Agents of Innocence (4 page)

Beirut; October 1969

At the end of Tom and Jane Rogers’s first month in Beirut, Sally Wigg, the ambassador’s wife, called.

“Jane!” said the ambassador’s wife. She spoke very loudly, with an enthusiasm that made clear how much pleasure she took in organizing the lives of other embassy wives.

“Yes, Mrs. Wigg.”

“Jane! We’re having a dinner next Saturday night! We’ll expect you at eight. See you then!”

She rang off without waiting for an answer. A social secretary from the embassy called an hour later to say that the affair would be black tie.

Jane Rogers was a sensible woman. She had attended a good private school and Mt. Holyoke College. She knew that when the ambassador’s wife calls in a post like Beirut, the world stops turning for a moment. So she did the sensible thing. She went out and bought a new evening dress, the fanciest she could find, from a designer on Hamra Street.

“A preemptive strike,” said Rogers when Jane told him about the invitation.

Rogers, who mistrusted ambassadors and their wives, resignedly took his tuxedo out of mothballs. He had bought it a decade earlier, when he graduated from the agency’s career training program, after a friend told him that a tuxedo was a must for a case officer overseas. Black-tie dinners were an ideal place to spot potential agents, the friend had advised.

That struck Rogers as preposterous, but he bought the tuxedo anyway. It was a beautiful suit, with crisp, notched lapels and a fine silk lining. Rogers had barely worn it in the years since. Intelligence work, he had happily discovered, had very little to do with attending dinner parties.

“You look smashing, my dear!” said Mrs. Wigg when she greeted them at the door. “Good for you!”

Her tone was that of a girls’ school principal, commending a new girl who has just scored a goal in field hockey.

“And Tom! How
nice
to meet you!”

Mrs. Wigg batted her eyelashes as she greeted Rogers. They were dark and crusted with mascara. She leaned forward slightly as she shook his hand, revealing a good deal of her bosom in the decolletage of her evening dress.

Rogers looked her squarely in the eye and thanked her for the kind invitation.

Ambassador Wigg emerged from the bar to greet them, holding a dark highball in his hand. He had bushy eyebrows and a deep, resonant voice.

“So glad you could come,” he said to Jane.

“Welcome to the family, Tom,” he said to Rogers with a wink. “In our embassy, I like to think that we
are
all one family.”

An ambassador who wants to be station chief, thought Rogers as he shook the ambassador’s hand.

“Let me introduce you around,” said Ambassador Wigg, escorting them into a huge living room.

“You know Phil Garrett, my deputy chief of mission, and his wife Bianca.” A flurry of handshakes.

“And Roland Plateau, the French chargé, and his wife Dominique.” The Frenchman kissed Jane Rogers’s hand. His wife gave a flirtatious smile.

“And I am pleased to present General Fadi Jezzine, the chief of the Deuxième Bureau of the Lebanese Army, and Madame Jezzine.” Nods and bows all around.

“Mr. Rogers is our new political officer,” said the ambassador, his eyebrows vibrating now at a very rapid pace. Everyone around the room smiled knowingly.

Rogers, who wasn’t eager to blow his cover the first month in Beirut, tried his best to look like a debonair member of the political section. He wished there was someone else from the station to lend moral support, but he was alone. Hoffman, it seemed, didn’t go to dinner parties.

Rogers’s discomfort eased as he saw the French diplomat’s wife ambling toward him. She was an attractive woman, dark-haired and sensuous, her age difficult to determine but somewhere in the long march between thirty and fifty. Her dress was open in the back, revealing a deep tan that was the product of months of determined sunbathing.

“Comme il fait beau aujourd’hui!” said Dominique Plateau, talking with very wide eyes about the weather. Yes, indeed, said Rogers. It was a beautiful day. He took a gin and tonic from a silver tray and decided to enjoy Beirut.

