The Falconer's Tale (12 page)

Two weeks after he had asked Mike Dukas to find Piat for
the second time, Alan Craik, in civilian clothes, finished a
meeting at the FBI and rode the Metro around to the
Anacostia station. He'd left his car there, now drove down
to Bolling Air Force Base. Once he was free of the parking
lot there, he found it a pleasure to walk: the day was warm
but not hot, not too humid as Washington days went. Women
were still in summer clothes—always a plus. He walked fast
out of habit; even if he'd been going nowhere, he'd have
looked like a man with a mission. In the elevator of DIA's
building, he rode up with a woman from counterterrorism,
a three-striper but in civvies, as he was. Their chat was short,
meaningless, not unpleasant.
You never knew who would have
something useful
.

Craik was the collections officer for the Defense Intelligence
Agency. A collections officer deals with numbers and ideas;
he is a bureaucrat with one foot in the world of operations—
not because he will be operational but because he has been—
and one foot in desk work. What a collections officer does,
in four words, is say yes or no. Or at least convey messages
of yes or no, because he sits on several committees and
belongs to several working groups, at which people from the
entire intelligence community decide whether proposed intel
operations should be allowed to go forward. You want to
plant a bug in Osama bin Laden's drawers? Find an intelligence
task in what is called the Green Book and make sure
your proposed operation fits within it, no crowding, nothing
left over, and then justify it with references and persuasive
prose and recommendations from heavy hitters, if not in
writing then on the jungle telegraph.

The Green Book is the bible of the collections officer's religion.
It is the same book for the entire community; any
notion that the individual agencies work independently is
nonsense, at least at this stage. They all see the proposals;
they all review the proposals; they all pass on the proposals.
Afterward, there may be some fudging and some lying, but
at the collections phase, everybody is on board.

An intelligence task is like a template. Your idea has to fit
into the template. Will the bug in bin Laden's drawers fit
under 57L9-3, “Acquisition of East German intelligence
through electronic means?” Obviously not. Will it fit under
98K147-13, “Recruitment of key Islamic persons in nuclear
technology?” Probably not, no matter what you've heard
about bin Laden and the bomb. But there are thousands and
thousands of tasks, dating back to the end of World War II,
so somewhere in there you'll find one into which your idea
will fit.

Except that sometimes the idea won't fit, and then you
need to go to the collections officer and write a new requirement.
And that requirement has to be approved by the
community, by the collectors, by politicians—in some cases,
by the General Accountability Office. Because really, collections
management usually comes down to one limiting
factor—money. The taxpayers only provide so much. And
the collections officer and his staff are, at the simplest level,
deciding where that money will be focused.

And then at a meeting, somebody from an agency's ops
will say, “Bin Laden doesn't wear drawers,” and everybody
will vote no, and the affected collections officer will have to
go back to the person who proposed it and say, “No dice.”
Which is why collections officers get quickly unpopular with
their constituencies, because everybody hates the messenger,
no matter what logic says. And the hatred will be deep and
long, because what depended on approval of your idea was
next year's budget and the chance for looking good.

It was in this job that Craik now found himself. It was a
hot billet—so long as you did it well and didn't piss off the
wrong people. You could springboard from it to higher rank.
Or you could end your career if you screwed up. Sometimes
even if you didn't screw up. But it was interesting.

Now, in his own office overlooking a vast room full of
people who worked for him, Craik hung his coat over a chair
and sat in front of his computer, clicking the mouse and
eyeballing his desk for message slips. Only four, none urgent.
In his inter-office mail were three draft tasking orders from
other agencies; glanced at, they told him little except what
he'd already heard about them in a working group.
Iraqi
education system, penetration and utilization of;
HUMINT
in
Northern Iran, expansion of; Vatican assets in East Asia, cooperation
with
. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He called up a subroutine he'd written when he'd first
made captain and taken this job. It allowed him to search
such intelligence traffic as he was allowed to see—a lot—for
terms that he defined. It wasn't illegal, but it wasn't necessarily
something he should be doing, either. Its advantage
was that it allowed him to pull items of information together
in clusters that hadn't been intended when the information
was disseminated. Occasionally, this produced something that
gave him a leg up in one of the working groups and allowed
him to beat the drum louder for DIA. Knowledge is power.

Now he added as a search term the collection management
number of Clyde Partlow's operation (more numbers—
he worked with more numbers than Albert Einstein). He
clicked the mouse, and the subroutine put its snout into the
classified traffic of the intelligence community and began to
root. Specifically, it was looking for subsidiary taskings—those
items that would show that Partlow was moving to a second
phase, data gathering—of his operation. All that Craik knew
of the operation so far was what he had told Dukas and what
they had approved in the working group, a specific but undescribed
operation under a counterterrorism task titled
“Penetration of al-Qaeda Financial Resources.” All that
Partlow had said in the meeting was that they “were going
in through the target's hobby.” Sounded good. Go for it,
Clyde. (What hobby? Stamps? Golf? Macramé?) Brilliant.

Without so much as a grunt, the subroutine found a truffle.

The computer dumped three subsidiary taskings on the
screen. He was about to learn some details of Partlow's operation:

One tasking was directed to collection officers and attachés,
Middle East, asking for “ongoing data concerning individual
named Bandar Muhad al-Hauq in the specific areas of (1)
falconry (2) collection and display of Islamic art, including
donations to museums, funding of art exhibits, and similar
activity (3) financial transactions, including via Grandwell
and Forstone Bank of Grenada, which individual is believed
to have taken over two years ago (lengthy citation here of
two classified reports).

