“How about you?” asked Rogers. “What’s cooking?”
“Are you kidding? Plenty! You know the Sovs have an embassy here now? I’m going crazy! Never been so busy. Day and night.”
Rogers asked what particular battles of the Cold War were being waged in Kuwait these days.
“Media!” said Jorgenson emphatically. “The Sovs have got people on the payroll at all the local papers. Indians from Kerala who do the editing and make-up. The KGB resident feeds them articles-written by some clown in Moscow-and they run the stuff as is. Verbatim. Word for word. The Kuwaitis don’t know the difference. They don’t read the newspapers anyway. But the Palestinians love it.
“You gotta see this shit. You won’t believe it!” said Jorgenson.
He scurried over to his file cabinet, unlocked the top drawer, and pulled out a thick file of clippings.
“Look at this!”
He handed Rogers an article headlined: “Kremlin Endeavors to Give People More Homes.”
“Can you believe that? Isn’t that a gem? Look at this one.” Jorgenson pulled out another article, headlined: “Afro-Asian Peoples Protest American Mideast Policy.”
“Unbelievable! Who writes these headlines? Joe Stalin? Wait! There’s more,” exclaimed Jorgenson. He was considerably agitated now, handing Rogers story after story with headlines like “Kim Il-Sung Strongly Supports Anti-Zionist Armed Struggle” and “Imperialism Behind Food Shortage in Sudan.”
“The Sovs are shameless!” said Jorgenson, bursting with indignation. “And the Keralites print this crap for a few dinars a week. It’s pathetic. No wonder we’re in trouble around the world.
“Fortunately,” said Jorgenson with a sly smile, “I’ve got a few Keralites of my own. We’re getting into this game, toe to toe. Want to see some of what we’re putting out?”
“Are you sure you should be telling me this?” asked Rogers.
“Yeah, sure. Who gives a shit?”
Jorgenson removed another folder from the file cabinet, much thinner than the first, and opened it with a flourish.
“Check this out,” said the Kuwait station chief.
He handed Rogers an article headlined: “Hard Facts About Air Pollution.” And another titled “Alaskan Oil Potential Enormous,” and a long feature piece titled “Will U.S. Shift to All-Volunteer Army?”
“This stuff is subtle,” said Jorgenson. “I’m getting it from Langley. A little pro-American spin for a change. What do you think?”
“Great,” said Rogers, almost speechless. “Really great.”
Kuwait was a study in hypocrisy, Rogers decided. It was an Islamic country, where it was technically forbidden for people to drink alcohol. Yet when Rogers passed Kuwaitis in the hotel lobby, slumbering on the couches, he could smell the whisky on their breath. In the evening along Arabian Gulf Street, he could see swarms of drunken migrant workers from India and Ceylon.
Islamic Kuwait was officially prudish about sex. Yet Rogers learned from a garrulous hotel desk clerk that airline stewardesses, on a stopover from London, could make $1,000 a night entertaining Kuwaiti gentlemen. Even the local English-language newspaper seemed to be sex-crazy. Every day on page 8, it ran pin-up pictures of half- naked women. The day Rogers arrived the page 8 girl was a bosomy blonde in garters and black silk stockings with the caption: “It’s back to belts!”
The only people who seemed dilligent and disciplined were the Palestinians, who did most of the work in Kuwait’s government ministries, schools, and hospitals. The Palestinian population was thought to number about 200,000-the Kuwaiti Emir was too nervous to publish precise census data-and it overwhelmingly supported Fatah. The commando group demanded two things from the skittish Kuwaiti government: the right to levy a tax of 7 percent on the incomes of all Palestinians working in Kuwait; and denial of Kuwaiti passports to all but a few of the Palestinians, so that the rest would remain stateless and militant.
Fatah, in fact, had been born in the diaspora of Kuwait. The Old Man had worked in Kuwait during the 1950s. So had the Diplomat and Abu Namli. Rogers had Jorgenson check with a police source at the Ministry of Interior and learned that Jamal, too, had sojourned in Kuwait. He had come there from Cairo in the mid 1960s to join the movement. Now, the movement had matured and Jamal was returning.
A day before the meeting, Rogers received a cable from Langley via the Kuwait station, marked with the highest security classification. It was a message from the operations chief of the Near East Division, an aggressive young careerist named John Marsh, who regarded Rogers as a rival.
The cable was full of gratuitous advice. Rogers should use the Kuwait meeting to lay the groundwork for a future “controlled-agent operation,” the cable advised. To establish a basis for control, he should probe for the agent’s pressure points.
After the meeting, Marsh directed, Rogers should recommend to NE Division the suitability of two options: financial recruitment, with suggestions as to the amount of money that would be necessary; and blackmail, through a threat to disclose tapes and photos documenting the agent’s contacts with the CIA.
“Control is the essence of this operation,” admonished Marsh in his concluding paragraph.
Rogers tore the cable in two, burned it, and flushed the ashes down the toilet. He had the code clerk transmit a brief response to Langley. It read: “C/NE/OPS. Msg text unreceived. Transmission garbled. Pls resend. Rogers.”
He checked out of his hotel, rented a car in the name of Frank Worth, and headed for the safehouse, where nobody-not even the wizards of Langley-would disturb him.
14
Kuwait; March 1970
Rogers departed the hectic confusion of Kuwait City, driving a big American car that floated gently on its springs like a boat on a crest of water. As he reached the outskirts of the city, he stopped the car, made a U-turn, and then doubled back again to see if he was being followed. He wasn’t. One of the benefits of working in the Middle East, as opposed to Europe, was that surveillance was loose or nonexistent. In the Arab world, the Soviets seemed to be as lazy as their clients.
He turned on the radio. A local Arabic station was playing a song by Fayrouz, a Lebanese singer adored throughout the Middle East. The song told the story of a girl who waited forlornly by the roadside for a lover who never arrived.
“I loved you in the summer…I loved you in the winter,” Fayrouz sang in her tremulous voice. It was the sound of the Arab world, Rogers thought. A sentimental story about unkept promises.
As he headed south along the Persian Gulf coast, Rogers saw a breathtaking change in the landscape.
Stretching to the western horizon was the Arabian desert, undulating slightly like the sea on a calm day. But rather than the blank white of midsummer, the desert was a thin carpet of green, dotted with the blue flowers of thistles and the yellow of daisies. The effect was like a pointillist painting, with tendrils of herbs and shrubs dabbed against a sandy background.
It was spring in Kuwait. The brief season between the rain of February and the heat of May when the desert burst into bloom. In this brief springtime, Kuwaitis liked to flee the city and emulate their Bedouin ancestors. Every few miles Rogers saw the billowing flaps of a camping tent, often with a shiny new RV parked alongside, which marked a Kuwaiti family on a desert holiday. Further from the highway were the ragged tents of a few real-life Bedouin nomads, lost in time, wandering with their sheep and camels across the ocean of sand.
The radio crackled with static. Rogers fiddled with the tuning knob trying to find a clearer station. Eventually, he heard a familiar radio voice, speaking in perfect, modulated, American English:
“…and it is well known that the peoples of Africa and Asia are resolutely opposed to the plans hatched in Washington for further warfare against the peoples of Indochina. According to certain circles, the American monopolists, as is well known, are achieving super-profits from this military adventure. A concrete analysis of the situation…”
Radio Moscow! Rogers changed the dial. It was remarkable, he thought to himself, that no matter where you were in the Middle East, Radio Moscow was always the loudest broadcast signal. As he fiddled with the dial, Rogers
