KBL (16 page)

There had been much skepticism in the hallways at Langley when Vince’s appointment was first announced. The instant verdict from CIA’s 42,389 full-time employees (augmented by 30,000-plus contractors), was that Vince Mercaldi was an APP—another professional politician—a spineless puppet who would do the White House’s bidding.

Two politicians had previously been appointed CIA directors. George Herbert Walker Bush, who would go on to be the nation’s forty-first president and after whom the CIA headquarters would later be named, had served as director for just under a year. Previously, Bush had been a congressman, run for the Senate unsuccessfully, and served as ambassador to the United Nations and chairman of the Republican Party. When he was selected as director of central intelligence by President Gerald Ford he was the head of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People’s Republic of China—in effect, our first ambassador there, although without the title.

Bush assumed his role as DCI on January 30, 1976. Five months later, Francis Melloy, the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, and his economic counselor, Robert Waring, were kidnapped by terrorists and subsequently murdered. DCI Bush was summoned to the White House, where he briefed President Ford and his national security team on the incident. But instead of remaining in the Situation Room, where he could have gotten hours of face time with the president, Bush asked to be excused. “I need to be back in our operations center at Langley with my troops,” the World War II Navy pilot told the president.

That act earned Bush the reputation of a man loyal to an agency that had suffered the loss of Vietnam and had been tarred by the stigma of Watergate. Bottom line: George H. W. Bush was well liked by most of the CIA rank and file.

The second politician was Congressman Porter J. Goss, a Florida Republican and former CIA case officer whose short tenure as DCI (September 2004 to April 2005) was judged a disaster. Goss was aloof and vindictive, and he wasn’t shy about bringing politics to the seventh-floor director’s suite. His acolytes, known as the Gosslings, were largely recruited from his congressional office and composed of Hill staffers and former Agency bureaucrats who settled old scores and drove many of CIA’s professionals into retirement. Goss was almost universally detested.

By the time the forty-fourth president sent Vince Mercaldi’s name up to the Senate for its advice and consent, the only politician-turned-CIA-director just about anyone still serving at CIA remembered was Goss. The corridor gossip at Langley, therefore, was not favorable to the former California congressman. Some of the more cynical wags in the clandestine service suggested that Call Me Vince should be treated like a mushroom: kept in the dark and fed lots of manure.

Yet Vince surprised everyone. He surprised the White House staff by being his own man and not knuckling under to the strongly partisan Chicago-style politics the rough-and-tumble political staff were used to conducting. He surprised the Department of Justice by fiercely defending his CIA constituents when the attorney general decided to mount a politically motivated witch hunt against those officers who conducted what was labeled enhanced interrogation techniques and waterboarding against captured enemy combatants. And he surprised his Langley skeptics by demonstrating loyalty down the CIA’s chain of command, a tectonic policy shift from most of his predecessors, who would—and did—sell out Langley’s worker bees at the hint of a crisis or embarrassment.

Indeed by the end of 2009, it was understood almost universally at Langley that if you were straight with Vince Mercaldi, he’d be straight with you. And he’d watch your back.

0748 Hours

“You saw this?” Vince held up a sheaf of newspaper clippings, the CIA’s version of the Pentagon’s Early Bird, a daily clip file containing all significant news stories about defense policy issues and the armed forces. CIA’s version, which was unnamed, dealt with stories on intelligence, terrorism, and world politics. Vince’s copy was folded back to a
USA Today
clip that quoted unnamed U.S. Embassy officials in Islamabad on the subject of Ty Weaver. Their anonymous quotes, most of which hinted that he was a rogue operator who didn’t enjoy diplomatic status, didn’t do him much good.

Stuart Kapos, the National Clandestine Service director, dropped into the armchair facing the director’s desk and spoke through pursed lips. “I did. What can I say, Vince? They’re assholes.”

“Ty’s wife, Patty, called Rich Erwin, the deputy at SAD, at five-thirty. She’d just received a call from some idiot reporter in Pakistan asking her to comment. Thank God she hung up on him. Rich called his boss, and John called me. John said Rich told him Patty was in tears, Stu. Tears. She has no idea what her husband is doing out there or why we haven’t gotten him out of jail. She knew he left with an official passport and had diplomatic immunity. Now all she knows is he’s in jail, and neither we nor the State Department is doing a goddamn thing to help the situation. I’m afraid she’ll miscarry again—John told me about last year—and then there’ll be all hell to pay.”

“Can Kate help us out here?” Secretary of State Katherine Semerad and Vince Mercaldi had known one another for years and had a first-rate working relationship, despite the fact that State—or more to the point, its USAID administrator—was screwing up Afghanistan by allowing the Chinese to steal just about all of that country’s valuable mineral assets, like copper and uranium, by shutting American firms out of the bidding process.

Diplomats. They didn’t have a clue. “You know how hard it is to rein in those goddamn cookie-pushers,” Vince said. “Leak, leak, leak. I swear, that’s what they do for a living.” He uttered a bitter cackle. “They certainly don’t spend much time defending American interests.”

