Stone arrived promptly at the Director’s office and stood stiffly in front of his desk.
“I’ve just come from the White House,” said the Director in a weary, pained tone of voice.
“I had to pretend to the president that I know what’s going on inside the PLO, when in fact I don’t know what’s going on inside the PLO. I can assure you, I don’t like being in that position.”
Stone looked distressed.
“Do we have any penetrations of these guerrilla groups?” asked the Director.
“Nothing very useful,” said Stone. “We bought a handful of Palestinians in Beirut and Amman years ago, but they don’t provide us with much.”
The Director was frowning and drumming his pen against the desk top.
“We have a promising operation starting up in Beirut,” ventured Stone. “One of our best young officers out there is trying to recruit a senior man in Fatah. It could be a real catch, but it’s the sort of thing that will take time to ripen.”
“We don’t have time,” said the Director, raising his voice slightly.
“We must recruit one of these fellows,” he said, talking as if he was describing a rival tennis team, “as soon as possible! I don’t care what it takes, what it costs, or who gets mad about it!”
The division chief nodded his head.
“There is a slight problem that I must bring to your attention,” said Stone.
“And what is that?”
“Our relationship with the Fatah official is currently structured as ‘liaison.’ ”
“Liaison?” asked the Director incredulously. “Surely you don’t mean intelligence liaison, like what we have with the British and French?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Stone.
“That’s completely mad. I don’t want to share intelligence with these hooligans. I want an agent! Someone who is signed, sealed, and delivered!”
“That’s our goal with the Fatah man, of course. But we aren’t there yet. So far he is only dealing with us through intermediaries.”
“Stone,” said the Director, who retained a schoolboy habit of addressing people by their surnames, “I want a penetration. And soon.”
Stone nodded.
“Right,” said the Director. “Let’s get on with it.”
The Director congratulated himself on his performance when Stone had left the office. He imagined the wave of activity that would be set in motion by this brief conversation: the cables, meetings, and shadowy contacts that would eventually-if they were lucky-start a stream of information flowing back toward his office.
That was the real secret about the CIA, the Director believed. Not its exotic tradecraft, but the fact that it was very much like the rest of the federal government. It was a pinhead: a vast body controlled by a small brain sitting in the White House. The president issued an order-or perhaps, like today, expressed concern about something during a meeting-and it reverberated through the government like a roar of thunder. Directors summoned division chiefs, who cabled station chiefs, who summoned case officers-and so on until the huge apparatus of government was mobilized to deal with an issue the president had probably long since forgotten.
The Director turned to a more practical problem: How to keep any intelligence that might be obtained from the Fatah operation out of the hands of the Israelis.
He called the Deputy Director for Plans on the secure phone. After chewing him out for the Jordan fiasco, he got to the point. He had reviewed the Fatah penetration with Stone and wanted it to be a top priority.
“We’re taking care of it,” said the DDP, who didn’t like the Director going behind his back.
“Not any more,” said the Director. “Stone will report directly to me on this operation. He’ll keep you briefed.”
“I must protest…,” said the DDP.
“Don’t waste your time,” said the Director.
“One more thing. On this Fatah business, I want you to keep KUDESK at arm’s length.”
“Very well,” said the wan voice of the DDP.
It was a polite way of saying: Keep the Israelis at arm’s length. KUDESK was the cryptonym for the CIA Counterintelligence staff. In addition to their normal work of thwarting the KGB, the counterintelligence staff had the special assignment of maintaining CIA liaison with the Mossad. This peculiar division of labor stemmed partly from personal ties between the chief of KUDESK and Israeli intelligence officials that dated back to the 1940s. It was also a deliberate effort to compartmentalize information-to keep the CIA people who dealt with the Arabs separate from those who dealt with the Israelis-and thereby reduce the chance of leaks.
“We’ll have quite a mess on our hands,” said the Director.
“What mess?” asked the DDP.
“If the Israelis find out that we’re running an agent at the top of the PLO.”
“Yes, Director. Quite a mess.”
“So let’s make sure they don’t find out.”
The Director hung up the phone and put the PLO problem aside. An aide brought in an urgent cable from the Saigon station, summarizing the latest disaster in Vietnam. The lead Vietnamese agent in a CIA network that stretched into Cambodia had disappeared the previous week. The new intelligence report said that he had been spotted in Hanoi. The entire network had presumably been blown. The throat-slitting would come later.
Stone drafted an urgent cable for Hoffman. It said the Fatah project had the “highest repeat highest” support and should be put on a crash basis immediately. Headquarters’ Operational Approval for the recruitment would be expedited, Stone said, and all necessary paperwork should be forwarded as soon as possible.
“This is to be run as a controlled-agent operation, not liaison,” Stone concluded. “Please advise soonest your plan for recruitment.”
11
Beirut; January 1970
“This is classic!” said Hoffman the next day as he read the cable from Stone assigning the highest priority to the espionage operation against Fatah.
“One month they don’t want to hear about the Palestinians, and we have to beat them over the head to get anything approved. The next month the PLO is the hottest thing since Oleg Penkovsky.
“You see,” Hoffman confided. “That’s why they are on the seventh floor, and we’re out here shovelling shit. Because they understand these things.”
“Why is the front office so interested all of a sudden?” asked Rogers. “And why so much emphasis on control?”
“Beats me,” said Hoffman. “That’s your problem. But I know a three-alarm fire when I see one, and this is a three-alarm fire! So take a friendly word of advice from your old pal: Don’t fuck up!”
The words were still ringing in Rogers’s ears several hours later as he pondered the case. He now had all the support he could dream of. The only thing he lacked was a plan that would lead promptly and surely to the recruitment of Jamal Ramlawi as an American agent.
The problem, Rogers reassured himself, was a familiar one. He had faced it over the years with Saudis, Omanis, Yemenis, Sudanese. How do you get a potential agent to cross a line that he doesn’t want to cross? How do you impose your will on him and establish control? Do you buy him? Break him down, find his weaknesses and exploit them? Or do you try to establish a bond of trust and personal commitment?
Rogers thought back over his own career. For all his training in deceit, his successes as a case officer had most often come from being open and straightforward. The true marvel of the intelligence business, in his experience, wasn’t the gadgetry or the shadowy operations. It was the simple fact that people like to talk. The old politician wants to tell war stories. The young revolutionary wants to explain how he plans to change the world. They shouldn’t tell you these things, but they always do. And all of them, all over the world, want the ear of an interested American. That was what made the business fun.