One was directed to active intelligence-gathering operatives
and their superiors in Southeast Asia and the Middle
East, asking for data on travel within the last five years by
individual named Prince Bandar Muhad al-Hauq and for data
on planned or rumored travel by this individual.

One was directed to the National Security Agency and to
the signals office of the Defense Intelligence Agency, asking
for data on international intercepts of telephone and computer
contacts with or about an individual named Prince Bandar
Muhad al-Hauq within the last five years.
Oops,
thought Alan.
I shouldn't have been able to see that
.

Taken together, the three taskings meant that Partlow was
planning a move against a Saudi named Bandar Muhad al-
Hauq, who might be an al-Qaeda bagman (the banking), and
that he was looking for a place to do it (the travel stuff).
Either falconry or art would be the means of contact (the
hobby), which must have meant finding an agent with knowledge
in one of the areas so that he or she could show a
common interest. In fact, Partlow must have had an agent
already in his sights, because pretty clearly he had needed
Piat to make the agent contact. At least Craik couldn't see
any other reason for wanting Piat right there at the beginning
of the operation. And that meant that Piat knew the
prospective agent, knew him well, maybe even—the ploy
would hardly be new—had run him before. But falconry?
Or art?

Interesting. Very interesting.

But Craik wasn't going through the taskings to find what
was interesting. He wanted to make sure that he wasn't
connected, even remotely, with a turkey. (There had been a
set of orders, money spent, time used, to go to Iceland.) Such
was Partlow's reputation that, in the plainest terms, he wanted
to cover his ass.

Craik read the taskings again, glanced over the headers,
pursed his lips over the references. There were five in all,
used in various combinations in the three taskings.
Presumably, they bolstered the cases for gathering data on
the Saudi. One he recognized as a defector report from before
the Iraq war, probably not worth a crap. One he remembered
from the working group as a CIA paper on the al-
Qaeda money-laundering and money-moving operation. He
drew a blank on the others.

He glanced at his watch. He was running behind already,
and it was still morning. He isolated the three unknown
references and then sent them to a Marine sergeant sitting
against the far wall of the room beyond. He typed in,
“Sergeant Swaricki: Please locate these and send to me. Not
urgent.”

He squeezed as much work as he could into an hour, then
walked through the big space where his people were working,
checking with some, nodding to anybody who met his eyes.
Showing the flag, checking with the troops.

He went to another floor for a briefing, stopped to report
quickly to his immediate superior on the meeting at the FBI
(“the usual crap from Justice—‘trust us, it's legal'—but no
underpinnings”) and had a quick and not very good lunch
in the basement cafeteria. He had a limited appetite for boiled
greens and black-eye peas. The banana custard with vanilla
wafers was good, though. The place was full of people he
knew, lots of waving and smiling, but there were also civilians
he didn't know, including, somebody told him, a
congressman.

“What's he want?”

“Who the hell would know? Just hold on to your wallet.”

Craik had forty people working for him, mostly analysts, both
civilian and military from all the services. He had started
them on a big push to update the Green Book, get rid of the
chaff left over from decades ago and give attention to new
tasks that would put collection right where breaking news
was. It wasn't an easy job. There was a big constituency of
the lazy and the fearful for the oldest and least pertinent
tasks: to the people who gave out money and medals, a task
was a task, and if you managed to get an operation going
under one and brought it home successfully, up went your
budget and your reputation. Should anybody care that the
task had been written in 1947 and had to do with assessing
the threat level posed by radical Buddhists in the old Siam?
Not the people who gave out the money and the medals,
certainly; to them, a task was a task, so don't waste your
sweat on the hard ones, boys.

On his way back from lunch, he went through the big
room again, but this time managed to pass all the cubicles
and have at least a word or two with half the people. He
was really focusing on the seven who were leading the
internal Green Book review groups. Clustered by geographical
area, the groups were each reading all the old documentation
from when the tasks were first created. Boring,
sometimes laughable—the early Cold War had some people
in stitches—but essential. He touched base with all of them,
not necessarily happy with himself for doing it but knowing
it should be done.
My God,
he thought,
I'm
shmoozing
. He
remembered a day with his father, who had been a Navy
squadron CO—the same glad-handing, the same constant
greetings, the jokey tone.

“Sir!” The voice was female, every word coated with the
thick syrup of the Deep South. He knew who it was before
he turned around. “You're about the fastest walker I ever
tried to follow!”

She was middle-aged, somewhat overweight, brilliant. She
was also, in the absence of an assistant (the post was supposed
to have been filled weeks before—some screwup) the closest
thing he had to a right hand. Her name was Rhonda (after
a fifties movie star) Hope Stillman, and she used all three
because she was Southern. She had a hefty frontage and tiny
ankles, and she gave off emanations of a demure and muted
womanliness—Mother Earth with a Georgia accent.

“Mrs Stillman,” he said.

“Captain, you are a
walker
!” Presumably, she liked him,
too. She had been there for thirteen years, counted as a kind
of senior eminence among the analysts. Now, she wanted to
take him aside and tell him that people were feeling overworked,
and could he lay back a little and relax just the
teeniest bit the deadline for the Green Book review? Could
he?

She made him smile. She was so serious and yet so nice.
Like a shop steward without attitude. He said, “Send me
what you have in mind and we'll talk about it.” He suspected
she had been a cheerleader. Still was, in a sense. He said,
“But if you can do something about the mid-afternoon
gabfests when the coffee truck comes around, I'd appreciate
it.”

“People need their recreation.”

“Not forty minutes of it on my time. See what you can
do.”

He passed on along the line of cubicles, came to Sergeant
Swaricki's, put his head in and said hello and would have
passed on, but Swaricki said, “They're on your computer.”

Alan remembered in time. “Oh, the references on the CIA
operation.”