Until this moment Salome hadn’t been sure herself. She’d been thinking out loud. Writing letters to the stars, as her high school boyfriend said. But the words came to her. She knew they were true. Her legs trembled under the table, but her voice was steady.
“For a few million dollars, we can do this.”
“Men from the Mossad? The IDF?”
“Too easy to trace. And I don’t think Tel Aviv”—where the Mossad was headquartered—“would approve.”
“Where, then?”
“Men who kill for money aren’t hard to find.”
“Do you have specifics? Of how this might be done?”
“I have ideas.”
“A budget? Employees?”
She saw he was putting the operation in the terms he understood best, a business plan.
She shook her head. The wrong answer.
“Then you’re wasting my time. If you truly believe you can do this, the next time we meet, you’ll have details. What it costs. How we do it without our friends in Tel Aviv catching on. I can move money wherever you need. Ten, twenty, even fifty million a year. But everything else, that’s up to you. The logistics. How big a team. How we find them. What we tell them.”
“I understand.”
“No. You don’t.” His voice a lash. He’d never spoken to her this way before. Like she was an employee who’d disappointed him. “There’s no timetable. You call me when you’re sure you can answer my questions, all my questions, and we’ll meet. When you’re ready. Not before.”
“All right.”
“Zev will see you out.” Nothing more. He walked off, leaving her to watch her oatmeal turn to concrete.
Like the CIA, the Mossad ran espionage operations all over the world. The Israeli Defense Forces had the simpler but equally crucial task of stopping suicide bombers before they reached Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
Spy services made elaborate, months-long efforts to recruit agents. The IDF used a simpler strategy. Like a big-city police department, it paid for tips. The Palestinian security services viciously punished anyone they caught collaborating with Israel. Even so, with the average Palestinian making less than two thousand dollars a year, rewards of a few hundred dollars attracted plenty of informants.
Salome had seen the strategy succeed firsthand. Israel had a military draft. After basic training, she joined the IDF’s intelligence division. She learned surveillance and countersurveillance, how to find and recruit potential agents, interrogation techniques. Then she went to work as a junior intelligence officer, handling low-level Palestinian informants in the West Bank. She had come away after her two years of service feeling that for enough money, anyone could be bought.
Still, she had no illusions about her ability to handle an operation like the one she’d proposed to Duberman. She could hire the hackers and forgers she needed for communications and passports. Eastern Europe was full of those guys. Finding the trigger pullers would be much harder. She had told Duberman the truth. Plenty of men would kill for money. Unfortunately, they were mostly the wrong men: untrustworthy, uncontrollable, and potentially police informants. She couldn’t risk scraping together a new team for every job. No, she needed eight or ten men with clean passports who could travel all over Europe and Asia. Mercenaries and paramilitaries. She couldn’t find them herself, so she needed to find someone who could. He would make the hires and run the op on a day-to-day basis, serve as a screen between her and the team. Ideally, he would be American, ex-military or — CIA.
She knew there had to be CIA or Army officers who would bite on the deal she would offer. They were the men who’d come home from yearlong tours in Kabul to find that their wives had moved out. Who waited for noon so they could settle on the couch with a bottle of Smirnoff and a glass of ice. Who slept with their pistols under their pillows. Who would be desperate to try anything that might let them stop thinking about themselves.
Her man was one of those.
But how to find him? She couldn’t exactly put out an ad: Troubled former CIA officer needed to run assassination cell. Competitive salary, full benefits. Must be burned out, but not completely.
It wasn’t as if anyone kept a list of these men.
Then she realized she was wrong. Of course someone kept a list.
She told Raban he should investigate whether the Mossad was doing enough to manage its troubled case officers. At first, the idea bored him. Then she explained that the hearing wouldn’t have to be classified. The chance for television exposure warmed him up immediately. You think it’s important, that’s enough for me, sweetie.
She knew that the committee would never hold such a hearing. No matter. She had Raban make an official request. Then she asked a friend at the IDF to put her in contact with the CIA. Not the National Clandestine Service or even the Directorate for Analysis. The human resources department. She told the good folks in HR that she and her boss wanted to reform the way the Mossad dealt with difficult officers.
These people, they’ve served us. They deserve our help, we can’t just toss them aside like used tissues. I know some of them we can’t reach, but at least we have to try. She figured, correctly, that human resources managers didn’t get much respect from their frontline cousins and would appreciate being taken seriously.
I hate to bother you with this, but our people are stonewalling me. I ask them for numbers, they just say these problems are rare. I ask how rare, they say internal matter. I ask how they respond, they say internal matter. Internal matter this, internal matter that, I’m so sick of hearing those two words. I’m hoping I might run some questions by you. Pick your brain, isn’t that the English expression?
She had top-level Israeli security clearances. Anyway, she wasn’t asking for the details of ongoing operations, just how the agency handled burned-out case officers. Three weeks later, she found herself in a conference room at Langley. I’m interested in warning signs, how you intervened, when you realized cases might be hopeless. How much damage they did, how you contained it. I don’t mean in just the obvious ways, blown operations or agents. I’m talking about more subtle problems, hits to station morale, lost management time. The stuff the frontline guys pretend doesn’t matter, but in reality matters a lot. She watched that last line score. A half-dozen heads nodded. And the horror stories began.
Obviously, I wouldn’t want you to tell me names. But I would hope you would stick to the facts of their lives and careers. In other words, if someone was drummed out for being an alcoholic in Cairo, don’t make him a heroin addict in Tokyo. The more accurate the information you give me, the better sense I can make of it.
And the easier it will be for me to find the man I need.
They provided even more information than she’d hoped. Whatever else it might be, the CIA was a bureaucracy. Everybody had a file. After two days, Salome had learned about dozens of troubled officers. One in particular stood out. A man who served with distinction in Baghdad, then transferred to Hong Kong and flushed his career away. Who lost millions of dollars gambling. Who rejected the agency’s every effort to help and was ultimately forced out. Millions of dollars? Weren’t you concerned where the money was coming from? If he was selling secrets? Of course, the CIA managers said. But the money turned out to be his own, an inheritance. His parents had died in a car accident. He’d received a large settlement. After a review of his career, the agency determined that he was not a security risk despite the gambling losses. There was no evidence that he had tried to contact the FSB, the Chinese, or any other foreign intelligence agency. Nor had he tried to hide his problems. They had been obvious from the start of his Hong Kong posting. And even if he’d wanted to betray his own agents, he hadn’t had any to give up. In Hong Kong, he had hardly worked. In Baghdad, he had teamed with the military on operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq. But those missions had little ongoing intelligence value.