The Increment (8 page)

“The Brits,” he said after a long pause. “SIS had two people in their Tehran embassy the last I knew. Maybe they could help us find him. Maybe they could get enough collateral that we could ask better questions of Dr. Ali, assuming we ever have two-way with him.”

“Can they keep it quiet?”

“Sure. The Brits are the best liars in the world. Plus I know Adrian Winkler, the new SIS chief of staff. He’ll do anything I ask him. We were together in Moscow and Baghdad. I could go over, brief him and his boss, work up an ops plan. Keep it tight.”

The director didn’t respond until they were almost to the gates of the headquarters complex. He had too much on his mind now. He had been a happy man when he left the military to come to the agency. At first he had treated CIA like a big navy base. He went to the cafeteria with his wife, played softball at “Family Day,” gave out the medals and the supergrade promotions himself. But the easy part was over, and now he had a big dysfunctional organization to worry about. Pappas sensed that he didn’t really like this work, or the people who did it. He liked driving boats. The CIA was another tribe.

“Do it,” said the director. “Go to London as soon as you can make arrangements.”

Pappas promised he would be on his way in twenty-four hours. The limousine had parked in the garage now. The director was about to take his private elevator to the seventh floor. There was one more question.

“Are you going to tell Fox?” asked Pappas.

The director didn’t answer, which Pappas understood to mean no.

Adrian Winkler might have
posed for an SIS recruiting poster, if that most secret of secret services had wanted to advertise. He was dark-haired and intense, with a furtive twinkle in his eyes. He knew how to shoot a gun, jump from an airplane, speak an exotic language, tell a wry joke. He operated with a panache that reminded you that intelligence work was really an extension of life in a British public school—the hazing and deception shaped by cunning intellect. When he completed a particularly good operation, Winkler would confide as if to a fellow schoolboy, “That was a good wheeze!” Most Americans were intimidated by him, put off by his sardonic wit and his refusal to tolerate incompetence. But Harry Pappas was so far from Winkler on the social landscape that he didn’t feel threatened. He liked Winkler because he was good at his job and seemed to enjoy it.

Pappas had met him in another lifetime, when they were both young officers in Moscow. The CIA at the time was in one of its recurring panics about Soviet penetration of the agency, and life at the old U.S. Embassy compound was grim in midwinter. The station chief had told his restless cadre of case officers to stand down on new operations until the situation was clearer, which meant that Pappas didn’t have anything to do. To pass the time, his colleagues drank heavily, flirted with other people’s spouses, and tried to avoid saying anything that might get them in trouble. Pappas was so bored he would take rides on the Moscow subway, back and forth, Kurskaya to Kievskaya, just to confuse the KGB surveillance teams.

Then along came Adrian and Susan Winkler. They arrived in Moscow by car from Finland, a more harrowing trip in winter than it sounds, bearing their two young daughters. The roads were icy and treacherous, the children were wailing, the Soviet police were menacing. They drove day and night to get to Moscow before a blizzard that was moving east. Exhausted by too many hours of driving, Adrian had searched for a spot he could pull off the road and get a little sleep. He finally found a little hideaway just off the main highway, tucked behind the fir trees. It was so dense and dark back there, you could almost disappear. He closed his eyes and fell into a deep slumber, until he was awakened by the cries of one of his girls.

But Winkler had remembered the spot: that was the point of the story, when he recounted it for Pappas late one night. He had remembered the little rest area, filed it away in a compartment of his mind where it lay…until one day a few months after his arrival when he needed a covert rendezvous point, urgently. The SIS had ordered a crash operation to exfiltrate a Soviet KGB agent they were running. The agent was supposed to go out via Finland, but they needed someplace where he could disappear along the way. Winkler recalled the rest area in the woods—located it on the highway almost down to the precise kilometer. And that was the ops plan: the Russian agent drove in from one side; a British NOC from the other. One car emerged, with the agent in disguise. The exfiltration scheme became a legend within SIS. Winkler was just twenty-nine at the time.

Winkler shouldn’t have told Pappas the story. It was still a secret. The Brits wanted the Soviets to think the agent was dead. But he and Harry were out of Russia at the time, in a safe house in Stockholm drinking vodka, and as Winkler said, “You have to trust someone.”

“Did he thank you?” Pappas had asked.

Winkler had shaken his head ruefully.

“Who? Pavel? Are you joking? He was a right bastard. He thought he did it all himself.” Winkler had paused.

