The message was simple but the processs of delivering it was complicated by security procedures. An embassy courier took the letter and dropped it in the mailbox of “Trans-Mediterranean Forwarding Agents,” a fictitious company that maintained a one-room office in the Starco Building downtown. A Lebanese contract agent carried it from there to a dead drop in an alleyway in the Souk Tawile. The courier then called Fuad from a public telephone and, using a prearranged code, told him that a message was waiting.
Fuad retrieved the message and called Jamal. Using another prearranged code, he set up a meeting an hour later at a crowded cafe. Three layers had been interposed between the American case officer and the Palestinian. If the system worked, the links in the chain were invisible.
Fuad reported back to Rogers twenty-four hours later. They met in an apartment off Hamra Street, entering the building fifteen minutes apart through different doors. Fuad handed Rogers a brief message from Jamal written in neat Arabic script, quoting the text of an Arabic proverb that was unfamiliar to Rogers.
The message read, in its entirety: “They came to milk the goat. He broke wind.”
“What in the hell is this supposed to mean?” demanded Rogers.
Fuad looked reproachfully at his case officer. He removed his sunglasses.
“I assume it means that this particular goat has no milk for you.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Rogers. “Translate for your American friend.”
“I believe Jamal means that you asked the wrong person for information about the Kahhaleh incident, and so you are getting a rude reply,” Fuad said gently.
“Great!” said Rogers. “That’s very helpful. Anything else?”
“We talked for a few minutes about the situation,” answered Fuad.
“What did Jamal say?”
“He said that he talked to the Fatah military leaders after he returned to Beirut. They told him that Fatah wasn’t to blame. The Christians provoked the crisis. He said that Fatah has shown restraint from the beginning and doesn’t need advice from the Americans.”
“That’s the party line,” said Rogers. “I could have read that in the newspaper.”
“Jamal says it’s true. He said one other thing. One of the PLO splinter groups is trying to exploit the situation. They fired mortar rounds on Christian areas of the city last night and they will try to do it again. He said that the Old Man is opposed to the extremists, and that they are the ones you should worry about, not Fatah.”
“If it’s just the crazies, this will die down,” said Rogers.
“Probably,” agreed Fuad.
“Was Jamal angry at my message?”
“He was until he thought of the proverb about the goat. Then he stopped being angry. He said that you should add it to your collection.”
Rogers briefed Hoffman on the intelligence report and drafted a cable for Langley. The crisis in Lebanon would blow over, the cable said. The PLO group with the most firepower, Fatah, didn’t want a confrontation. Other Palestinian factions were trying to exploit the situation, but without Fatah’s support they could be contained easily by the Lebanese authorities.
“Not bad,” said Hoffman. “Maybe your little operation isn’t entirely worthless, after all. But loverboy had better be right about this one. Because if he isn’t, we are in very serious trouble. There are people on the Christian side screaming bloody murder. They want to pound the refugee camps into rubble, and we’re telling them to cool it.”
“I trust our man,” said Rogers. “Besides, he’s all we’ve got.”
“Send the cable,” said Hoffman.
The Beirut station looked good the next day when the gunfire around the Tal Zaatar refugee camp stopped and the Lebanese prime minister, a Moslem, issued a statement declaring that the crisis was over.
17
Beirut; April 1970
It took Rogers several weeks to complete the Personal Record Questionnaire, or PRQ, formally proposing that Jamal be enrolled as an agent. The real work was already done. The contacts had been made in Beirut, Amman, and Kuwait. Jamal, whatever his status, was already providing timely information. But none of that mattered to the bureaucracy. Their triumph was to reduce the mysterious and often sublime relationships of the intelligence world to an orderly flow of paper.
Rogers loathed this sort of paperwork. The PRQ was a lengthy document that was itself compartmentalized for security reasons. Part I was a seven-page biographical summary, much like the resume that a normal job-seeker might present to a prospective employer. It included the subject’s name, birth date, and home address; the names of his parents, his educational background, his hobbies; it also summarized his drinking habits, drug usage, and sexual history. Part I used true names throughout.
The PRQ Part II had the juicy operational details. It explained how the subject had been spotted and assessed, how the information about him in Part I had been gathered, and most important, how the case officer intended to use him. It was a sort of operational game plan, outlining how the agent would be run and what intelligence he would be expected to provide. Part II referred to the agent only by a cryptonym. The segregated parts of the PRQ went into the agent’s basic file in the central registry, known as the “201 file.” In theory, the people who had access to the real names of agents hadn’t any access to their operational records, and vice versa.
The agency had borrowed many of these bookkeeping practices, along with so many other details of running a secret service, from the British. The British, however, took the business of secrecy far more seriously than the Americans. In the early days, they didn’t even like to use code words in their operational records and preferred, where possible, to use numbers. Rogers had read of an SIS man who had been reprimanded for a security breach years ago. His crime was that in a message home he had identified Berlin as the capital of the country known in SIS jargon only as “12000.”
A six-letter cryptonym was assigned to the case. Agents in Lebanon all had code names that began with “PE.” Jamal Ramlawi became, in agency-ese, an agent with the code name PECOCK.
The portrait of PECOCK that emerged from the biographical material suggested that he had the makings of a quite remarkable agent. Indeed, the Americans could not have invented a better target for recruitment.
PECOCK, the documents explained, was a sort of Palestinian aristocrat, with the self-assurance and disdain for conventional manners that are typical of the children of prominent families around the world. In 1964, after graduating from Cairo University, he had attended the founding session of the Palestine Liberation Organization in East Jerusalem. At that meeting he accosted some of the leaders of Fatah, then a small underground network based in Kuwait, and asked to join them. Several of the elders tried to convince him to go to graduate school instead, but he would have none of it. He moved to Kuwait in 1965. Because of his easy bearing and his knack for languages, he was used often as a courier in Europe.
Like so many aristocrats, the young man gravitated toward intelligence work. Perhaps the visible world bored him. He moved to Amman in 1967 and worked under Abu Namli, vetting new recruits to Fatah. The next year, the Egyptians quietly offered to help Fatah form a security service. PECOCK was among the ten members of Fatah who went to Cairo in mid-1968 for a six-week training course in intelligence. The course covered recruitment and control of agents, surveillance and interrogation techniques, and the preparation of intelligence reports and estimates.
The ten Cairo graduates, who returned to Jordan in late 1968, formed the nucleus of a new Fatah intelligence organization, known as the Jihaz al-Rasd, or “Surveillance Apparatus.” Like many security services, it was divided into two parts: one responsible for counterintelligence and the other charged with collecting information and conducting special operations. The chief of the Rasd, from 1969 on, was Mohammed Nasir Makawi, known as “Abu Nasir.” PECOCK was one of his three top assistants. He was thought to be the most influential because of his relationship with the Old Man, who treated the handsome young Palestinian like a son.