My God, I wondered, did Madani really say that to me? That he was “chatting with the engineer”? I should’ve broken protocol right then and there. I should have made contact. I went on.
“Problem: Madani and I were questioned by the Iranian border police, after which they spoke to Madani privately, after which I was told Madani was a wanted terrorist, after which I was told to post a hundred-dollar bail. A hundred dollars? For a terrorist?
“Problem: these very same police didn’t look twice at me, an English-speaking foreigner in an area where you seldom see tourists, traveling with an alleged terrorist? Not even look at my passport? The director who staged this folly should be sent back to school.”
The sun was setting now, and blue shadows began pooling around the room. I heard a vacuum cleaner going down the hall. I felt like a prosecutor, wrapping up his case.
“The simplest. Most obvious. Is the most reasonable explanation, returning to Occam’s razor: ‘The simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.’ Therefore, Tango is fake. Need more? Problem: Madani—”
Eric interrupted. “Look, Dan, we already know, OK? We began to suspect along the way, just like you. That something wasn’t adding up.”
“You knew,” I said, scar throbbing again. I grew quiet, my voice lower. “And you kept me in the dark?”
Eric sighed heavily.
“First off, Dan, we didn’t ‘know’ until a few days ago. At the beginning we only suspected, and telling you was impossible because you were already traveling with him on the train. Anyway, telling you that would have placed you in much greater danger. If Tango is a fake, and he at all suspected—”
“And as I’m the only one here who knows Madani, the only one here who spent past two weeks with him, breaking bread with him, drinking tea with him—no one is better to extract that information than I am, particularly now, when we both know he’s bad. There are so many details we could extract from him, that I can’t even start to count.”
“Wait,” Benny interrupted. “Let me ask you something, Dan. Say Tango is a fake, what do you care?” The question seemed rhetorical to me. “So, we got the wrong guy. Then what? No damage was done. He gave us nothing, we gave him nothing. End of story.”
“Propaganda,” I retorted, again realizing they just wanted to hear my reasons, which might be different from theirs. “You should care, because if he’s fake, you can’t hold him, you won’t give him all the goodies Madani would get. Therefore, once he walks, in Istanbul, Tehran, or Washington, DC, it will soon hit the media that the Iranians toyed with us again, and we’ll be getting yet another black eye from public opinion. And if it comes out he’s a fake that the Iranians sent, the bloggers and armchair counterspies will be all over it. Then the House and Senate Committees. You know that.”
“Not so fast, my friend,” said Benny in a measured tone. “Even if Madani is fake and what you’re saying is true regarding the propaganda war, it’s still not the end of the story, for one because we’ll be credited for exposing his lies. And besides, fake or not, we’ll take the opportunity to milk what he knows.”
“Knows?” I said in half contempt. “If he’s fake as I suspect, then he knows nothing, zilch. The Iranians are smart. Do you think they would risk sending someone with any information whatsoever, other than the price of a loaf of bread and the bus fare? Nonetheless we need his confession that he’s fake on video in case he goes public and Iran tries to mock us.”
“Dan,” said Eric, “don’t be so sure that he couldn’t tell us anything of value. Even if he was recruited off the street, he knows who they are, and what they told him to say. He was trained some place, he could tell us that. He could tell us who his instructors were, and whether others were trained with him. There’s always something.”
The only problem with that reasoning: No one learns the names of their recruiters, instructors, or other trainees. They all use false names. Eric knew that. I knew that. So when Eric saw my astonished face, he added, “I know, I know, they all use fake names, but in a closed society like Iran, when many people know many others, although fake names are used, there are after-hours gatherings, a coffee and a cigarette together. People lose their defenses after a while.”
Eric was right, of course, so I didn’t respond. There was no point in developing the argument.