When the introductions were done, Mrs. Wigg gathered Jane and Mrs. Garrett, the DCM’s wife, and led them to a corner of the room. They sat on a couch beneath a large painting, donated by a wealthy Lebanese American, which illustrated scenes from Khalil Gibran’s
The Prophet
.

“Jane! What are your interests, my dear?” said the ambassador’s wife. The DCM’s wife, who seemed to be there in the role of vice-principal, nodded for emphasis.

“Reading, I suppose,” said Jane. The two ladies were stone-faced.

“And the children, of course.” They were glowering.

“And…tennis.”

“Hmmm,” said the ambassador’s wife. Jane seemed to have come up with an at least partially correct answer.

“Doubles?” said Mrs. Wigg.

“Yes, quite often I do play doubles. Though in Oman it was usually so hot….”

“Tomorrow morning, then!” said the ambassador’s wife, cutting her off. “Nine o’clock!”

Mrs. Wigg rose from the couch and smiled at Jane through clenched teeth.

“I’m so pleased,” said Mrs. Wigg, and with that, she departed to attend to other guests, leaving Jane and Bianca Garrett together on the couch.

Jane waited for the older women to say something, and when she didn’t pressed ahead herself.

“Bianca…,” Jane began.

“Binky,” the other woman corrected her. She was patting her hair, which was lacquered in place around her head like a helmet.

“Have you been in Beirut very long, Binky? We’ve only just arrived.”

“I must tell you that you’re very lucky,” said Mrs. Garrett.

“Oh yes,” said Jane. “We love Beirut.”

“I mean about the tennis,” said the older woman. “You needn’t worry about playing well, by the way. She’s terrible. But it’s a good start for you.” There seemed to be a hint of jealousy in her voice.

“And you aren’t even one of us, really,” added Mrs. Garrett.

“Excuse me,” said Jane. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Oh come now,” said the other woman, leaning toward Jane in a conspiratorial whisper.

“Everyone knows that Tom isn’t a foreign service officer. It’s no secret, and why should it be? You’re among friends.”

Jane blushed so deeply and suddenly that she felt as if her cheeks were on fire.

“You’re awfully lucky that Tom’s boss isn’t here. The fat one. Hoffman. He’s a toad. And his wife, Gladys, is even worse. They tell me she has a degree from a secretarial school. Nobody in our crowd likes the Hoffmans. He’s so
loud
.”

Jane cleared her throat.

“Say!” remarked Bianca Garrett to herself as if she had solved a riddle. “That’s probably why you’re here! Because Frank Hoffman isn’t.”

Jane Rogers, her discomfort increasing by the moment, signalled for a waiter.

“Let me tell you something, dearie,” said Bianca Garrett in a whisper. “I used to work for you-know-who myself once, as a code clerk, in Lagos and then in Addis Ababa. That’s how I met Phil.” She winked and took another drink from the waiter who had arrived with his silver tray.

“So don’t think I don’t know the score,” Binky continued. “And let me give you a word of advice. In a post like this, where socializing is half the fun, you really shouldn’t keep to yourself and your little crowd from the fifth floor. Don’t fight the ambassador. And for heaven’s sake, don’t fight his wife!”

Jane, who had never acknowledged to another soul outside the agency what her husband really did for a living, mumbled a few words and changed the subject.

“We’re looking for a good doctor for the children,” she asked sweetly. “Can you recommend someone?”

Binky, with one more wink, recited the list of acceptable practitioners.

Eventually the bell rang, signalling that it was time for dinner. As Binky Garrett rose from the couch, she leaned unsteadily toward Jane and confided a last bit of advice.

“It all looks very civilized around here,” she said. “But you and Tom shouldn’t forget that there are Indians just over the hill. Looking for scalps. And white women!”

She downed her drink and was off.

Rogers was seated at dinner between the wife of the Lebanese Army general and the wife of the French chargé. Both turned to him nearly in unison when they were seated, both staring up coquettishly at the tall and attractive new American in town.

