See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (26 page)

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I believe you, but the rest of the community doesn’t - especially the Pentagon.’

I knew she was talking about the CIA and had mentioned the Pentagon only to deflect my annoyance, but none of that helped my mood.

‘Well, tell those jerks to put up their platforms and they might see something other than the martinis planted on the bar in front of them.’

‘I’m just telling you what they’re telling me.’

‘Yeah, I’m starting to get it. If it’s not in The Washington Post or The New York Times, it’s not true. Should one of their fancy Washington byline correspondents get on the wrong airplane and end up in Kurdistan, I’ll be sure to point him to the front.’

Silence.

‘Give me Bob,’ I said,’ please.’

She did, but he wasn’t impressed. ‘Give it a break,’ he said as soon as he got on the telephone.

‘Bob, listen to me a second. There’s a real live war going on up here. In another week there will be no V Corps.’

‘No one here gives a shit about the Kurds. You got it? The next thing I want to hear from you is that you’ve crossed the border into Turkey.’

‘You’ve got to understand that at least in the opposition’s mind, I’m personally associated with what is going on - the collapse of V Corps. If you pull me out, the offensive will stop.’

‘And sir, you had better understand that Tony Lake wants your scalp. You have an appointment with Fred Turco at oh-nine-hundred on March 15. You’d better fucking be there.’

As predicted, Talabani’s offensive petered out and V Corps did not collapse. Talabani survived, though, with enough of his pech merga intact to go back to fighting Barzani in what seems to be a never-ending Kurdish civil war. Chalabi, for his part, wandered around for a while, then returned to Salah al-Din. Barzani, probably under Saddam’s orders, eventually evicted him. The general whose defection had brought me to northern Iraq did go on to Damascus, and from there to London. And Saddam Hussein was only moderately discomforted by it all.

Not long afterward, Saddam started trading oil for food, which eased the suffering inside Iraq just enough to stem the tide of defections from his army. So if we want him out now, it will probably take a war, not a coup.

As for me, I had orders to report to Langley, Virginia, at 0900 on March 15, and so I did.

I wasn’t thrilled when Fred Turco shipped me upstairs to the general counsel’s office that first morning back at CIA headquarters. The two FBI guys who were waiting for me didn’t do much to add to my mood, especially when they informed me I was the subject of a criminal investigation. I had been yanked back from what I still consider a historic opportunity to unseat Saddam Hussein and dropped into a vipers’ nest, but in all honesty, I wasn’t really worried.

Whatever Tony Lake might have believed - or conveniently allowed himself to believe - there never was a rogue ‘NSC team’ headed by one ‘Robert Pope’ (aka Bob Baer) in northern Iraq. That was all Chalabi’s work, a wonderful invention that Lake had swallowed whole. I don’t claim to be a Boy Scout, but I hadn’t violated Executive Order 12333, either, or federal murder-for-hire statutes. I still had enough confidence in the system to believe that the truth would prevail, and in fact it did.

On March 22, 1995, 1 passed an FBI polygraph test and drove a stake into Lake’s investigation. FBI agents were rooting around in CIA files, but they weren’t going to find anything for one simple reason: There was nothing to find. Eventually, on April 4, 1996, the Justice Department would send a ‘declination’ letter to the CIA, an official notice that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. The CIA was about as apologetic as it knew how to be. It awarded my team a citation.

But neither a declination nor a citation was a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’d upset the national security adviser and sent the political seismic needles quivering at Langley. That meant two to three years in the penalty box: no overseas assignment until new management came along and memories faded. If I could keep my nose clean and mouth shut, I’d probably be able to get back in the field eventually. One more overseas tour, I figured, and I’d be able to retire. (Overseas years count extra in the Directorate of Operations; with enough of them, you can retire at fifty.)

To be sure, I’d never be promoted because someone would always vaguely remember that I’d infuriated the president’s national security adviser and taken a joyride in a Russian tank. A couple of sniggers around the promotions board table and my file would end up on the ‘not management’ stack. But the point was the CIA was going to leave me alone if I didn’t get into any more trouble.

My new job as deputy chief in the Central Eurasian Division’s South Group was just the place for lying low. Although South Group oversaw eight posts in central Asia and the Caucuses, my job had nothing to do with running agents or coups. All I really had to do was keep the paper flowing and the in box empty, and I had a lot of help with that. Some twenty-five people worked under me. If a thorny problem came up, like whether we should buy a new car for the chief in Bishkek, I could always buck it up to the group chief, Len, who could then buck it up to the deputy division chief, and so on. Headquarters was like slipping into a warm bath. Relax, and nothing much bad could happen. Or so it seemed at first.

