Portrait of a Spy

“What level are we today?”

“Didn’t you hear?” asked Carter. “We’ve abandoned the old color-coded system.”

“What’s your blood pressure telling you?”

“Red,” said Carter dourly. “Bright red.”

“Not according to your director of homeland security. She says there’s no immediate threat.”

“She doesn’t always write her own lines.”

“Who does?”

“The White House,” said Carter. “And the president doesn’t like to needlessly alarm the American people. Besides, raising the threat level would conflict with the convenient narrative making its way around the Washington chattering classes these days.”

“Which narrative is that?”

“The one that says America overreacted to 9/11. The one that says al-Qaeda is no longer a threat to anyone, let alone the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. The one that says it’s time to declare victory in the global war on terror and turn our attention inward.” Carter frowned. “God, but I hate it when journalists use the word ‘narrative.’ There was a time when novelists wrote narrative and journalists were content to report facts. And the facts are quite simple. There exists in the world today an organized force that seeks to weaken or even destroy the West through acts of indiscriminate violence. This force is a part of a broader radical movement to impose sharia law and restore the Islamic Caliphate. And no amount of wishful thinking will make it go away.”

They sat on opposite sides of the rectangular table. Carter picked at the edge of a stale croissant, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. Gabriel knew better than to rush the proceedings. In conversation, Carter could be a bit of a wanderer. Eventually, he would make his way to the point, but there would be several detours and digressions along the way, all of which would undoubtedly prove useful to Gabriel at a later date.

“In some respects,” Carter continued, “I’m sympathetic to the president’s desire to turn the page of history. He views the global war on terrorism as a distraction from his larger goals. You might find this difficult to believe, but I’ve seen him on just two occasions. He calls me Andrew.”

“But at least he’s given us hope.”

“Hope is not an acceptable strategy when lives are at stake. Hope is what led to 9/11.”

“So who’s pulling the strings inside the administration?”

“James McKenna, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, also known as the terrorism czar, which is interesting since he’s issued an edict banning the word ‘terrorism’ from all our public pronouncements. He even discourages its use behind closed doors. And heaven forbid if we happen to place the word ‘Islamic’ anywhere near it. As far as James McKenna is concerned, we aren’t engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists. We’re engaged in an international effort against a small band of transnational extremists. These extremists, who just happen to be Muslims, are an irritant, but pose no real threat to our existence or way of life.”

“Tell that to the families of those who died in Paris, Copenhagen, and London.”

“That’s an emotional response,” Carter said sardonically. “And James McKenna doesn’t tolerate emotion when it comes to talking about terrorism.”

“You mean extremism,” said Gabriel.

“Forgive me,” Carter said. “McKenna is a political animal who fancies himself an expert on intelligence. He worked on the staff of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee in the nineties and came to Langley shortly after the Greek arrived. He lasted only a few months, but that doesn’t stop him from describing himself as a veteran of the CIA. To hear McKenna tell it, he’s an Agency man who has the best interests of the Agency at heart. The truth is somewhat different. He loathes the Agency and all those who toil within its walls. Most of all, he despises me.”

“Why?”

“Apparently, I embarrassed him during a senior staff meeting. I don’t remember the incident, but it seems McKenna has never gotten over it. Beyond that, I’m told McKenna regards me as a monster who’s done irreparable harm to America’s image in the world. Nothing would make him happier than to see me behind bars.”

“It’s good to know the U.S. intelligence community is functioning smoothly again.”

“Actually, McKenna is under the impression it’s working just fine now that he’s running the entire show. He even managed to get himself appointed chairman of our new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. If a major terrorist figure is captured anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, James McKenna will be in charge of questioning him. It’s a great deal of power to place in the hands of a single person, even if that person were competent. But, unfortunately, James McKenna doesn’t fall into that category. He’s ambitious, he’s well intentioned, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And if he isn’t careful, he’s going to get us all killed.”

“Sounds charming,” said Gabriel. “When do I get to meet him?”

“Never.”

“So why am I here, Adrian?”

“You’re here because of Paris, Copenhagen, and London.”

“Who carried it out?”

“A new branch of al-Qaeda,” said Carter. “But I’m afraid they had support from a person who occupies a sensitive and powerful position in Western intelligence.”

“Who?”

Carter said nothing more. His right hand was shaking.

Chapter 12

Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

THEY ADJOURNED TO THE REAR terrace and settled into a pair of wrought-iron chairs along the balustrade. Carter balanced a coffee cup on his knee and gazed toward the gray spires rising gracefully above Georgetown University. Paradoxically, he was speaking of a shabby district of San Diego, where, on a summer day in 1999, there arrived a young Yemeni cleric named Rashid al-Husseini. With money provided by a Saudi-based Islamic charity, the Yemeni purchased a run-down commercial property, established a mosque, and went in search of a congregation. He did most of his hunting on the campus of San Diego State University, where he acquired a devoted following among Arab students who had come to America to escape the stifling social oppression of their homelands, only to find themselves lost and adrift in the ghurba, the land of strangers. Rashid was uniquely qualified to serve as their guide. The only son of a former Yemeni government minister, he had been born in America, spoke colloquial American English, and was the not-so-proud owner of an American passport.

