by Carr, Jack
Alec had not made his request immediately upon taking office. He had already waited two decades. He could wait a few more months. The new president needed to learn, research, and plan; he needed to lead. He had inherited a country still reeling from the economic repercussions of an almost complete shutdown in response to a virus that had originated halfway around the world. The follow-on civil unrest had devastated the nation. Those wounds were slowly healing, in large part due to Alec’s leadership.
He’d had access to some of the documents included in the files when he was in Congress, but there were two new files that he was particularly interested in today.
The commander in chief pressed his knuckles into the oak timbers of the presidential desk, his left hand still bearing the scars from the Taliban bullet, the tinnitus in his ears from the IED reminding him that he’d never truly be at peace. That was okay. Peace was not what he was after.
He’d already read two of the files, front to back. They were stacked to his left. Alec looked down at the two remaining folders. One was labeled Executive Order 12333. He flipped to part two, paragraph thirteen: Prohibition on Assassination. His eyes scanned the section of the order, a version of which had been signed or strengthened by every president since Gerald Ford.
No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in or conspire to engage in assassination.
The president then shifted his gaze to the last file. It had been delivered by the CIA that morning and passed to the national security advisor, who in turn had placed it on the president’s desk. It was labeled DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE / TOP SECRET / SI-GAMMA / TK / HCS / RSV / KDK / NOFORN / HANDLE VIA EXECUTIVE CHANNELS ONLY.
Under those code words and control labels was a name: JAMES REECE.
The president flipped the page and began to read.
CHAPTER 5
John F. Kennedy International Airport
New York, New York
ALI REZA ANSARI MADE sure he wasn’t the first to exit the Jetway. He didn’t want to look overly eager to anyone monitoring the cameras or facial recognition programs constantly scanning every face deplaning in one of the busiest airports on earth. He’d specified with his travel department that he’d like a window seat near the rear of the business class cabin. That would be expected for someone in his position and would put him near the back of the first pack of deplaning passengers.
He’d been with BioDine Medical Systems for seventeen years. A global health-care company headquartered in Switzerland, it boasted research and manufacturing facilities in Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, and what they referred to as the Central Eastern European region. Ali had first interned with them as a graduate student pursuing dual-track business and pharmaceutical sciences degrees from Saarland University in Germany. BioDine was also one of the few bio-medical research companies with research and distribution networks in both the United States and Iran.
BioDine was a respected, progressive, and diverse company that traced its roots back to 1758, when it was founded as a trading business specializing in chemicals, dyes, and pharmaceuticals. It was called Andros & Sons then, and for their first hundred years they focused on producing alizarin blue and auramine dyes. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that they developed a medical-grade pharmaceutical, an antiseptic for soothing arthritis. With that success, the company shifted to the research and development of medicines in their Basel, Switzerland, chemical plant. In 1971, they sold to Glencore Trading Company. That merger gave them international reach through research labs and manufacturing plants in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. In 1997 they merged again, this time with one of the largest health-care companies in the world, becoming BioDine, with biomedical research labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tehran, Iran, through a partnership with the Iranian Communicable Disease Research Center.
Ali got into the line for non-U.S. citizens and waited patiently for his turn with the Customs and Border Protection official, who opened his Swiss passport and compared the photo to the man on the other side of the glass. Ali offered a pleasant smile as the uniformed officer scanned the bar code and shifted his eyes to the computer. Why the United States did not screen passengers ahead of time like El Al, Ali would never understand. He’d also never fly El Al.
“What is the purpose of your visit?” the CBP officer asked.
“Business,” Ali replied, with only the slightest hint of an accent, as he’d done at least a hundred times over the years.
“And what kind of business is that?”
“A medical device technology company,” Ali replied, not offering any more than required. Pharmaceuticals had the tendency to be off-putting with so much bad press around the opioid epidemic in America. It seemed as if the venerable news program 60 Minutes ran weekly segments on Big Pharma’s shady lobbying and marketing practices, pointing out that opioids killed more Americans annually than were killed during the entire Vietnam War. What the West called terrorism had nothing on opioids. Even though BioDine did not manufacture the devastating drugs, Ali did not want to highlight the pharmaceutical side of the company to someone who might be related to one of the thousands affected by a highly addictive narcotic.
The official flipped pages in the passport, looking for stamps from Yemen, Afghanistan, or Pakistan, which would lead to additional questions and a possible secondary screening.
“How long will you be staying in the United States?”
“About a week,” Ali lied.
The official found a blank page and stamped it with an entry date before returning Ali’s passport under the Plexiglas partition.
“Enjoy your stay,” he said, nodding to the next person in line.
Ali made his way casually into the international baggage claim, noting exits and careful to pay just the right amount of attention to the armed police patrolling the area. He was also sure to force a disarming smile when he passed by a police officer with one of the Americans’ canines by his side. Americans loved their dogs. Filthy animals.
Senior lab manager with one of the world’s leading medical technology companies was not the career field to which Ali aspired in his youth. He’d only wanted to kill Iraqis and Americans.
