Agents of Innocence (21 page)

When lunch was done, Marsh turned to Fuad and asked him to leave the room. “We have some matters to discuss,” the American said. Jamal protested, but Fuad was already out the door.

Marsh removed from his pocket a device that looked like a small tape recorder and turned it on. It made a babbling noise, like the sound of five conversations taking place at once.

“Security,” said Marsh with a wink.

Jamal clucked his tongue.

“Let’s talk business,” Marsh began. “As you may have guessed, I am an intelligence officer. I am familiar with the details of your case and I have read the full transcripts of all your previous meetings.”

Jamal winced.

“Oh yes!” said Marsh, nodding his head for emphasis. “We have all of those meetings on tape!”

Jamal lit a cigarette and seemed to disappear in the clouds of smoke. Marsh pursued him intently.

“I must also advise you that I am a senior official of my agency, unlike the people you have dealt with previously, and I am thus familiar with the broad aspects of this case.”

“What case?” muttered Jamal. He was slumped in his chair, like a teenager listening to an especially unwelcome parental lecture. His head was tilted so that he looked at Marsh out of half-closed eyes.

“Am I going too fast for you?” asked Marsh.

“No,” said Jamal, slumping even deeper in his chair.

“Good. Now then, I believe that our relationship with you has gotten off to a bad start because we haven’t clarified in a businesslike way the nature of our dealings. We are in the business of acquiring information. You have information that is of value to us. Therefore, a basis exists for a relationship that is mutually beneficial. But there must be no mistake—I repeat, no mistake—about who is running the show. There will be severe consequences for you if you fail to live up to your side of the bargain. Would you like me to detail those consequences?”

Instead of answering, Jamal sat up in the chair and spit on the rug.

“Stop that!” said Marsh. Control your agent, he reminded himself.

The American picked up a leather attachè case he had brought with him and placed it on the coffee table in front of Jamal. He turned it toward the Palestinian and popped the locks. The case was filled with $100 bills, neatly stacked and bound. The money, gathered covertly from a half-dozen banks in Europe, was dog-eared and dirty.

“I hope we can reach a businesslike agreement,” said Marsh. “There is $100,000 in that briefcase as an initial payment. You may count it if you like.” He picked up a wad of bills and rifled them with his thumb.

“As in any business arrangement, I must request that you sign a contract.” He removed a sheet of paper from his inside coat pocket and placed it face up on the table, next to the money. From another pocket he removed an ink pad, to take the fingerprint that would form his receipt.

Jamal lit another cigarette. His face had the tight surface tension of a balloon that is nearly ready to explode.

Marsh was oblivious. In his own nervousness, he had barely looked at the Palestinian.

“As you will see from the contract,” continued Marsh, “we propose to pay you a sum of three million dollars over the next five years. The balance will be paid in regular installments to a numbered bank account in Switzerland. We have taken the liberty of opening the account already.

“Three million dollars!” Marsh repeated the sum like an incantation. With this final, gross invitation to bribery, the balloon burst.

Jamal rose from his chair, muttered an oath in Arabic, and kicked the attaché case—dumping the neat stacks of bills on the floor. He loomed over Marsh’s chair. His hands were shaking with rage. Hundred-dollar bills were scattered on the rug in front of Marsh.

“You bastard!” said the Palestinian. “If I had a gun I would shoot you!”

With that, Jamal went to the bedroom and began packing his bag.

Marsh, suddenly frantic, walked to the bedroom and began making blackmail threats. He talked about photos, tapes, incriminating evidence that would be sent to the Soviets, warrants that would be issued for Jamal’s arrest in Italy, Lebanon, and Jordan. When it was obvious that these threats were having no effect, Marsh picked up the phone and called a number that reached the switchboard of the Rome station. With a few prearranged code phrases, he signalled that he had a problem and needed a backup team in a hurry.

Jamal ignored the American. When he had finished packing, he walked briskly past Marsh to the door. He took the stairs to the ground floor and slipped out a side entrance, escaping into the heat of the Roman summer.

