the land of Saddam Hussein; apart from the Aurora and the U-2 doing the same but at closer range, there were other machines of daunting complexity dedicated to providing airborne information.
Another breed of satellite, in geosynchronous position, hovering over the Middle East, was dedicated to listening to what the Iraqis said, and these satellites caught every word uttered on an open line. They could not catch the planning conferences held on those 45,000 miles of buried fiber-optic cables.
Among the airplanes, chief was the Airborne Warning and Control System, known as AWACS. These were Boeing 707 airliners, carrying a huge radar dome mounted on their backs. Turning in slow circles over the northern Gulf, on twenty-four-hour rotating shifts, the AWACS could inform Riyadh within seconds of any air movement over Iraq. Hardly an Iraqi plane could move or mission take off but Riyadh knew its number, heading, course speed, and altitude.
Backing up the AWACS was another Boeing 707 conversion, the E8-A, known as J-STAR, which did for movements on the ground what AWACS did for movements in the air. With its big Norden radar scanning downward and sideways, so that it could cover Iraq without ever entering Iraqi airspace, the J-STAR could pick up almost any piece of metal that began to move.
The combination of these and many more technical miracles on which Washington had spent billions and billions of dollars convinced the generals that if it was said, they could hear it, if it moved, they could see it, and if they knew about it, they could destroy it. They could do it, moreover, come rain or fog, night or day. Never again would the enemy be able to shelter under a canopy of jungle trees and escape detection. The eyes-in-the-sky would see it all.
The intelligence officers from Langley were skeptical, and it showed.
Doubts were for civilians. In the face of this the military became irritable. It had a tough job to do, it was going to do it, and cold water it did not need.
On the British side the situation was different. The SIS operation in the Gulf Theater was nothing like that of the CIA, but it was still a large operation by the standards of Century House, and in the manner of Century it was lower profile and more secretive.
Moreover, the British had appointed as commander of all U.K. forces in the Gulf, and second-in-command to General Schwarzkopf, an unusual soldier of uncommon background.
Norman Schwarzkopf was a big, burly man of considerable military prowess and very much a soldier’s soldier. Known either as Stormin’ Norman or “the Bear,” his mood could vary from genial bonhomie to explosions of temper, always short-lived, which his staff referred to as the general going ballistic. His British counterpart could not have been more different.
Lieutenant General Sir Peter de la Billiere, who had arrived in early October to take command of the Brits, was a deceptively slight, lean, wiry man of diffident manner and reluctant speech. The big American extrovert and the slim British introvert made an odd partnership, which succeeded only because each knew enough of the other to recognize what lay behind the up-front presentation.
Sir Peter, known to the troops as P.B., was the most decorated soldier in the British Army, a matter of which he would never speak under any circumstances. Only those who had been with him in his various campaigns would occasionally mutter into their beer glasses of the icy cool under fire that had caused all those “gongs” to be pinned to his tunic. He had also once been commanding officer of the SAS, a background that gave him a most useful knowledge of the Gulf, of Arabic, and of covert operations.
Because the British commander had worked before with the SIS, the Century House team found in him a more accustomed ear to listen to their reservations than in the CIA group.
The SAS already had a good presence in the Gulf Theater, holed up in their own secluded camp in the corner of a larger military base outside Riyadh. As a former commander of these men, General P.B. was concerned that their remarkable talents should not be wasted on workaday tasks that infantry or paratroopers could do. These men were specialists in deep penetration and hostage-recovery.
Sitting in that villa outside Riyadh during the last week of October, the CIA and SIS team came up with an operation that was very much within the scope of the SAS. The operation was put to the local SAS commander, and he went to work on his planning.
The entire afternoon of Mike Martin’s first day at the villa was spent in explaining to him the discovery by the Anglo-American Allies of the existence of the renegade in Baghdad who had been code-named Jericho. They told him he still had the right to refuse and to rejoin the regiment. During the evening he thought it over. Then he told the CIA-SIS briefing officers:
“I’ll go in. But I have my conditions, and I want them met.”
The main problem, they all acknowledged, would be his cover story.
This was not a quick in-and-out mission, depending on speed and daring to outwit the counterintelligence net. Nor could he count on covert support and assistance such as he had met in Kuwait. Nor could he wander the desert outside Baghdad as an errant Bedou tribesman.
All Iraq was by then a great armed camp. Even areas that on the map seemed desolate and empty were crisscrossed with army patrols. Inside Baghdad, Army and AMAM check-squads were everywhere, the Military Police looking for deserters and the AMAM for anyone at all who might be suspicious.
The fear in which the AMAM was held was well known to everyone at the villa. Reports from businessmen and journalists, and from British and American diplomats before their expulsion, amply testified to the omnipresence of the Secret Police, who kept Iraq’s citizens in dread and trembling.
If Martin went in at all, he would have to stay in. Running an agent like Jericho would not be easy for him. First, the man would have to be traced through the dead-letter boxes and realerted that he was back in operation. The boxes might already be compromised and under surveillance. Jericho might have been caught and forced to confess all.
More, Martin would have to establish a place to live, a base where he could send and receive messages. He would have to prowl the city, servicing the drops if Jericho’s stream of inside information resumed, although it would now be destined for new masters.
Finally, and worst of all, there could be no diplomatic cover, no protective shield to spare him the horrors that would follow capture and exposure. For such a man, the interrogation cells of Abu Ghraib would be ready.
“What—er, exactly did you have in mind?” asked Paxman when Martin had made his demand.
“If I can’t be a diplomat, I want to be attached to a diplomatic household.”
“That’s not easy, old boy. Embassies are watched.”
“I didn’t say embassy. I said diplomatic household.”
“A kind of a chauffeur?” asked Barber.
“No. Too obvious. The driver has to stay at the wheel of the car. He drives the diplomat around and is watched like the diplomat.”
“What, then?”
“Unless things have changed radically, many of the senior diplomats live outside the embassy building, and if the rank is senior enough, they will have a villa in its own walled garden. In the old days such houses always rated a gardener-handyman.”
“A gardener?” queried Barber. “For chrissake, that’s a manual laborer.
You’d be picked up and recruited into the Army.”
“No. The gardener-handyman does everything outside the house. He keeps the garden, goes shopping on his bicycle for fish at the fish market, fruit and vegetables, bread and oil. He lives in a shack at the bottom of the garden.”
“So what’s the point, Mike?” asked Paxman.
“The point is, he’s invisible. He’s so ordinary, no one notices him. If he’s stopped, his ID card is in order and he carries a letter on embassy paper, in Arabic, explaining that he works for the diplomat and is exempt from service, and would the authorities please let him go about his business. Unless he is doing something wrong, any policeman who makes trouble for him is up against a formal complaint from the embassy.”
The intelligence officers thought it over.
“It might work,” admitted Barber. “Ordinary, invisible. What do you think, Simon?”
“Well,” said Paxman, “the diplomat would have to be in on it.”
“Only partly,” said Martin. “He would simply have to have a flat order from his government to receive and employ the man who will present himself, then face the other way and get on with his job. What he suspects is his
