“Liaison?” asked the Director incredulously. “Surely you don’t mean intelligence liaison, like what we have with the British and French?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Stone.
“That’s completely mad. I don’t want to share intelligence with these hooligans. I want an agent! Someone who is signed, sealed, and delivered!”
“That’s our goal with the Fatah man, of course. But we aren’t there yet. So far he is only dealing with us through intermediaries.”
“Stone,” said the Director, who retained a schoolboy habit of addressing people by their surnames, “I want a penetration. And soon.”
Stone nodded.
“Right,” said the Director. “Let’s get on with it.”
The Director congratulated himself on his performance when Stone had left the office. He imagined the wave of activity that would be set in motion by this brief conversation: the cables, meetings, and shadowy contacts that would eventually-if they were lucky-start a stream of information flowing back toward his office.
That was the real secret about the CIA, the Director believed. Not its exotic tradecraft, but the fact that it was very much like the rest of the federal government. It was a pinhead: a vast body controlled by a small brain sitting in the White House. The president issued an order-or perhaps, like today, expressed concern about something during a meeting-and it reverberated through the government like a roar of thunder. Directors summoned division chiefs, who cabled station chiefs, who summoned case officers-and so on until the huge apparatus of government was mobilized to deal with an issue the president had probably long since forgotten.
The Director turned to a more practical problem: How to keep any intelligence that might be obtained from the Fatah operation out of the hands of the Israelis.
He called the Deputy Director for Plans on the secure phone. After chewing him out for the Jordan fiasco, he got to the point. He had reviewed the Fatah penetration with Stone and wanted it to be a top priority.
“We’re taking care of it,” said the DDP, who didn’t like the Director going behind his back.
“Not any more,” said the Director. “Stone will report directly to me on this operation. He’ll keep you briefed.”
“I must protest…,” said the DDP.
“Don’t waste your time,” said the Director.
“One more thing. On this Fatah business, I want you to keep KUDESK at arm’s length.”
“Very well,” said the wan voice of the DDP.
It was a polite way of saying: Keep the Israelis at arm’s length. KUDESK was the cryptonym for the CIA Counterintelligence staff. In addition to their normal work of thwarting the KGB, the counterintelligence staff had the special assignment of maintaining CIA liaison with the Mossad. This peculiar division of labor stemmed partly from personal ties between the chief of KUDESK and Israeli intelligence officials that dated back to the 1940s. It was also a deliberate effort to compartmentalize information-to keep the CIA people who dealt with the Arabs separate from those who dealt with the Israelis-and thereby reduce the chance of leaks.
“We’ll have quite a mess on our hands,” said the Director.
“What mess?” asked the DDP.
“If the Israelis find out that we’re running an agent at the top of the PLO.”
“Yes, Director. Quite a mess.”
“So let’s make sure they don’t find out.”
The Director hung up the phone and put the PLO problem aside. An aide brought in an urgent cable from the Saigon station, summarizing the latest disaster in Vietnam. The lead Vietnamese agent in a CIA network that stretched into Cambodia had disappeared the previous week. The new intelligence report said that he had been spotted in Hanoi. The entire network had presumably been blown. The throat-slitting would come later.
Stone drafted an urgent cable for Hoffman. It said the Fatah project had the “highest repeat highest” support and should be put on a crash basis immediately. Headquarters’ Operational Approval for the recruitment would be expedited, Stone said, and all necessary paperwork should be forwarded as soon as possible.
“This is to be run as a controlled-agent operation, not liaison,” Stone concluded. “Please advise soonest your plan for recruitment.”
11
Beirut; January 1970
“This is classic!” said Hoffman the next day as he read the cable from Stone assigning the highest priority to the espionage operation against Fatah.
“One month they don’t want to hear about the Palestinians, and we have to beat them over the head to get anything approved. The next month the PLO is the hottest thing since Oleg Penkovsky.
“You see,” Hoffman confided. “That’s why they are on the seventh floor, and we’re out here shovelling shit. Because they understand these things.”
“Why is the front office so interested all of a sudden?” asked Rogers. “And why so much emphasis on control?”
“Beats me,” said Hoffman. “That’s your problem. But I know a three-alarm fire when I see one, and this is a three-alarm fire! So take a friendly word of advice from your old paclass="underline" Don’t fuck up!”
The words were still ringing in Rogers’s ears several hours later as he pondered the case. He now had all the support he could dream of. The only thing he lacked was a plan that would lead promptly and surely to the recruitment of Jamal Ramlawi as an American agent.
The problem, Rogers reassured himself, was a familiar one. He had faced it over the years with Saudis, Omanis, Yemenis, Sudanese. How do you get a potential agent to cross a line that he doesn’t want to cross? How do you impose your will on him and establish control? Do you buy him? Break him down, find his weaknesses and exploit them? Or do you try to establish a bond of trust and personal commitment?
Rogers thought back over his own career. For all his training in deceit, his successes as a case officer had most often come from being open and straightforward. The true marvel of the intelligence business, in his experience, wasn’t the gadgetry or the shadowy operations. It was the simple fact that people like to talk. The old politician wants to tell war stories. The young revolutionary wants to explain how he plans to change the world. They shouldn’t tell you these things, but they always do. And all of them, all over the world, want the ear of an interested American. That was what made the business fun.
That gentle approach, unfortunately, didn’t seem to be what Langley wanted in this case. They wanted something quick and dirty. Rogers decided to have a chat with Hoffman.
“Let’s go out and have a drink,” suggested Hoffman when Rogers stopped by his office late that afternoon. “I know just the place. The Black Cat!”
The Black Cat was a sleazy strip joint on a narrow side street off Hamra. It was dark inside, and it took Rogers a few seconds to adjust to the red lights and clouds of cigarette smoke. When his eyes had focused, he saw a long bar, with a half-dozen overweight European women in various stages of undress sitting on the bar stools. On the stage, glowing under a blue stage light, was a woman-completely naked-careessing a rubber snake.
“The virtue of this place,” said Hoffman, pushing his stocky frame past one of the chubby bar girls, “is that nobody would think to look for us here.
“The other virtue,” he added in a whisper, “is that we own it. Don’t ask me why, but a few years ago it seemed like a good idea. That means nobody will overhear us. Except us.”
There were a few other patrons, mostly Arabs in long white gowns. One of them was sitting in a corner, drunkenly trying to undo the bra of one of the bar girls.
“Saudis!” said Hoffman scornfully. “Blackmailing Saudis is so easy it’s pathetic.”
The arrival of the two Americans had roused the woman on stage to more aggressive courtship of the rubber snake. She pulled it slowly between her legs and then caressed each breast with the serpent’s tongue. The blue light showed on the woman’s head. She was naked, Rogers noticed, except for a small black veil covering her face. The mysterious East.