Agents of Innocence (3 page)

“Interesting fellow,” said Hoffman. “He’s convinced that it’s America’s destiny to liberate the Arabs! God knows why he has such faith in us, but he does.”

“Is he reliable?” asked Rogers.

“That’s for you to tell me, my boy. Because starting now, he’s your agent.”

Rogers laughed and shook his head.

“Does he know that he’s on our books?”

“Sort of,” said Hoffman. “Let’s go.”

They walked back to the car in silence. When the doors were closed, Hoffman turned to his new case officer.

“There’s something you need to know about Fuad that isn’t in the files,” said the station chief.

“His father was assassinated a few years ago. He thinks the man who killed his father was a Lebanese Communist.”

“Is that true?” asked Rogers.

“I have no reason to doubt it,” said the station chief. “But who cares what I think? The fact is that Fuad believes it.”

Rogers met Fuad in an apartment in Rauche, overlooking the sea, which served as one of the agency’s half-dozen safehouses in Beirut.

The apartment was furnished in the garish style many Arabs enjoyed, derided by interior decorators as “Louis Farouk.” Gilt-edged mirrors, overstuffed couches in pink and yellow with tufts of material sprouting from the fabric, coffee tables lacquered with enamel. Rogers arrived early and scouted the apartment. It was hideous, the sort of decor that might impress a Bedouin from the desert, but not an honors graduate from AUB.

There was a knock at the door, and the ritual exchange of passwords.

“Are you busy today?” asked Fuad.

It struck Rogers as a foolish code, hardly worth the trouble, but he went ahead with the prearranged reply.

“No, I have a few minutes now.”

Rogers opened the door, shook Fuad’s hand, and led him to one of the pastel couches.

“Hello again, Fuad,” said Rogers.

“Hello, Mr. Reilly.”

Fuad moved across the room with the agility of a cat. He was dressed today in the clothes of a young Lebanese playboy. A jacket with wide lapels, pinched at the waist; linen trousers; matching suede belt and shoes; and the inevitable Ray-Bans. It was an outfit, Rogers reckoned, that must have cost Fuad a month’s salary.

The curtains in the apartment were drawn, and the room was dark. As he sat down on the couch, Fuad removed his sunglasses and stared at Rogers with the intense curiosity of a man who is putting his life in another person’s hands. There were two striking things about Rogers. The first was the American’s size. He was over six feet, a giant by Arab standards, a size normally associated with Kurdish wrestlers or Circassian bodyguards. The second was his informality. The loose fit of his clothes, the frayed collars on his shirts, the way he stared out the window when he was smoking a cigarette. The combination made him seem an embodiment of the Arab image of America: big and relaxed, exuding power and intimacy at the same time.

The housekeepers from the Beirut station had arranged the room carefully. The plate on the table was full of packs of cigarettes, three different brands, in an Arab gesture of hospitality. Fruit and drinks were in the pantry. Fuad took the pack of cigarettes closest to him—a pack of Larks—and lit the first of many cigarettes. Rogers poured sweet Arab tea into two glass cups and made small talk. He asked about Fuad’s family, talked about his own wife and children, inquired about the political situation in Egypt. When they had finished the preliminaries, Rogers came to the point.

“Tell me about the Palestinian guerrilla leaders. Which ones should we try to get to know?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Reilly,” said Fuad. “But the ones you should get to know are the ones who won’t talk to you.”

He’s right, thought Rogers. But he said nothing and waited for Fuad to proceed.

“In Egypt, I met two kinds of Palestinians,” Fuad continued. “There are the traditional leaders, the ones who can be bought, who are useless. And there is the new group—the fedayeen—who are not so easy to buy, and who are shaking the Arab world like a volcano. But you have a problem. The new ones are revolutionaries. They’re getting training and guns from Moscow. Why would they want to talk to America?”

“Everybody wants to talk to America,” said Rogers. “That’s the one thing I have learned in this line of work.”

“I am sure you are right, Mr. Reilly,” said Fuad cautiously.

“Tell me about Fatah,” said Rogers.

“It is the largest guerrilla group.”

“Yes, yes. I know that. Tell me about the leaders.”

“First there is the Old Man,” said Fuad. “He is not really so old, but everyone calls him that. He is a very complicated and devious man. Perhaps a people with no country will inevitably select a leader like him, with no morals. The Old Man will say anything to anyone. He gets money from the Saudis and guns from Moscow. He tells his Saudi friends that he is a devout Moslem and his Soviet friends that his only god is the revolution. This man may look like a fool, but you should not underestimate him.

