Taylor sent home a detailed cable summarizing these developments, but the front office was not amused. Continuing the surveillance in Alma-Ata would be a practical impossibility. The operation was finished. The CKJACK transcripts would no longer feed the maw of analysts and taskers and estimators. A “product” would disappear from the shelves; the sum of intelligence would be diminished. It was all very sad. The only person back home who seemed genuinely pleased by this course of events was Edward Stone. A regular reader of the CKJACK traffic, Stone saw another small piece of his mosaic falling into place.
III
SDROTTEN
LONDON / ISTANBUL
FEBRUARY–MARCH 1979
11
Anna Barnes arrived in London the day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran. The agency was in a generalized state of panic. All the big stations in Europe had been alerted to look for assets who might be able to do something, anything, to help patch together contacts with the new regime. The files of old prospects who had been rejected years before as uninteresting or unreliable were now being reopened. They were turning over every stone—wild-eyed Kurdish nationalists, money-grubbing Iranian journalists. French leftists—nobody was so weird that the agency wasn’t willing to give him a look now, when it was in trouble.
What possible interest could any of this have for the young dark-haired American woman arriving on Pan Am Flight 106 from Dulles? None, evidently. She had been immersed in a copy of Institutional Investor on the way over, and when she arrived at Heathrow, she bought herself the latest issue of Euromoney. She was a banker, apparently. A young career woman on the make. They were everywhere that year, the women lawyers and bankers fresh out of Oxford and Yale and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, queuing up for their seats on the global gravy train.
Halcyon Ltd. had its offices in one of those forgettable squares near Holborn Circus. Anna showed up the first day in a dress-for-success pinstripe suit, light makeup, all business. She spent the morning filling out forms for a Mrs. Sanchez, the head secretary, who was the only person there until nearly eleven o’clock.
“You’re PCS, aren’t you?” asked Mrs. Sanchez.
“Excuse me?” asked Anna.
“Is this a permanent change of station, or are you here on TDY?”
“It’s my first station, actually,” said Anna.
Mrs. Sanchez rolled her eyes as if to say: I guessed that. She showed Anna to her office, gave her a key to the ladies’ room, pointed out where they kept the paper clips and pencils, handed her some cable forms, and generally did her best to make Anna feel like an idiot. Apparently Mrs. Sanchez was not entirely comfortable with the notion of a woman case officer entering her domain. Eventually other co-workers arrived and gave Anna at least the semblance of a real welcome.
Presiding over Halcyon Ltd. was a twinkle-eyed and slightly dizzy man in his fifties named Dennis Rigg. He had been a NOC for more than twenty years, and his manner suggested that all the years of concealment and anxiety had devoured the interior of his personality, leaving only the cheery, giddy shell. The firm’s two other associates worked for the agency as well—both young men in their early thirties, who tried very hard to look like Ivy Leaguers but were actually from state schools in the Midwest. Mrs. Sanchez and the other secretaries were CIA, too. The only non-agency person on the premises was a retired military man, Admiral Hawes, or Dawes—Anna could never quite get the name because he swallowed his words—who was nominally the chairman of the firm and was trotted out to impress visitors and putative clients. The Admiral took very long lunches. Sometimes they lasted for days.
Halcyon Ltd. was a nest of NOCs: a small group of case officers working under non-official cover. It was a tidy arrangement. The Halcyon NOCs reported to the London chief of station, just like embassy officers, but they met their handlers at safe houses. Like all NOCs, they had some obvious advantages over the inside people. They could spot and develop agents without disclosing official U.S government interest. They could gain access to people and places that would be denied to an embassy staffer. They could meet unobtrusively with agents. All in all, they had less flap potential. Unless, of course, they got caught.
Halcyon was a product of the agency’s endless wrangle over cover. Everybody knew that embassy cover—as a political or commercial officer—was the same as no cover. It was transparent. If the Russians couldn’t figure out for themselves who were the spies by looking at the Diplomatic List, they had help from State Department wives, who complained endlessly at cocktail parties about the better perks that CIA officers received: bigger apartments, larger allowances for entertaining, more frequent travel. The State Department had tried to help by developing something called “integrated cover,” in which CIA officers going behind the Iron Curtain would train and study alongside ordinary foreign service officers—seemingly indistinguishable. But once people got to the embassies, cliques started to form, and they gave the game away.
The answer was more NOCs. That, at least, was the recommendation of several of the task forces that had examined the cover problem since the 1950s. The argument for more NOCs was always the same: They were truly clandestine. The argument against them also was always the same: They were a pain in the ass. Halcyon illustrated both sides of the debate. Since the firm nominally specialized in Third World investment projects, especially in the Near East, its “employees” could travel widely and meet a range of people without arousing suspicion. The drawback, from the London station chief’s standpoint, was that running NOCs was almost as complicated as running agents.
