Dynamite Fishermen (6 page)

“I asked the Egyptian out to lunch the next day. From then on, he and I went to parties together, played poker together, got drunk together, chased broads together—you name it. Hasan and I did it on the buddy system. I even took him to Bangkok for a week. God, we screwed sixteen-year-old Thai whores together till our eyes turned white. And in six months I had him on the payroll.

“Hasan was a hell of a guy, actually. One of the smartest agents I ever knew. He went to the best schools in Egypt, had a degree in history from Cambridge, and spoke English better than you or I ever will. What’s more, he had phenomenal connections back in Egypt: his father was a field-grade air force officer and his grandfather had been speaker of the Egyptian National Assembly. Hasan was clearly on his foreign ministry’s fast track.

“The only trouble was that he was the most arrogant son of a bitch in Karachi. Everybody at his embassy, from the ambassador to the tea boy, hated his guts. His section chief did everything he could to make him look bad, even to the point of assigning a first-tour officer to take his place at important meetings and intercepting his invitations to diplomatic receptions. Hasan would eat his liver every night over what the section chief did to him that day.

“One afternoon he happened to be hovering over the desk of the section’s typist and found a cable that the section chief had drafted for the ambassador’s signature asking the foreign ministry to recall Hasan to Cairo. At that moment, I think, something in Hasan snapped.

“When he came to my place that evening I could tell something was very wrong. He didn’t want to talk about which girl’s knickers he had gotten into the night before or what the bloody Indians were up to. Instead he announced that he wanted to leave the diplomatic service and go to live in the States. I tried not to act too surprised and asked him a few questions about his plans. But before long, he told me about the recall cable and how much he dreaded the idea of going back to Cairo. And that’s when I pitched him. He was a little surprised at first, but it didn’t take him very long to say the magic words.

“Looking back on it, I think a robot could have recruited Hasan. It didn’t require much in the way of brains or charm, just patience and a little time to get to know the guy. So within six months of my chat with the chief of station, Hasan was up and running as an agent. By the end of the year, I got my GS-11.

“As it turned out, if I had waited much longer I might have lost him. The cable to Cairo worked its way through the foreign ministry, and within a month Hasan was reassigned to a staff position supporting Egypt’s negotiating team in the Sinai disengagement talks. It wasn’t a promotion, by any means, but it wasn’t such a terrible place to be either. Hasan worked like a dog, and before long he had access to the team’s restricted files. He would photograph the stuff every night and hand the film cassettes over to his Agency case officer on his way home from work.

“That was in the days of Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy. If Hasan missed a day, Kissinger would call the director and ask where the hell his goddamned intelligence was. The fact that I had recruited one of the Agency’s star reporters was not lost on the next year’s promotion panel either. My GS-12 practically dropped into my lap.”

“Who handled Hasan after he was reassigned to Egypt?” Prosser interjected. “Did you have to turn him over to Cairo Station?”

Pirelli downed the last sip of beer in the glass and slowly pushed his tray away. The self-congratulatory smile vanished. “Oh, I turned him over all right. Cairo Station was ecstatic about getting him, too, since Hasan’s access to the Egyptian hole cards in the disengagement talks was far more direct than any of the station’s other assets. The COS made a big deal out of assigning his most experienced Arabist to handle him, and Hasan reported brilliantly for more than a year. Then Hasan was given to a younger case officer, who took him for granted. When the disengagement talks started to wind down and there was less for him to report, the new case officer met him less and less frequently.

“After having had his ego fed for two years, Hasan began to feel underappreciated. Month by month his booze intake went up and his intelligence output declined. Usually he was discreet about his boozing, but, as I said, he was an arrogant son of a bitch. One night he got shitfaced after a state dinner for the king of Morocco and started insulting other members of the negotiating team, calling them bloody idiots and telling them that the Americans and the Israelis had taken them for fools. Somebody challenged his version of the facts, and Hasan came out with so many examples of their having been outmaneuvered by the Israelis that somebody in Egyptian security decided to put surveillance on him. Sure enough, a few weeks later they caught him making a dead drop of some film cassettes in Giza and arrested him the next day. Nobody quite knows for sure what happened after that, but the word is that he’s no longer among the living. The Egyptians are generally pretty easygoing people, but they are damned rough on spies.”

