Agents of Innocence (2 page)

Beirut; September 1969

Tom Rogers stepped off the Middle East Airlines plane into a vision of Oz. The new office towers and apartment blocks of West Beirut sparkled in the afternoon sun; the diminutive porters at the airport bustled to and fro, shouting and strutting as they hurled the baggage from place to place; in the distance, their horns blaring to wake the dead, a line of cars and trucks stood bumper-to-bumper along the airport road, bound for the enchanted city.

Rogers carried his two-year-old daughter Amy gently in his arms. She had gotten sick in Oman and was still weak. Rogers blamed the incompetence of the Omani doctor. But in Beirut, Rogers was convinced, Amy would get well. Behind Rogers, holding their eight-year-old son Mark by the hand, came his wife Jane. She was radiant, with jet-black hair and a creamy complexion, looking stylish even in the simple gray skirt and red blouse she had worn on the long flight.

The air was soft and fragrant, scented with traces of olive and mint. It was early fall, the start of that long, blissful season before winter. Rogers cradled his daughter against his chest and carried her to the red-and-white Middle East Airlines bus for the ride to the terminal. The other passengers smiled as they gave up their seats for Rogers’s wife and children. A man offered Rogers’s son a piece of candy.

“We love children,” said the man in English, as if speaking for the entire Arab world.

“Shokran,” said Rogers’s son, using the Arabic word for thank you. The passengers beamed. How cute. How innocent.

Rogers listened to the buzz of Arabic voices on the bus: Lebanese accents, mostly; a few Palestinian; a few Egyptian. Most of them were talking about how good it was to be back in Beirut.

A fellow passenger might have guessed that Rogers was a college professor visiting Lebanon with his family to teach for a year at the American University of Beirut, or perhaps a journalist assigned to Beirut by one of the big American newspapers. He was tall and thin, wearing a worn corduroy suit. He had a slightly disheveled look: a shock of dark hair not quite combed, his white shirt fraying slightly at the collar, his suit jacket missing a button on the sleeve. He was wearing reading glasses to study the customs forms: they were half-glasses, made of tortoise shell, perched on the middle of his nose so that he seemed always to be looking over the top of them. As Rogers stared out the window of the bus toward the hills above the airport, he had a blank expression. The look of a man lost in thought, or perhaps lost in the absence of thought.

The bus deposited the passengers at the terminal. Rogers presented his diplomatic passport to the Lebanese policeman at passport control. The policeman looked at him and smiled the thin, corrupt smile of immigration officers around the world. Rogers could almost hear the click of the shutter as a camera somewhere took his picture. He studied the policeman’s face and wondered, for an instant, how many different intelligence services had bought a piece of him.

Rogers hailed one of the sorry-looking yellow taxis outside the terminal. He told the driver in crisp Arabic that he wanted to go to the Sarkis Building in the Minara District, near the old Beirut lighthouse. That, he told the children, would be their new home.

“As you like,” said the driver in English. He was shocked that an American—he had to be an American, he was so tall and he wore shoes with laces in them—could speak the language.

Rogers bribed the landlord the first day, in the precise amount suggested by the administrative officer at the embassy. The man was effusively grateful and took to calling Rogers by the honorific,
Effendi
. Rogers also paid a small bribe to the doorman, who mattered a good deal more to the happiness and security of his family. He was a dark-skinned man who had come to Lebanon several decades ago from Assiut, in upper Egypt, and never left. He liked to be addressed by the Egyptian term for doorman:
Bawab
.

The apartment was vast and bright. It was laid out like a villa, with a large living room and dining room for entertaining, surrounded by bedrooms, a library, a playroom, and a maid’s room. The center of the apartment was a large screened porch overlooking the Mediterranean. From the porch, you could watch the fishermen heading out to sea in their skiffs in the morning, and you could hear the crash of the waves against the rocky coast, 200 feet below. It was an apartment where a family could live richly and stylishly, in the Lebanese way.

Jane took the children on forays to scout out the neighborhood. There was Smith’s market on Sadat Street, which seemed to have every spice and condiment—every canned, potted, and dried food imaginable—from around the world. A few doors down was the ice-cream man selling the Arab version of ice cream, sweeter than sweet, with a texture and flavor almost like pudding. In an alley was a tiny shop that sold coffee, mixed with spices in the Arab way, and on a summer day the whole of Sadat Street seemed to smell of cardamom.