It was assumed that NOCs were neurotic. They had to be, living out there in the cold. They would come back after a half dozen years of pretending to work for an advertising agency or an airline all messed up in the head. Sometimes the cover job would have taken over so completely that the NOC would imagine it was all for real—the big car, the trips to Nice—and forget he was still a GS-14. It was hard, even for men. And for years, it had been assumed that it would be impossible for women. They would get too lonely, too isolated, too weird. They would fall in love with their agents, or their case officers, or any old Joe who talked to them in the street. Those old assumptions were slowly changing. Even so, the mandarins probably wouldn’t have sent Anna Barnes forth so eagerly that year if the world hadn’t been so obviously going to hell.
The real problem with being a NOC, Anna decided after her first week, was that there wasn’t enough to do. The gang at Halcyon wasn’t allowed to operate on its own, assigning itself targets and levying requirements. Everything had to be cleared through the London station, then through Langley, then back through the station, and back finally to Halcyon. That multiplied the paperwork and delays.
At first Anna thought it was just because she was so new that she had so few real things to do every day. But she noticed that it was the same for the others. They spent an awfully long time reading the newspapers each morning. At twelve forty-five the men would all stride off to lunch, for fancy meals in Mayfair restaurants that were allocated variously to “spotting” and “development” of prospective talent. They returned around three o’clock, usually looking a bit flushed, and occupied themselves with paperwork for several hours. Sometimes they even did a little merchant banking business, to keep their cover intact. But the impression remained that they were somewhat underemployed. Anna remembered what Edward Stone had said about intelligence work and boredom. Perhaps he had been right.
Anna busied herself the first week with moving into a flat in the newly fashionable district of Notting Hill Gate. (“Yes,” Dennis had said, “that’s where you would live.”) She also reacquainted herself with London, a city she had passed through a half dozen times before, often with her father. During her lunch hour—at Halcyon it was more like two hours—she took to visiting her father’s old haunts. She paid calls to his favorite shirtmaker on Jermyn Street, to the store where he bought his hats on St. James’s Street, to his favorite shoe store on King Street. After tw
o days of visiting the stations of the cross, she got tired of it—there wasn’t much to see in a men’s shoe store, after all—and went shopping for herself along New Bond Street.
Several times that first week Anna told her twinkle-eyed boss that she worried she wasn’t getting much accomplished. Dennis answered such queries with aphorisms culled from a lifetime in the spy business. “Keep spotting!” he would say. “Always be on the lookout!” At the end of the first week, sensing that all was not entirely happy with the new girl, Dennis sent her off to a seminar on Saudi development planning, thinking that would make her feel better.
Anna needn’t have worried quite so much. The wheels of the bureaucracy, although invisible to her, were indeed turning. At the beginning of her second week on the job, she received a telephone call from a man at the embassy named Howard Hambly. He was nominally a second secretary in the economic section, but he was in fact the officer assigned to supervise the care and feeding of Anna Barnes. He was calling from phone booth to arrange a meeting.
They met at a safe house in Stoke Newington. It was a small workingman’s house on a quiet street called Carysfort Road, a block from Clissold Park. It was a street where milkmen and minicab drivers lived, a street where people went out to eat at the fish-and-chips shop around the corner. It struck Anna as a silly place for a safe house, a place where an empty dwelling occupied briefly and occasionally by Americans would stick out rather obviously. But she was new to the business.
Howard was waiting at the door. He was balding man in his mid-forties, harried-looking, not quite put together, the sands running out in the hourglass of his career. He had been sent to London as a reward for many years in sub-Saharan Africa, and he seemed to regard his tasks in the London station as a diversion from the important work of attending plays and visiting pubs. Running a NOC was the last thing he wanted to be doing. They were notoriously fucked up. Even the men.
“So how are you settling in?” Howard asked solicitously. Meaning: Are you cracking up yet?
“Fine!” said Anna cheerily.
“Got an apartment?”
“Yes. A really nice one. Above an antique shop.”
Howard surveyed her. She certainly didn’t look neurotic, which to Howard meant homely. She was dressed neatly, attractively even, in a skirt and cashmere sweater. She seemed perky enough. She wasn’t complaining.
“I have a little job for you,” said Howard.
“Great!” said Anna. “What is it?”
“We have a guy who’s been trying very hard to make contact with us. He’s an Iranian. He keeps calling the embassy, leaving messages. Claims to be part of Khomeini’s secret intelligence service, which is weird, because we don’t think Khomeini has one. He also claims to have some very hot poop. We haven’t known what to do with him, so we haven’t done anything. He’s kind of an oddball, to be honest. I don’t suppose that would have any interest.”
“Are you kidding?” said Anna. “Of course it would. When do I start?”
The embassy man smiled. There was something about Anna that made people remember their own first blush of enthusiasm. “Listen,” he said. “I ought to warn you. This guy may be a big nothing. In addition to being weird.”
“No problem,” said Anna. “What’s his name?”
“Ali Ascari. At least that’s the one he’s using with us.”
“When can we arrange a meet?”
“Hold on, sweetie. We need traces. We’ll ask headquarters and Tehran whether they’ve got anything on Ascari, any past connections with us or anybody else. For all we know, we’ve already got a 201 file on him back home, under some other name.”
“So how am I going to meet Mr. Ascari?”
“That shouldn’t be too hard. We’ll use SDFIBBER.”
