“Perhaps downstairs,” said the director. “This is a little sensitive.”
So they went down to the Situation Room. Through the big door at the bottom of the stairs, past the guard post that was staffed twenty-four hours a day, just in case. They made a peculiar parade, descending the stairwell and assembling around the conference table. The national security adviser took off his suit jacket, even though the room was chilly as a wine cellar, and everyone else did the same.
“The Iranians have restarted the weapons program,” said the director. “They’re working on a trigger.” He wasn’t one to beat around the bush.
“Holy Toledo!” said Appleman. He did not like to use curse words. “Are you sure?”
“We have an agent inside. Or so it seems.”
“At last!” said Appleman. He ventured a thin smile, but it was hard to read: at last they had an Iranian agent, or at last they were telling him about it? Fox had probably briefed him weeks ago.
“The president had almost given up on you fellows. But what’s this ‘so it seems’? Either you have an agent or you don’t, right? Or am I missing something?”
The director’s navy cap was sitting on the table, all gold braid. He was out of his element. He turned to Pappas. “Harry can explain.”
“He’s what we call a virtual walk-in,” said Pappas. “He came in through the website. He’s like the Soviet defectors who walked into our embassies in the old days, but the computer-era version. We call him ‘Dr. Ali,’ but we don’t really know who he is. We can make some educated guesses based on the information he has sent us, but we’ve never laid eyes on the guy. He first pinged the website in June. We messaged back and got nothing, so we were suspicious. But a few days ago we got some good stuff. Very good. So I’m thinking he’s the real thing.”
“Tell me more about this ‘good stuff,’ please.” The national security adviser was leaning across the table toward the agency visitors.
“Stewart, if I might,” broke in Fox. “Let’s not make this too complicated. Our asset in Tehran has sent proof that the Iranians are making a bomb. Not thinking about it, not preparing the fuel, but doing it. They are working on the neutron generator. Bingo. This is what we’ve been looking for. The smoking gun. Next thing, they will be conducting an actual nuclear weapons test.”
The air seemed to go out of the room suddenly, suspending everyone in a vacuum. Fox was trying to look grim, but there was a smile of satisfaction on his lips, just a trace. It escaped no one’s attention that Fox had used the national security adviser’s first name. They were social friends, it was rumored at the agency. Political friends, too.
“How can you be sure, Arthur?” said the national security adviser, breaking the silence. He nodded in Harry’s direction. “I mean, if you don’t even know who he is.”
Appleman was a believer, but he didn’t want to get burned if the intelligence was wrong. He had watched that movie play out with Iraq.
“We don’t have to know his identity, Stewart,” replied Fox.
“Why not?”
“Because his information is his bona fides. He has sent us documents that could only come from inside the nuclear program. The first message was a summary of their enrichment of uranium. It told us two things: that they were moving toward weapons grade on their highly enriched uranium track, and that they might—might—have a second track to produce plutonium. We briefed it to you, but we didn’t have any collateral. Now he sends this new document. It describes Iranian experiments with a neutron generator. This fits with either a uranium or a plutonium track, but that’s not the point. The fact is that they are assembling the pieces of a bomb, Stewart. They are nearing a breakout. They’re having trouble getting the hardware to work, but they’ll figure it out. We’re running out of time. That’s the point.”
The national security adviser asked the director if he agreed with Fox’s technical assessment. The director nodded. “If Arthur and his team at CPD say it’s the real thing, I’m ready to weigh anchor.”
Harry winced inwardly as he listened to the simple formulation offered by Fox and endorsed by the admiral. They were making it sound too easy. Open and shut. He looked toward the screens and monitors that lined the walls. This room had been designed as a command post for the president to wage war. Those were the stakes.
Harry cleared his throat to speak. Fox pulled back uneasily, but Appleman was attentive.
“Can I say something?” asked Harry.
“Of course,” said the national security adviser.
“We need to be careful, sir. I’m sorry to sound like a pussy, but I have to tell you that. This case is murky. We don’t really know the source, or where he’s coming from. To the extent we understand this document, it says they’re having trouble making things work, not that they’re about to break out. You policy folks have to make the big decisions, but as an intelligence officer, I wish I had better information for you. That’s all, just a blinking yellow light from an old case officer who has been burned too many times.”
Appleman removed his tortoiseshell glasses and polished them against the silk of his striped orange-and-black tie. He was a Prince ton man. He shared that distinction with Fox. Pappas had gone to Boston College, hustled his way into ROTC, and felt lucky to graduate. Appleman put his glasses back on and raised his hand, palm outward, as if he were stopping traffic.
“Caution noted. Registered. Appreciated. But, ah, before we go any further, the president needs to hear this. Right away, I think.” He paused, thinking something over, and then continued. “The president doesn’t like crowds, so I want just two of you to join me.” He turned toward the director. “Whoever you like.”
The director nodded to Fox. He was the designated briefer on this case, anyway. “Arthur?”
“Whatever you say, sir.” He relaxed his squint for a moment.