“I can imagine how you must have felt. I mean, if you hadn’t recruited him—”

Pirelli cut him off. “Yeah, I felt pretty low for a while, but it was something I had to learn. No matter how hard we try to prevent it, sooner or later agents tend to get caught. Not all of them, of course, but the better their access, the harder we use them and the more likely they are to be rolled up. Since you and I are the ones who recruit and run them, sooner or later you’ll watch one of your own agents get the shaft. Sure, it makes you feel low for a while. But it’s part of the job and you just have to accept it.”

Pirelli’s eyes met Prosser’s. Whatever the station chief had expected to find there—empathy, understanding, perhaps even admiration—he looked disappointed.

Prosser only hoped Pirelli could not see the extent of his unease at the story’s outcome, for it had been foreseeable from the moment of his recruitment that Hasan would be rolled up. Whether the Egyptian’s life was worth the extra advantage it brought the United States in the Camp David negotiations was anyone’s guess. But whether he, Conrad Prosser, was willing to take responsibility for shortening the life of a Hasan each year of his Agency career was a choice only he could make. And despite his years of training and experience, he had resisted making it. One thing was becoming very clear about the decision: if his answer was yes, he would have to land his first Hasan very soon.

Chapter 4

Prosser turned the corner onto rue Clemenceau and spotted his man waiting at the curb. He was in his mid-forties, half a head taller than the average Levantine Arab and built like a boxer, with slender hips and thick shoulders and arms. Although he was not in uniform, his closely cropped black hair, trimmed mustache, and erect posture were clearly those of a military man. Prosser watched the man’s swarthy, lantern-jawed face brighten in recognition as the Renault passed. Two weeks before, Prosser had shown him the spot and had driven him past the apartment building just off rue Omar Daouk where they were about to meet.

Prosser drove on for another three blocks to find a parking space and then started back on foot along the quiet, tree-lined avenue where century-old stone villas had only recently begun to make way for modern reinforced concrete and cinderblock apartment buildings. Advancing toward the corner where he had seen the agent, he paused before the display window of a men’s clothing boutique to watch the movements of the few pedestrians around him. He paused again before a goldsmith’s window filled with handmade Aleppo chains and eighteen-karat wrist bangles that shone in the direct rays of the afternoon sun. He combined a lingering look at the jewelry with a rapid sweep of the block and then crossed the street to enter a neatly whitewashed six-story building block of working-class flats and professional offices.

The money changer’s stall just inside the foyer was shuttered for the afternoon, but the door to the concierge’s tiny studio was wide open, filling the area with the odor of rancid mutton and the overwrought crooning of an Egyptian torch singer. Prosser passed the door and quietly mounted the stairway. On reaching the fourth floor, he halted and listened for any sound of movement on the floors above and below, then quickly pulled a key ring from his pocket to unlock the twin deadbolts of the door before him.

He entered, locking a single deadbolt behind him, and then moved down the long hallway into the living room. He had not been inside the apartment in more than a month, not since the elderly National Assembly member he usually met there refused to meet in Muslim West Beirut any longer out of concerns for his safety.

The flat’s tenant was an American woman of about fifty who had long ago divorced her Lebanese husband and decided to remain in Beirut with the idea of earning her living as an artist. Wisely, she had held onto her part-time administrative post with a United Nations relief office and, as a result, collected a modest salary that was sufficient to meet her needs and cover the rent on her one-bedroom living quarters near rue Verdun. The place where Prosser now tidied up and dusted was her studio, furnished tastefully, if sparsely, on the slim budget that the station allowed her. Unfinished and unsold works, generally Lebanese pastoral scenes that imitated the Impressionists—and did so badly—filled every room. Although the canvases showed only modest ability, Prosser admired their uninhibited use of bold colors and their irrepressible spirit of hope.

