The Case Officer (9 page)

“I told you. Nothing. Washington
just told me to ask, that’s all.” Mac’s only concern was damage control at this
point. “Now let’s just forget it and get that drink.”

“I can’t forget it, Mac, and I
don’t believe you.” Huang’s voice was less accusatory than hurt, his tone was
flat. MacMurphy started to interrupt, but Huang stopped him. “You and I are not
in that vacuum you mentioned. I will tell you frankly, I feel like you have
betrayed our friendship. I expected more from you. Certainly not this…

“When I tell Beijing about this,
they will forbid me to see you any more. And I do not think I want to see you
any more either. I am sorry Mac.” Huang turned to leave. Mac’s muscles
tightened, as a mixture of sorrow and bitter regret engulfed him.

“Wait.” Mac grabbed his elbow.
“I’m sorry. I really am Tsung-yao. But just listen to me for one minute.” Huang
tried to pull away, but MacMurphy strengthened his grip. “Please don’t say a
word about this to anyone. No one… It’s for your own good.” Huang tugged harder
and Mac blurted, “For God’s sake, Tsung-yao, listen to me. I know what I’m
talking about. They won’t just tell you can’t see me anymore. They’ll recall
you to Beijing. They will jerk your ass out of here so Goddamn fast....”

Huang jerked his arm free. “Do
not be ridiculous. Why would Beijing do that? I have done nothing wrong.”

“They will, Tsung-yao,” MacMurphy
said firmly. “I know they will. Listen to me. They always do. I know about
these things better than you.”

“Better than me? I don’t think
so…”

Huang turned abruptly and
rejoined his colleagues at the far end of the balcony, never once looking back
toward Mac. His turned back conveyed a message that burned through Mac with an intensity
he hadn’t felt before. Mac had done more than just fail in his doomed
mission—an outcome he had expected; he had also lost a friend…and in the
process, doomed that friend’s future.

MacMurphy had lost his cherry,
just as his mentor Rothmann had, more than twenty years earlier.

Chapter Twenty-Two

T
wo days later, after several
unreturned phone calls to Huang at the Chinese embassy, MacMurphy learned that
Huang had left “for consultations” that afternoon on the regular CAAC flight
from Addis Ababa to Beijing.

Huang never returned to Addis
Ababa, and it would be more than ten years before he was permitted to travel
outside of China again.

The system had betrayed MacMurphy
as it had Rothmann so many years before, and Mac thought long and hard about
leaving the clandestine service. His disillusionment sent him into a deep
depression. But in the final analysis, he chalked the whole affair up to
experience and carried on with his career. He had joined the Agency to serve
his country, not to make friends.

At the end of his Addis Ababa
assignment, he was rewarded with a promotion and a direct transfer to Thailand.
He would be the deputy in Bangkok Station’s Udorn base, tasked with running
cross-border operations across the Mekong River into Vientiane, Laos.

He was happy with the trust the
Agency had placed in him by rewarding him with the promotion and the
career-enhancing assignment, but the scars left by the Huang Tsung-yao case remained.
He would never again trust the Agency’s management as he had in the past, and
he would become more and more of a loner within the case officer ranks of the
CIA.

Chapter Twenty-Three

22
June 2004

Hong
Kong

M
acMurphy sat at his desk on the
top floor of the American Consulate General in Hong Kong. His in-box still
contained over four inches of morning traffic: operational cables, raw
intelligence reports, and analyses of recent events in China and the rest of
Asia.

He had already gone through an
equal amount of priority and immediate traffic and was on his second cup of
coffee of the morning. He had been at his desk for over an hour and his coffee
was getting cold, but he was too engrossed in his work to get up and get a
fresh cup. It was eight-thirty, opening of business, and his staff was drifting
in.

As the CIA’s station chief, he
was charged with directing all of the Agency’s operations run out of Hong Kong.
The station was the Agency’s most productive producer of raw intelligence on
China. The operating climate was benign compared to the “denied area” character
of Beijing and the rest of the mainland. Due to the importance and sheer size
of the China target, MacMurphy’s stable of agents spread throughout Asia and
Europe.

He was going to meet personally
with one of those agents in just a few hours.

Normally the COS of a station as
large as Hong Kong would not be meeting agents himself. That was the job of the
younger case officers, those with more energy and squeaky clean covers.
MacMurphy had been a case officer for almost ten years, and his cover had
eroded over those years until it was now so thin as to be practically
non-existent.

Hostile intelligence services
from Russia’s SVR and China’s MSS to Ethiopia’s MPS held thick operational files
on MacMurphy. They knew who he was, who he really worked for, and that his job
was to recruit and handle spies within their respective governments.

So when he went out on the
streets, they watched him. And if surveillance were to see him meeting with an
agent, the asset would be automatically compromised; guilt through association
with a known CIA operative.

MacMurphy was handling this
particular agent because he had personally recruited him earlier that year—not
in true name as a member of the American Consulate General, of course, but in
alias and under deeper cover as French journalist Barry LeMen. Mac had taken on
this particular “false-flag” recruitment task because none of his other case
officers had the language ability to pass themselves off as French.

Thanks to his mother, Mac had
grown up speaking French (and German) in the home, and he had continued to
study the languages throughout his formative years and into college. And this
Chinese journalist asset had been assessed as a Francophile, having spent a
previous tour in Paris with the New China News Agency. 
 

The operation was classic. The
agent was a junior editor for the NCNA.  He was spotted and assessed as a good
recruitment target by another asset—a Hong Kong Chinese access agent—who had in
turn introduced him to MacMurphy/LeMen. The agent was paid the enormous (by
Chinese standards) monthly “consulting fee” of $500 for essentially overt
information and analysis of the Chinese political and economic situation.