Across the street was a florist, selling the most delicate flowers: orchid and rose, iris and gladeolus. The owner was a burly Sunni Moslem man, completely bald, who had the appearance and manner of a Turkish wrestler. It was a incongruous sight: this huge bull of a man, gently wrapping flowers for the fine ladies of Beirut.

The fall social season began in Moslem West Beirut soon after Rogers arrived. The shops in the Place des Canons twinkled with lights and the city was swept along by a tide of self-congratulation and good cheer.

It was the season for frantic partying: a prominent Lebanese doctor who worked for Aramco threw a farewell bash for himself at the Phoenicia Hotel; he was departing, poor man, for Saudi Arabia and received many condolences; in the Sunni neighborhood of Koreitem, the Moslem ladies of the Beirut College for Women were beginning rehearsals for their annual concert of Christmas music; in a similar spirit of ecumenicism, the International Women’s Club of Beirut was planning its fall tour of churches and mosques.

Hamra Street, the grand boulevard of the new Lebanon, was crowded with shoppers, peering in the windows at the latest dresses from Paris, shoes from Italy, books from London and New York. This was the precinct of Lebanon’s new money, where the middle class flocked to buy fashion, culture, respectability. The language in the shops was French, perhaps a little English, but certainly not Arabic, which represented a culture the Lebanese were rushing to escape.

“Les déracinées” was what the old feudal lords liked to call the young men who had come down from the mountains to build this new Beirut. The Uprooted. They inhabited a city that had slipped its old moorings and was drifting happily and obliviously into the future.

Beirut in 1969 was a border town, whose residents fancied their city as the last outpost of Europe, even though it stood on the landmass of Asia, at the frontier of Islam and the Orient. It was a city of confluence, where two cultures—East and West—met to produce a steaming and sensuous vortex, like the collision of two ocean currents.

Living on the border, the Lebanese felt the tremors of the 1960s from both directions. The Arabic papers were breathless with the latest impossible news from America: A man on the Moon. The Sharon Tate murders. Hippies. Vietnam. The headlines conveyed a sense of upheaval and rebellion at the center of the world, which gave people at the periphery a feeling of power and dread, like peasants watching the feudal manor burn to the ground.

Beirutis liked to call their city “the Paris of the Orient,” but it often seemed more like the Hong Kong of Europe. Beirut had a quality often found in the Third World, a tendency toward ostentation and self-parody. A Lebanese host would provide his visiting Saudi friends with two voluptuous whores each, rather than just one. The Armenian tailor on Hamra Street learned that he could sell more suits by raising his prices, and calling each garment a “special” model, than by lowering them. On Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines, the first-class seats were always sold out, while tourist class was nearly empty. The Lebanese national motto seemed to be: A thing worth doing is worth overdoing.

A headline in one of the local papers conveyed the national mood. It read: “Super Scheme to Turn Lebanon into Dream Country Aired; Project Said Easy to Achieve.” The scheme in question was to build elevated highways to handle the crush of city traffic. It would cost a staggering $350 million, a hopeless sum for a nation that couldn’t even raise enough tax revenues to collect the garbage.

It was all very exhilarating to the Lebanese. But outsiders saw the warning signs that most Beirutis ignored. The government bureaucracy had become so corrupt that it had difficulty performing the services for which officials solicited bribes. The old aristocracy had become so cynical that it was using radical rhetoric and gangs of armed thugs to maintain political power, and in so doing was unleashing forces that threatened to bring down the regime.

The Palestinians, everyone agreed, were a problem. They were the piece of the Lebanese mosaic that didn’t quite fit. Their gunmen were becoming bolder in West Beirut, sitting in the cafés of Hamra Street with guns bulging from the tops of their blue jeans. It was a problem nobody quite knew how to handle, except to join in the Arab chorus of invective against Israel.

The Palestinian refugees, the uninvited guests at Lebanon’s party of self-congratulation, lived in a string of camps around Beirut that were known as “the belt of misery.” In the Lebanese way, two big Sunni landowning families named Sabra and Shatilla had found a way to profit from the influx. They offered derelict land near the Beirut airport for the refugees to build tin-roofed shacks and stucco houses.

