Agents of Innocence (10 page)

Rogers walked very slowly. When he reached the shadow of a building, he stopped and turned around. There was nobody following him. He waited fifteen seconds in the shadows, then walked another half block. He was afraid to turn around. Afraid not of who would be there, but of who wouldn’t. He took a cigarette from his pocket and turned around to light it.

And there, ambling toward him, was a man in a black leather jacket.

Bingo! said Rogers under his breath.

Jamal approached Rogers and asked him if he had an American cigarette.

“Marlboro,” offered Rogers.

The Palestinian took the cigarette and lit it.

“What information do you have for me, friend?” said Jamal.

“Come back with me to a quieter place, where we can talk,” answered Rogers.

“No. Here.” He sounded like he meant it.

“Very well,” said Rogers. “The message I have for you is this: The King will rescind his decree about carrying weapons.”

“The King will back down?” asked Jamal dubiously.

“Yes,” said Rogers. “He will back down.”

Jamal looked at him suspiciously. He brushed a strand of hair out of his eyes.

“When?” demanded the Palestinian.

“I don’t know.”

“How do you know this information?” asked the Palestinian.

“Because I know it,” said Rogers. “I can’t say any more than that.”

The Palestinian took a long drag on his cigarette. If we stand here any longer, thought Rogers, we will become conspicuous.

“There are other important things I must discuss with you,” said Rogers.

“Not here,” said the Palestinian. “Not in Amman.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Where?” demanded Rogers.

“I will send you a message.”

“When?”

“When I return to Beirut.”

He took another cigarette and was gone.

Rogers, tired but elated, was back in Beirut that night.

Two days later, the king held a press conference and announced that he was “freezing” his order banning the fedayeen from carrying weapons in public. The confrontation had been the result of a “misunderstanding,” the Jordanian monarch explained. “Our power is their power and their power is our power,” he said of the fedayeen.

The king had capitulated.

A week after that, back in Beirut, Jamal sent word through Fuad that he would meet Rogers in early March in Kuwait.

Hoffman listened to Rogers tell the story of the encounter in Amman, and then asked him to repeat it.

“I have one question for you, hot dog,” said Hoffman, after he had heard the explanation for the second time. “How in the hell did you know that the King was going to back down? I didn’t see that in any of the cables.”

Rogers looked sheepish.

“To be honest, I didn’t know it. But it seemed like a safe bet.”

“You’re shitting me!” said Hoffman. “You mean you risked this operation on a hunch?”

“It was better than a hunch,” said Rogers. “It was a strong probability.”

Hoffman looked at his young case officer with a combination of puzzlement and new respect.

“You’re crazier than I thought,” said Hoffman. “In fact, you’re almost as crazy as I am.”

Rogers took it as a compliment.

“So Jamal thinks the CIA helped to pressure the King to stop the crackdown?” asked the station chief.

“Perhaps,” said Rogers with a trace of a smile. “But I doubt he’s that gullible.”

Hoffman called Rogers into his office several days later.

“Guess who’s packing his bags and leaving sunny Beirut?” said the station chief, his eyes twinkling.

Rogers shrugged his shoulders.

“A certain French diplomat.”

“Oh shit,” said Rogers.

“Hold on. It’s not what you’re thinking. The wife did it!”

“What?” said Rogers. “Why?”

“It seems,” said Hoffman, “that Madame Plateau got angry at her husband one day for being such an asshole and told him the whole story. How she was fucking her brains out with one of the Palestinian guerrillas and loving it, and what did he think of that? Apparently she didn’t tell him who, because the thugs from SDECE are making inquiries all over West Beirut trying to find out. The chargé got so angry that he beat her up. They had to take her to the hospital. It’s the talk of Beirut.”

“What’s going to happen to them?” asked Rogers.

“The French Ambassador is mucho embarrassed. Frenchmen are supposed to screw other people’s wives, not vice versa. Anyway, it doesn’t look good for Mr. and Mrs. Froggie. They’re being recalled for extended consultations back home. Looks like bye-bye, Beirut.”

“And the photographs?” asked Rogers.

“I didn’t have the heart to give them to the Frenchman. The guy is miserable enough as it is. He didn’t need to see the smile on his wife’s face. Anyway, there wasn’t much we could have squeezed from him. Even if we had threatened to run the pictures in
An Nahar
.

“One more thing,” added Hoffman.

“When you see your Palestinian friend, tell him to keep his pecker in his pants for a while. People take sex seriously in this part of the world. Around here, if you touch the merchandise, you’ve got to buy it.”

Kuwait; March 1970

Rogers arrived in Kuwait three days early. He wanted to get the feel of the place, to look over the safehouse, prepare the food and drinks, ready himself emotionally for the encounter. It was a bit like practicing before a basketball game. The exercise probably didn’t improve your aim, but it steadied the nerves.

Kuwait was a flat little smudge of sand at the western end of the Persian Gulf. It had three distinguishing features: a vast reservoir of oil, which was transforming the sheikdom into the richest country per-capita in the world; a class of merchants and traders that dated back several centuries, which gave Kuwait the semblance of a mercantile elite and spared it the indignities of Bedouin culture; and a huge influx of Palestinian migrant workers, which made Kuwait an important staging ground for the Palestinian Revolution.

Kuwait was in many ways an ugly country, made more so by the oil boom. It was ferociously hot in the summer—over 120 degrees in July—so hot that the air seemed to burn your lungs and had to be breathed in small gulps. Kuwait City was on the coast, and the heat there wasn’t the dry baking heat of the desert, but the humid heat of a steam bath. The temperature wasn’t so bad now, in mid-March, during the brief Kuwaiti spring. But in all seasons, the place seemed to smell of oil, which was so plentiful in Kuwait’s vast Burgan field that it bubbled out of the ground on its own, without a pump.

As Rogers drove in from the airport, he saw a spasm of spending and construction. Everywhere there were new buildings, erected as fast and cheaply as the British and American contractors could build them. Along Fahad al-Salem Street, approaching downtown, there was a traffic jam of bulldozers and cement mixers and dump trucks, all caught in the rush to build more ugly new buildings. He noticed that the Kuwaitis were all driving big American gas-guzzlers. Cadillacs, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, the bigger and gaudier the better.

Kuwaitis seemed to understand that these automotive behemoths were the mother of their prosperity. Though the country lacked modern highways, it had nearly as many cars as people, and the downtown area resembled a vast parking lot. As the traffic slowed to a halt, the Kuwaitis sat in their velour-upholstered cars, power windows up and the air conditioning on full blast, enjoying the accident of geology that had made them, at least momentarily, the richest people on earth.

Soon after arriving, Rogers stopped by to see the local station chief. His name was Egbert Jorgenson and he ran a small, three-person shop—himself, an operations officer, and a code clerk—in a cluttered wing of the embassy.

Jorgenson’s cover job was agricultural attaché. It was a silly cover, since there wasn’t any agriculture to speak of in Kuwait, but that seemed to be the least of Jorgenson’s problems. He was a small, intense man with a loud voice and a look of perpetual harassment.

“Hey, great to see you. How’s the family? What are you doing in Kuwait?” asked Jorgenson in one long sentence as he ushered Rogers into his office.

“I can’t tell you that, Bert,” said Rogers amiably. “Sorry.”

“Yeah sure, I know. Okay.” said Jorgenson. He looked hurt.

“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.