“Then tell me how this leads to Belghazi.”
“Belghazi makes sure Mahfouz gets a cut of all Belghazi’s weapons deals. So if Belghazi has a problem, he calls Mahfouz. Belghazi spreads around a lot of patronage. He can ask for a lot of favors.”
“All very interesting,” I said, “but so far the connections you’re offering me seem a little thin.”
“I know they’re thin. I don’t have all the answers, but I’m trying, all right? And I’m telling you things that I probably shouldn’t, partly because I owe it to you after what just happened in Hong Kong and Macau, partly because I’m concerned that, if you’re not satisfied that I’m leveling with you, you’re going to do something unwarranted, possibly involving me.”
“All right, keep going, then.”
He exhaled forcefully, his cheeks puffing out slightly as he did so. “Do you know that, in mid 2002, word leaked to the press that the semiofficial Defense Policy Board, which recommends policy to the Pentagon, had written a report concluding that, quote, ‘The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader’? The Secretary of the State was mobilized within hours to quash the report and distance it from the purported actual views of the Bush administration. Then, last summer, Bush ordered twenty-eight pages of a Congressional report on Nine-Eleven redacted, ostensibly to protect national security, in fact because the redacted portions provided details on Saudi financing of terrorist groups.”
“A conspiracy?” I asked.
He shrugged. “More like a conspiracy of silence. Everyone in Washington knows what’s going on, but bringing it up goes over about as well as a discussion of incest in the family. But the lack of discussion doesn’t make it all any less pervasive.”
He took a sip of coffee. “So here’s what I know. Fact one, someone in NE Division is very concerned that Belghazi might be on the list, and that we might have sent someone after him in Macau. Fact two, shortly after the NE Division guy visits me, six Saudis show up in Macau and Hong Kong to try and take you out. Fact three, the six Saudis are connectable to Belghazi through Mahfouz. Fact four, there are elements of the U.S. government that are intent on protecting the Saudis.”
We were quiet for a moment. “Then the speculation,” I said, “is that Crawley-sorry, the guy from NE-finds out about me and warns Belghazi, who contacts Mahfouz for help, who sends in the Saudi team?”
“Yes.”
I considered. If the facts were true, the speculation was reasonable. But I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the way Kanezaki had presented it all to me. He’d given me a few juicy tidbits, then paused to allow me to reach my own conclusions. And I could too easily imagine him taking diligent notes in a “How to Run Your Assets” course at Langley: Let the subject reach his own conclusions… the conclusions we reach ourselves are always more convincing than the ones someone else proposes… .
“How did Belghazi get on the list?” I asked. “Given that various important personages at the Agency seem less than thrilled to find him there.”
He shrugged. “Like you said, sometimes the right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing. And, like I said, there are plenty of people who don’t want to know more about the list than they have to. Also access is tightly controlled through the CTC in any event. The good news is, the relative lack of oversight means that the list is one of the few intelligence items out there that isn’t distorted by politics and corruption. The bad news is, the lack of the usual watered-down consensus means the product might offend some people.”
I took a sip of coffee and considered. “If Crawley found out about Belghazi being on the list and was upset about it, why not just have him removed from it?”
This time he didn’t even react to the mention of the name. “I don’t know for sure, but probably because he doesn’t want to draw too much attention to himself or his motives, whatever they are. Belghazi is practically the poster boy for terrorist infrastructure. It’s easy to use a wink and nod and a slick line of bullshit about ‘counterpart relations’ and ‘national security’ to imply that someone’s name shouldn’t be added to something like the list, that there might be repercussions if it is. It’s a lot harder to explain why you outright want the name off. You’d have a lot of explaining to do at the time. And people would remember afterward.”
“So you think the Hong Kong team came from Belghazi.”
There was a pause, then he said, “I see two possibilities. One is that the woman spotted you for what you are and didn’t want you to interfere with whatever she’s doing, so she’s behind it. Two is that Belghazi is on to you, and the team in Hong Kong came from him. But Belghazi seems the more likely of the two. I don’t think all those phone calls, or the Belghazi/Mahfouz connection, are a coincidence.”
His assessment tracked pretty closely with my own. I wondered whether he knew more than he was saying. Regardless, I didn’t see him being behind the Hong Kong/Macau team. Since I had contacted him from Rio, he’d had numerous and better opportunities to set me up, if that’s what he’d had in mind.
“Are you still tracking Belghazi?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Where is he now?”
“Still on Macau.”
I looked at him. “How do you know that?”
He shrugged. “Let’s just say there’s a certain satellite phone that Belghazi thinks is clean, that isn’t. Why are you asking?”
“Because it doesn’t make sense that he’d still be in Macau. Why is he still there, do you think?”
He shrugged. “We’ve already talked about this. He has business in the area, and he’s a gambler. We expected him to spend time at the casinos. He always does.”
I nodded. “So you’re telling me he’s still there-to gamble? This is a guy who learns that he’s been tracked to Macau, that one or maybe two contractors have been sent after him there, he’s sufficiently concerned about this chain of events to call in a favor in the form of a six-man Saudi team to eliminate the threat, the team gets wiped out and the threat is still at large, and you’re telling me he’s still there because he doesn’t want to interrupt his vacation?”
He looked at me, his cheeks flushing. After a long moment, he said, “You’re right. That was stupid of me, not changing my interpretation of his behavior in light of subsequent facts. You’re right. Let me think for a minute.”
“You can think on your own time. If you want me to continue this op, you need to share information with me, not spend more time meditating on things in solitude.”
His flush deepened, and I felt an odd twinge of sympathy. The kid was trying so hard. Managing characters like Dox and me would be tough on anyone, let alone someone as young as Kanezaki. He was actually doing well, too, and getting better all the time. He just wasn’t as good yet as he wanted to be, and that was frustrating him. But he’d get there.
“All right,” he said, “what do you want to know that I haven’t already told you?”
“First, I want to know about Crawley. I want to know his interest in this, so I can understand whether, why, and how he’s connected to Belghazi.”
“I don’t know,” he said, again not bothering to argue with me about the name. “I’m going to try to find out.”
So am I, I thought, thinking of the digital photos Dox had showed me. And I bet I can get more information than you can.
“Do that,” I said. “Now, let’s talk about Belghazi. You told me originally that he was in Southeast Asia to build up his distribution network, that Macau was just gambling, incidental to the real purpose of his trip.”
He nodded. “That seems to have been incorrect.”
“It does. So the question is, why Macau?”
He rubbed his chin. “Well, it’s got good port facilities. Likewise for Hong Kong, of course. So a possible transshipment point for the arms he’s selling to Jemaah Islamiah and Abu Sayyaf and other fundamentalist groups in the region.”