David checked his phone. The good news was that he now had some coverage. The bad news was that he had only one bar. That was too much of a risk. He couldn’t take the chance and make an international call when so many cell towers were down. Even if he got through, a call to Dubai would likely get noticed by Iranian intelligence since call volume in the area had to be so low at the moment. Then again, David figured, he did have five secure satellite phones on the seat beside him.
He opened one, called Zalinsky, and coded in as Zephyr.
The conversation didn’t go as David hoped.
“Your memo was inappropriate,” Zalinsky began.
“Why?”
“Because your job is to gather and send us actionable information about the Iranian government, not political analysis about our own. Also because I told you not to get sidetracked by all this Shia End Times stuff. That’s not the story. The weapons are the story. And even if all the analysis in your memo was right-and I highly doubt that it is, but even if it was-you provided no hard facts to back up all those dubious assertions. It’s an op-ed piece for the Post, and not a particularly good one at that.”
David gritted his teeth but didn’t back down. He insisted he was sending back every scrap of intel he could. But he was equally adamant that he would be derelict in his duty not to report his impressions of the religious and political dynamic he was seeing inside Iran, and his sense that the U.S. was not doing nearly enough to stop the Iranians in time. Only having got all that off his chest did he tell Zalinsky that the deputy director of Iran’s nuclear program had recently been killed by a car bomb, and that he suspected the Israelis were doing what the U.S. wasn’t-fighting fire with fire.
Zalinsky was stunned that Saddaji was dead. Stunned, too, that Saddaji had been living for several years in Hamadan. He hadn’t known that. No one in the Agency had. And David was probably right: it had to have been the Israelis who had taken Saddaji out. It certainly hadn’t been anyone from Langley.
“The Mossad is treating this like a real war,” David argued.
“We are too,” Zalinsky said.
“No, we’re not,” David pushed back. “The Israelis have been sabotaging Iranian facilities and kidnapping or assassinating key scientists and military officials for the last several years. What have we been doing? begging Hosseini and Darazi to sit down and negotiate with us? threatening ‘crippling’ economic consequences but imposing lame, toothless sanctions instead? No wonder the Israelis are losing confidence in us. I’m losing confidence in us.”
“That’s enough,” Zalinsky said. “You just do your job and let me do mine.”
“I’m doing my job, but it’s not enough,” David replied, trying to control himself but growing more frustrated and angry by the minute. “I’m sending you everything I have, but where is it getting us? Nowhere.”
“You have to be patient,” Zalinsky counseled.
“Why?”
“These things take time.”
“We don’t have any more time,” David insisted. “The Israelis just ran the largest war game in their history. They just took out the highest-ranking nuclear scientist in the country. Prime Minister Naphtali is warning President Jackson and the world that if we don’t act, Israel will. What are we doing? Seriously, what are we really doing to stop Iran from getting the Bomb? Because from my perspective on the ground, sir, things are spinning out of control.”
“Believe me, I understand,” Zalinsky said, “but we have to build our case with facts, not guesses, not speculation, not hearsay. We blew it in Iraq. I told you that. Not completely, but when it came to weapons of mass destruction, we didn’t have the facts-not enough of them, anyway. We didn’t have the ‘slam dunk’ case we said we did. So we’d sure better have one this time. We need to be able to carefully document the answers to every question the president or his advisors ask us. The stakes are too high for anything less. So give me a target. Give me something actionable, and we’ll take action.”
“What kind of action?” David asked. “You think the president is going to order someone assassinated? You think we’re really going to blow up some facility? We already know of a dozen or more nuclear facilities here. Have we hit one yet?”
“First of all, that’s not your call,” Zalinsky said. “Your job is to get us information we don’t have. What happens next is my job. But don’t forget the president’s executive order. We are authorized to use ‘all means necessary’ to stop or slow down Iran’s nuclear weapons program. When the time is right, we’ll do just that. But we can’t afford any screwups. You got that?”
David wanted to believe Zalinsky. But he secretly admired the courage the Israelis had to defend the Jewish people from another Holocaust, and he worried his own government had either lost its nerve or become resigned to the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.
Shifting gears, David asked if Zalinsky and Fischer had gotten anything useful out of Rashidi’s or Esfahani’s phone calls. Unfortunately, the answer was no.
“We learned that Rashidi’s brother-in-law had died tragically,” Zalinsky replied. “We learned his name was Mohammed and that the funeral was going to be in Hamadan. None of the calls ever mentioned a car bomb or his last name. So this is good work, son. I’ll get the rest of the team right on this, verifying all this. But this is exactly what I want you to be doing-giving me information I can use. I’m not saying you can’t have your own opinion. But I’m not asking you for your analysis. I’ve got twenty guys doing analysis. What we need are facts no one else in the world has. Stuff like this. Just get me more.”
David promised he would. He coded out, hung up the phone, and cleared the satellite phone’s memory of any trace of the call. But his frustration was growing. It was one thing for the White House not to get what was truly happening on the ground inside Iran. But David feared his mentor might not fully get it either.
72
David pulled into an Iran Telecom switching station on the edge of the city.
The facility itself and the equipment inside had been heavily damaged by the earthquake, and the parking lot was filled with the trucks of Iran Telecom staff and contractors who had come to get the place back in working condition.
David found Esfahani on the second floor, wearing a hard hat and assessing the extent of the damage with a group of repairmen. He caught the executive’s eye and held up his right hand, indicating he had the five remaining satellite phones with him. Esfahani excused himself from his colleagues and took David aside.
“Where are they?” Esfahani asked.
“They’re in my trunk.”
“How quickly can you get all the rest of them here?”
“All 313?”
“Exactly.”
“I really don’t know if that’s possible.”
“Look, Reza, we don’t have a lot of time,” Esfahani said. “Things are moving very rapidly now. I will go to the Chinese if I have to, but I want to work with you, so long as you understand we have to move fast.”
“I completely understand,” David said. “I know you’re under a huge time constraint. I’m just saying we have to be careful. Do you know how hard it was to get these twenty without drawing suspicion from within my company, much less from all the international intelligence agencies who are watching everything that comes in and out of this country like hawks?”