Protocol won out and Rogers turned to the wife of the Lebanese general. She was a flower of Lebanese Christian society: the daughter of one of the great families that ruled a part of the Lebanese mountains; dressed in the style of East Beirut, like a fine china doll, elaborately coiffed and manicured; feminine and flirtatious in her conversation, but also smart and tough.

“So who is this Mr. Rogers who has joined the American Embassy?” she said, studying Rogers’s face.

Rogers smiled and adjusted his black bow tie. He told her a little about himself: where he had grown up, where he had served previously, what he liked about America.

“Tell me,” demanded Madame Jezzine, “How is it possible to live in so democratic a country? That is what I have never understood. How can you organize things when there is no upper and lower, when everyone is the same? Isn’t it very confusing?”

“Not at all,” said Rogers. “We have no history in America. So we can invent ourselves in whatever shape we like.”

Rogers smiled at the Lebanese woman and took a drink of his wine. Madame Jezzine, who had already emptied her glass, signalled the waiter for more.

“I think it sounds very tiring,” she said. “Here in Lebanon it is very different, as you will see. Here we know exactly who everyone is. If a man tells you his name and his village, you know everything there is to know about him. And if you travel from his village to the next one over the hill, you enter a completely different world. A different religion, different customs, different accent, sometimes even different words.

“It is a great sport here in Beirut to imitate the accents of our rural cousins,” continued Madame Jezzine.

“For example?” said Rogers.

“Take Zahle, in the Bekaa Valley. We have a friend from there named Antun—Tony—who speaks like a primitive. A cave man.” The aristocratic woman had a mischievous look on her face.

“Here, I will show you,” said Madame Jezzine. And in a loud voice, she proceeded to utter a vulgar Arabic expression as it would be spoken by someone from the district of Zahle.

Heads turned around the dinner table and there was a sudden silence.

Fortunately, Ambassador Wigg, who sat on the other side of the Lebanese woman, understood scarcely a word of Arabic.

“That sounds interesting!” he said loudly, eyebrows aflutter.

Madame Jezzine turned to him with a gracious smile and told him sweetly that it was a Lebanese folk saying, popular with rural folk, and had no meaning whatsoever. The ambassador laughed vigorously, to share in the joke, and then engaged Madame Jezzine in an earnest conversation about their respective children.

About that time, Rogers felt a slight brush against his leg. It was the French diplomat’s wife, reaching for her napkin, which she seemed to have dropped. Rogers retrieved it for her and embarked on a pleasant and flirtatious conversation in French, in which the subject of children did not come up once.

Toward the end of the meal, Madame Jezzine turned again to Rogers.

“It is a scandal, don’t you think, what the Palestinians are doing to my country?”

“I beg your pardon?” said Rogers.

“I said,” repeated the Lebanese woman much more loudly, “I think it is a scandal that the Palestinians are taking over Lebanon.”

There was dead silence around the room. The ambassador was too startled to say anything.

Rogers stepped into the void.

“The Palestinians are welcome to try, but I suspect even they would have difficulty taking over such a complicated country as this.” Several people laughed nervously.

“No, I mean it!” continued Madame Jezzine. She was determined to have her say.

“No one will speak up about it. The Palestinians have bought the politicians. They have bought the journalists. Now they are buying the Lebanese Army!”

Sally Wigg rose from her seat.

“I believe coffee is ready for us in the living room,” she said icily.

“It’s true!” insisted Madame Jezzine above the commotion of people rising from their chairs and heading toward the living room. At that very moment, Bianca Garrett arrived and suggested to the Lebanese general’s wife that they might go together to the ladies room and freshen up.

Rogers made small talk in the living room with General Jezzine, who headed Lebanon’s intelligence service. He promised to call on the general when he was settled. The incident with Madame Jezzine seemed to be forgotten over brandy and cigars, but as the Rogers’s said goodnight to their hostess, Mrs. Wigg gave Rogers a tart look, as if to say: This was your fault, young man. Attractive men who flirt with older women are courting disaster.