“Then there is Abu Nasir. He is the head of their intelligence organization. A very clever man. The Egyptian intelligence service, the Moukhabarat, were afraid of him. They tried to control Fatah intelligence by training a dozen of Abu Nasir’s people. It didn’t work. The training only made them more dangerous.

“And there are others. The man they call the Diplomat, who lives in Kuwait. He is smart, rich, well-connected in Saudi and Kuwaiti business circles. He thinks that he, rather than the Old Man, should lead Fatah, and he doesn’t mind telling people so. Then there is Abu Namli, who runs the dirty operations. He is a clever politician but he talks too much. He does everything too much. Eats too much. Smokes too much. Drinks too much. This one is dangerous. He is a killer.”

Rogers was jotting down notes, mostly for show. The tape recorder was running and he would read the transcript tomorrow morning.

“The most interesting person in Fatah is someone who you’ve probably never heard of,” said Fuad.

Rogers put down his pen and listened.

“He’s only twenty-seven, but he’s already the Old Man’s favorite. I met him in Cairo two years ago at a conference on Palestinian politics, and we talked half the night. I have heard since then that he is a rising star in Fatah.

“He’s complicated. We would say in Arabic
mua’ad
. His father was a famous Palestinian fighter who was killed by the Jews. Part of him wants to be like his father—become a martyr and uphold the family name. But another part rejects the world of his father as backward and corrupt. That is why he is an interesting man. He is a modern Palestinian who wants to break out of the sickness of Arab culture. He loves Western things: cars, women, appliances. Anything that is modern.”

Fuad paused a moment.

“Go on,” said Rogers.

“You may not understand what I am saying, but he doesn’t act like a Palestinian. He doesn’t boast or brag. He doesn’t tell lies like the Old Man and the rest of the Fatah leaders. He doesn’t have the Arab sense of shame and inferiority about the Israelis. To him, they are the enemy, pure and simple.

“I saw him once in Cairo reading a copy of
The Jerusalem Post
. I don’t know where he got it, but only someone very brave would do that. He told me that the Israelis were clever because they knew how to use the press to reach the Jews of Europe and America. The Palestinians should learn from them, he said. Nobody else in Fatah would dare to say such a thing.

“I had a strange feeling talking to him, as if I was playing chess with someone who had thought out his moves to the end of the game.”

“What’s his name?” said Rogers, trying not to sound too interested.

“Jamal Ramlawi.”

“Perhaps,” said Rogers, “you could renew your acquaintance with Jamal Ramlawi.”

Beirut; September 1969

When the transcripts of the session with Fuad were ready the next morning, Rogers took them down the hall to Hoffman. He attached a cover letter, asking permission to do some initial scouting on a potential source inside Fatah.

“He’s busy,” said Hoffman’s secretary, Ann Pugh.

“He ought to look at this today,” said Rogers. “As soon as he has time.”

Miss Pugh tilted her head to one side and gave Rogers a sardonic look that seemed to say: Who the hell do you think you are? She was the sort of CIA clerical worker who, in nearly twenty years with the agency, had handled more top-secret information than a dozen case officers. She was totally loyal to Hoffman, whom she regarded as a kindred spirit, and at war with anyone making demands on his time, especially newly arrived case officers. But a half hour later she buzzed Rogers and said that Hoffman was free for a few minutes. Rogers went immediately to his office.

“What’s all this crap?” demanded Hoffman when Rogers arrived, waving the bulky interview transcript. “You don’t expect me to read all this, do you?”

“No, sir,” said Rogers. “I just want you to approve a little fishing expedition, based on something that Fuad told me yesterday.”

“Will it cost me money?” queried Hoffman. CIA stations needed permission from headquarters for any operation costing more than $10,000.

“Nothing beyond the normal operational budget.”

“Will it get me in trouble?” asked Hoffman.

“Absolutely not,” said Rogers.

“I’m not authorizing anything that would require my authorization,” said Hoffman. “Got that?”

Rogers said yes.

“If that’s understood, then you have my authorization. Go see my deputy if you need anything special. And don’t ask me to read any more God-damned paperwork. I have enough as it is.”

Fuad called on Jamal two days later at a small office on the third floor of a building in the Fakhani district, just north of the Sabra camp. The neighborhood was in Fatahland, patrolled by commandos in tight blue jeans and Italian loafers.