Beirut; September 1970

Rogers was shattered when he heard about the Rome meeting. He felt mute and helpless, like a father hearing the news that one of his children has died while in the custody of someone else. In the first several weeks he tried to reestablish contact with Jamal. He came up with various strategems, but nothing worked. It was difficult to locate somebody if you couldn’t acknowledge that you knew him.

The Palestinian remained silent and invisible. The Lebanese had no record of his returning to Beirut. Indeed, nobody had any record of his going anywhere. He had vanished. It was then that Rogers began to suspect that he had underestimated Jamal.

Rogers’s immediate problem was Fuad. The Lebanese was disgusted by what had happened, and for a time he disappeared, too. He eventually sent a message to Rogers from Greece—a postcard from Skiathos—but Rogers let him be. Fuad’s anger toward the United States would help reinforce his cover, Rogers assured Hoffman. Eventually, Fuad returned to Beirut and threw himself into the whirl of Lebanese leftist politics. He went to meetings of the Progressive Socialist Party, the National Syrian Socialist Party, the Independent Nasserite movement. He watched, he gathered information, he reported at regular intervals to Rogers. And he wondered, in his idle moments, why it was that the Americans were so accident-prone.

The
PECOCK
file went dead. There were meetings and discussions. The DDP’s office conducted a review of Marsh’s handling of the Rome meeting and concluded that he had badly bungled the case.

Much as Rogers disliked Marsh, he felt sorry for him now. His career was in limbo. He asked for a transfer to the newly formed staff that was handling congressional relations. It was said to be a growth area for the agency. There was some debate about the wisdom of that move, but Stone vouched for Marsh’s integrity. Rogers was pleased that his own arguments about how best to run the case had been vindicated, but that did him little good now. The agent had bolted.

In August, Stone made a swing through Beirut. Without ever admitting that his own recommendations had been wrong, he commended Rogers for his patience and good judgment. He also advised him that he would receive a promotion and advance to a higher pay grade as of September 1. It was Stone’s way of saying that he was sorry.

Jamal found the disastrous meeting in Rome oddly comforting. It clarified matters for him. The Americans seemed, once again, to fit the stereotype. They were arrogant and manipulative, interested in the Arabs only to the extent that they could get something from them. Jamal was also relieved to have broken off the ambiguous relationship he had begun with Rogers. He liked blacks and whites better than grays.

The Old Man was not so pleased when he received a coded account of the meeting from Jamal through the Kuwaiti diplomatic pouch from Bonn. The Old Man regarded the American channel as a project of the highest importance. He sent Jamal a return message advising him to continue building his network in Europe. He should forget about the Americans for now. Fatah would maintain contact with them through other intermediaries in London and Amman.

Though the Americans didn’t know it, Jamal was under their noses. He had remained in Europe, staying mostly in Rome, where the Fatah security service maintained a secret base of operations. The Fatah intelligence service, the Rasd, had safehouses there and secret sources of funds and even a local documentation office that produced forged travel documents. Jamal travelled occasionally through the summer, especially to Germany and France.

He was building an infrastructure. The Rome center operated under the cover of a bar called II Principe Rosso near the Via Veneto. It was financed by wealthy Palestinians in Kuwait and provided the Rasd a discreet way to move large sums of money. The Italian authorities, had they been curious, would have believed it was nothing more than another Roman establishment cooking the books and cheating on its taxes. On his trips to Paris and Munich, Jamal broadened the network. He developed local contacts and used them to rent apartments, open bank accounts, spot local talent, and do the thousands of other mundane things that provide a base for clandestine operations.

Jamal didn’t ask what it was all to be used for. The Old Man had told him that the movement might need such a network someday and dismissed further questions with a wave of his hand. Making his rounds in Europe, Jamal felt sometimes like a squirrel storing up nuts for a long winter whose advent nobody could predict.

The crisis in Jordan had been building for months. But the final confrontation was triggered by an act of terrorism so foolish and inflammatory that even Jamal wondered later whether it had been a deliberate act of provocation.