The camps became a familiar sight for air travellers: the MEA jets would turn right from the Mediterranean, begin their descent above the shops and cafés of Hamra Street, and roar over the miserable camps of Sabra and Shatilla, so close that the frail houses seemed to shake, and then touch down their wheels in the Paris of the Orient.

Beirut; September 1969

Rogers had to wait a week before meeting the station chief, Frank Hoffman, who was away on a trip to Saudi Arabia. He was curious to meet his new boss, who had a reputation for being an outspoken character in an organization that prized discretion and anonymity.

Hoffman’s secretary, a woman in her fifties named Ann Pugh, scowled at Rogers when he arrived at the station chief’s office.

“You’re five minutes late, Mr. Rogers,” she said. Miss Pugh walked to a heavy oak door and knocked twice. There was a growl from inside. With an electronic buzz, the door swung open, revealing Hoffman at his desk.

Hoffman was short and stocky, with a meaty face and a bald spot in the center of his head. He looked—and talked—more like an FBI agent than a CIA man.

“So you’re my new case officer,” said Hoffman dubiously.

“Tom Rogers,” said the younger man, approaching the desk with his arm outstretched. Hoffman grunted and shook hands.

“You look the part,” said Hoffman, surveying his new case officer. Part of Hoffman’s anxiety about being overweight was expressed by caustic remarks to anyone who wasn’t.

“Sit down,” barked Hoffman. Rogers sat on a fat, red leather couch.

“Now then…,” said the station chief, shuffling through the papers on his desk. “Your cover job is political officer.”

“Much obliged,” said Rogers. To maintain his previous cover, as a consular officer in Oman, Rogers had spent half his day processing visa applications. Before that, in Khartoum, his cover had been commercial officer, which required shuffling through import-export papers part of the day. Cover as a political officer was the easiest and best in any embassy, since the requirements of the nominal job weren’t very different from those of an intelligence officer.

Hoffman took out a pack of Lucky Strikes.

“You don’t smoke a pipe, I hope,” said Hoffman. “I don’t like professor types who smoke pipes.”

“I’ll take a cigarette,” said Rogers.

Hoffman handed him a Lucky. Rogers took a wooden match from a box on the desk and lit it against the sole of his shoe.

“Is that how they light matches at Yale?” said Hoffman.

“I didn’t go to Yale,” said Rogers. Hoffman was beginning to get on his nerves.

“Good,” said the station chief. “There’s hope.”

“It says here that you single-handedly penetrated the politburo in South Yemen,” said Hoffman, staring at a piece of paper. “That right?”

Rogers smiled for the first time. It was inconceivable that any such information would be written on a piece of paper in an open file.

“I had several useful contacts,” said Rogers.

“Cut the crap,” said Hoffman.

“You have it about right,” said Rogers. “I recruited one of the revolutionary leaders in Aden a few years ago. He turned out to be a gold mine. The closer he got to power, the more talkative he became.”

“And why was that?” asked Hoffman.

“I don’t know,” said Rogers. “People like to talk.”

“Bullshit.”

“Maybe I was his insurance policy,” said Rogers. “Maybe he hated the Russians. I don’t know why, but he told me his life story. How he learned revolutionary strategy in Moscow. How the KGB taught him to establish a secret police force after taking power. He was a walking textbook on Soviet operations.”

“Soooo?” asked Hoffman, still looking at the bogus file. “I mean, what’s the point?”

Rogers paused. He thought of his Yemeni agent, who was now a senior official of the country that had been renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.

“There isn’t any,” said Rogers. “Except that the Soviets aren’t as stupid as they look.”

Hoffman squinted his eyes and looked closely at Rogers. Then he laughed.

“No shit!” said Hoffman. “That took you three years to find out?”

Rogers relaxed. The inquisition seemed to be over.

“Okay, my friend,” said Hoffman. “You know your business. Let me give you an idea of what we’re up to around here.”

He handed Rogers a thick file marked “Top Secret,” which carried the unlikely bureaucratic title, “Related Missions Directive.” This document, prepared back in Langley, set forth the station’s priorities.

“Read it later,” said Hoffman. “I’ll tell you what you need to know, which is the following: Beirut is a three-ring circus. We’ve got a little bit of everything here. We have a string of Lebanese politicians, the greediest bunch of bastards I ever met, who wouldn’t be worth the trouble except that they seem to know everyone else in the Arab world. We have some third-country agents—Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis—we run through the Beirut station. We have the usual cat-and-mouse game with the Soviet mission here.”

