From the outside, nobody is meant to be able to tell whether the helicopter is, in fact, Marine One, with the President and myself on board, or just another of all our look-alike helicopters. If the airplane is Air Force One out of the many in our armada. From whichever airport we touch down at, we are always transported behind smoked glass in Cadillac One, also known as “The Beast”, with a five-inch-thick floor of reinforced armor. With another limousine, identical from the outside, traveling just in front or just behind.
But in these times of sweeping cosmetic change, of doubles and false identities, no-one is irreplaceable.
And because I suddenly became aware that somebody else in the Team would take my place, I had to blame it on a passing fever. When my preliminary readings turned out to be in perfect order, I was given clearance to travel with the Team. I had no earlier mark on my record, no contrary indication, not from all those years. But I was forced to accept the Nurse as a personal escort. For safety’s sake, as they put it.
As she sat down next to me in the helicopter, in the row behind the President and the First Lady, I could not help feeling that this was meant to be. That the Nurse, in one way or another, was part of the plan.
The state visit to Stockholm was mysterious, written into the President’s calendar at the last moment. In strict terms, it could only be referred to as an “official visit”, since there had been no invitation from Sweden’s head of state. The only plausible reason for traveling to this particular corner of the world was that our government wanted to make a diplomatic point to Russia, the country we were scheduled to visit. If Edward Snowden had not just been granted asylum there.
Our security people had not been happy about these late changes. Priority in Stockholm would be given to external security and would tick all the right boxes despite the short notice. The advance party had been sent out as soon as the date was fixed. But what was called “internal security” was an altogether more complex matter.
In the weeks before our departure, we were warned to increase our vigilance. There were rumors about moles within the organization. In the Team we kept a close eye on each other, watched every move. And on this occasion we were not given our final instructions until on board Air Force One—and only after we had taken off and could no longer communicate with anybody who did not have clearance.
Our team consisted of four special security agents, not counting Edelweiss. He was our operational boss and the one giving our daily briefings. He was the one the rest of us followed, admired, respected—but above all feared. His body was monumental. Like an entire foreign planet with folds and pockets, craters, deep secrets. He would stroke his chins as he pondered one of our questions. Then deliver the answer with his surprisingly soft, clear voice: often saying things that no-one else would even think of. Still less say out loud.
We were told that it was Edelweiss who had hand-picked each of us on the basis of our specialist skills, in the desperate days following 9/11, when all other available structures had failed.
We also gathered that he had been given a free hand. That often requires a filter, a layer which both empowers and conceals, relieves the decision-makers of responsibility for their decisions. Sometimes numerous, almost invisible sheets: like a vast millefeuille in which the bottom level always protects the upper one, complex sequences of knowledge and not knowing, none of which can do without the other.
In our own cases, camouflage was the beginning and the end. It was referred to as a “military approach to precautionary security measures”. After our training in the sealed wing at West Point—which continued in parallel with our university education, allowing us to practice our abilities to lead double lives and to deceive—we started putting our new-found skills to use. For the most part, I was sent out on short solo missions of increasing ardor. At first small, and then bigger sabotage operations, designed to ensure that our country should not be exposed to the same thing, resolving or setting off almost invisible conflicts in countries which many people had never heard of, unleashing domestic political turmoil elsewhere in the world.
In my other life, I completed my doctoral thesis in moral philosophy. Interminable sessions with my mesmerizing supervisor went on throughout the remainder of the 1980s and all through the 1990s, in parallel with my special duties in the security world. I took my doctorate in September 2001, five days before the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Some weeks after that, on November 4, we were brought together in a windowless lecture hall two stories below ground. Like silhouettes, shadows, ghosts from earlier times: some of us maybe even on the same special forces training course at West Point. But we had all been through cosmetic surgery at least once since then. I did not recognize anyone in this select group.
And not one of us understood the implications of our having been brought together. We had answered the encrypted summons, from which could be gleaned that the formation of the Team would be the beginning of our new life and the end of the old. An invitation which we had felt unable to resist.
There were more of us than I would have expected for what had to be a very special assignment. That meant that the core would be smaller—and everything around it much bigger. The Team itself might not consist of more than eight to ten people, and the rest would make up the support functions.
It became apparent that the Team—Edelweiss called us “NUCLEUS”, as in the center of a cell or atom—would consist of six chosen ones, including himself and someone unknown, who went by the name Alpha.
And after more than a day’s wait without food or drink, no doubt intended to make us more malleable from the start, Edelweiss appeared. That enigmatic figure with his enormous silhouette. Floating and formless, like an apparition in the ill-lit room. He who had been my main teacher at West Point, maybe for the others too, and who would be in charge of our lives.
Edelweiss began with the official version. The vague formulation that defined the Team’s place in our new war plan, transformed by the shock-waves from 9/11: “A small, mobile unit acting as a separate protection squad in times of peace, side by side with the President’s own command, and which in case of crisis and war can operate with full autonomy.”
Then the unofficial version. Edelweiss had been given a free hand to create something new. A phoenix from the ashes of the World Trade Center, from the ruins of our old security system, from what in every way was a “Ground Zero”. Now that all our existing structures—the security services, the surveillance system, our counter-terrorism efforts—had proved to be inadequate.
His idea was that our team should be the spider in the web. Or rather, both web and spider. An amorphous structure binding together all the existing functions: the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the N.S.A., the Secret Service… But which could also operate in the gaps between them.
Edelweiss told us that he had no idea who had given him the task. He only knew that someone using the pseudonym Alpha had written him credible e-mails, with sufficient encryption in place to have convinced him that the orders came from the very top. There was no doubt one more layer or filter between Alpha and the President, but perhaps no more than one. And that layer, in turn, must have been given a free hand by the President.
Our goal seemed simple. Edelweiss’ orders were expressed in broad terms, and the person who had given them did not want to know the details of their execution. Everything had one focus: stop something like this from happening again, anything like a hostile airplane flying into the World Trade Center in broad daylight. The idea was for us to take all necessary preventive measures outside the scope of conventional intelligence work. The end would justify the means.