“Money for nursery rhymes,” MacMurphy
liked to say, designed just to get the development to the point where the agent
becomes comfortable with the relationship and used to providing information,
any kind of information, in return for money. 

It had taken several months for
the hook to set. As the potential agent became more and more accustomed to easy
money for his “China watching” views, the case officer began allowing his cover
to peel off like the layers of an onion.

First the idea of clandestinity
was introduced: “We shouldn’t be seen in public together. People might get the
wrong idea!” Then the case officer’s requirements became more narrowly focused
on “privileged” information, and the concept of sourcing was introduced. “Who
told you that? Information is no better than its source.”

And then the recruitment pitch.
“I’ve been passing your information to the U.S. Government without your
knowledge. They love it and want to meet with you directly. It would be a good
thing for both countries. It would increase understanding and reduce friction
and contribute to world peace. They’re also willing to double your salary. I’m
being transferred back to Paris, so you can either continue with them or call
it quits.”

The agent had become comfortable
with the relationship and there was little incentive for him to back out of the
relationship. The money was good, and soon to get much better, and there
appeared to be little risk in continuing. So the agent bought it and signed a
secrecy agreement to that effect.

When the recruitment was solidified
and the asset had been thoroughly vetted and polygraphed, plans for the
turnover to another case officer with solid diplomatic cover were put into
motion. The turnover was scheduled for the first week in July, just before
MacMurphy’s departure from Hong Kong back to CIA headquarters in Langley.           

Chapter Twenty-Four

M
acMurphy exited the Consulate on
the ground floor and passed the Marine Guard Post number one at the front
entrance. On his way out the door he threw a casual salute and a “Hi, Steve” to
the strapping Marine Gunnery Sergeant on duty.

As a former Marine officer,
MacMurphy had a special affinity for the grunts who guarded the U.S. embassies
and consulates around the world, and the Marines in turn respected and
genuinely liked Mac. He had been selected as the guest of honor at their
anniversary ball the previous November and had entertained them with an
inspirational and witty speech on the evolution of the Corps and his
experiences as a young OCS candidate at Quantico, Virginia. 

As he stepped out of the
air-conditioned fortress consulate building into the heat of Garden Road, the
glare of the summer morning temporarily blinded him.

Mac wore tan slacks and a
short-sleeved, light blue cotton shirt, yet despite his sensible dress, the
heat was nearly insufferable. He had removed his tie before leaving his office
and hung it on the back of his office door along with the jacket he kept for
his frequent meetings with the protocol-conscious Consul General.

MacMurphy believed that jackets
and ties were insane during the long Hong Kong summers. Only crazy old colonial
Englishmen and some of the weirder State Department twinkies wore them in that
kind of heat. He was reminded of the old Noel Coward song that posited “Only
mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” He preferred his case
officers to blend in on the streets, so jackets and ties were out as far as he
was concerned—at least when they were away from the strict State Department
environment of the consulate. It was more than a matter of mere comfort; it was
a cover issue. But the comfort element entered into it too. How could he expect
his people to do a good job when they were broiling and sweating?

Strolling down the hill to the
nearby Hilton Hotel, he entered through the side entrance at the base of Garden
Road, went past the lobby, and back out the front entrance. There he tipped the
doorman to whistle a cab for him. He knew that his surveillants—he had not seen
them yet, but he knew they would be there—would have had no trouble keeping him
in sight during his short stroll, and they could easily keep the cab in view
during the twenty-minute trip through the harbor tunnel to Kowloon.

His training and experience had
taught him that the way to handle a surveillance team was to lull them asleep.
Never, ever piss them off by making them look stupid. Never let them know you
are deliberately trying to shake them. There are too many ways they can make a
case officer’s life miserable. Better to let the team string along casually
behind and lose them only when it is absolutely necessary, and only for as long
as necessary—when an operational act must be committed—and then do it with
finesse, so they don’t appear incompetent when they submit their daily
surveillance report to their superiors. If they couldn’t be gotten rid of in
this manner, then the operational act should be aborted.
 

By the time he entered the cab,
he had spotted the team—three Chinese men on two small 50cc Honda motorbikes,
one ready to hop off and handle any foot surveillance and the other two for
vehicular surveillance. They were old “friends” who had been with him many
times before. They were not hard to spot; short Chinese clones dressed in
long-sleeved white shirts rolled up to the elbows, dark baggy trousers,
one-size-fits-all belts ending at mid-back, and worn black shoes topped with
droopy white socks.

Mac had nicknamed them Gimpy (for
his limp), Grumpy (for his attitude), and Dopey (because he was).

His surveillance detection route through
the harbor tunnel to Kowloon was designed to draw the surveillance team through
a series of “corridors” where each surveillant could be positively
identified—he could not afford to be surprised by a fourth or fifth member—and
accounted for before the operational agent meeting could take place.

By the time MacMurphy reached
Kowloon, he was certain the team consisted of only Gimpy, Grumpy, and Dopey. He
knew they were not equipped with radios, and therefore would be forced to
maintain visual contact with each other. This fact was established during
previous observations of MSS teams by MacMurphy and his colleagues, and
confirmed by operational information provided to the CIA station by a former
member of the Hong Kong Special Branch, now chief of the British SIS station in
Hong Kong.

Mac maintained a close liaison
relationship with the Brits and knew their information came from a reliable
high-level penetration of the MSS’s Investigative Division in Hong Kong. It
made his job a lot easier.