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Authors: David Ignatius

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Now Harry Meeker needed a girlfriend. She should be pretty; sexy, even. Everybody had seen James Bond movies, including jihadis, and people would just assume that a real American spy must be banging a hot chick. Hoffman wanted a picture of a blonde with big tits in a bikini, but Azhar said that would be too obvious, the Pamela Anderson thing. They should make her sexy, but someone who could work for the agency, too. Ferris had a clever stroke: The girlfriend should be African-American. That was just unlikely enough to be totally believable. Hoffman suggested his secretary--a cocoa-skinned beauty with a dazzling smile. He asked if she would mind posing for a picture in a low-cut blouse. Her name was Denise, which seemed about right, so when the picture was developed Hoffman asked her to write on the back, "I love you, baby. Denise," with a little heart.

Ferris wondered about a love letter, but decided that would seem phony. People didn't write love letters anymore; they sent e-mails. Harry Meeker wasn't going to be carrying a computer, but Azhar suggested text messages on Meeker's cell phone, and that seemed perfect. They sent two from "Denise's" phone. One just said, "sweet sugar." The other said, "baby come back. i miss u 2 much. xxoo. dee." Sexy, not slutty. Hoffman said Harry should have a condom in his wallet, to suggest that maybe he was getting a little on the side while he was away from home.

The cell phone was a challenge. Azhar programmed Denise's number and the headquarters number at USAID, and then added a
number for an imaginary other girlfriend he called "Sheila," and one for an imaginary friend, "Rusty," whose number was actually Azhar's home phone. To throw in some raw meat, Azhar called the Meeker cell phone from several different extensions at CIA, with the recognizable 482 prefix. He put some other teasers into "Received Calls" and "Dialed Numbers"--a couple of restaurants in McLean near agency Headquarters, several Pentagon numbers, one from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, another from the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi. Everyone's cell phone is a digital record of his life. You wouldn't have to spend much time with Harry Meeker's phone to suspect that this man was leading a secret existence.

They dressed the corpse one day in late fall in a cold room Hoffman had built specially for the purpose under the CIA's North Parking Lot. Harry's skin was yellowing ivory, the color of a fading neon light, ice-cold to the touch. The hair was a little shaggy, so they trimmed it almost to the scalp to give him a Bruce Willis look. Harry lay naked on the gurney, undescended testicle and all.

"Jesus, put some fucking clothes on this guy," said Hoffman. He suggested briefs, but Azhar cocked his head and said, "I think not," so they found a pair of well-washed boxers and pulled them up around his waist. They pondered for a minute whether Harry would wear an undershirt, and decided no, too prissy. Putting on the shirt and trousers was easy, but the shoes were difficult: The feet were rigid from death and the cold, and they didn't bend at the toes or ankles. Hoffman sent a secretary out to buy a portable hair dryer, which he used to warm the feet just enough to make them pliable.

Finally, they added the pocket litter--the little bits of paper in the pockets and the wallet that would make Harry Meeker convincing or give him away. They had a charge slip from Afghan Alley, a restaurant in McLean frequented by CIA officers on their lunch break, charged to Meeker's Visa card. Hoffman added a second charge from the agency's favorite expense account restaurant, Kinkead's Colvin Run Tavern in Tyson's Corner--nearly $200 for dinner for two. Maybe Harry was getting serious about Denise.
Ferris supplied the card of a jewelry store in Fairfax, with the handwritten notation, "2 carat--$5,000???" Harry was thinking about getting engaged, but worried about the money. Azhar suggested a receipt for dry cleaning at Park's Fabric Care in the McLean shopping center. People always forgot to pick up their laundry before going on a trip. And a receipt from the Exxon station on Route 123, just before the entrance to Headquarters. That was a nice touch. So was the coupon for a free car wash at a gas station in Alexandria, near Harry's apartment.

Hoffman wanted to give Harry an iPod, and they debated what sort of music their imaginary case officer would like. But then Azhar had a brainstorm--they shouldn't download music onto the iPod, but an Arabic language course. Whoever found the body would spend hours puzzling over the phrases--wondering if they were a secret code--and then realize it was just a language lab for spoken Arabic training. That was precisely what an ambitious, self-improving case officer would be carrying with him--so earnestly, annoyingly American. Hoffman had an old ticket stub from a Washington Redskins playoff game, and he put that in one of the jacket pockets, too.