Hoffman paused.

“We also have a few Palestinians, who have been on the books for years and who are the biggest bullshit artists in this entire, fucked-up part of the world.”

“And that’s where you come in,” said Hoffman with a toothy smile. “When you get settled in, I’d like you to handle the Palestinian account.”

At their next meeting, two days later, Hoffman was a little more relaxed. He was playing with a pen on his desk, absent-mindedly bouncing it in the air and catching it.

“Let’s play a game,” said the station chief.

“Assume that there’s someone who wants to kill you. What do you do about it?”

“Kill him first,” said Rogers.

“Wrong answer. In this part of the world, the guy’s brother will come after you and kill you, so you still end up dead.”

“Get somebody else to kill him,” said Rogers.

“Better, but still wrong. The correct answer is penetrate! You got that? Penetrate!”

Rogers nodded.

“Find someone who knows the killer. Someone who can get very friendly with him, who’ll know where he goes, who he sees, what he eats for breakfast. You follow me? And get
this
guy to tell you when the other guy is coming after you, so you have time to get out of the way. Get the picture?”

Rogers nodded. He was beginning to like Hoffman.

“My friend,” said the station chief. “If you can play this little game in real life, then we’re going to get along fine. Because that is precisely what we want to do with some of the undesirable elements around here who think that killing Americans is fun. Such as your friends, the Palestinians.”

Already, Rogers noticed, they were “his” friends.

“Let’s take a trip,” said Hoffman, suddenly rising from his chair. “Show you around town.”

He buzzed his secretary, grunted the word “car” into the phone, took Rogers by the arm, and led him out the door and down the stairwell. It was a comical sight: the short, pudgy Hoffman, dressed in a baggy blue suit, steering the tall young man by the arm. On the ground floor, Rogers headed for the front entrance. Hoffman yanked him by the arm and led him toward a side door where a black Chrysler was waiting.

“Take the day off, Sami,” said Hoffman to the Lebanese driver. He slid into the front seat.

“Get in,” he said to Rogers. When the doors were closed, Hoffman removed an automatic pistol from a shoulder holster and put it in the glove compartment. Rogers, who had never worn a gun in the office and never known anyone in the agency who did, concluded that Hoffman was an eccentric.

“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” said Hoffman. “Another smart kid, like you.”

Hoffman popped the Chrysler into gear and roared out of the alleyway onto the Corniche, heading west. He rounded the point beneath the lighthouse, passed the Bain Militaire on his right, and was spinning along the Mediterranean coast at 60 miles an hour, humming to himself.

When they reached an amusement park on the coast, Hoffman slammed on the brakes, swerved left onto a side street, and parked the car where it couldn’t be seen from the Corniche.

“Get out,” he said to Rogers.

There was a large Ferris wheel, turning lazily in the morning sun, and several smaller rides for children. The park was nearly deserted.

“Do you like cotton candy?” asked Hoffman. Rogers said he didn’t.

“Too bad. It’s very good here. A local specialty.”

Hoffman walked ahead of Rogers toward a small building in the shadow of the Ferris wheel. It was a small, open-air café, empty except for an old man who was sitting at a table smoking Turkish tobacco from a hookah pipe.

When the old man saw his visitors, he dropped the pipe from his lips, walked over to Hoffman, and kissed him on both cheeks. Hoffman, to Rogers’s surprise, reciprocated.

The old man disappeared into the back of the café. Not a word had been said.

“Smoke?” asked Hoffman, pointing to the pipe.

“No thanks,” said Rogers.

“All the more for me,” said the station chief, sitting down in front of the hookah and taking a big drag from the smoldering pipe.

Hoffman sat contentedly, puffing occasionally on the mouthpiece of the pipe but saying nothing.

After five minutes, the old man returned with coffee and then disappeared once again. The sun was warm and there was a pleasant breeze blowing in from the Mediterranean. Hoffman remained silent.

Rogers wondered if this was some kind of test.

They had been in the café about ten minutes when Rogers noticed a figure in the distance, walking alone on the beach. He was a young Arab man, smooth and compact, wearing sunglasses.