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched a terrorist “spectacular” on September 6 by simultaneously hijacking two airplanes. They landed at an airstrip in Jordan that PFLP propagandists dubbed “The Airport of the Revolution.” On September 9, the PFLP hijacked another plane. The group held nearly five hundred hostages, many of them Americans.

The hijackings were like pointing a blowtorch at a pool of gasoline. The flames exploded from several directions at once. The United States, which had been urging the king for months to crack down against the fedayeen, moved the Sixth Fleet toward the Eastern Mediterranean. The king—who had been taunted in recent months by Bedouin officers who put brassieres on their tank antennas to signal their doubts about his resolve—finally ordered the army to crack down hard. There was the usual comic interlude of mediation by the Arab League. But the king finally gave the order to his army on September 17 to open fire with their tanks and heavy artillery.

The military pretensions of the guerrillas were quickly demolished. The Jordanian Army captured the Fatah headquarters on Nasser Square in minutes. The Old Man fled deeper into Jebel Hussein, then to the hilltop of Ashrafiyeh. In the first hours, the Fatah leader spent his time frantically calling his Jordanian political contacts to try to arrange a cease-fire. Fatah had no battle plan, no secure headquarters, no reliable communications other than open radio transmissions.

The one-sided battle lasted barely more than a week. It ended when the Old Man ignominiously slipped out of Amman, disguised in Bedouin robes as a member of a Kuwaiti mediating delegation. The Jordanians continued for more than a year mopping up what was left of the resistance until they eventually slaughtered the last band of die-hard fighters who had remained in the woods near Jerash and Ajlun in northern Jordan.

The Old Man had believed nearly to the end that he would win in Jordan. His folly was documented in stacks of handwritten memos and documents that were captured by the king’s Bedouin troops during the Battle of Amman.

It was a touching collection. A hand-drawn plan of Basman Palace, roughly sketched as if by a child, showing how the fedayeen could attack the Hashemite monarch in his chambers. A crude map showing how to attack a Jordanian military encampment on a road between Amman and Salt. Another rough sketch showing how to penetrate Jordanian barbed wire. Lists that endlessly detailed the responsibilities of various chiefs and subalterns in this most bureaucratic revolution. Handwritten notes from the Old Man himself that showed him scheming, double-dealing, manipulating, and playing politics—assuring the king all the while that the fedayeen hadn’t any designs on his throne.

After it was all over, the king gathered the most incriminating documents into a simple booklet called
The Activities of the Fedayeen in Jordan, 1970
. The booklet was printed only in Arabic and was never distributed in the West. But the king sent a copy to each of the twenty-one Arab heads of state. It was a catalogue of the Old Man’s perfidy and helped explain why, for years after, the other Arab leaders paid lip service to the Palestinian cause but didn’t fully trust the PLO chairman.

“Black September,” as the dazed Palestinians called the events in Jordan, seemed at first like a finale, but it was really only a prelude. It was a hurricane, which swept through the cracks and crevices of the Arab political world and left the foundations weak and vulnerable. One of the Fatah leaders who supervised the Rasd’s intelligence activities wrote later of a warning that he secretly transmitted to the Jordanian king after the events of Black September:

“If you strike the fedayeen in their last holdouts in Jerash and Ajlun, I’ll follow you to the end of the earth, to my dying breath, to give you the punishment you deserve.”

It must have sounded like a vain and idle threat. But it was the beginning of a nightmare that took the codename “Black September.”

Beirut; Fall 1970

Hoffman came into the office the morning after the Lebanese election waving a copy of
An Nahar
, the leading Beirut newspaper. A banner headline across the top of the page proclaimed: “The Voice of the People Has Spoken.” Beneath it was a front-page editorial, lauding the victory of the new president, who had been elected by parliament the previous day by one vote.

“Can you believe these assholes?” said Hoffman to his four senior officers as they sat down in the conference room for one of their infrequent staff meetings. Hoffman was in a bad mood: red-faced, mean-tempered, a menace to anyone unlucky enough to get in his way. He brandished the newspaper at Rogers.