They would add the finishing touches later: the documents Harry Meeker would be carrying to his contact in Al Qaeda; the photos and cables that would explode like virtual time bombs as they made their way up the network--the evidence that the enemy's cells had been turned and betrayed. What they were constructing with such care was a poison pill, one wrapped so believably and tantalizingly that the enemy would swallow it. The poison pill was Harry Meeker, and he could burst every node and capillary in the body of the enemy. But first, they had to swallow the lie.

1

BERLIN

F
OUR DAYS AFTER THE
car bomb exploded in Milan, Roger Ferris traveled to Berlin with the chief of Jordanian intelligence, Hani Salaam. The message traffic back at Amman station was a digital blizzard, with the seventh floor screaming for anything on the Milan bombers that the director could take to the president. But they were always screaming about something at Headquarters, and Ferris thought the trip with Hani was more important. In this instance, Ferris turned out to be right.

Ferris had heard stories about the prowess of the Jordanian intelligence service. CIA officers called them "the Hearts," partly because of their cryptonym, QM HEART, and partly because it fit their style of operations. But it wasn't until the Berlin trip that Ferris really saw the Hearts in action. The pitch wasn't anything very fancy. The setup had taken months of planning, but in the moment of time in which it played out, the operation was simplicity itself. It was a question that had only one answer. Ferris didn't give much thought then to the complexity that lay beyond his vision: the maze that was so perfectly constructed you didn't think to ask whether it was perhaps inside a larger maze; the exit path that was so brightly lit that you didn't think to wonder whether it was really an entrance to something else.

They made their way to an apartment building in the eastern suburbs of Berlin, a district that had been mauled by the Red Army in 1945 and never fully recovered. A pale October sun gave a faint metallic wash to the clouds, and the cityscape was the color of dirt: mud-brown plaster on the walls, oily puddles that filled the potholes on the street; a rusted old Trabant parked along the curb. Down the street, some Turkish boys were kicking a soccer ball, and there was traffic noise from the Jakobstrasse a block away, but otherwise it was quiet. Ahead was a grim block of flats built decades ago for workers in the nearby factory; they were now urban ruins inhabited by immigrants and squatters and a few aging Germans who were too dazed or demoralized to move. The smells coming from the few open windows weren't of cabbage or schnitzel but garlic and cheap olive oil.

Ferris was just under six feet, with bristly black hair and soft features. His mouth fell into an easy smile, and there was a sparkle in his eyes that made him appear interested even when he wasn't. His most obvious flaw was a limp, which was the result of an RPG that had been fired at his car on a road north of Balad in Iraq six months before. Ferris had been lucky; his leg had been raked with shrapnel, but he had survived; the Iraqi agent driving the car had died. They say that good intelligence officers are gray men, the people whose faces you forget in a crowded room. By that measure, Ferris was in the wrong profession. He was hungry and impatient, and looking for something he didn't yet have.

Ferris followed behind Hani and his assistant, Marwan. They stepped carefully around the trash overflowing the dumpster in the alleyway and made their way toward the back door. The wall was smeared with fat block letters of graffiti, written in a mix of German and Turkish. The word next to the door looked like "Allah." Or maybe it was "Abba," the Swedish rock group. Hani put his finger to his lips and pointed to the windows on the third floor. Through the stained brown curtains, you could see lights. The target was home, but that was no surprise. Hani's men had been watching the place for several months, and they didn't make mistakes.

 

H
ANI
S
ALAAM
was a sleek, elegantly dressed Jordanian. His hair was a lustrous black, too black for a man in his late fifties, but the mottled gray in his moustache gave his age away. He was the chief of the General Intelligence Department, as Jordan's intelligence service was known. He was a commanding, well-spoken man, and people usually addressed him by the Ottoman honorific "Hani Pasha," which they pronounced with a "B" sound so that it came out "Basha." Ferris had found him intimidating at first, but after a few weeks, he began to think of him as an Arab version of the lounge singer Dean Martin. Hani Salaam was cool, from the glistening polish of his shoes to the smoky lenses of his sunglasses. Like most successful men of the East, he had a reserved, almost diffident demeanor. His smooth manners could seem British at first, a remnant of the semester he had spent at Sandhurst long ago. But the bedrock of his character was the generous but secretive spirit of a Bedouin tribal leader. He was the sort of man who never told you everything he knew.