“That’s the thing about this business, isn’t it? We work with the worst people in the world. If there wasn’t something wrong with them, why would they be talking to us in the first place? And you know what? Some of it is going to
rub off.
”

From the moment
Adrian Winkler arrived in Moscow, he and Pappas had made common cause. They both had young families. Pappas’s son Alex was just four then—a little roustabout who never seemed to get cold no matter what the temperature was. They weren’t supposed to socialize, but they lived near each other, and Winkler was sending his girls to the American School because he had decided that the British School was run by a sadist. And their wives liked each other. So they became friends. Winkler loved to hear Harry’s stories about training the contras in Honduras; he wanted to hear about guns and bombs and the other toys that paramilitary officers played with. Harry wanted to understand espionage, so they taught each other.

They started a film club, to animate the bitterly cold Moscow nights. They watched old Cary Grant movies, and classic French films by Jean Renoir and François Truffaut, and when they could get them, tapes of Monty Python and Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was an education for Harry. His taste in movies growing up in Worcester had been
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
.

Winkler was the star; everyone in Moscow station seemed to know that he had pulled off a coup, even if they didn’t know what it was. But people were jealous, too, especially Winkler’s colleagues. Nobody likes someone to be too successful, especially at a young age. And Harry was something of a star, too. The director himself had taken a shine to Harry after meeting him in Honduras. He liked people with mud on their boots, and he personally arranged Harry’s assignment to Moscow to make him a real case officer so that he wouldn’t have to take shit from the Career Trainee prima donnas anymore.

Harry did what the old man wanted. He shook up Moscow station and got it back in the operations business. He developed new tradecraft for doing the simple things—shaking KGB surveillance, checking radio propagation, finding good drop sites. He and Adrian even worked together servicing an agent the Brits and Americans had recruited jointly in Germany. For a man who’d just left a shooting war in the jungles of Nicaragua, the risks of running agents in Moscow seemed small indeed.

The two young officers watched each other’s backs. They weren’t supposed to do that, either. But CIA and SIS were “cousins,” and it all flowed together back at headquarters, so they figured, What the hell? When Pappas had to travel on operations, Winkler would look in on Andrea and Alex; Pappas would do the same for Susan and the girls.

Winkler didn’t have a son of his own, so he sort of adopted Alex. When it was finally time to leave Moscow, Alex was referring to the British man as “Uncle Adrian.” Winkler sent him gifts every year at Christmas. They were always books—adventure stories like
Captains Courageous
and
Horatio Hornblower
at first, and then later, real war stories about real wars. That was all that ever interested Alex, other than sports.

When Alex died, Pappas
and Winkler were both in Iraq, as chiefs of their respective stations. They had that in common, too; they had watched a catastrophic mistake unfolding, tried fitfully to stop it, and failed. But on the day Alex died, it stopped being a policy problem. When Pappas heard the news, he went to Winkler’s liaison office in a half-destroyed building near the palace that served as the CIA station, closed the door, and started to cry. He couldn’t stop. He kept saying, “It’s my fault.” Winkler sat with him. This was a house of grief he couldn’t enter. Eventually he drove Pappas to BIAP and put him on a plane back home to Andrea. A sadder man he had never seen. Winkler flew to Washington several days later, to be with his friend when the body arrived at Dover, and to help put Alex in the ground. Nothing was the same after that, for either of them.

Pappas met Winkler at
the antiseptic SIS headquarters known as “Vauxhall Cross,” on the Albert Embankment along the south side of the Thames. Winkler was a certified big shot now. He was chief of staff, which was perhaps a stepping-stone to becoming head of the service. Pappas took the elevator up to the top floor where Winkler had his office, just down the hall from Sir David Plumb, the knight of the realm who was the current custodian of the famous initial “C.” In the corridor were sharp-eyed young men in gaudily striped shirts who noted the presence of the visiting American.

Winkler beckoned Pappas into his office and closed the door. The room was decorated with African masks and spears, which seemed odd if you didn’t know that Winkler had grown up in Uganda. He’d lived on a farm in the bush, until his father was killed. Relatives had arranged for him to go to school at Rugby, and then he had won a scholarship to Corpus Christi. What brought him to the attention of the dons, who in those days still acted as spotters for SIS, was that Winkler spoke the Niger-Congo dialects of Uganda with uncommon fluency. In addition to the facility with languages, they noted that he was a young man who needed a father. He might as well have had SIS stamped on his forehead.