Beirut; October 1969

Rogers thought of his wife in the moments before sleep. He felt her lustrous black hair brushing gently against his neck and her breasts full against his chest. He liked so much softness. Other embassy wives seemed to Rogers as tough as shoe leather. They adopted the clannish manners of the girls’ schools where most of them had been educated, gave lavish parties, drank too much, talked too much. They prodded their husbands for details of their work and gossiped to each other about embassy life.

Jane was different. She never ventured near Rogers’s work. When someone from the embassy brought up the subject, or asked her what her husband was working on, she would laugh and say honestly: “I don’t know. I never ask him.”

They had met while Rogers was a student at Amherst in the 1950s. Jane was a student at Mt. Holyoke, an intense, hardworking girl who turned down dates so that she could study on weekends. She was an English major and liked, in those days, to talk to Rogers about such things as “the new criticism” and the different types of ambiguity in poetry, and whether Charles Dickens was, in fact, the greatest novelist who ever lived.

Rogers met her at a mixer and asked her out for a month before she finally accepted. She was a dreamgirl of the fifties: a slim waist, curvaceous figure, and the dark hair that seemed to make her skin look whiter than ivory. Rogers became infatuated with her on the first date and told his roommate that he had met the girl he would marry. She was a virgin, and Rogers pursued her lustily, half-disappointed when she removed his hand from beneath her dress and half-pleased.

Jane fell in love with Rogers, slowly and completely, with the passion of a woman who would fall in love only once. Rogers seemed to her older than the college boys she had dated. He was handsome, determined, occasionally taciturn, yearning for things outside the class-bound world of Amherst and New England, driven to succeed by forces that Jane couldn’t understand. She teased him on one of their early dates that he was a new type of ambiguity. But gradually she grew to trust him, and her trust, once given, was total.

They were married the summer after graduation, on a perfect July day at an Episcopal church in Morristown, New Jersey. Though they seemed the perfect Ivy League couple—the dashing young man from Amherst and the chaste English major from Mt. Holyoke—the marriage bridged what in those days was still a wide social gap between Protestants and Catholics. He was an Irish Catholic, the son of a police captain from Springfield, Massachusetts. She was a Yankee Episcopalian, the daughter of a former Army intelligence officer who liked to be called “Colonel” and commuted to a stock brokerage firm on Wall Street. Parents on both sides were suspicious and prickly.

What drove Rogers was, in part, the insecurity of an Irish Catholic—a “harp,” as the Brahmins of Boston liked to call them—who had gained admittance to the court of the Yankee elite. Rogers never lost his sense of being an outsider. The more time he spent in the world of the establishment, the more he felt that he was not of it. That yearning had pushed Rogers from Springfield to Amherst, as long and chilly a trip as swimming the Irish Sea. And it eventually pushed him into the Central Intelligence Agency.

Rogers’s intelligence career began a few months after he was married. Like most of the recruits of the 1950s, he was initially spotted by a college professor and encouraged to contact a certain government official, whose title and agency were never precisely specified. He went to Washington full of enthusiasm, suffered through weeks of mumbo-jumbo about just who he would be working for and what he would be doing, and eventually was offered a job. It was 1958, a time when a new recruit could dream of using the enormous power of the United States, secretly and subtly, to make the world a better place. What’s more, Rogers didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to go to law school. He didn’t want to work on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. He liked the idea of travelling. So he became a spy.

Jane’s father, the Colonel, sensed that something was up when Rogers visited Morristown the Christmas after he joined the agency training program. What sort of work are you doing? asked the Colonel.

“Government work,” said Rogers.

“What agency?” asked the Colonel.

“What do you mean?” answered Rogers.

“I mean, where do you work?”

“Oh,” said Rogers. There was a long pause. “Uh, the State Department.”

“Balls!” said the Colonel. They never talked about it again, but the older man seemed delighted and gave Rogers his unqualified approval from that moment on.