Hani had joked once, when he was giving Ferris his first tour of the GID in Amman, that Jordanians were so scared of him they referred to his headquarters as the Fingernail Factory. "You know, these people are very foolish," he had said with a dismissive wave of his hand. Of course he didn't allow his men to rip people's fingernails out. It didn't work; the prisoners said anything to make the pain stop. Hani didn't mind that people thought him cruel, but he hated the idea they would think him inefficient. Hani explained to Ferris at that first meeting that when he had a new Al Qaeda prisoner, he would keep the young man awake for a few days in the interrogation room the Jordanians called "the blue hotel," and then show him a picture of one of his parents or a sibling. Often that was enough. The family can do what a thousand blows from the prison guard cannot, Hani had confided. They undermine the will to die and reinforce the will to live.

People back at Langley always described Hani as a "pro." There was something condescending in that, like white people describing a well-spoken black man as "articulate." But the plaudits for Hani masked the fact that the agency had come to depend on him more than it should. As acting chief of station, Ferris was supposed to establish rapport with the head of the liaison service. So when Dean Martin himself had personally invited him two days earlier to join an operation in Germany, it was a big deal. The paper pushers in the Near East Division had objected that he should stay at his desk and answer cables about the Milan bombing. But Ed Hoffman, the division chief, had intervened. "They're idiots," he said of the subordinates who had tried to block Ferris's trip. He told Ferris to call him when the operation was over.

 

T
HE
J
ORDANIAN
eased open the back door and waved Ferris and Marwan forward. The passageway was dark; the walls smelled of mildew. Creeping on the toes of his Jermyn Street loafers, Hani ascended the concrete stairs. The only sound was the smoker's wheeze of his lungs. Marwan went next. He looked like a street tough who had been cleaned up for Ferris's benefit. He had a scar on his right cheek next to his eye, and his body was as lean and hard as a desert dog's. Ferris followed; the limp was almost imperceptible even though his leg still hurt.

Marwan was carrying an automatic pistol, its outlines visible under his jacket. As they climbed the stairs, he took the pistol out of its holster and cradled it in his hand. The three stayed close, moving in unison. Hani froze when he heard a door opening on the floor above. He motioned to Marwan, who nodded and steadied the gun against his leg. But it was just an old German woman heading out with her cart to go shopping. She passed the three men on the stairs without looking at them.

Hani continued up the stairs. All he had told Ferris back in Amman was that he had been preparing the operation for many months. "Come and watch me pull the trigger," he had said. Ferris didn't know if Hani and Marwan were actually going to shoot someone. That would be illegal, technically, but Headquarters wouldn't mind if he wrote the report the right way. They weren't so fussy about that kind of thing anymore. America was at war. In wartime, the rules are different. Or at least that was what Hoffman was always telling him.

The Jordanian motioned for them to stop when he reached the third floor. He took a cell phone from his pocket, put it to his ear and whispered something in Arabic. Then he nodded for them, and the three crept toward the door of the apartment marked "36." Hani knew that Mustafa Karami would be there that afternoon. Indeed, he knew nearly everything about him--his job, his habits, his school friends when he was a boy in Zarqa, his family back in Amman. He knew what mosque he prayed at in Berlin, what cell phone numbers he used, what
hawala
wired him funds from Dubai. Most of all, he knew when Mustafa Karami had gone to Afghanistan, when he had joined Al Qaeda, who trusted him in the organization and who communicated with him. Hani had gone to school on him, so to speak, and now it was graduation time.

Marwan raised his pistol as Hani approached the door. Ferris remained in the shadows a few yards back. He had his own pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat and now put his right hand on the pebbled metal butt. Upstairs, in another apartment, he heard the faint jangle of Arab music. Hani raised his hand to signal that he was ready. He knocked once loudly on the door, waited a moment and then rapped again.

BOOK: Body of Lies
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