It wasn’t long, though, before I began to realize just how lost I was in the current culture of Washington and the CIA. Some of the signs were obvious. When I had last spent time in the nation’s capital, it was still possible for a case officer to enjoy some of life’s little luxuries. In the interim, housing costs had spun out of control, and restaurant prices had swollen so much that only the expense-account class could afford to eat out with any regularity. After putting my life on the line for two decades in places few people would choose to live, I was earning the same salary as a midlevel career civil servant who never leaves his desk. Worse, I seemed to be carrying around a set of job skills that were constantly diminishing in value.

That was the bigger shock: not that I was relatively poor but that my professional worth had dropped so sharply and that I was so ill equipped to deal with this new world. I knew more about the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine/General Command than I did about my own country, more about the Saudi Wahabis than I did about the House and the Senate. For decades I had unpacked my bags in places like Tajikistan and the Sudan and begun learning the ins and outs of the local culture, and that’s what I did now. I needed an education, and no one was going to hand it to me, so I created my own graduate curriculum in American politics and set out to fulfill it. I did what professional intelligence officers are trained to do: I started talking with all sorts of people, anyone who could teach me how Washington works, intentionally or otherwise. And the lessons came pouring in. I would eventually learn far more than I had bargained for.

To my wonder, I would see how committee hearings and press leaks can be almost as effective as suicide bombers in promoting narrow, parochial causes. To my dismay, I would find that the tentacles of big oil stretch from the Caspian Sea to the White House. And to my anger, indeed to my rage, I would also see how money, not lives or national security, skews so much of what takes place in the very places most charged with protecting us all.

It was like The Odyssey, I finally figured out. While we were off fighting Troy, the people back home were drinking and whoring. They didn’t give a damn what those of us on the front had gone through, and they sure as hell didn’t want to hear what we had to say now.

But I’m getting ahead of my story.

My first, and in some ways most enduring lesson in the politics of Washington arrived a little before noon on May 17, 1995, in the form of the smart, bespectacled, but not unattractive South Group reports officer. She was holding a single piece of paper between her thumb and index finger. With her other hand, she held her nose.

‘This one stinks like shit,’ she said. The South Group reports officer had a sharp tongue to go with her sharp mind.

The paper was a ‘tasker’ from an NSC staffer named Sheila Heslin, who wanted to hear what the CIA knew about three American citizens: Georgetown University professor and prominent Maryland Republican Rob Soubhani; a doctor living in California, Sahag Baghdasarian; and oilman Roger Tamraz.

I didn’t know Soubhani or Baghdasarian, but I’d heard a lot about Tamraz from my days in Lebanon. He was a business partner of Amin Jumayyil, the Lebanese president who had released the suspects in the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut. The two had done well together, but in 1989, after Jumayyil’s term ended, Tamraz’s bank in Beirut failed, and a Lebanese prosecutor indicted him for defrauding his depositors. Tamraz blamed Syria for the bank’s failure, claiming it was engineered to punish him for serving as Jumayyil’s emissary to Israel. Whatever the truth, Lebanon registered Tamraz’s indictment with Interpol, turning Tamraz into an international fugitive, a big enough black mark to prevent him from doing business in a lot of Middle Eastern countries. Always resilient, Tamraz moved on to the Caspian Sea. He was one of the first oilmen to show up in Turkmenistan after independence. Soon he had parlayed a suitcase of dollars of unknown origin into two prime Caspian oil-reserve blocks. By 1994 he was back in the news, promoting a pipeline that would carry oil from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Armenia.

Sheila Heslin had included a note in the margin of the tasker, asking for derogatory information on all three men. In Tamraz’s case that would be a snap. But there was a small problem. (Or as my reports officer so gently put it: ‘Is she nuts?’) Whatever his faults, Roger was an American citizen, and ever since Richard Nixon and Operation Chaos, the CIA had stopped spying on Americans. In 1981 an executive order had outlawed it. In the CIA’s rule book, spying on Americans was tantamount to assassinating a foreign leader, but maybe, I generously thought, the new crew at the White House was too young to remember Nixon.

‘Why does Heslin want dirt on these guys so badly?’ I asked innocently.

‘How should I know? Maybe she’s a jilted lover.’

‘So what do we have to do with it?’ I asked. Heslin’s tasker, I had noticed, was addressed to the Directorate of Intelligence, not to our Directorate of Operations.

‘Heslin thinks Tamraz is one of ours - a recruited agent.’

That put Heslin’s request in a new light. According to a 1977 agreement between the secretary of state and the director of the CIA, the DO is obligated to inform policymakers when they are in contact with an agent. Since NSC staffers were considered policymakers and Heslin was due to meet Tamraz on June 2, we were obligated to tell her about his connections to the CIA. The 1977 agreement, in short, trumped the 1981 executive order.

It turned out Heslin was right about Tamraz’s having a connection to the CIA. According to a file sent over from the Near East Division, he had been in contact with our case officers since the 1970s. At one point, he had even provided cover for two of our officers in one of his US banks. When it later surfaced that the bank was affiliated with Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI - the bank of choice for international narcotics dealers, money launderers, and other crooks - the CIA pulled out of the arrangement. Heslin was wrong, though, in assuming Tamraz was an agent. We had never paid him, and in our books, that meant he never worked for us. Nor was he the kind of person we ever felt entirely comfortable dealing with. Tamraz was always his own man. He helped the CIA only when it served his interests.