“The guy wins by one fucking vote and they’re calling it the voice of the people!” said Hoffman. “Imagine what they would be saying if he had won by
two
votes.”

“Sore loser?” asked Rogers.

“Hell, yes,” said Hoffman. “It cost us plenty to buy the old gang of thugs. Now we’ve got to start all over again.”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, chief,” said the station’s senior political analyst. He was a beady-eyed man who looked as though he should be wearing a green eyeshade.

“No doubt,” said Hoffman. “Everything seems to be more complicated than I think it is. All I want to know is who won and who lost.”

“That’s just the problem,” said the analyst. “It’s very hard to tell. The old political establishment has been swept out of office, to be sure. But that doesn’t mean there are clear winners and losers. The Sunni Moslems might seem to have won, since the new president has the support of most of the Sunni leadership. But the new president also has the support of some of the Christian militia leaders who were being squeezed by the old regime. So you see, it’s really rather complicated.”

“Bullshit,” said Hoffman.

“May I suggest the real problem with this election?” ventured Rogers.

“Oh please,” said Hoffman. “Absolutely. By all means.”

“The real problem with this election was that both sides couldn’t lose.”

Hoffman tilted his head, squinted his eyes at Rogers, smiled with elaborate politeness, and silently clapped his hands. Rogers looked at the round-faced station chief. Sitting in his comfortable, overstuffed leather desk chair, he looked like Humpty-Dumpty.

“Now then, boys and girls,” said Hoffman. “Since you’re all such political experts, perhaps you can help the United States government figure out where we stand with the new leaders of this miserable excuse for a country.”

There was silence.

“Any volunteers?”

“Yes, sir,” spoke up a new member of the station named York Harding. He had arrived in Beirut two months earlier, following a stint in Vietnam, and he wore his hair in a crew cut. York Harding was what grade schoolers call an “eager beaver.”

“Yes, Mr. Harding,” said Hoffman.

“The election of the new president offers us a real opportunity for political action…”

“The election of the Squirrel,” interjected Hoffman.

“The Squirrel?” queried Harding, totally mystified.

“That’s what I call the new president, Mr. Harding. And do you know why?”

“No, sir,” said Harding.

“Because he looks like one, you idiot! He’s a furry little bastard whose cheeks always look like they’re full of nuts. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sorry I interrupted you, Mr. Harding. Pray, continue.”

“I think the election of, uh, the Squirrel gives us a new opportunity to find a middle ground in Lebanon. A third force, between the Christians and the Moslems.”

“A third force, eh?” said Hoffman, stroking his chin.

“Yes, sir.”

“How long were you in Vietnam, son?” asked the station chief.

“Eighteen months, sir,” said Harding.

“And you were a political action officer out in the countryside. Teaching the peasants about farming and medicine and self-government, and maybe a little throat-slitting on the side. Am I right, Harding?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, spare me your Vietnam bullshit, will you, Mr. Harding? We may have problems here in Lebanon. But we are not yet at the total monumental fuck-up stage. You get me?”

“Yes, sir,” said Harding.

“And if I ever hear the words ‘third force’ again, I’m going to throw you out the window.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t call me ‘sir,’ you cross-eyed little son of a bitch.”

Rogers looked at Harding. The young case officer’s eyes were moist. Rogers decided it was time to draw the bull away before he further wounded his young prey.

“Chief,” said Rogers, “I think Harding has a point. There are opportunities created by the election of a new president. Let’s face it. The incumbents were running a glorified police state. The country was under the thumb of the Deuxième Bureau, which made life easy for us. But the Lebanese, evidently, got sick of it.”

“Sooooo?” said Hoffman.

“So we shouldn’t shed any tears for the old gang.”

“That’s very touching,” said Hoffman. “I’m ashamed that I’ve been so insensitive.”

Rogers ignored Hoffman’s sarcasm and pressed ahead.

“The problem is polarization,” Rogers continued. “If extremism continues among Christians and Moslems, the whole country will begin to unravel. Harding is right. The only hope lies in some kind of middle ground. What we should be discussing is whether we—the embassy—are ready to get serious about creating an alternative to extremism.”