The president was contacted in the family quarters. He would be down in fifteen minutes, as soon as he finished making his apologies to the congressmen. Pappas went upstairs and waited in the anteroom outside the national security adviser’s office. He had been there nearly an hour when his stomach began to growl. He thought about going over to the snack bar in the Old EOB and getting something to eat, but he wanted to be there when the director returned. That was his ride. It was also the only way he would know what had been discussed outside his hearing.
When the director and Fox finally trundled back upstairs, it was nearly 9:00 p.m. Fox looked disappointed that Pappas was still there, but the director seemed pleased. He wasn’t stupid. Fox apologized that he would be going back to the agency separately. He had a dinner meeting downtown, he said, and he would summon a car from Langley when he was done. Pappas rolled his eyes. Fox was so obvious. He was going to have dinner with Stewart Appleman. Why didn’t he fucking say so?
“Let’s go home,” said the director.
He didn’t say another word until they were in the limousine, heading toward the George Washington Parkway that would take them back to Langley. The silence was oppressive in the big car.
“So?” said Pappas when they had gone a few blocks.
“So…what?” answered the director.
“So what did the president say, for chrissakes?”
“He said ‘holy shit,’ or words to that effect. He said we need to prepare military options if the Iranians are moving toward a nuclear test. He also said we need to know more. About the neutron gizmo, and the plutonium track, and the whole damn thing. I told him he was right. The truth is, we don’t really know very much.”
Pappas smiled. He was relieved. He was never sure the director really understood how imperfect a picture was drawn by intelligence information. And he had no sense at all of how the president made decisions. But this had turned out about right.
“Arthur must be disappointed,” said Pappas. “It sounded like he wanted to launch the cruise missiles tonight, from the way he was talking to Appleman.”
“He gave the president a hard-
edged briefing. As you would expect. But he didn’t go beyond what we have, if that’s what you’re worrying about. He was…appropriate.”
The director looked tired. Weighed down by all the secrets he was carrying around. Even his uniform didn’t look quite as starchy as usual. Pappas put his hand on the boss’s shoulder. They weren’t friends, really, but he looked like a man who needed one.
“This is dangerous,” said Pappas.
“No shit.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to find out more about Dr. Ali. Who is he? What does he really know? What else can he tell us about the program? How can we run him effectively? That’s just for starters. They’re going to want to squeeze him hard, and rattle the cage some. After tonight, we can’t make any mistakes with this case. None.”
“Not so easy, Admiral. We have nothing on the guy, and we don’t have good ways of finding out more. We don’t have a station in Tehran. And I don’t want to send in a non-official cover. If a NOC got caught, he wouldn’t have diplomatic immunity. A few days in Evin Prison and even the toughest son-of-a-bitch would give it up. Dr. Ali would be dead and we’d have no information.”
They were humming along the George Washington Parkway now. There was a full moon out and the river was bathed in pale light, the few boats upriver outlined in half shadow. Harry looked down at the broad estuary. A new species of fish known as snakeheads had invaded these waters in recent years. They had come originally from Asia, nobody quite knew how, and now they were eating the local fish. Someone in NE Division had suggested that perhaps the thing to do was to get an even bigger and meaner fish from somewhere else, and let them eat the snakeheads. That was what it was coming to.
“What’s the alternative?” asked the director. “If it’s too dangerous to send in a NOC, what do we do?”
Harry thought a moment. He had been pondering this question himself for several weeks, even before the receipt of this latest message. How could they identify a frightened Iranian computer geek who insisted on remaining in hiding? How could they reach into the miasma of Tehran, a city of nearly 12 million people, and pluck out the one person they needed? You couldn’t do it from Dubai. You couldn’t do it from Istanbul. You certainly couldn’t do it from Langley. You had to be there. That was the puzzle Harry had been trying to solve, and he knew he needed help.
“The Brits,” he said after a long pause. “SIS had two people in their Tehran embassy the last I knew. Maybe they could help us find him. Maybe they could get enough collateral that we could ask better questions of Dr. Ali, assuming we ever have two-way with him.”
“Can they keep it quiet?”
“Sure. The Brits are the best liars in the world. Plus I know Adrian Winkler, the new SIS chief of staff. He’ll do anything I ask him. We were together in Moscow and Baghdad. I could go over, brief him and his boss, work up an ops plan. Keep it tight.”
The director didn’t respond until they were almost to the gates of the headquarters complex. He had too much on his mind now. He had been a happy man when he left the military to come to the agency. At first he had treated CIA like a big navy base. He went to the cafeteria with his wife, played softball at “Family Day,” gave out the medals and the supergrade promotions himself. But the easy part was over, and now he had a big dysfunctional organization to worry about. Pappas sensed that he didn’t really like this work, or the people who did it. He liked driving boats. The CIA was another tribe.
“Do it,” said the director. “Go to London as soon as you can make arrangements.”
Pappas promised he would be on his way in twenty-four hours. The limousine had parked in the garage now. The director was about to take his private elevator to the seventh floor. There was one more question.
“Are you going to tell Fox?” asked Pappas.
The director didn’t answer, which Pappas understood to mean no.