Rogers began his CIA career with a mixture of ambition and idealism. The agency was a place, in those days, for doing good and doing well. Rogers had all the basic skills of a good case officer—the drive, the intelligence, the intuitive sense of how to manipulate others. And he had one thing more: the burr under his saddle, which left him never quite comfortable or content.

He fell into the Middle East almost by accident. The agency was offering a two-year training program in Arabic for interested new recruits. The only real qualification seemed to be a lack of prior involvement in the region. Rogers, knowing next to nothing about either Arabs or Israelis, was regarded as an ideal candidate. He leapt at the opportunity. The Middle East was as far from Springfield, Massachusetts, as he could imagine.

From the first, Rogers loved his work and excelled at it. His father, the police captain, had once confided to his son, as if it was a great secret, that every time he put on his uniform, he was an intensely happy man. It was a secret that Rogers shared. He regarded his work—the simple tasks of recruiting agents and gathering intelligence—as a sublime pursuit, combining duty and pleasure in equal measure. What more, Rogers occasionally asked himself, could a man want?

Rogers’s marriage survived some difficult tests in the early years. The worst moment, etched in his memory, was their arrival in Khartoum in midsummer 1963.

Jane was weak and exhausted from a month of sleepless nights. She had given birth to their first child only four weeks before and wanted to wait until fall, when it was cooler, before travelling to Sudan. But Rogers had insisted that they couldn’t wait. He was needed in Khartoum. There were rumors about a pro-Soviet coup. He was missing out on the action.

They had landed in Khartoum in the sweltering heat of July and unpacked their bags in an embassy house that didn’t have an air conditioner. When they opened the door, a lizard was crawling on the living room wall and there were large bugs in the kitchen sink. Rogers remembered that first night in Khartoum—Jane nursing the baby in the intense heat, sweat pouring off her breasts as the infant sucked and cried—like a nightmare. He fell asleep that night to the sound of Jane sobbing in the bathroom and promised himself that he would try to make up for the awfulness of that first assignment. He never quite did.

Khartoum was the first child. Oman was the second. In those first few months in Beirut, Rogers and his wife still didn’t like to talk about what had happened to their daughter in Oman. It was too painful, too much a symbol of what frightened Jane about the Middle East.

Jane coped. She learned to live with the privations of the Arab world. She studied Arabic, read and reread her beloved English novels, immersed herself in the world of her children. Surrounded by the deceit of the intelligence business, she somehow remained tender and vulnerable, as idealistic as she believed her husband to be.

As the years passed, Rogers’s fascination with the Middle East became more intense. He was an Arabist in his heart, as well as his head. He spoke the language fluently, understood the strange rituals and nuances of the culture, grieved at the stupidity and suffering of the Arabs. He felt the Middle East like a physical sensation on his skin: from the moist, dank air of Jiddah on the Red Sea, where clothes hung from the body like wet rags in midsummer, to the dry deserts outside Cairo and the crunchy taste of sand in the mouth and throat during the winter dust storms.

Unlike many of his colleagues, who served their time overseas chiefly to advance their promotion prospects back at headquarters, Rogers wanted to stay abroad forever. He was happiest trekking through the wilds of Dhofar in Oman to call on a tribal leader, or sitting in a parlor in Aden, chewing qat, as he talked Arab politics late into the night with a Marxist revolutionary.

Rogers tried, not always successfully, to keep from romanticizing his work. He reminded himself that, at bottom, it was a struggle for control, over his emotions and those of others. But there was also a restlessness deep down in him—that burr under the saddle—which was part of why he had been drawn to intelligence work in the first place. There were so many layers of self-control in Rogers that people usually didn’t see the yearning and the impulsiveness. But it was there.

Jane Rogers saw it and left it alone. If she worried about her husband, it was only that he worked too hard. She was the sort of woman who could not imagine character defects in someone she loved.