Al Shifa chemical plant in the Sudan; they founded an executive jet service in Switzerland that made planes available to anyone anywhere with no questions asked. You get the idea, Jack. It was nothing less than the administrative apparatus of covert action on a grand scale. And it was all being done in my name.”
“So you’re saying …what? That you’re really a spy?”
“No, nothing so grand. Or nearly so clear. I was…” Karsarkis stopped and thought, searching for the right word, “a facilitator. I used my commercial resources to facilitate various operations by American intelligence about which I knew very little.”
“In return for what? A get-out-of-jail-free card from the SEC? An agreement by the IRS to look the other way? You played ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ and ended up in over your head. That’s about the size of it, isn’t it?”
Karsarkis smiled, once again without the slightest appearance of any embarrassment.
“Let me tell you how the Iraqi oil sales worked,” he said. “It’s a good example of the way these things were usually done.”
I said nothing.
“After the Vietnam War ended,” Karsarkis continued, “America lost interest in Asia. Americans largely turned their back on half the world for nearly two decades. In the period just before the first Gulf War broke out, at least some Americans started to realize they might be in trouble because of that.”
I listened, but still I said nothing.
“In the early nineties, I was told a significant quantity of crude oil was being smuggled out of Iraq in spite of the economic embargo. I was also told I could obtain access to this oil through a certain Jordanian intermediary and no objection would be raised by the Americans if I brokered this oil to a very specific list of companies. As it turned out, all of these companies were controlled by politicians in Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.”
“Why would anyone in the US want to help the Iraqis sell embargoed oil?”
“Just think about it, Jack. It was really a very clever play. The Americans knew the Iraqis were going to sell the oil anyway, so if they secretly helped do it, they would at least have some measure of control over how much got sold and where it went. They would even know how the Iraqis were being paid and could keep track of what they did with the money. Best of all, they could use the sale of the oil itself to funnel money to people in Asia who they wanted to influence, a part of the world where they needed some new friends. It was a sweet deal all around.”
“For you, too, I imagine.”
“Well…yes, it was. I wasn’t doing all this for intellectual stimulation. I made money at it. That’s the way business works.”
“Did you make a lot of money?”
“Yes,” Karsarkis said, “I made a lot of money.”
His tone had an edge of challenge to it, but I didn’t argue the point. If Karsarkis was telling the truth and if his oil sales had been officially sanctioned, then there wasn’t very much of an argument to be made. Companies were in business to make money, weren’t they? I could hardly object to Karsarkis doing it, particularly if his deal carried the stamp of approval of the United States of America.
“That was when things started to go bad.” Karsarkis looked at me and hesitated. “I was asked to take on Cynthia Kim,” he said, “to give her cover as my assistant.”
He paused again, but I made an impatient gesture and he went on.
“I was told she was involved in tracking the money the Iraqis received from the oil sales and I assumed Cynthia was CIA. But she wasn’t CIA after all it turned out, and she had a rather more ambitious agenda than accounting for a little oil money. Eventually I found out Cynthia was sent to me straight from the White House.”
“Are you saying you were in direct contact with the president?” I asked carefully.
“That was always implied, of course, but…well, if not directly with him, then with the boys in the basement. That’s more or less the same thing.”
“The boys in the basement?”
“The National Security Council. Their operations center is in the basement of the Executive Office Building next door to the White House. The President’s staff calls them the boys in the basement. Very colorful, huh? Full of implications.”
“But the NSC is just—”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody else thinks, too. Nothing but a bunch of paper pushers and professors on leave.” Karsarkis shot me a quick look. “No offense, Jack.”
I ignored both Karsarkis’ insult and his apology. “Maybe I’m really not with you here. The NSC doesn’t handle covert operations.”
“Really?”
Karsarkis seemed amused.
“You mean covert operation
s like the guns for hostages deal with Iran Ollie North ran out of the Reagan White House? Or maybe you mean covert operations like the hit squads the NSC funded in Nicaragua to murder the left-wing priests and other threats to their friends there. Or maybe, if you want an example a little closer to home, you mean covert operations like using the Asian Bank of Commerce for large-scale money laundering and then murdering people to cover it up when Jack Shepherd discovered what was going on and—”
“Okay,” I interrupted, “you’ve made your point.”