“All sorts of strays and lost souls began stumbling into Rashid’s mosque, including a pair of Saudis named Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.” Carter glanced at Gabriel and added, “I trust you’re familiar with the names.”

“They were two of the muscle hijackers from American Flight 77, personally selected by none other than Osama Bin Laden himself. In January 2000, they were present at the planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, after which the Bin Laden Unit of the CIA managed to lose track of them. Later, it was discovered that both had flown to Los Angeles and were probably still in the United States—a fact you neglected to tell the FBI.”

“Much to my everlasting shame,” said Carter. “But this isn’t a story about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.”

It was a story, Carter resumed, about Rashid al-Husseini, who soon developed a reputation in the Islamic world as a magnetic preacher, a man to whom Allah had granted a beautiful and seductive tongue. His sermons became required listening, not only in San Diego but also in the Middle East, where they were distributed by audiotape. In the spring of 2001, he was offered a clerical position at an influential Islamic center outside Washington, in suburban Falls Church, Virginia. Before long, Nawaf al-Hazmi was praying there, along with a young Saudi from Taif named Hani Hanjour.

“Coincidentally,” said Carter, “the mosque is located on Leesburg Pike. If you hang a left onto Columbia Pike and go a couple of miles, you run smack into the western façade of the Pentagon, which is exactly what Hani Hanjour did on the morning of 9/11. Rashid was in his office at the time. He actually heard the plane pass overhead a few seconds before impact.”

It did not take long for the FBI to connect al-Hazmi and Hanjour to the Falls Church mosque, said Carter, or for the news media to beat a path to Rashid’s door. What they discovered was an eloquent and enlightened young cleric, a man of moderation who condemned the attacks of 9/11 without equivocation and urged his Muslim brethren to forsake violence and terrorism in all its forms. The White House was so impressed with the charismatic imam that he was invited to join several other Muslim scholars and clerics for a private meeting with the president. The State Department thought Rashid might be the perfect sort of figure to help build a bridge between America and one and a half billion skeptical Muslims. The Agency, however, had another idea.

“We thought Rashid could help us to penetrate the camp of our new enemy,” said Carter. “But before we made our approach, we had to answer a few questions. Namely, was he somehow involved in the 9/11 plot, or were his contacts with the three hijackers purely coincidental? We looked at him from every conceivable angle, starting from the assumption that he had a great deal of American blood on his hands. We looked at timetables. We looked at who was where and when. And at the end of the process, we concluded that Imam Rashid al-Husseini was clean.”

“And then?”

“We dispatched an emissary to Falls Church to see whether Rashid might be willing to put his words into action. His response was positive. We picked him up the next day and took him to a secure location near the Pennsylvania border. And then the real fun began.”

“You started the assessment process all over again.”

Carter nodded. “But this time, we had the subject seated before us, strapped to a polygraph. We questioned him for three days, pulling apart his past and his associations, piece by piece.”

“And his story held up.”

“He passed with flying colors. So we placed our proposition on the table, accompanied by a great deal of money. It was a simple operation. Rashid would tour the Islamic world, preaching tolerance and moderation while at the same time supplying us with the names of other potential recruits to our cause. In addition, he was to be on the lookout for angry young men who appeared vulnerable to the siren song of the jihadis. We took him on a domestic test drive, working closely with the FBI. And then we went international.”

Operating from a base in a predominately Muslim neighborhood in East London, Rashid spent the next three years crisscrossing Europe and the Middle East. He spoke at conferences, preached in mosques, and sat for interviews with fawning journalists. He denounced Bin Laden as a murderer who had violated the laws of Allah and the teachings of the Prophet. He recognized the right of Israel to exist and called for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. He condemned Saddam Hussein as thoroughly un-Islamic, though, on the advice of his CIA handlers, he stopped short of endorsing the American invasion. His message did not always go over well with his audiences, nor were his activities confined to the physical world. With CIA assistance, Rashid built a presence on the Internet, where he attempted to compete with the jihadist propaganda of al-Qaeda. Visitors to the site were identified and tracked as they moved through cyberspace.

“The operation was regarded as one of our most successful efforts to penetrate a world that, for the most part, we had found almost entirely opaque. Rashid fed his handlers a steady stream of names, good guys and potential bad guys, and even tipped them off about some plots that were brewing. At Langley, we spent a great deal of time marveling at our cleverness. We thought it would go on forever. But it all ended rather suddenly.”