Ali couldn’t even remember the last time he’d seen his father. He was still in the crawling stage when his dad was conscripted into military service. Two years later his oldest brother would leave for the front lines, followed five years later by his middle brother, who would fight in the final battles of the Holy Defense, a conflict the rest of the world insisted on calling the Iran-Iraq War.
His mother had not been notified by a knock on the door, as he’d seen in so many American movies. Rather, a list of the dead and missing was posted each week in the town square. The list was displayed a good distance from the Provincial Society office, the locally elected Islamic Council responsible for coordinating regional affairs with the Islamic Consultative Assembly in Tehran; the politicians seemed more afraid of backlash from Iranian mothers and widows than they were of invading Iraqi forces.
Young Ali would accompany his mother to town each week in search of news. She would leave him in a chair by a butcher stand on the corner and push her way through the crowds to read the names, praying to Allah for the safe return of her loved ones. The stench of rotting meat behind the thin curtain would stay with Ali the remainder of his life. He could live with the smell. What haunted his dreams were the wailings of the women. Their screams as they read the names of husbands and sons they’d never see again would fuel his every decision. The list offered no cause of death. No locations. The bodies were buried on the battlefield out of necessity, often in mass graves. Rarely was it possible for the dead to receive a proper Islamic burial as mandated by sharia law. In wartime, one must make sacrifices.
They would mourn his older brother first, killed in the early days of the war in a human wave attack in the marshes of Basra in 1982. At fifteen years of age he’d received a week of training
before being sent to the front lines. The cult of the martyr had become a powerful instrument of the state. Whether he was killed by artillery, rockets, tanks, or small arms fire, or hunted down by the devastatingly effective Mi-25 helicopters using the same “hunter-killer” tactics the Soviets had used against the mujahideen in Afghanistan, Ali would never know. His only connection to his older sibling would come years later in the Iranian Martyrs Museum in Tehran, where he’d found his brother’s picture encased under a glass display.
Additional research would reveal that his father had been a victim of a sarin gas attack in the town of Halabja, Iraq, in March 1988. As a soldier and then university student, Ali would spend hours sifting through available photographs of the battle, trying to identify his father among the bloated bodies of the dead. Iraq’s chemical weapon attacks would kill thousands of Iranians and expose even more to the deadly contaminants. Even thirty years following the UN-brokered end of hostilities, close to one hundred thousand Iranians were still receiving medical treatment for the lifelong effects of the toxins.
Open-source declassified CIA documents would confirm that by 1984 the American intelligence agency was aware of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons in violation of international law. An ally of Iraq, the United States not only remained silent but ramped up their military and intelligence support of Saddam Hussein’s troops, even using their clout with the United Nations Security Council to block condemnation of Iraq when UN investigators presented unrefuted proof of the use of banned weapons by the Iraqi regime. Free of condemnation, Iraq increased its use of weaponized neurotoxins through the end of the war in 1988.
Ugly things are done in times of war, Ali knew. Heads are turned. Reports are falsified. Evidence is buried. The United States should have done a better job at covering their tracks. It was U.S. satellite imagery provided to Iraq that allowed them to effectively target advancing Iranian troops that March day in 1988, the day Ali’s father was killed. The Americans were responsible for the excruciating deaths that morning, bodies of women and children scattered among the soldiers, their faces contorted in agony. Gas was not a precision weapon system and did not discriminate between combatants and civilians.
In 1982, deciding that an Iranian victory was contrary to U.S. foreign policy objectives, President Reagan removed Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The military-industrial complex about which Eisenhower had so solemnly warned was in full swing. War was big business. Reagan’s actions opened the door to military equipment and munitions sales to include the dual-use technology that would allow Iraq to produce and weaponize the chemicals that would give them the upper hand against the Iranians, the same poisons that had altered the course of Ali’s life.
In the popular press, Iran was portrayed as the instigator, which made it easier for the world to support the Baathists in Iraq. With a billion dollars a month flowing in from Saudi Arabia, Iraq was able to purchase weapons from the United States, the Soviet Union, and the countries of Western Europe. Howitzers, Exocet missiles, Gazelle helicopters, Mirage jets, Soviet tanks, Mi-24 attack gunships, mines, RPGs, and AKs flooded the country. MiG-25 Foxbats and Su-22 Fitters escorted Soviet-made Tu-22 Blinders and Tu-16 Badgers on bombing runs of Iranian cites in a strategy of total war. Saddam Hussein was the West’s man in the Middle East. As American flags were burned in the streets of Tehran, American support flowed unfettered to their adversary. With the world aligned against them, Iran had stood strong; Allah was on their side.
In later training with his country’s intelligence service, Ali would learn that even more unforgivably, the United States secretly supplied Iran with weapons in exchange for help securing the release of American hostages in Lebanon. The so-called land of liberty prolonged the conflict and profited by selling the instruments of death to both sides in a war of attrition. America was the world’s most prolific arms dealer. They had abandoned their god and chosen to worship a false idol—the almighty dollar.
