19
Cairo; May 1970
Holding the next meeting in Egypt was Jamal’s idea. Rogers thought it was crazy. Why hold a supposedly clandestine meeting in the heart of enemy territory, surrounded by thousands of gumshoes from the Egyptian Moukhabarat? Why travel to the center of Soviet influence in the Middle East?
Jamal insisted that Egypt would be safe. He knew the Egyptian security service from his training there, he told Fuad. He knew how they tapped phones and how they conducted surveillance. They were incompetent. Rogers shouldn’t worry. It was almost as if Jamal wanted to demonstrate his proficiency as an intelligence officer. Rogers reluctantly agreed to meet in Cairo and packed his bags once again.
They set the meeting for early May, when Jamal had to be in Cairo on Fatah business. Fuad gave Jamal the address of a CIA safehouse in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. It was an apartment on a quiet street in a Coptic Christian neighborhood where the Nasser regime had few friends. Jamal should proceed to the apartment, use the agreed password, and enter. If no one answered, he should return the next day, an hour earlier, and try again. Avoiding surveillance on his way to the meeting would be Jamal’s problem, Fuad said. Jamal scoffed at the precautions.
Rogers arrived in an Egypt that was hobbling along in the waning days of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was like visiting the locker room of a baseball team that has lost twenty straight games. The Egyptians were surviving on their good humor. The dreams and illusions of Nasser’s revolution had been shattered by the 1967 War, when Nasser’s boasts about Arab military power had been revealed as puny lies. Yet the good-natured Egyptians forgave their leader everything. When he spoke, the masses still chanted: “Nasser! Nasser!” The name translated as: “Victory! Victory!” Perhaps they meant it as a joke.
A thin veneer of Nasser’s socialism overlay Egypt, but it was warping and peeling at the edges. Beneath were the residues of so many other cultures-British, French, Ottoman, Bedouin, Roman, Greek-left behind by each wave of invaders that had sojourned in Egypt since the days of Pharoah. Walking around Tahrir Square downtown, Rogers felt as if he was suspended in several centuries at once. Above him were the French-style facades of the old commercial buildings, their ornate moldings and capstones barely visible under the grime of the city; ahead were the modern Egyptian bureaucrats and businessman in their sharp suits, mopping their brows in the Cairo heat; below, in the shadows, were the fellabin, the peasants from the villages of the Nile Delta, ragged and barefoot, relieving themselves in alleyways and on doorsteps, laughing and telling crude jokes. All around was the incessant noise of cars honking their horns and merchants peddling their wares and pedestrians bantering in musical Egyptian Arabic.
Rogers was staying at the Nile Hilton, a grand American hotel along the river that had become, paradoxically, the favorite haunt of President Nasser. It was an island of sanity and efficiency in the middle of chaotic Cairo. Egyptian novelists came to the air-conditioned Coffee Shop to write their books in the cool and calm; Moslem brides held their wedding receptions in the crowded lobby, blushing as a chorus sang tales of the wedding night. It was the place where all Cairo met and socialized.
Rogers arrived a day before his meeting and practiced losing the Moukhabarat surveillance teams, the little men in baggy suits who waited in clusters outside the hotel. He found that it was easy and wondered whether perhaps Jamal had been right.
The day of the meeting, Rogers slipped out the back door of the hotel and walked several blocks up Kasr el- Nil Street to Talat Harb Square, where he hailed a taxi. He had the taxi drive to Dokki, across the river. He stopped there, checked for surveillance, and took another taxi back toward the center of town. He shifted cars one more time before heading to Heliopolis. When he finally arrived in the neighborhood of the safehouse, he had the taxi drop him a block from his true destination and walked the rest of the way, stopping twice to check for little men in baggy suits.
Jamal arrived on schedule an hour later. Rogers barely recognized him. He was dressed like a bawab, a humble doorman, in a dirty gray gallabiya, muddy leather sandals, and a turban-like scarf that covered his head and most of his face. It was a discordant sight: the dark lustrous hair and fine features of a movie star, wrapped in the rags of a beggar. Rogers found the outfit faintly comical and said so.
“I count on the snobbery of the secret police,” said Jamal. “They would never imagine that anyone dressed like this would be worth following.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Rogers, walking toward the window.
The drapes were closed to prevent surveillance from across the street, leaving the room nearly dark at midday. Rogers opened the drapes slightly. The street looked quiet. In the building across the way he saw women and children. In one apartment, a young man was sitting alone reading a newspaper and looking idly out the window. He looked harmless. Rogers closed the drapes.
He offered Jamal a whisky. The Palestinian smiled and said no, tea would be fine. They made small talk for only a few minutes. Jamal seemed eager to do business. From the folds of his dusty gallabiya, he removed two sheets of paper covered with dense Arabic writing and handed them to Rogers with a flourish. The shyness of Kuwait had vanished.
“The Old Man sends greetings to the United States,” Jamal said.
Rogers touched his heart in a sign of gratitude.
“What’s in the papers?” Rogers asked.
“Part of our security cooperation,” said Jamal, still beaming.
“Tell me,” said Rogers. The tape recorder was going. He wanted a record for Stone.
“We are giving you the names of eight people who are attending a training camp in South Lebanon. There are four Palestinians, two Germans, and two Italians. They are studying techniques that could be used in airplane hijackings. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine organized the camp, but one of the trainers works for us.”
“Why are you giving us this information?” asked Rogers.
“The Old Man doesn’t like the fact that the Europeans are involved,” explained Jamal.
It struck Rogers as an odd sort of racism, the notion that it was all right for Palestinians to blow airplanes out of the sky but not Europeans. But he kept his mouth shut.
“The second page is the most useful,” said Jamal with the knowing smile that a lawyer or accountant might use in briefing a client.
The second page gave details about the passports that had been prepared for the eight by the PFLP’s documentation bureau. The four Palestinians would be travelling on real Algerian passports, the two Germans and two Italians on false ones from their home countries. The names and passport numbers were listed neatly.
“Thank you,” said Rogers.
Rogers was more pleased than he wanted to admit. The document was a bonanza. It would allow Western intelligence services to track the terrorists as they left the training camp in Lebanon, monitor their contacts with other operatives in Europe and the Middle East, and apprehend them before they killed anybody.
The American dreaded what he had to do next.
“The names and passport numbers are fine, as far as they go,” Rogers said in a measured voice.
“But they don’t tell us all that we need to know. They tell us who will try to hijack airplanes and discredit the Palestinian Revolution. But they don’t tell us when or where. For that, we must go further. I am sorry to push you, Jamal, but we must move to a new level of security cooperation.”
Jamal looked at him suspiciously. The enthusiasm had drained from his face. His lips were tight and his nostrils flared.
Rogers removed the paperweight from his pocket.
“This is a simple device that can help us save many lives. I’ll explain how it works…”
“Aaacchh!” Jamal cut him off with a sharp cry. It was almost a scream, a noise that someone might make to block out another sound he didn’t want to hear.
“Impossible! It is absolutely impossible! I told you in Kuwait that I will not be your spy!”
Jamal was almost shouting. Rogers was torn between concern for the Palestinian and worry about the racket he was making.
“Shhh!” said Rogers.
He walked to the darkened window again and pulled the curtain back a hair to see if the noise had roused