“Listen,” Paul said. “Imagine an Iranian general—any Iranian general—glued to TV broadcasts of a Madani, telling the Iranian public how the CIA had offered him a cool three million to defect—but since the CIA caught him as a fake, they’d expelled him, so he has no money, but there he is telling the world about that offer. The Iranian security apparatus would not be happy to hear that on television. To say the least. It would be like a commercial to all Iranian military commanders, ‘Come to us and we’ll give you three million dollars tax-free, and asylum, if you are for real.’”
“Do you still think, even if Madani is a fake, that Iran would be able to maintain any kind of upper hand in the propaganda war?”
“A general?” Benny weighed in. “You wouldn’t even have to be a general. Say you’re a major, hardly making it in Iran. Maybe you’re sick of everything, the Ayatollahs, the moral police, the oppression. All of it. And there you are, in front of the TV. And you hear of an opportunity to give yourself and your family a better, freer life. You have a wife and children, wouldn’t you consider defecting, seriously?
“So I say, let the fake Madani say whatever he wants. It’ll still be our best recruitment tool, enticing others with possible intel to consider defection to the US. Three million dollars turns defection into real possibility. Not just asylum—money. That’s a considerable carrot.”
“The world’s most expensive carrot,” I said. “Why tax-free?”
“Because under an Internal Revenue ruling, any bonus paid to a defector is not taxable since it’s for ‘work’ performed before the defector came to the United States,” said Paul.
It was now evening, almost dark. I could see the three of us—Eric, Benny, and me—reflected in the window, in yet another safe house, another city, another country, trapped yet again in the twisting maze of intelligence work. Once again, both sides were playing the counterintelligence game, and neither party was able to reveal its tricks. In this case, because it might tip the other side as to how the enemy might be using a defector—as if the Iranians or the US and Israel needed instruction on deception. In the Mossad, especially, deception meant survival. My Mossad days taught me that if one wants to come out ahead, he must persuade the opposition that its ranks are riddled with spies and moles. In this way, you turn the enemy on itself.
I excused myself for minute to the bathroom, to splash water on my face. I needed to clear my head. The cold water shocked me into clarity. Yes, I thought: we must persuade the opposition that its ranks are riddled with spies and moles. I knew such an approach could work. In the 1960s, the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James J. Angleton, was sure that the Soviets had infiltrated the CIA. He took measures that effectively paralyzed the CIA’s operations in Moscow. A quintessential counterintelligence overreach—too much information of no use disseminated by a counterintelligence officer.
I came back to the room with Benny, Eric, and Paul and sat down, the four of us, quietly, as if digesting a full meal. All four of us were thinking, thinking; you could almost hear gears whirring.
Hopefully, I thought, the same paralyzing fear will take effect in Iran. With any luck, the CIA has Iranian counterspies turning Tehran’s labs upside down. Of course, years ago it was remarkably easy to sow seeds of doubt in just about any foreign government, including Iran’s. US counterintelligence agents could very simply contact a member of a terrorist organization and hint, insinuate, or just say, “Hey, Nawaf, or Abdul, or what have you, is working with us, why don’t you?”
And it would work. Even if the target turned away, the “Hey, Nawaf” approach would inevitably work its magic. When the
target reported the encounter, rounds of internal accusations and investigations to find our supposed “spies” would ensue.
Likewise, it was in the CIA’s interest to paint the re-defector, or the fake defector, as just one of many long-term American moles—or, at the very least, as someone who gave up the names of others in the nuclear program who might be vulnerable to CIA recruitment after he fled to the West. Almost certainly, Iranian security would wring any defector dry on that score—or worse—and redouble its efforts to root out the CIA’s supposed spies.
The challenge for both sides, of course, is, was, and always will be knowing for sure who is on whose side. And in the spy versus spy world’s so-called wilderness of mirrors, you can never be sure.
I was still sure about one thing, though: the man calling himself Madani, whom I escorted from Iran to Turkey, was not our intended Tango, General Cyrus Madani.
“OK,” I said, “OK. Fake or not fake, maybe it can work in our favor. You make good points. And, as you say, he’ll have useful information for us, whatever his motives.”
