Rogers felt his stomach tighten.
“Was he a Communist, this man Darazi?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Mr. Hoffman told me so.”
“What else did Mr. Hoffman tell you?”
“He told me that I had a choice. I could get revenge in the Lebanese way, by killing Darazi. Or I could get revenge in the American way, by working to destroy the people who had created Darazi. The Communists.”
“And what did you do?”
“A little of both,” said Fuad. “Lebanese and American.”
“You killed Darazi?”
“No. I only wounded him. But I cleared our family name of shame.”
“What happened then? Didn’t Darazi’s people go after you?”
“Mr. Hoffman helped me to get out of the country, to Egypt. He found me a job there.”
“And then?”
“You know the rest,” said Fuad. “I am an agent. I work for you. I am at your service.”
Rogers took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He looked the young Arab in the eye.
“Is everything you have told me true?” asked Rogers.
“Yes,” said Fuad.
“Are you working for anyone other than me?”
“No.”
Rogers continued to look at him for what must have been fifteen seconds. Fuad did not blink. Rogers took his measure and finally looked away. You have to trust someone in this business, he thought to himself. Otherwise, what was the point?
“Trudie,” Rogers called to the other room, where the technician was waiting with her polygraph machine.
“It’s getting late. We’ll flutter him another time.”
Rogers shook Fuad’s hand, thanked him, and said goodnight in Arabic.
9
Beirut; December 1969
The covert relationship between the CIA and Fatah’s deputy chief of intelligence put down a first frail root in late December 1969. Even by the standards of the espionage business, it was an awkward and furtive contact.
Two things mattered to Rogers in planning this opening move. The Palestinian must understand that Fuad was an agent of the CIA and that Rogers was his case officer. And the Palestinian must signal his good faith directly to Rogers-even though he refused, for now, to meet with him.
A clandestine relationship had to begin as straightforwardly as possible, Rogers felt. Otherwise it soon became hopelessly tangled in the web of confusion and deception that was inevitably part of the secret world. Rogers also wanted to see Jamal in the flesh, to look in the eyes of this twenty-seven-year-old Palestinian and assess his character.
The arrangement was simple. Jamal and Fuad would meet at the sidewalk cafe in front of the Strand Theater on Hamra Street. They would sit down at a table together and order coffee. Rogers would walk slowly past the cafe.
As Rogers approached, Fuad would signal Jamal with a prearranged phrase, and Jamal would put his arm on Fuad’s shoulder. It would be understood that this gesture would mean “Fuad is my contact” and would signify Jamal’s willingness to deal with the CIA. The two sides were agreeing in principle to share information, but there was no commitment on the details.
Jamal asked that there be no surveillance of the meeting by either side, and he brought none of his own retinue of aides and bodyguards. In fact, he had told only one person about the meeting-a figure he referred to only as “the Old Man.”
“Tough shit,” said the station chief, when informed of Jamal’s request that there be no surveillance of the rendezvous on Hamra Street.
“Tell him we agree to his condition and then screw him. If he thinks we’re flying into this one blind, he’s crazy.” Rogers protested briefly but then gave up. He recognized that deceit was part of the business. Even so, it made him uncomfortable to begin a relationship of trust with a lie.
Hoffman assigned a small team of agents to cover the area. One would be positioned at a shoeshine stand across the street. Another would be in a cafe on the corner of Hamra and Rue Nehme Yafet, just west of the meeting place. Another would be just east, in a car parked on the corner of Hamra and Rue Jeanne d’Arc. The station chief insisted on photographing the rendezvous from several angles, so that there would be physical evidence showing Rogers, Fuad, and Jamal together. He arranged to have one photographer shooting from an office window across the street and one shooting from a parked car.
“We need a little control over this guy,” Hoffman said matter-of-factly. “A little something in the bank if he ever decides to play games with us.”
The rendezvous was set for two o’clock in the afternoon. Jamal was late, and Rogers worried that the operation had been blown before it started. But Jamal arrived at 2:20 p.m., sat down at the table with Fuad, and began chatting.
The Palestinian looked as sleek as ever. He wore the collar of his leather jacket turned up against the winter chill. But he left the top buttons of his shirt undone.
As Jamal talked with Fuad, his eyes panned Hamra Street. The Palestinian seemed to be as eager to lay eyes on Rogers as the American was to see him.
Rogers began walking slowly up the street, from the corner of Rue Nehme Yafet. He gazed up at the marquee of the Strand Theater, which was showing Ice Station Zebra that week, and then turned his head down toward the cafe.
Jamal had his arm firmly on Fuad’s shoulder.
Then something happened that wasn’t in the script. Jamal stared full into Rogers’s eyes and nodded his head.
Rogers kept walking. As he rounded the corner of Rue Jeanne d’Arc, he let out a little shout of pleasure, restrained but audible.
PART III
January-March 1970
10
Washington; January 1970
The Director of Central Intelligence had held his job so long and survived so many bureaucratic wars that people simply called him “the Director,” as if there had never been another. He was to the interagency conference room what Fred Astaire was to the ballroom. So smooth, so self-assured, so perfectly right in his role that even if he missed a step, you couldn’t be sure that he had gotten it wrong. Perhaps the choreographer had made a mistake.
Part of the Director’s charm was that he looked so precisely like what he wanted to be. Some people’s appearance is at war with their self-image. Not so the Director’s. He was a tall, patrician-looking figure, with thinning hair and a Roman profile, who had the useful talent of sounding disarmingly frank without saying anything injudicious. After a distinguished career in the agency, he had mastered the survival skills necessary to a DCI. He knew that his first priority was to maintain good relations with the president, the Congress, and the press, in that order. If those tasks were done, he reasoned, running the agency would take care of itself.
Though he was regarded as one of Washington’s most powerful officials, the Director understood the limits of his authority. He served at the pleasure of the president. His job was to do the dirty work and take the blame when things went wrong. And, of course, to keep his mouth shut. These tasks he did to perfection. To some of his colleagues, he seemed like a bureaucratic version of the English butler: more intelligent and better mannered than his master, yet always obedient, respectful, discreet.
What the Director didn’t like were surprises, especially when they came at White House meetings. So he was particularly uncomfortable in late January 1970, when the “cousins” from British intelligence (as they liked to call themselves) threw him a curve ball.
The occasion was a meeting of the National Security Council attended by the British prime minister, who was visiting Washington that week. It was held in the Situation Room, a cramped, windowless crypt in the basement of the West Wing of the White House. The room featured a long teak conference table, polished to a bright shine every morning by a cleaning woman with a top-secret clearance; a dozen well-padded executive chairs that would allow the nation’s leaders to plan World War III in comfort; communications and audio-visual equipment that could provide information instantly from around the world; and along the outer walls, chairs for the aides who were allowed to attend the meetings, and did much of the work, but were not privileged to sit at the big table.