He gave his name to an unshaven man in an outer office who appeared to be a secretary but for some reason had a gun thrust in his pants. Fuad sat down on a dirty couch and waited. In front of him on a coffee table was a huge ashtray, the size of a hubcap, filled with what looked like hundreds of cigarette butts.

Fuad was going to smoke but thought better of it and pulled out his worry beads. Inside the main office he could hear an occasional murmur of voices.

After a few minutes, the door of the main office opened and out walked a stunning blond woman, dressed in a leather miniskirt. A German, Fuad thought.

She was giggling and seemed to be fastening the top button of her blouse. Her breasts were loose and she was having trouble. The woman walked past Fuad, turned to him, and gave him a little wave. Clasped in her hand, Fuad noticed, was a pair of panties.

“You can go in now,” said the man in the outer office.

Jamal was sitting in a chair with his hands behind his head and his feet up on his desk.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” said the Palestinian, swivelling his chair toward Fuad.

He looked, at first sight, like a European rather than an Arab. He was bright-eyed and clean-shaven, without the usual Arab mustache and beard. He was dressed all in black: black jeans, a black shirt open almost to the waist, and a black leather jacket slung over the chair.

Fuad began haltingly to introduce himself, mentioning that they had met in Cairo, but Jamal cut him off.

“I know who you are,” said Jamal, rising from his chair.

The Palestinian grabbed his leather jacket, took a gun from his desk drawer, put it in his jacket pocket, and walked toward the front door.

“I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go out and have lunch.” The man in the outer office, who turned out to be a bodyguard, trotted along behind.

Jamal told the driver to take them to a restaurant called Faisal’s on Rue Bliss, across from the American University of Beirut. Fuad was delighted. He had spent much of his undergraduate career sitting in Faisal’s, smoking cigarettes and talking politics with his classmates. Faisal’s was famous in Beirut as the meeting place of the intellectuals who had spawned the Arab cultural renaissance of the 1930s. Leftists still venerated the spot as the birthplace of Arab nationalism.

Across the street were the AUB gates, bearing the inscription carved by the Protestant missionaries who founded the university a century earlier: “That they shall have life and have it more abundantly.” A noble sentiment. Faisal’s was a good spot, Fuad thought, to renew his acquaintance with Jamal and talk, as brothers, about the woes of the Arab nation.

“I think you work for the Americans,” said Jamal quietly, when they were seated in the restaurant. Fuad felt his heart pounding in his chest but his face remained expressionless.

“Why do you say that?” responded Fuad evenly.

“Because it is the truth,” said Jamal.

There was a long silence.

“When we first met in Cairo,” said Jamal, “you told me you were a member of the Congress for Arab Cultural Freedom. I had never heard of this organization, so I asked a friend in the Egyptian Moukhabarat about it. He asked the Russians, who said it was an American front group. I found that interesting, but I said nothing to you. Why should I? Perhaps, I thought, this young Lebanese doesn’t know who really runs his group.

“Then yesterday I heard that an old Palestinian man, who everyone knows is an American agent, was asking around Fakhani for the location of my office. So I was expecting a visitor. I was very pleased that it was someone like you—a friend—and not a dirty dog like the Russians send after us.”

Jamal pulled back a strand of his long black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He withdrew a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his black leather jacket, offered Fuad a cigarette, and lit one for himself.

“I won’t speak about it again,” said Jamal with a twinkle in his eye. “Everyone in Beirut works for somebody. Why not the Americans? Don’t worry. I haven’t told my people. As the Egyptian proverb says: ‘To us belongs the house and the talk therein.’ ”

Fuad changed the subject. He talked about the weather. He talked about Egypt. Anything he could think of. It was only many hours later that he concluded, with relief, that he wasn’t going to be killed.

When Fuad reported the conversation to Rogers, the American was furious about the security breach. He made a note to have Hoffman fire the low-grade agent who had obtained Jamal’s address. He also lectured Fuad about cover.

The more Rogers thought about the meeting, the more perplexed he was by Jamal’s behavior. Why would an important Palestinian official, aware that he was talking to a CIA agent, join him for lunch and then promise to keep quiet about it? Why would he refrain from the usual Palestinian denunciations of American Mid-east policy?

There seemed only two possibilities: either Jamal was a provocateur, trying to lure Fuad into an embarrassing situation, or he was inviting further contact. Rogers decided that it was worth the risk to find out which. He gave Fuad $5,000 in cash from the station’s contingency fund and told him to rent an apartment near the Palestinian quarter of the city.

“Let’s find out whether Jamal would like to make some new friends,” said Rogers.