Kuwait was a study in hypocrisy, Rogers decided. It was an Islamic country, where it was technically forbidden for people to drink alcohol. Yet when Rogers passed Kuwaitis in the hotel lobby, slumbering on the couches, he could smell the whisky on their breath. In the evening along Arabian Gulf Street, he could see swarms of drunken migrant workers from India and Ceylon.
Islamic Kuwait was officially prudish about sex. Yet Rogers learned from a garrulous hotel desk clerk that airline stewardesses, on a stopover from London, could make $1,000 a night entertaining Kuwaiti gentlemen. Even the local English-language newspaper seemed to be sex-crazy. Every day on page 8, it ran pin-up pictures of half-naked women. The day Rogers arrived the page 8 girl was a bosomy blonde in garters and black silk stockings with the caption: “It’s back to belts!”
The only people who seemed dilligent and disciplined were the Palestinians, who did most of the work in Kuwait’s government ministries, schools, and hospitals. The Palestinian population was thought to number about 200,000-the Kuwaiti Emir was too nervous to publish precise census data-and it overwhelmingly supported Fatah. The commando group demanded two things from the skittish Kuwaiti government: the right to levy a tax of 7 percent on the incomes of all Palestinians working in Kuwait; and denial of Kuwaiti passports to all but a few of the Palestinians, so that the rest would remain stateless and militant.
Fatah, in fact, had been born in the diaspora of Kuwait. The Old Man had worked in Kuwait during the 1950s. So had the Diplomat and Abu Namli. Rogers had Jorgenson check with a police source at the Ministry of Interior and learned that Jamal, too, had sojourned in Kuwait. He had come there from Cairo in the mid 1960s to join the movement. Now, the movement had matured and Jamal was returning.
A day before the meeting, Rogers received a cable from Langley via the Kuwait station, marked with the highest security classification. It was a message from the operations chief of the Near East Division, an aggressive young careerist named John Marsh, who regarded Rogers as a rival.
The cable was full of gratuitous advice. Rogers should use the Kuwait meeting to lay the groundwork for a future “controlled-agent operation,” the cable advised. To establish a basis for control, he should probe for the agent’s pressure points.
After the meeting, Marsh directed, Rogers should recommend to NE Division the suitability of two options: financial recruitment, with suggestions as to the amount of money that would be necessary; and blackmail, through a threat to disclose tapes and photos documenting the agent’s contacts with the CIA.
“Control is the essence of this operation,” admonished Marsh in his concluding paragraph.
Rogers tore the cable in two, burned it, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. He had the code clerk transmit a brief response to Langley. It read: “C/NE/OPS. Msg text unreceived. Transmission garbled. Pls resend. Rogers.”
He checked out of his hotel, rented a car in the name of Frank Worth, and headed for the safehouse, where nobody-not even the wizards of Langley-would disturb him.
14
Kuwait; March 1970
Rogers departed the hectic confusion of Kuwait City, driving a big American car that floated gently on its springs like a boat on a crest of water. As he reached the outskirts of the city, he stopped the car, made a U-turn, and then doubled back again to see if he was being followed. He wasn’t. One of the benefits of working in the Middle East, as opposed to Europe, was that surveillance was loose or nonexistent. In the Arab world, the Soviets seemed to be as lazy as their clients.
He turned on the radio. A local Arabic station was playing a song by Fayrouz, a Lebanese singer adored throughout the Middle East. The song told the story of a girl who waited forlornly by the roadside for a lover who never arrived.
“I loved you in the summer…I loved you in the winter,” Fayrouz sang in her tremulous voice. It was the sound of the Arab world, Rogers thought. A sentimental story about unkept promises.
As he headed south along the Persian Gulf coast, Rogers saw a breathtaking change in the landscape.
Stretching to the western horizon was the Arabian desert, undulating slightly like the sea on a calm day. But rather than the blank white of midsummer, the desert was a thin carpet of green, dotted with the blue flowers of thistles and the yellow of daisies. The effect was like a pointillist painting, with tendrils of herbs and shrubs dabbed against a sandy background.
It was spring in Kuwait. The brief season between the rain of February and the heat of May when the desert burst into bloom. In this brief springtime, Kuwaitis liked to flee the city and emulate their Bedouin ancestors. Every few miles Rogers saw the billowing flaps of a camping tent, often with a shiny new RV parked alongside, which marked a Kuwaiti family on a desert holiday. Further from the highway were the ragged tents of a few real-life Bedouin nomads, lost in time, wandering with their sheep and camels across the ocean of sand.
The radio crackled with static. Rogers fiddled with the tuning knob trying to find a clearer station. Eventually, he heard a familiar radio voice, speaking in perfect, modulated, American English:
“…and it is well known that the peoples of Africa and Asia are resolutely opposed to the plans hatched in Washington for further warfare against the peoples of Indochina. According to certain circles, the American monopolists, as is well known, are achieving super-profits from this military adventure. A concrete analysis of the situation…”
Radio Moscow! Rogers changed the dial. It was remarkable, he thought to himself, that no matter where you were in the Middle East, Radio Moscow was always the loudest broadcast signal. As he fiddled with the dial, Rogers mused about the phrase “concrete analysis.” What did it mean, exactly? Certainly not an analysis made of concrete.
Rogers eventually found another station. It was a voice speaking loudly in Arabic, with the cadence and intonation of someone shouting through a bullhorn.
“…Zionism is a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for liberation and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aim, and fascist in its methods. Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and a geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for…”
Radio Baghdad.
Rogers turned off the radio.
A few miles past the town of Mina Abdulla, he slowed the big car and turned off the main highway onto a sandy road that ran along the beach. The road skirted an irregular row of beach houses, which prosperous Kuwaitis and westerners used as retreats during the Moslem weekend of Thursday and Friday. “Chalets” is what Kuwaitis liked to call these cottages by the steamy Persian Gulf.
Rogers parked his car outside one of the houses-a modest gray bungalow that belonged, on paper, to a senior executive of the Americo-Kuwaiti Oil Co.
Inside, it was neat but slightly faded, like an old motel. Behind a small leather-topped bar, someone had neatly arrayed bottles of whisky, gin, vodka, and brandy; in the refrigerator, Rogers found heaping platters of Arab and American food; on the kitchen table was a basket piled high with fresh fruit. On the stove was a fresh pot of coffee.
There was a musty smell in the house. Rogers opened the windows to let in the sea breeze. Then he walked into the main bedroom, opened a compartment that was hidden behind a wall painting, and checked the taping system. It was a voice-activated Wollensak that automatically recorded anything said in any room of the house. There was a second recorder, hidden in a separate place, which served as a back-up, and Rogers checked that too.
Eventually, he settled into an easy chair in the living room and fell asleep reading a book called Arabian Sands, the memoirs of an obscure British Arabist.