That the Great Satan and her European allies would switch course and betray Saddam just a few years later only confirmed their duplicity and hypocrisy, the height of which was using Iraq’s WMD development program as a pretext for invading Iraq in 2003. When administrations change every four to eight years, the institutional memory is short. They had conveniently forgotten their country’s complicity in the chemical atrocities wrought on civilian and military targets when it suited their objectives. Their constituents were easily distracted and had little interest in world affairs, particularly the plight of people beyond their borders. Ali would not forget.
The war between Iraq and Iran would end in a stalemate, with no change in territorial boundaries and no reparations. The only thing either country had to show for it was a million dead soldiers and civilians. Ali knew too well that the toll was much higher. The official numbers were an estimation and did not take into account the psychological impact of the war. That had been ingrained in Ali’s mind when he found his middle brother swinging from a rope in their home by his neck. A veteran of the final summer of fighting at Tawakal ala Allah, one of the last battles of the war and a military disaster for the Iranians, he’d never mentioned it in the two years he’d been home. To his younger brother and widowed mother, he rarely said anything. Inside he’d been waging his own personal jihad, a struggle he couldn’t win. He’d been dead for a few hours when Ali found him upon returning from school. Ali stared up at his naked brother, shit and piss already dried on his legs and on the floor under his suspended body. Ali was twelve. When his mother arrived an hour later the wailing began again. Suicide was prohibited in the Quran. Allah was the ultimate arbiter of life and death. It was not Allah who had called his brother to paradise. It was the Americans.
His father and brothers had died for nothing. They had perished in a war that would have been over years earlier had it not been for the U.S. support of Saddam. The infamous 1983 photograph of then special Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein was seared into Ali’s mind. They would meet again in 1984 to cement the relationship and reassure the dictator that Iraq had complete U.S. support in the war against Iran, going so far as to restore full diplomatic relations. Ali would later read reports of a CIA front company in Chile delivering cluster bombs and chemical precursor agents to Baghdad.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Ali was a young soldier with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He thought his time had finally come to kill Americans. The Ministry of Intelligence (MOI) had other ideas. The most powerful ministry in Iran, it falls under the direct control of the Supreme Leader and traces its history back to the eleventh century, when the Ismaili Shiite sect known as the Nizari used targeted killings as an instrument of power. They were called “Hashshasin” for the use of hashish in their training. To the Crusaders they were known as assassins. Within the MOI is a group known as Department 15. Their mission is to target and kill threats to the Iranian regime abroad. It was this group that recruited Ali Reza Ansari.
The Iranian intelligence service had studied the American response to 9/11. They read the 9/11 Commission report, and, along with the rest of the world, they watched the long lead-up to “shock and awe,” where America’s military prowess was confirmed with a quick conventional victory on Iran’s doorstep. They then watched incredulously as the Americans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, allowing themselves to be pulled into an insurgency of their own creation through an ineptitude born of arrogance. Iranian intelligence and political leaders observed in disbelief as the United States disbanded the Iraqi military and enacted a policy of de-Baathification put in place by that silly man at the Coalition Provisional Authority who wore combat boots with his suits. The United States had essentially handed Iraq to Iran. What the Iranians couldn’t do in eight years of war, the Americans had managed to do in a period of months. Now they just needed American forces to leave them to it.
Almost immediately, the MOI began a covert program, arming and training militia movemen
ts in neighboring Iraq. From their safe haven across the border, Iran built and supported an insurgency. That was phase one. The second phase would include the introduction of the EFP, the devastatingly effective explosively formed penetrator. Developed in World War II, it had been refined by Hezbollah in Lebanon but took hold of the public consciousness only when used to target Americans. Introduced into Iraq in force in 2005, they would wear down public support for the war effort as more and more soldiers returned home in flag-draped coffins. America’s sons and daughters once again paid the price as corporate shareholders benefited from increased revenue; armored vehicles didn’t come cheap. Iranian intelligence built EFPs and smuggled them across centuries-old “rat lines” to Shiite militias and Badr Brigade splinter groups to defeat the Americans’ technologically superior armor on the streets of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Mosul. Those attacks could weaken the giant, but eventually she would limp home to recover, adapt, and then continue a war against Iran that had begun with the fall of the Shah. To defeat her they would have to take other measures.
A small group of senior Intelligence Ministry officials met with the Supreme Leader in the summer of 2003. They presented a plan.
By the fall they were scouring the ranks for candidates with specific attributes for a special mission. They were looking for young soldiers who had scored high marks on academic exams, specifically in the sciences.
There was a long history of Iranian students traveling abroad to study. Abbas Mirza, the crown prince of Persia, first sent students to Europe in the early part of the nineteenth century. Iranian academic institutions retained close ties with European and American universities up through 1979. Those exchange programs, along with lavish donations, kept the lines of communication open until all Iranian universities were shut down from 1980 to 1983 as part of Iran’s Cultural Revolution. When they reopened, instead of being modeled on the American universities they had emulated under the Shah, they now included a mandatory Islamic curriculum in a strict Islamic educational forum.