Winkler’s office had a view across the Thames toward Victoria Station and Pimlico and in the distance downstream, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. He motioned for Pappas to sit down on the couch and pulled up a chair for himself. The bulky gray corridor of Whitehall, the SIS version of “downtown,” was concealed behind the riverfront buildings a mile away.

“You look like you got hit by a truck,” said Winkler. It was true. Pappas had deep ruts under his eyes and an unhealthy pallor to his skin.

“Up all night on the plane,” said Pappas. “I thought I could drink myself to sleep, but it didn’t work.”

Pappas was too tired for small talk. And he didn’t want to leave an empty space in the conversation, into which memories of Alex might fall.

“I need a favor, Adrian. I figured you’d take me more seriously if I came in person.”

“I always take you seriously, Harry. It’s one of my life rules. What’s it about?”

“Iran.”

“Very nice. Flavor of the week. Iran and what, perchance?”

Harry cocked his head, as if appraising his old friend one more time, and then gave him a wink.

“This is for you only. You and Plumb, I mean. Nobody else gets briefed, unless we give the okay. Is that acceptable?”

“No. But I don’t have any choice, do I?”

“Nope. And if this gets out, I personally will make sure that you never get another secret from Uncle Sugar until the day you die.”

“Gosh! Very intimidating. So Iran, then. How can we be helpful?”

“How many people do you have in your embassy in Tehran?”

“One.”

“I thought it was two.”

“We just had to pull one back. His wife had an ectopic pregnancy. I think that’s what it was. She almost died. He got soggy, asked to come home. Not long for the service, I’m afraid. Pity. Very good at languages.”

“Any NOCs?”

“A few travelers in and out, same as you, but not many.”

“Can your man in Tehran operate? The one who’s still there.”

“Well now, that depends on what he’s asked to do.” Winkler looked at his friend slyly. “You’ve got someone on the hook, haven’t you? Someone good. You lucky bugger. And you need our help servicing him. Is that it?”

“Something like that. More complicated, really.” He paused again.

“God, Harry! Really! You’re less communicative than my daughters.”

“Okay. It’s what I told you in the cable a few weeks ago. We have an Iranian walk-in. Except he didn’t exactly walk, he telecommunicated, through our website. We still don’t know who he is. But he has access to some very good material. Or should I say, ‘seems to have access.’ We call him Dr. Ali, but we have no idea what his real name is.”

“Where does he work?”

“We’re not sure, but we know the general area, from what he has sent us. You can guess what that is, given that I flew over here on twenty-four hours’ notice.”

“The weapons side of the nuclear program. They’ve started up again.”

“Roger that.”

“Those little bastards. Well, we knew they would, didn’t we? Knew they’d never actually stopped. You lads were the gullible ones, frankly.”

Winkler sat back slowly in his chair, as if taking it in. There was an even brighter twinkle in his eyes than usual.

“And now you’ve got a Joe. Well done! And he’s legitimate?”

“I think so. At least his material is. Or so Arthur Fox keeps telling me.”

Winkler made a face as if he had just eaten a bad oyster. “I don’t like that man, Harry. He’s a show horse.”

“Tell me about it. But he has the president’s ear, literally. He’s the one briefing the White House on our new guy. He’s got people so cranked up some of them are ready to drop a bomb on Natanz tomorrow morning.”

“Are they that crazy?”

“Not yet. That’s why I’m here. The director wants me to run our guy like a real agent and extract what he knows. But first I have to find him. We don’t have the assets on the ground. That’s why I’m here. As I said when we started this conversation, I need help. From you.”

“How endearing,” said Winkler. “We always like you Americans when you are needy and vulnerable. It brings out your feminine side.”

“Fuck you, Adrian. But I will assume that means yes.”

They got a map
of Tehran and spread it out on Winkler’s desk. Neither of them had ever served there before, but they had both looked at so much overhead imagery of the city that they felt as if they knew it. Winkler put his finger on a spot in the middle of the map, just below a big intersection marked Ferdowsi Square.

“Here’s our embassy, on Jomhuri-ye Islami Avenue. From here, we can get a fix on radio propagation. Does your guy have any commo gear?”

“No. I told you, we’ve never laid eyes on him. He’s just an email address. But from the messages, I have the feeling that he’s in one of the nuclear labs. Maybe the big one in North Tehran, maybe one of the satellite shops under commercial cover.”

Winkler moved his finger up to the top of the map, to a small spot on the edge of the Alborz Mountains, near an old tuberculosis sanatorium that was now one of the city’s main treatment centers for AIDS patients.