The D/CIA continued: “I can talk to Kate—I will, too—but we both know there’s no way she’ll be able to put the cork in this.” He paused long enough to drop the clips on his desk. “The immediate problem here is Weaver’s wife. She’s frantic.”

“We can send someone over.”

“I thought we had.”

“We did—we do,” Kapos said. “But not on a daily basis.”

Mercaldi frowned. “Do some spade work. Talk to Rich Erwin at Special Activities. Find Ty’s friends—people he’s close to—and get them over to help Patty out. Certainly for the weekend. And starting next week twenty-four-seven if you have to.”

“Will do,” Stu said. He paused. “But can I be frank for a second, Boss?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why the big push on this? Ty knew the risks. And he’s an adult—he can handle it. I—”

“Hold it right there.” Vince cut him off. “There’s a lot at stake here. I don’t want anyone making the connection between Weaver and Abbottabad. Or Weaver and ISI. Or Weaver and the Asymmetric Warfare Group. Or, worst of all, between Weaver and the BLG, even though we’ve worked hard to keep him compartmented from anything to do with UBL. We know the Paks he killed were snatch-and-grab guys. They had stolen stuff on their bodies and illegal weapons. Even the bike was stolen. But they still had ties to ISI. So it’s a can of worms. Which is why everybody’s focused on Ty’s diplomatic status and the killings, right?”

Kapos nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, like it or not, and no matter how tough it is on Ty, that’s where the story has to stay.”

The director looked over at Kapos. “Look, Stu, the media is smart. The Paks are smart. For chrissakes, Bin Laden is smart. Every one of them can put two and two together. I don’t want anybody getting anywhere near two.”

“Understood.”

“Then you understand one way to do that is to keep the Weaver family on our side. I don’t want Patty giving tearful sidewalk interviews to Channel 7,
Oh, they sent him out with a diplomatic passport but they asked him not to use it because he was on some sort of secret mission but CIA won’t tell me anything
. How do we ensure she won’t give that interview? We don’t just
tell
her we’re doing everything we can, we
do
everything we can. We make sure she sees that we are doing everything we can. We support her. We make sure she is comfortable. And informed.”

“And all those leaks from State?”

“Don’t you have any contacts in the press after all these years?” Vince gave Kapos a sly smile. “You could pass on a few words to the . . . wise.”

Kapos grinned. “I could.”

“Then do it. SECSTATE is with us on this. But the professional diplomats at Main State and Islamabad and Lahore think they know better. So make them look like the striped-pants, heel-rocking, change-jingling, equivocating, namby-pamby, mush-mouthed assholes they are. On deepest background, of course.”

Vince’s expression grew serious. “Look, Stu, when our people visit Ty under consular cover, they’ve got to be able to give him positive messages from Patty. I want him to know we’re doing our damnedest. And I want folks like Charlie Becker to know that, too. And the others. Like the folks you’ve got hunkered down at Valhalla Base. And Bagram. And Jalalabad.”

The director tossed the bundle of news clippings across the table. “This isn’t about Ty Weaver. Or Patty Weaver. Or what the goddamn media print. You and I, and Dick Hallett, and Spike, and everybody at BLG, we have to keep our eyes on the prize. Everything we do, everything we say, every action, every reaction, has significance. We have to think about
everything
. Look at everything holographically. Why? So nothing caroms around the table and comes back to bite us on the ass. We have to stay focused. Consider all the angles, all the subtleties, all the crazy intangibles. This is all about the bigger thing, Stu. The Abbottabad thing. It’s about getting our hands around the throat of that rotten murdering sonofabitch we’ve been chasing for ten goddamn years. And putting him in the ground.

“UBL. That’s why Charlie’s out there risking his life. And the people we have at Valhalla Base, and Doctor Afridi who tried to get DNA for us. And all the others, too—including all those who don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. People like Ty Weaver. And the other Whiskey Trio team we used as diversions. And all those SEALs and Delta shooters and helicopter pilots Wes Bolin has in training. We’re doing this for a goddamn reason. It isn’t because we’re going to end terrorism once and for all, or make al-Qaeda or any of its franchises disappear. It’s not about bringing democracy to totalitarian regimes, or making the world a better place, or singing ‘Kumbaya.’ And it isn’t about politics or personalities. Not about me, or Secretary Hansen, or Secretary Semerad, or the president even. It’s all about KBL—Kill Bin Laden. Put him in the ground because that’s where he deserves to be, full stop, end of story. This is about KBL. That’s what you and Wes Bolin and I have to stay focused on. That one goal. KBL, and bringing everybody home alive.”

He peered over his aviators at the NCS director. “I mean, that
is
the goal, right?”

Kapos sat silent. Stunned. In almost three decades at CIA he’d never heard a director express himself with such passion for the mission and loyalty to the people who were putting their lives on the line to achieve it. Finally, he thought, someone who doesn’t consider us chess pieces. Or political pawns. This man
gets it
.

At that instant Call Me Vince reminded Kapos of his football coach at the Naval Academy. Now, he realized in an epiphany, he was lucky enough to have known two leaders for whom he would willingly run through walls. And one of them was a fricking fourteen-karat certified Washington insider. A pol. