language and had always relied on the interpreters, or “’terps,” who accompanied them everywhere. But the ‘terps had an agenda, too. They also received favors for interesting revelations, so they had a motive to make them up.
After four years, the man at prayer was dubbed “noncooperative,” which simply meant unbreakable. In 2004, he had been transferred across the gulf to the new Camp Echo, a locked-down, permanent-isolation unit. Here, the cells were smaller, with white walls, and exercise was allowed only at night. For a year, the man had not seen the sun.
No family clamored for him, no government sought news of him, no lawyer filed papers for him. Detainees round him became deranged and were taken away for therapy. He just stayed silent and read his Koran. Outside, the guards changed while he prayed.
“Goddamn Arab,” said the man coming off duty. His replacement shook his head.
“He’s not Arab,” he said. “He’s an Afghan.”
“So, what do you think of our problem, Terry?”
It was Ben Jolley out of his daydream, staring at Martin across the rear of the limo.
“Doesn’t sound good, does it?” Terry Martin replied. “Did you see the faces of our two spook friends? They knew we were only confirming what they had suspected, but they were definitely not happy when we left.” “No other verdict, though. They have to discover what it is, this al-Isra operation.”
“But how?”
“Well, I’ve been around spooks for a long time. Been advising as best I can on matters of the Mideast since the Six-Day War. They have a lot of ways: sources on the inside, turned agents, eavesdropping, file recovery, overflying; and the computers help a lot, cross-referencing data in minutes that used to take weeks. I guess they’ll figure it out and stop it somehow. Don’t forget we have come one hell of a long way since Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in ‘sixty, or the U2 took those photos of the Cuban missiles in ‘sixty-two. Guess before you were born, right?”
He chuckled chestily at his own antiquity as Terry Martin nodded.
“Maybe they have someone right inside Al Qaeda,” he suggested. “Doubt it,” said the older man. “Anyone that high up would have given us the location of the leadership by now, and we’d have taken them down with smart bombs.”
“Well, maybe they could slip someone inside Al Qaeda to find out and report back.”
Again, the older man shook his head, this time with total conviction. “Come on, Terry, we both know that’s impossible. A native-born Arab would quite possibly be turned and work against us. As for a non-Arab, forget it. We both know all Arabs come from extended families, clans, tribes. One inquiry of the family or clan and the impostor would be exposed. “So he would have to be CV perfect. Add to that, he would have to look the part, speak the part and, most important, play the part. One syllable wrong in all those prayers and the fanatics would hear it. They recite five times a day, and never miss a beat.”
“True,” said Martin, knowing his case was hopeless but enjoying the fantasy.
“But one could learn the Koranic passages, and invent an untraceable family.”
“Forget it, Terry. No Westerner can pass for an Arab among Arabs.” “My brother can,” said Dr. Martin. In seconds, if he could have bitten off his own tongue he would have. But it was all right. Dr. Jol-ley grunted, dropped the subject and studied the outskirts of Washington. Neither head in the front, beyond the glass, moved an inch. He let out a sigh of relief. Any mike in the car must be turned off.
He was wrong.
CHAPTER 3
The Fort Meade report on the deliberations of the Koran Committee was ready by dawn that Saturday and destroyed several planned weekends. One of those roused Saturday night at his home in Old Alexandria was Marek Gumienny, deputy director of operations at the CIA. He was bidden to report straight to his office without being told why.
The “why” was on his desk when he got there. It was not even dawn over Washington, but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince George ’s County, where the Patux-ent River flows down to join the Chesapeake.
Marek Gumienny’s office was one of the few on the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA and is known simply as “ Langley.” It had recently been redubbed “the Old Building,” to distinguish it from the mirror-image New Building that housed the expanding agency since 9/11.
In the hierarchy of the CIA, the director of Central Intelligence has traditionally been a political appointment, but the real muscle is habitually the two deputy directors. Ops handles the actual intelligence gathering, while the DD Intelligence covers the collation and analysis of the incoming harvest to turn raw information into a meaningful picture. Just below these two are Counter-intelligence (to keep the agency free from penetration and in-house traitors) and Counter-Terrorism (increasingly becoming the boiler room as the agency’s war swerved from the old USSR to the new threats out of the Mideast).
DDOs, back to the start of the Cold War around 1945, had always been Soviet experts with the Soviet Division and SE (Satellites and East Europe) making the running for an ambitious career officer. Marek Gumienny was the first Arabist to be appointed DDO. As a young agent, he had spent years in the Middle East, mastered two of its languages (Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran) and knew its culture.
Even in this twenty-four-hour-a-day building, predawn on a Saturday is not an easy time to rustle up piping hot, aromatic black coffee the way he liked it, so he brewed his own. While it perked, Gumienny started on the package on his desk containing the slim, wax-sealed file.
He knew what to expect. Fort Meade may have handled the file recovery, translation and analysis, but it was CIA in collaboration with the British and Pakistan ’s CTC over in Peshawar who had made the capture. CIA’s stations in Peshawar and Islamabad had filed copious reports simply to keep their boss in the picture.
The file contained all the documents downloaded from the AQ financier’s computer, but the two letters-taking up three pages-were the stars. The DDO spoke fast and fluent street Arabic, but reading script is always harder so he repeatedly referred to the translations.
He read the report of the Koran Committee, prepared jointly by the two intelligence officers at the meeting, but it offered him no surprises. To him, it was clear the references to al-Isra, the magical journey of the prophet through the night, could only be the code for some kind of important project. That project now had to have a name in-house for the American intelligence community. It could not be al-Isra; that alone would betray to others what they had found out. He checked with file cryptography for a name to describe, in the future, how he and all his colleagues would call the Al Qaeda project, whatever it was.
Code names come out of a computer by a process known as random selection, the aim being to give nothing away. The CIA naming process that month was using fish; the computer chose “Stingray,” so “Project Stingray” it became. The last sheet in the file had been added Saturday night. It was brief and short. It came from the hand of a man who disliked wasting words, one of the six principals, the director of national intelligence. Clearly, the file out of Fort Meade had gone straight to the National Security committee (Steve Hadley), to the DNI and to the White House. Marek Gumienny imagined there would have been lights burning late in the Oval Office.
The final sheet was on the DNI-headed paper. It said in capital letters:
WHAT IS AL-ISRA
IS IT NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL, CONVENTIONAL? FIND OUT WHAT, WHEN AND
WHERE. TIME SCALE: NOW. RESTRAINTS: NONE. POWERS: ABSOLUTE
JOHN NEGROPONTE
