Something had happened. The Iranian was scared. Pappas knew it. He could feel the sweat on Molavi’s hand, as if he were greeting him at a safe house.
The Iranian had seen something at work, noticed surveillance on his way home, found a hidden program on his computer. Pappas had handled so many agents over the last twenty-five years that he could smell their fear, even in an email. They walked down the path of betrayal so confidently, thinking they knew what they were doing, and then one day they heard footsteps nearby, and they saw menacing shadows, and they knew. That’s where Dr. Ali was now: his hands were trembling, and his knees were buckling under him. He wanted out.
Pappas could see it in agonizing clarity, except for one thing. He still had no real idea who Karim Molavi was, beyond the name and address the British had obtained. He had decided he would keep those details to himself, for now. He knew too little, and thanks to Adrian, he knew too much.
Pappas gathered the members of the SAP group later that day. Fox sent his deputy. He was already on to a different page.
“Our man is spooked,” Pappas told his colleagues. “I think he wants out.” People around the table groaned and shook their heads. They knew how valuable the Iranian was, even if Fox didn’t, and that it was critical that he remain in place. Now he was sending a cryptic message asking to defect? Nobody wanted to hear that now, when the clock was ticking and the president himself talked in the Situation Room about “our man in Tehran.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Fox’s deputy. He was worried that Harry would do something rash that might derail the policy train.
“Nothing,” said Harry. “Just tell him that we received his message and that we’ll get back to him soon.”
People around the table were relieved. At the modern-day CIA, doing nothing was usually the desirable course of action. If you did something, it was bound to make someone angry, and then they would start asking questions and demanding answers. But Harry meant something a little different. He would do nothing through CIA channels. He had entered a separate space. That was what Adrian had achieved. He had drawn Harry into another compartment.
Harry wanted to understand the photograph. It was a clue, but what did it mean? He sent a copy of the jpeg to the Iranian-
American analyst in Persia House who had recognized the fragment of Ferdowsi’s poetry many weeks ago. Could she identify the woman using any of their databases? Could she find out more about when and where the photograph was taken?
The analyst was suspicious. She thought the photograph was too perfect, and wondered if she had seen it before. She did some research, and after twenty-four hours, she found an identical picture—of an Iranian movie actress and a child. It was a still photo from a new Iranian film, which had appeared in Kayhan newspaper a few months before. A little more research revealed that the woman in question was married to an Iranian movie director—so she could not be the wife of their Dr. Ali. It was a haunting photograph, in its way. But why had he chosen to send this false documentation?
Pappas asked the analyst for more information. What was in the background of the photograph? Was there any Farsi writing that might be a clue? Who was the movie director? What films had he made? The analysts sent Harry a list of the films made by the director. The most famous of them was called Paper Airplanes. It was about illusions, the analysts said. Was that part of Dr. Ali’s message? Did that explain his comment that “the problem you are worried about will be okay”? Was it part of his plea for help in escaping?
And then it occurred to Harry that there was a simpler explanation. Dr. Ali had sent a false picture because a true one would have given him away. He had sent a picture of someone famous, whom the Iranians could identify if they tracked the message. They would ask all their questions about the director and his wife. When they realized that the movie director was blameless, they would assume that the sender of the message must have a wife and child, too—that this was part of the communication. But it was a veil, over a mask, over a lie.
“I say we leave him in,” said Fox. “A few more months, while all this plays out. He can still do us some good, if he’s in. Once he’s out, he’s worthless.” He looked toward Harry and stuck his chin out, as if to show that he was in command of the situation.
They were sitting in the director’s office, on the couch by the window. The director was fiddling with a set of pearl-inlaid dice he had received on a recent trip to Oman, from the chief of the intelligence service there. He kept shaking them in his hand, but he didn’t let them roll. The rattle and click of the dice was the only sound in the room.
“What do you think, Harry?” asked the director, setting down the dice. They showed double sixes. Boxcars.