“Good.”
I sighed and waved to Karsarkis to continue.
“Cynthia’s mission was focused on Indonesia,” he said. “Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world and it has the largest Muslim population on earth. Historically, Southeast Asian Muslims have been far more moderate than Arab Muslims, but that was changing, partly because of a determined effort by Arab Muslims to create instability there and partly because of the homegrown efforts of some Indonesians. The country seemed ripe to blow. If it did, Afghanistan would look like the good old days.”
“I don’t see anything odd about the NSC being interested in Indonesia. That’s what they do. They track hot spots and advise the president on how to respond before a full-blown crisis develops.”
Karsarkis leaned back and crossed his legs at the knee. He seemed to think for a moment about what I said, but I doubted that. My guess was that he was thinking about something else altogether, something I probably could never even begin to imagine.
FORTY SIX
“CYNTHIA’S JOB WAS to build a close relationship with a group of presumably moderate Indonesian Muslims,” he said. “The idea was to cultivate a manageable force as buffer between the military and the worst of the Islamic radicals.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“Yes, it does, doesn’t it? It’s the formula you Americans always use, and it just keeps blowing up in your faces. Good God, you can see the same thing happening over and over. Americans try to make friends with some revolutionary movement that seems less dangerous than the rest of them, starts supplying resources, even weapons, then eventually these people turn the very weapons you gave them against you and the cycle starts all over again with someone new.”
Karsarkis uncrossed his legs and leaned toward me.
“Cynthia was in contact with an Indonesian known to her as Jabir. He convinced her if his group was to maintain its credibility with Indonesian Muslims, it had to show the ability and the will to engage in violence. Eventually Cynthia bought the argument—actually, it did make sense—and agreed to provide weapons as well as some explosives and detonators to Jabir. I agreed to allow her to use ships owned by Icon to do it. For his part, Jabir promised he would only engage in small operations that caused limited damage, undertaking them just for the effect of it but…” Karsarkis rolled his shoulders in a sort of shrug, “things didn’t work out quite that way.”
“What happened?”
“Some of the explosives we delivered to him were used for the Christmas Eve bombing campaign in 2000. Thirty Christian churches in Indonesia were bombed almost simultaneously, but most of the devices were so badly made they only managed to kill about a dozen people. Some more of the stuff turned up in Singapore five years later when the Singaporeans broke up a plot to bomb the American and Australian embassies there.”
“And the rest of it?” I asked. “What happened to the rest of it?”
I thought I could guess where this was going, but I hoped I was wrong.
“Yes, well…” Karsarkis looked away.
“Bali?” I asked.
Karsarkis nodded slowly. “When the bombings took place in Bali, some of the explosives and one of the detonators were traced back to the original lot Cynthia acquired for Jabir, the stuff Icon delivered to him.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “And Jabir? What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. He just faded away. Maybe we were manipulated from the beginning. Maybe he never even existed.” Karsarkis spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. “Nearly two hundred people dead, most of them Australian kids, and the stuff that killed them traceable to an NSC operation gone wrong and a man who may never have existed.”
“And you, of course. Those explosives were also traceable to you.”
“Yes,” Karsarkis nodded. “With your usual quickness, Jack, you seem to have grasped the first part of my problem.”
“Was that when they indicted you for the oil sales?”
“It was a neat move, I have to admit. Painting me as a traitor for selling embargoed Iraqi oil pretty well gutted any claim I might make that I’d been nothing but a delivery boy for the NSC in Indonesia. Cynthia was the only person who knew the truth of it, at least the only person I had any contact with who knew, and she had always been straight with me. Without her, the NSC could pin the weapons and explosives shipped to Indonesia solely on me whenever they wanted to.”
“And Cynthia was dead.”
“I see you have now grasped the second part of my problem. Cynthia would have told the truth,” he said. “Cynthia would have saved me.”