Rogers looked over to Hoffman at that moment and noticed that the station chief had his hands clapsed over his head, as if he was stretching. Or making a signal.

The young man slowly approached the seaside café.

“This is the fellow I wanted you to meet,” said Hoffman. “His name is Fuad.”

The young man entered the café. Hoffman welcomed him and made the introductions.

“Fuad, I’d like you to meet John Reilly,” he said, pointing to Rogers.

“How do you do, Mr. Reilly,” said the Arab. He seemed calm and almost unnaturally composed.

“Call me John,” said Rogers. He hated work names, especially ones that were chosen for him by somebody else.

The Arab sat down and removed his sunglasses. Rogers could see a look of intensity, almost of hatred, in his eyes. Not hatred of the Americans, apparently, but of somebody.

“We first met Fuad when he was a student at the American University of Beirut,” said Hoffman. “We have the highest regard for him.”

Rogers nodded his head and smiled. Fuad nodded his head and smiled. It was all very Oriental.

“Fuad has been in Egypt for the last several years, working for a Lebanese trading company and dabbling in leftist politics.” Hoffman panned his eyes slowly across the café and the beach beyond, making sure that nobody was approaching, and continued.

“While in Egypt, Fuad maintained occasional contact with our organization and provided a number of interesting reports. We especially appreciated his reporting on the activities of Palestinians in Egypt.”

“Now Fuad is thinking of moving back to Lebanon,” said Hoffman. “We think this is a fine idea.”

Hoffman smiled at Fuad, who this time did not smile back.

There was silence. A cruise ship was slowly moving across the horizon.

Rogers spoke up, in Arabic.

“The Egyptians have a saying about travel by sea,” Rogers said in colloquial Arabic, gesturing to the ship.

“They say: ‘Better to hear the farts of camels than the prayers of the fishes.’ ”

Fuad cocked his head, as if he wasn’t quite sure that he had heard right, and then smiled.

“The Egyptians are quite right,” said Fuad.

“Bullshit,” muttered Hoffman.

“The Egyptians have another saying that I like,” continued Rogers in Arabic. “It’s a warning for people who think they understand the Arab world.”

“And what is that?” asked Fuad.

“ ‘We expose ourselves to danger when we regard our own counsel as sufficient.’ ”

“Let’s get serious here for a minute,” said Hoffman. “Because I’ve got better things to do than listen to the two of you tell each other folk wisdom in a language that is not my mother tongue.”

Rogers lit a cigarette, offered one to Fuad, and settled back in his chair, listening to Hoffman.

“Fuad, I’d like you to meet again in Beirut with Mr. Reilly for a serious talk about the Palestinians,” said the station chief, all business now.

“I want you to do the same sort of thing for him that you did for me two months ago. Names, histories, political records, a Who’s Who of the people you got to know in Cairo. I want Mr. Reilly to have as full a picture of the leadership of the guerrilla organizations as he possibly can.”

Fuad nodded.

Hoffman pulled a 3 × 5 index card out of his pocket. On it was typed the address of an apartment in West Beirut, a time, and two brief sentences. He handed the card to Fuad.

“Go to this address three days from today, at ten in the morning. Mr. Reilly will be there, waiting for you. Say your code phrase, he’ll respond with his, and then he’ll let you in. If you’re followed, or if you can’t make the meeting for some other reason, go to the same address the next day, at four in the afternoon. Got it?”

Fuad nodded again.

“Have you memorized what’s on the card?”

“Yes,” said Fuad.

“Then give it back to me.”

The young Arab took a final glance at the card and returned it to the station chief.

Hoffman rose from his chair. No one was invited to speak and no one did.

Fuad rose and shook Rogers’s hand firmly.

The Arab turned to Hoffman. He placed his hand on his heart in a gesture of sincerity, shook Hoffman’s hand, then turned and departed.

Watching the young Arab walk slowly across the beach, Rogers decided that he had the look of a born agent. His appearance was sleek and elusive: medium height, neither fat nor thin, with the sort of smooth, well-groomed face that you almost remember, but not quite. Some faces are a roadmap of character. Fuad’s was a blank slate, a lustrous tan without lines or wrinkles, a picture of a journey across a desert that has left no traces.

Hoffman relit the pipe. After a few minutes more of puffing on the hookah, he put down the mouthpiece.