“He’s our agent,” said Pappas. “He’s frightened, and he’s asking for help. He trusts us. If we screw him and he gets caught, it may be years before anyone else takes the plunge. Plus, we need to talk with him. We can’t understand what his intel means without a real debrief.”
“Could we get him out, assuming that we decided we want to?”
“Maybe,” answered Harry. “We have an exfiltration plan for Tehran, same as for everywhere. But it’s complicated because we don’t have a station there.” He debated whether to tell the director and Fox about what Winkler had said about the special British capability. “The Increment.” But that wasn’t his secret to share, so he fudged it.
“We might be able to get some people in on the ground, with help from other services. They could help us get our man out, or at least to somewhere we can debrief him. It would take a little time to organize, but I think it’s the best bet. The worst would be to go public with the information our source has provided so far. That’s sure to get him killed.”
“Don’t be sentimental,” said Fox. “I think we should stop worrying and leave him in place. More to the point, so does the White House. I asked, when the message first came in. That’s what they think. I quote: ‘We can’t sacrifice U.S. national security for the sake of one person.’ Sorry. That’s what they think. Direct from Appleman.”
Harry looked at Fox, smugly asserting his White House connections, and then at the director, who was fumbling with the dice again. Harry didn’t want to take a suicide dive. But he knew that if he didn’t speak up now, it would be too late.
“Stewart Appleman isn’t running this case, Arthur. I am. And as long as it’s mine, I am going to protect my asset in every way I can. We don’t know anything new about the Iranian bomb program except what he has told you. You wouldn’t know that they had tested a neutron generator unless this man had risked his life to tell you. You don’t know if they can get it to work, or whether they’re five months away from a test, or five years, or never. You won’t know anything until we have more information.”
Harry turned to the director. “That’s what I think. If you disagree, you better find someone else to run the Iran Operations Division.”
“Are you threatening me?” sneered Fox. “That’s outrageous.”
The director didn’t like conflict. He wanted to make everyone happy. He was nervous about Fox and his political patrons, but he was also wary of Harry and the permanent bureaucracy of the clandestine service, where Harry was a beloved senior officer.
“Take a deep breath, everyone, for God’s sake,” said the director. “We don’t need this. Let’s remember who the enemy is.”
He looked at Pappas. He wished he was back in the navy, where he could just give an order and know that everyone would salute.
“I don’t want you to quit, Harry. God knows. But I can tell you that Arthur is accurate in describing the mood at the White House. They are ready to roll, even if we are not. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to give Harry a little more time, to see what he can do about his man in Tehran. But not so much time that the president will think we are stalling. Because we’re not.”
Harry looked at his boss. This was the best he was going to get.
“Okay,” he sai
d.
“Suck it up, Harry,” said Fox. “Instead of pulling your boy out of the hot seat, why don’t you figure out a way to squeeze him? If this guy is as wonderful a source as you say, then why can’t you find him? And why can’t you figure out a way to use him? Why can’t you get more information that would actually help us understand what’s going on? Otherwise you’re wasting everybody’s time.”
“Fuck you,” Harry muttered under his breath. He wanted to say a great deal more, but he checked himself. He needed to be careful now. He had to start covering his tracks, and create space where he could operate. These people weren’t listening to him. He had been down this road once before and he knew where it ended up.
Harry opened the “iranmetalworks” Gmail account late that afternoon. He wrote a message and saved it. The message said:
We are working on vacation plans. We will bring the tickets to you. Be careful about that cold. Stay away from germs and wash your hands regularly.
19
WASHINGTON
Harry Pappas tossed and turned so much in bed that Andrea finally asked him groggily what was wrong. “My back hurts,” he lied, telling her to go back to sleep. He lay in bed for another hour and then went into Alex’s old bedroom. It had the musty, empty smell of a room that was never visited. Andrea had wanted to clean it out after the funeral, and put their son’s things into boxes and take them down to the basement. That was her way of saying goodbye, but Harry had said no. He wanted to leave the room the way it had been.