XIV
June 2007, Germany
Twenty-four hours later, I was in Germany, debriefing Madani, genuine or fake. Persistence wins. Well, at least with me versus Eric.
Interrogation rooms always look alike, no matter the country. Drab. Nondescript. One large one-way mirror and no window, so if your charge wants to look outside—if he finds himself looking around the room, if he needs a distraction—there isn’t any, only his own reflection. Sophisticated audio and video recording equipment was buried in the ceiling, covering the room from both sides.
This room was different, however. It was the notorious grinder. A safe house used only for Madani’s debriefing. Only those on the need-to-know short list were given the location. The defector, genuine or fake, had to be protected from outside attempts to kill him. Why a grinder? Because the subject is required to repeat his story again and again. His recorded accounts are then analyzed for consistency, and voice tremors to identify the subject’s lies or half truths. Sometimes, the process can take months to complete and determine whether the defector is bona fide or a plant.
I sat across from Madani today—the fake Madani, I was sure of it. He wasn’t yet searching the room; he was still placid, still calm.
“And you were born…?” asked one of the agents, a large, imposing man named Hank, although his demeanor belied his frame. His tone was soft, unthreatening. Next to him sat Doyle, wiry, with a mustache. He reminded me a little of a weasel. Hank, in mock disinterest—as if this were just another mundane routine he had to get through, like filing paperwork—read from the open file in front of him, and looked at Madani. I sat behind the agents, watching quietly.
“I was born in Yazd, Iran,” Madani said. “But isn’t that in the file in front of you?”
Hank shrugged in a kind of mock apology. “Yes, but you know how it is. We have to follow the routine.”
“Oh, yes, yes, of course,” said Madani, nodding and waving his hand in a conciliatory way, as if to say, Oh, of course, I’ve done this myself. Although he sounded relaxed, I knew he was not.
Behind him, just visible through the corner of his eye, sat a man in sunglasses and a raincoat, a man here without explanation. Madani could also see the man in the mirror in front of him. The man was not here to ask questions; he was not taking notes. He was simply sitting. He was there for one reason: to unsettle the person interviewed. Physical violence could often lead a suspect to man up, to steel himself against his interrogators, and therefore it was not dependably effective. To unsettle the person interviewed, though—to make him unsure of what was happening and why he was here, to make him question his own perception of what was happening right in front of him—this relatively subtle technique, unlike violence, was often tremendously effective. And the “quiet man in sunglasses” was a tried and true way of making the person interviewed very, very ill at ease, and a suspect who is ill at ease is, in the hand of a skilled interrogator, easy to trip up, to trap in his own lies. I’d seen and practiced it time and time again.
“And the street you grew up on?” Hank asked. Again, apparently reading from the open file in front of him.
“Besat Street.”
“The elementary school you went to?”
“Seyyed Al Shohada Elementary School.”
At this, Madani moved his head around, just slightly, for just a split second, as though stretching his neck. I’d seen this “neck stretch” move before. Because even though a suspect will always be positioned in such a way that he can see the man with the sunglasses in the mirror, for whatever reason, the suspect always seems to develop an urge to turn and look at the man in the flesh. But he has to fight that urge, he knows he has to fight that urge, because to turn at look would be to show your cards. To turn and look would be admitting there was something remiss here, that you’re wondering who the hell is behind you, that you’re nervous, that something isn’t right.
And so instead, suspects do what Madani just did. They stretch their necks. And still, the urge, the wondering, grows.
“So, you were recruited into Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, when.…” Doyle asked, trailing off. As he trailed off, he shuffled through the file as if trying to find something, as though looking for something lost. Two tried and effective techniques were going here at once. One, by “trailing off,” the interrogator is still, by design, giving off a disinterested air designed to lull the suspect. And two, the shuffling of papers, again by design, seems disheveled and disorganized, so the interrogator seems absentminded, a nonthreat. Until the suspect realizes yet again a man is just behind him, sitting, staring.