When the desk officer brought me the Tamraz memo that was to be sent in response to Heslin’s request, I didn’t even look at it. ‘Give it to Len to sign,’ I told him. Len was the chief of South Group.

I was still evading responsibility, but I admit I was curious. How did Tamraz find his way to Heslin? How did she know about his connections to the CIA? More important, why would an NSC staffer even bother meeting him?

At precisely 1:02 PM. on May 19, South Group faxed two memos to Heslin, both classified secret. One memo outlined the CIA’s relationship with Tamraz. The other explained that Soubhani, who was an oil consultant to Amoco as well as a professor, was an occasional contact of our chief in Baku. Although Soubhani probably had no idea he was even in touch with the CIA, we played it safe and let Heslin know about the connection. The DI sent its own separate memo on Tamraz to Heslin.

A week later the reports officer was back at my office. ‘Heslin’s on the warpath.’

I looked at her blankly.

‘She’s decided we’re protecting Tamraz.’

This time I read the Tamraz memo. It spelled out clearly that he was wanted in Lebanon for embezzling from his own banks and for other crimes.

‘So what’s wrong with that?’ I asked. Embezzlement sounded derogatory to me.

‘Heslin wants hard evidence to hang Tamraz, and we didn’t give it to her.’

Apparently, Heslin had gotten her dander up after comparing the memos from the DI and the DO. The DI sent along all the lurid Lebanese press reporting, which accused Tamraz of everything short of child molestation. Heslin had expected us to send over the same stuff - and more. Doesn’t the DO keep track of American businessmen working overseas; Heslin had asked her DI contact.

I rewound the spool to those long nights waiting for my agents on the Green Line, hoping Hezbollah wouldn’t kidnap or kill me. Apparently, I’d gotten it wrong. What the White House wanted all along was business intelligence, dirt on Roger Tamraz, rather than intelligence on the terrorists.

Still, I figured that Sheila Heslin might just need a little education. Probably she didn’t know that a DO file was for contact reports and cables related to the running of an agent. It wasn’t a place where we stuffed articles from the press or stored evidence against an agent, hoping one day to be able to indict him. To be sure, if we found that information on an agent broke American law, we made a record of it and turned the evidence over to Justice, but looking to indict our agents and contacts wasn’t something we did as a matter of course.

I took the bull by the horns and called Heslin to explain all this. I also wanted to remind her, as we had on the cover sheet for the Tamraz memo we sent on May 19, that the rest of his files were in archives and it would take time to retrieve them for a complete summary.

Heslin was unimpressed. She grunted and hung up the telephone.

In Washington, when it rains, it pours.

Bill XXXXXXXX the deputy chief in New York stuck his head in my door. I think it was May 30. ‘You guys interested in running an American oilman doing business in the Caspian?’

Whenever another case officer offers you an agent, it’s time to hold on to your wallet.

‘No one in New York has the time to run this guy’ he said. ‘Anyhow, the Caspian’s too complicated for us.’

Too complicated? Next thing I knew, Bill would be telling me that the oilman was owned by a little old lady who drove him only on Sundays.

‘Well, who is it?’

‘RogerTamraz.’

That surprised me. Nothing in his file had indicated that New York was still meeting Tamraz.

Let me be absolutely frank here: Any sane Directorate of Operations case officer in my position would have run the other way. Red flags were flying all over the field. A wanted Lebanese middleman, a shady Caspian Sea oil deal, and an NSC aide on the warpath - it doesn’t get much worse. Not to mention my track record with Tony Lake. But I’m always one to double my bet when I’m down.

‘Sure,’ I said. I had no idea what I’d do with Tamraz, but the fact that a staffer at the NSC hated him was enough for me to meet him. Anyhow, the DO didn’t have a single source in the Caspian. Tamraz was better than nothing.

‘Tell him to call me at this number,’ I added as I scribbled my CIA unclassified line on a piece of paper.

Unclassified lines are publicly attributed to the CIA. If you were to call the operator and ask about the three-digit prefix, she could tell you the number belonged to the CIA. The other lines, the sterile ones, were registered at the phone company in someone else’s name, like the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Parkway Mortuary, or something. I used the unclassified line because I didn’t want Roger Tamraz to think from the get-go that we were going to play footsie.

As soon as Tamraz pushed his way through the Four Season’s double doors, I recognized him from the photograph in his file. Slight and sandy-haired, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a Brooks Brothers suit, he didn’t look the least Lebanese. Ed Pechous was a couple of paces behind him. Lately the chief in New York and Tamraz’s last case officer - the one who hadn’t been sending in reports - Pechous had gone to work for Tamraz the day he retired from the agency.