The bric-a-brac Alex had accumulated since childhood filled the room: a Redskins banner from one of their Super Bowl seasons, along with a foam rubber pig nose to celebrate the team’s offense line, known as “the Hogs”; athletic trophies and ribbons Alex had won through school; a model sailboat he and Harry had built one winter from a balsa wood kit; a pennant from Princeton, which Alex had attended for the academic year that began in September 2001, before he dropped out to enlist in the Corps. A picture of him in his marine uniform, taken on the day he completed basic training.
The colors in the picture had faded since it was taken: a softer blue, a duller red, less shine to the brass. Alex looked fierce and determined in the picture, a fighting machine rather than a fragile young man, but Harry knew what was in those eyes: Are you proud of me, Dad? Is this enough?
Harry lay down on the bed and closed his eyes. He told himself that he could lie there until dawn and not bother Andrea anymore. Next to the bed was a picture of him with his arm around Alex, after his son had quarterbacked his high school team to a Northern Virginia divisional championship. Alex was as tall as Harry, but leaner and more fair-skinned. Did God ever create a more handsome boy? Harry turned the photograph over, and then took it back and studied it. There was a glow on Alex’s face, a smile of achievement that made Harry smile as he remembered the game. Then Harry felt the tears welling in his eyes.
Alex had been stationed in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The insurgency was in full swing then and Americans couldn’t move without risking their lives, but Washington was in denial and so, by God, were the Marines. Harry had become station chief in Baghdad a few months earlier. A friend at the Pentagon said they could arrange for Alex to go somewhere else, where Harry wouldn’t have to worry about him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Alex would be furious if he was taken out of his unit. He was a corporal now, trained as a “recon” commando to do the toughest and most dangerous work the Marines encountered. The Corps had wanted him to apply for OCS, figuring that he was a natural officer, but he had refused that, too.
Harry looked for any excuse to visit Ramadi that summer of 2004. It was hotter than hell itself in the Euphrates Valley. He would pay a call at the CIA base, spend a few hours, and then scoot over to the Marine encampment where Alex was stationed. Sometimes he would call ahead and sometimes he wouldn’t. Alex was always glad to see his father—never embarrassed. He didn’t have anything to prove now. Harry would stride over, big as life, dressed in his light khakis with his sidearm in a holster strapped to his thigh. His personal protection detail would disappear for a while, and Harry would embrace his boy, usually covered in sweat and sand from a day out on patrol.
“How’s it going out here?” Harry would ask, and his son would always give a version of the same Marine Corps answer.
“It’s fucking great, Dad. We are kicking ass.”
Harry would nod, and they would take a walk for a while, sit in the shade, and drink a Coke until it was time for Alex to go back out, or for Harry to return to the Green Zone. He didn’t need to ask his son for details of what he was doing. The reports came over his desk every morning. He studied them, looking for the name of Alex’s unit, just the way he studied the raw casualty reports as soon as they moved. He knew too much about what Alex was doing; that was part of the problem.
Several times, the Marine base was mortared while Harry was visiting, and he dove for cover with his son, behind one of the big cast-concrete shelters that had been arrayed every fifty yards. That was strangely exhilarating, to be huddled together with your boy as the shells came in, tight smiles on both their faces. That was the part he could never have explained to Andrea: the fun of it.
When it was time for Harry to go, his son would give him another hug, and some more upbeat talk.
“We are taking these fuckers down, Dad. You tell them that back at the Republican Palace.”
Harry would nod and pump his fist in the air, or say, “Go get ’em, boy,” or “Right on!” Words like that. That was what upset him the most, when he thought back on those last months of his son’s life: he had never told him the truth.