“I was twenty,” Madani said, voice perfectly modulated to neutral. He watched intently as Doyle continued rifling through his file. “My cousin had been recruited the year earlier and put in a good word.” That neutral voice: I had to hand it to him. Madani seemed, still, remarkably at ease. Even I might have mistaken his composure as true if it hadn’t been for that split-second neck stretch. Madani was Iranian after all. Iranians, I knew through experience, were notoriously difficult to read.
I could feel the mood in the room shift. Hank sat up straight. Doyle stopped shuffling papers.
I wrote on my pad: Madani is wrong here. He said he was born in 1952 and recruited to the Revolutionary Guard when he was 20—that’s in 1972. However, the Islamic Revolution was in 1979 and the Guard was first established in May 1979.
So he was off by seven years, a too substantial discrepancy. Was it a slip of the tongue or a crack in the wall that the Iranian VEVAK must have built around him to create the fake Madani? I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of questions, and therefore saved it for a later opportunity. If he was indeed fake as I suspected, then VEVAK did a sloppy job here.
“How about marriage? You were how old?”
“Twenty-four.”
“And where did you get married?” Hank closed the file in front of him, and slipped it into his briefcase.
“Aref, Yazd,” Madani answered.
“Hmmmm,” Hank said. “In fact, weren’t you married in Tehran?” Hank didn’t look at the file now; he looked Madani in the eye. In fact, Hank already knew everything in the file. He had never had a need to open it in the first place. It was a prop, merely another thing used to distract Madani, another thing in the room Madani could focus on. When interrogators looked at a file while they asked questions, so would the suspect. Suspects liked distraction. But now the file was closed, and Hank was looking Madani squarely in the eye, and the only way Madani could maintain the composure of someone telling the truth would be to look back.
“Oh,” he said. “Tehran was the place of my second marriage.” Madani’s eyes met Hank’s. Then he looked at Doyle. And then at me.
“Your second marriage,” said Doyle. A simple technique, repeating back to the suspect what he just said. Putting the suspect even more ill at ease.
“Yes. My second wife is much younger, so
of course when I think marriage, I think of her. Surely you understand.” Madani half-smiled here, looking from man to man; he was making an unconvincing play at male “bonding.”
“What about Yazd? You said you went to school there? But you didn’t. Didn’t you tell us during our initial contacts that you went to Imam Muhammad School, which was right next to your home? Now you are telling me you went to a different school that is more than three kilometers away. How did you get to school? As a young boy, you didn’t drive, did you?”
Madani again stretched his neck, then squeezed it as if he had a crick in it.
“That was a long time ago. How am I supposed to remember the road to my elementary school? I’ve lived a lifetime since then. Please. We are all reasonable men here.”
“That road didn’t just lead to your elementary school. You grew up on that road.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about. You didn’t ask me what road I grew up on!” His tone of voice was angry, even impatient. How dare you.
The man in the sunglasses stood up, and walked behind Madani. Madani turned to watch, and as he did, as fast as lightning, Doyle reached across the table, grabbed Madani’s head and slammed it on the table, twice. With his massive hand, he held it there. Madani’s nose started bleeding, dripping thick blood on the table.
“I’ve got a lot of other things to do today,” Doyle said. “So let me make this brief. You are on a military base, which means you have no access to a lawyer. No one knows you’re here. To us, unless you tell us what we need to know, you are nothing. Nothing,” he said in a raised voice. “I’m telling you all this because I want to make you feel right at home. We’ve created little slice of Iran for you, right here in this room. Here you have no rights.
“You’re a ghost. Anything can happen to you here. Anything at all. I think the Iranians who sent you want you dead, and we could just make that happen if you continue bullshitting us. Hey, I never thought we’d have a joinder of interests with Iran,” he chortled.
Defection Games (Dan Gordon Intelligence Thrillers) Page 17