Prosser stood at the picture window to gaze out over the cascade of red-tiled roofs that descended to the seawall. Late in the afternoons on such clear summer days, the sun reflected off the Mediterranean and filled the studio with a warm, rippling light that never failed to put him at ease. But today there would be no time for relaxation.

He opened the casement windows and switched on an electric fan to expel the stale air; then he went to the kitchen to fetch some refreshments from the refrigerator. On his way back, the doorbell rang. Setting the tray down silently, he approached the door noiselessly and looked out the peephole. On the other side was the swarthy agent he had passed on the street corner.

As soon as the door was locked behind them, the two men embraced in Arab fashion, kissing each other on both cheeks before exchanging formulaic greetings in Arabic. Although Prosser knew his guest would have to leave within an hour or two, he avoided showing any haste as he poured out two glasses of apple juice and offered the man a dish of salted pistachios.

“So, Abu Ramzi, tell me where you have been these past two weeks. Did you make your inspection trip to the Bekaa Valley that we talked about?”

Abu Ramzi nodded. “I did, but I saw no foreign trainees or any sign of the special operations courses that you asked me to find. Perhaps such training was going on in camps that I did not visit, but I doubt it. I think it more likely that such courses have been moved to newer camps near the Syrian border by Yanta and Deir el Achayer. I tried to go there, but it is impossible to enter without written orders from Damascus.”

Prosser picked up his notebook. “Who runs these camps?” he asked.

“Most of the training cadres are Palestinians, but they do not belong to the Palestinian Resistance. They call themselves Palestinians, but their true home is Damascus and they take their pay and their instructions from the Syrians. To my way of thinking, they are merely Syrians who speak with a Palestinian accent.”

“Surely you must know somebody who can tell you what’s going on inside.”

“Maybe so, but it will take time to find them,” Abu Ramzi replied noncommittally. “Wally,” he said, addressing Prosser by his alias, “it surprises me that you still fail to recognize that those who carry out terroristic acts are not permitted to remain within the Palestinian National Movement. Arafat prohibited aircraft hijacking and assassination by the Resistance years ago. We have no use for such tactics now that our men are able to attack the Israeli army directly in South Lebanon and the occupied homelands. Terrorist operations in the Western countries do nothing but blacken our name there and set back our struggle for diplomatic recognition. Surely you must appreciate this.”

“Arafat can boast all he wants about stopping international terrorism,” Prosser replied, “but that doesn’t mean all his people are listening. Terrorist cadres are training right here in West Beirut at bases run by Fatah and Saiqa and the Popular Front and other outfits in the PLO. Open your eyes, Abu Ramzi.”

No matter how often Prosser raised the subject of PLO involvement in international terrorism, Abu Ramzi always denied it and invariably laid responsibility at Syria’s doorstep. Irksome as this habit sometimes was, Abu Ramzi’s reporting on political and military affairs was highly accurate and rich in detail. Prosser had learned to accept Abu Ramzi’s biases and edit them out of his reporting.

Abu Ramzi had first volunteered his services to the Agency in the autumn of 1976, in revenge for Syria’s intervention against the Palestinian militias in the Lebanese civil war. A fervent Palestinian nationalist, Abu Ramzi had once told Prosser he would accept aid from Menachem Begin himself to resist Syrian domination of the Palestinian cause. His reason for joining the pro-Iraqi Arab Liberation Front was that he had lived in Baghdad from 1948, when his parents fled Haifa, until the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, when he traveled to Jordan to enlist in the Palestinian fedayeen forces.

Abu Ramzi had also felt that he understood the Iraqi character and could accept help from Iraq because Baghdad’s distance from Jerusalem meant the Palestinian Resistance had less reason to distrust Iraq’s leaders. Iraqi aid, Abu Ramzi often repeated, came with no strings other than continued opposition to Syrian domination in Lebanon and occasional public tribute to Saddam Hussein.