At first, what Karsarkis was saying came to me only fleetingly, like a sudden draft through an empty room. Then suddenly I understood it all. The truth broke over me like a cold ocean wave.
“You’re saying someone working for the NSC killed Cynthia Kim?”
“Yes.”
“They killed her because she knew the NSC was behind the shipments, not you?”
“Yes.”
“They killed her because she was going to testify to that?”
“Yes.”
“And then they killed Mike and Mia, and they tried to kill me to warn you to keep your mouth shut?”
“The others, yes. But I’m not sure about you. Maybe it was just a coincidence you were in the car with Mia that day.”
Karsarkis looked like he was about to say something else, but instead he walked back over to the green vinyl chair where he had been sitting when I first saw him. His back was to me and I couldn’t see what he was doing, but when he turned around again he was holding a white, letter-sized envelope. He gave me a half-smile, rueful and cheerless, and tossed it onto my bed.
“Fortunately for me, however, all is not entirely lost.”
I eyed the envelope. It wasn’t flat like it would have been if it had folded paper in it. It was slightly lumpy.
“After the Bali bombing there was a panicked debriefing of Cynthia by some NSA and White House people,” he said. “They conducted the debriefing in Singapore. Because they didn’t want Cynthia anywhere near the embassy, they used the Four Seasons Hotel for it, but they were in such a hurry they ignored even the most basic security precautions.”
Karsarkis looked at me as if he wondered whether I caught the importance of that. I said nothing.
“Cynthia was scared,” he went on. “She wasn’t sure whether they would try to hang Bali on me or on her, but she knew damned well they weren’t going to let it be tied back to the White House. She asked me to arrange to bug the suite at the Four Seasons where the debriefing took place. Mike took care of it. Cynthia’s questioners never suspected a thing.”
I glanced at the envelope again. I had no doubt now what was in it.
“I have the original tapes myself, and those…” Karsarkis inclined his head toward the white envelope, “are the only copies.”
“What’s on them?”
“Two NSC people and a very senior White House official talking to Cynthia damage limitation with respect to the Bali bombing. They wanted to make sure there was no way to connect it to their screwed-up operation.”
Karsarkis watched me with a slight smile when he said that and I felt the pieces of his story beginning to come together in my mind.
“A senior White House official?”
“Uh-huh,” Karsarkis said, his expression neutral.
“That wouldn’t happen to be anyone I know, would it?�
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“It’s a funny old world sometimes, Jack.”
Things that never made any sense before were beginning to click together like pieces of an animated jigsaw puzzle that had all of a sudden lurched into motion and started to assemble itself.
“Does the NSC know about the tapes?”
“When the rumors started about Cynthia testifying for me, they guessed we had something, but they couldn’t be sure what it was.”
“This was behind the pardon all the time, wasn’t it?” I watched Karsarkis carefully. “If I had gone to the White House with a pardon application, they would have known you really did have something.”
“Yes, I think they would have looked at it that way.”
“Even you wouldn’t have had the balls to ask for a pardon if you didn’t have something pretty good to trade for it.”
“As always, Jack, you seem to have cut straight to the heart of things.”
“And that was why you needed me all along. I have a personal connection to the man whose voice is on these tapes. You wanted me to blackmail him, to blackmail the White House. That was how you intended to get your pardon.”
“Yes, that’s all true.”
“You used me.”
“Of course. What are friends for?”
I couldn’t look at Karsarkis any longer, so I let my head fall back against the pillow and stared at the ceiling.
“It was all just a game of pin the tail on the donkey,” I said after a while. “And I was the goddamned ass.”
After that, neither one of us said anything else for what felt like a very long time.
“They might still get to you,” I said after a while, breaking the silence.
“I doubt it. After I spill everything in Paris, I’ll have too much light on me. They won’t dare touch me then.”
“And if you’re wrong, or you don’t make it to Paris?”
“That’s the reason I came here this morning, Jack. That’s why I’m leaving the copies of the tapes with you.”