It wasn’t going “fucking great” out in Anbar. That’s what Harry knew but didn’t say. The insurgency was gaining strength, day by day. The CIA’s requests to be allowed to work with Sunni tribal leaders were being rejected by civilians in the Pentagon and the viceroys of the Coalition Provisional Administration, who thought they knew better. Harry was sending Washington increasingly stark warnings by mid-2004: the insurgency is recruiting new members more quickly than we are killing them; control of Iraqi cities and towns is falling into the hands of criminal gangs that make deals with Al-Qaeda and the insurgency; the Iranians are pumping millions of dollars across the border each week to finance the Shiite militias. These were the real powers in Iraq, not the straw men in the Green Zone. Harry said it all in his cables, so much that when a particularly gloomy one reached the White House, the president was supposed to have demanded to know whether the station chief was some kind of defeatist. Or a Democrat. Harry told the White House that the Iraq mission was unraveling. But he didn’t tell Alex.
Back in the spring of 2002, Harry had tried to talk his son out of quitting Princeton, but not very hard. September 11 had just happened, and in his heart he agreed with his son that any able-bodied young man who didn’t help his country now didn’t deserve to be an American. It was sentimental crap, but back then everyone believed it, Harry as much as anyone else, and he was proud of his son. He had always wondered what it must have been like for people who stayed in college in 1944 and 1945 and didn’t serve in World War II. Did they ever get over the shame?
But by late 2002, when Alex was starting his “recon” advanced training and it was obvious that America was going to invade Iraq, Harry wondered if he had been wrong to allow his boy to follow along behind the marching band. Harry knew the Middle East. He had served an emergency tour in Beirut after the station chief was kidnapped, tortured, and killed, and he knew that the Arab world was at bottom a chaotic mess. The idea that Iraq was going to become an American-style democracy was preposterous to him. But he didn’t speak out within the agency. Almost no one did back then, except for a few analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence. What was the point? The decision had already been made. We were going to invade.
Harry knew, too, that the White House was lying when it suggested, with winks and nudges, that Saddam Hussein had been linked in some way with September
11. They never quite came out and said it, but the pitch was obvious to Harry the first time he had visited the Green Zone. On the wall of the main dining room in the Republican Palace, where the soldiers came to eat after a day out in the shit, there was a big mural that showed the Twin Towers, surrounded by the crests of the military services alongside those of the New York Police Department and the New York Fire Department. It might as well have been in neon lights: This is what it’s about, boys, going after the guys who took down the Trade Center.
It was the same thing in the gym, over by the transplanted Pizza Hut. When Harry went to work out, he could see the images on the wall behind the reception desk. There was one of Muhammad Ali, standing over the fallen body of Sonny Liston and brandishing his fist like a cocked pistol. Okay, fine. And there was a big blowup of the cover of Time magazine’s 2003 Person of the Year—“The American Soldier.” Amen to that. But the biggest image of all—the one that told the grunts what they were there for—was a giant image of the World Trade Center, with the inescapable message: Those Iraqi motherfuckers did this. It’s payback time.
Harry knew that it was a lie. He had studied the intelligence about Saddam’s contacts with Al-Qaeda. Thanks to Adrian, he had even read the reports from an agent the British had inside the Iraqi moukhabarat in 2000, when Osama bin Laden had proposed working with the Iraqis, and Saddam himself had said no.
It was a lie, a fabric of lies. But Harry hadn’t told that to Alex, who was out in Ramadi living with the consequences. And it had begun to eat away at Harry, as the weeks and months passed. He never said a word to Alex. How could he? As long as the boy was here, he needed to maintain his confidence and belief in the mission. So Harry poured his anger into his cables back home, using language that was so blunt his colleagues back at Langley wondered if he was committing career suicide. He was raging at the men in suits, the policymakers, the White House—but really, he was raging at himself for not having spoken out sooner, in time to have kept his own son from carrying the weight of the criminal mistake that Harry, by his silence, had tolerated.
THE INCREMENT Page 16