“I can answer that for you right now, boys and girls,” said Hoffman. The answer is No. N-O. No fucking way.”

“Then that makes it simple,” said Rogers. “If we aren’t going to intervene to help the good guys, then we should at least try to keep track of the bad guys—the militias, terrorist cells, secret organizations. Find out what they’re doing, and to whom.”

“Motion proposed,” said Hoffman. Without waiting for anyone to respond, he pounded the table with his fist.

“Agreed!”

Hoffman turned to other subjects: details of the station’s operations; plans for making contact with members of the new government; guesses about who the new president would appoint to run the Deuxième Bureau; discussion of what Hoffman should tell headquarters in the cable he had to send later that day; and finally, a new scheme that Hoffman had devised for conducting surveillance in crowded areas that would, in theory, eliminate one person from each surveillance team. Eventually the station chief pushed his over-stuffed chair back from the table and adjourned the meeting.

“Thank you very much, boys and girls,” said Hoffman. “Class dismissed.”

The Squirrel, as Hoffman called him, took office in September and immediately began a purge of the Deuxième Bureau. The first thing he did was change its name. It was no longer the Deuxième Bureau, simply the Military Intelligence Office.

A symbolic house-cleaning came several months later when the new prime minister, a moon-faced Sunni Moslem who smoked big Cuban cigars and wore a fresh carnation in his lapel every day, led a raid on the Deuxième Bureau’s telephone-tapping facility. The tappers, housed in the central PTT building in downtown Beirut, had run a notorious operation that regularly monitored several thousand telephones. It was an outrageous violation of civil liberties, everyone agreed. Dismantle it! In the enthusiasm of the new regime, nobody thought to mention that the government was losing its best means of keeping track of the deadly political germs that were infecting Lebanon.

At the end of the year, the Squirrel took the inevitable last step. He replaced General Jezzine as head of the Lebanese intelligence service and quietly (though not so quietly that it wasn’t the talk of Beirut) instructed the Ministry of Justice to begin investigating whether the general had violated the law in certain practices of the Deuxième Bureau.

General Jezzine, whatever his faults, was not stupid. He left the country a week after he was fired for what was described as a vacation in Geneva. Since it was well known that he maintained a house there and a large bank account, it was assumed that the general wouldn’t be back any time soon. Rogers visited General Jezzine in his village the day before he left. He came to make a simple request. The American Embassy wanted access to Jezzine’s files.

The general was curt and evasive. His files had all been confiscated by the new head of the intelligence service, the president’s man, he said. Jezzine himself couldn’t even get access to them now. He had taken a few personal papers with him, to be sure. Nothing of any importance. And those already had been shipped to Geneva. So there was nothing, alas, that he could do to help his dear friends, the Americans.

“I am touched by your concern,” said the general sardonically as he ushered Rogers to the door. “Pity that it did not come a bit sooner.”

The Squirrel’s regime soon became mired in corruption. It was the revenge of what the former president had called “the cheese-men.” A health minister who tried to reduce drug prices ran into a wall of opposition from friends of the president who monopolized the drug trade. The pharmaceutical magnates simply withheld drugs from the market—public health be damned!—until the minister gave up and resigned.

A public works minister who attempted to rebuild the country’s primitive road system lasted only fifteen weeks. A finance minister who advanced the novel theory that the government should collect taxes and audit its books was rebuffed. The president’s own son was installed as telecommunications minister and began soliciting bribes that were enormous, even by Lebanese standards.

It was get-rich-quick time in Lebanon. Rapid inflation turned peasants into land speculators and created a new class of overnight millionaires. The government became a free-for-all. In this climate of ambition and avarice, the Lebanese lost what little respect they still had in public institutions. The public stopped believing that what was left of the Deuxième Bureau would maintain order, or that the army would keep the Palestinian commandos in check. Instead, the Lebanese turned increasingly toward the private militias that were forming ranks throughout the country.