9
LONDON
Adrian Winkler might have posed for an SIS recruiting poster, if that most secret of secret services had wanted to advertise. He was dark-haired and intense, with a furtive twinkle in his eyes. He knew how to shoot a gun, jump from an airplane, speak an exotic language, tell a wry joke. He operated with a panache that reminded you that intelligence work was really an extension of life in a British public school—the hazing and deception shaped by cunning intellect. When he completed a particularly good operation, Winkler would confide as if to a fellow schoolboy, “That was a good wheeze!” Most Americans were intimidated by him, put off by his sardonic wit and his refusal to tolerate incompetence. But Harry Pappas was so far from Winkler on the social landscape that he didn’t feel threatened. He liked Winkler because he was good at his job and seemed to enjoy it.
Pappas had met him in another lifetime, when they were both young officers in Moscow. The CIA at the time was in one of its recurring panics about Soviet penetration of the agency, and life at the old U.S. Embassy compound was grim in midwinter. The station chief had told his restless cadre of case officers to stand down on new operations until the situation was clearer, which meant that Pappas didn’t have anything to do. To pass the time, his colleagues drank heavily, flirted with other people’s spouses, and tried to avoid saying anything that might get them in trouble. Pappas was so bored he would take rides on the Moscow subway, back and forth, Kurskaya to Kievskaya, just to confuse the KGB surveillance teams.
Then along came Adrian and Susan Winkler. They arrived in Moscow by car from Finland, a more harrowing trip in winter than it sounds, bearing their two young daughters. The roads were icy and treacherous, the children were wailing, the Soviet police were menacing. They drove day and night to get to Moscow before a blizzard that was moving east. Exhausted by too many hours of driving, Adrian had searched for a spot he could pull off the road and get a little sleep. He finally found a little hideaway just off the main highway, tucked behind the fir trees. It was so dense and dark back there, you could almost disappear. He closed his eyes and fell into a deep slumber, until he was awakened by the cries of one of his girls.
But Winkler had remembered the spot: that was the point of the story, when he recounted it for Pappas late one night. He had remembered the little rest area, filed it away in a compartment of his mind where it lay…until one day a few months after his arrival when he needed a covert rendezvous point, urgently. The SIS had ordered a crash operation to exfiltrate a Soviet KGB agent they were running. The agent was supposed to go out via Finland, but they needed someplace where he could disappear along the way. Winkler recalled the rest area in the woods—located it on the highway almost down to the precise kilometer. And that was the ops plan: the Russian agent drove in from one side; a British NOC from the other. One car emerged, with the agent in disguise. The exfiltration scheme became a legend within SIS. Winkler was just twenty-nine at the time.
Winkler shouldn’t have told Pappas the story. It was still a secret. The Brits wanted the Soviets to think the agent was dead. But he and Harry were out of Russia at the time, in a safe house in Stockholm drinking vodka, and as Winkler said, “You have to trust someone.”
“Did he thank you?” Pappas had asked.
Winkler had shaken his head ruefully.
“Who? Pavel? Are you joking? He was a right bastard. He thought he did it all himself.” Winkler had paused.
“That’s the thing about this business, isn’t it? We work with the worst people in the world. If there wasn’t something wrong with them, why would they be talking to us in the first place? And you know what? Some of it is going to rub off.”
From the moment Adrian Winkler arrived in Moscow, he and Pappas had made common cause. They both had young families. Pappas’s son Alex was just four then—a little roustabout who never seemed to get cold no matter what the temperature was. They weren’t supposed to socialize, but they lived near each other, and Winkler was sending his girls to the American School because he had decided that the British School was run by a sadist. And their wive
s liked each other. So they became friends. Winkler loved to hear Harry’s stories about training the contras in Honduras; he wanted to hear about guns and bombs and the other toys that paramilitary officers played with. Harry wanted to understand espionage, so they taught each other.
They started a film club, to animate the bitterly cold Moscow nights. They watched old Cary Grant movies, and classic French films by Jean Renoir and François Truffaut, and when they could get them, tapes of Monty Python and Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was an education for Harry. His taste in movies growing up in Worcester had been Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Winkler was the star; everyone in Moscow station seemed to know that he had pulled off a coup, even if they didn’t know what it was. But people were jealous, too, especially Winkler’s colleagues. Nobody likes someone to be too successful, especially at a young age. And Harry was something of a star, too. The director himself had taken a shine to Harry after meeting him in Honduras. He liked people with mud on their boots, and he personally arranged Harry’s assignment to Moscow to make him a real case officer so that he wouldn’t have to take shit from the Career Trainee prima donnas anymore.
Harry did what the old man wanted. He shook up Moscow station and got it back in the operations business. He developed new tradecraft for doing the simple things—shaking KGB surveillance, checking radio propagation, finding good drop sites. He and Adrian even worked together servicing an agent the Brits and Americans had recruited jointly in Germany. For a man who’d just left a shooting war in the jungles of Nicaragua, the risks of running agents in Moscow seemed small indeed.
The two young officers watched each other’s backs. They weren’t supposed to do that, either. But CIA and SIS were “cousins,” and it all flowed together back at headquarters, so they figured, What the hell? When Pappas had to travel on operations, Winkler would look in on Andrea and Alex; Pappas would do the same for Susan and the girls.
THE INCREMENT Page 8