“Who’s SDFIBBER?”
“He’s an Iranian journalist here in London. His real name is Farduz, or Marduz, something like that. He knows everybody, sees everybody. He’s a perfect access agent. We’ll have him arrange a lunch with you and Ascari.”
“SD is the prefix for Iran?”
“You got it.”
“What’s my rationale for being there? If you don’t mind my asking a dumb question.”
“That’s not a dumb question. That’s a good question. Let’s see. You’re a pretty woman, a friend of SDFIBBER, like to meet interesting people.”
“No way,” said Anna. “He’ll take me for a hooker.”
“Okay. You’re a terribly serious young investment banker with a passionate interest in the Iranian economy. Like that better?”
“Much better.”
“I’ll see what headquarters has to say and get back to you. But they ought to buy it. They’ve gone Iran-crazy back home, now that everything has turned to shit. They’ll approve almost anything.” Anna barely heard him. She was going to handle a case. She was going to swim in the big pool.
12
As Anna lay awake that night, tense with the anticipation of her first assignment, she thought of Dr. Marcus, the agency psychiatrist. He had been Anna’s instructor for a two-week tutorial, “The Psychology of Agent Recruitment,” conducted in one of those crummy motel rooms back in Arlington. And in the way that psychiatrists do, even when they’re making conversation at a cocktail party, he had asked her questions and nodded gravely and said “Um-hum” as she tried self-consciously to answer. Anna hadn’t been sure at first whether she was Dr. Marcus’s pupil or patient, and then had realized that she was both.
When she first met Dr. Marcus, she had been surprised that someone like him could possibly work for the CIA. He looked like an aging graduate student, tall and shabbily dressed, balding with a fringe of matted red hair and dark circles under his eyes. It was the face of a man who had had too much caffeine over the years and too little sleep. He looked, in fact, like a walking illustration for one of his theories about recruitment: a man who hadn’t achieved all that he might have in life, and was therefore vulnerable to an approach. Except in his case, he wasn’t vulnerable. He asked all the questions.
The first few sessions had been like psychotherapy. The point was simply to talk, Dr. Marcus said, and cover any personal details that might have been skipped during the initial screening. Anna soon discovered that Dr. Marcus had a habit of pausing in mid-conversation, often for a very long time, and she found herself blurting out odd things about herself to fill the dead space. She wanted to be helpful. Dr. Marcus would ask a simple question about her graduate work and Anna would volunteer: “My father never wanted me to go to graduate school.”
“Um-hum,” Dr. Marcus would say in his flat, affectless voice. “And why was that?”
“I think he wanted me to go into the foreign service.”
“Um-hum.”
“But probably not the CIA.”
“And why not?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was afraid of it. Foreign service officers don’t usually like the CIA.”
“And does that make the CIA more attractive for you, Anna, the fact that your father didn’t approve of it?”
At this point Anna would want to punch Dr. Marcus in the nose. But he looked so hungry for words, and so harmless, that she was soon offering up some other morsel. She would talk about her useless brother in New Mexico, or her ex-boyfriend in Cambridge, or her brief and laughable experience with marijuana in college. Anything to keep poor Dr. Marcus from looking so forlorn. He seemed especially interested in Anna’s life as a woman. “Would you describe yourself as a feminist?” he asked during their second session.
“Yes, of course,” answered Anna.
“Why do you say ‘of course’?”
“Because for a woman my age it’s like saying you’re a woman.”
“Um-hum. And why is that?”
“Because. It just is. If you live in America and believe in your country, you say you’re an American. If you’re a woman and you believe in yourself, you say you’re a feminist. It’s no big deal.”
“Why not?”
“But not to you.”
“Yes, it is to me, too.”
“And what does it mean to you to be a feminist?”
“It means you stand on your own. You make decisions for yourself. You don’t just do what men tell you.”
“What if men are telling you to do something sensible?”
“Then you do it, of course. Give me a break, Dr. Marcus.”
“I see. And do you like men?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“What do you mean ‘of course’?”
“I mean I like men. I like talking to them. I like going to the movies with them. I like sleeping with them. I like men. Get the picture?”
“And do feminists like men?”
“Jesus Christ! How should I know? Some do. Some don’t. It all depends on their personal experience.”
“I see. And what has your personal experience been?”
“Good, mostly. Occasionally bad. But I’m careful.”
“Careful of what?”
“Careful not to get too involved with the wrong man. Careful not to let things get out of control.”
“What do you mean by ‘out of control’?”
“You know. Scary. Vulnerable. Like a roller coaster with no brakes.”
“Um-hum,” said Dr. Marcus, nodding gravely.
And so it went, hour after hour, these meandering analytic dialogues. At first Anna had been curious about Dr. Marcus and wanted to please him by giving appropriate answers. Then she began to find his questions intrusive and boring and decided that she disliked him. Finally, by the third day, she found herself relaxed and floating on a tide of self-revelation, saying whatever fell into her head without the slightest embarrassment. Whereupon Dr. Marcus seemed at last to grow tired of the exercise, and began focusing the sessions more closely on matters of tradecraft.
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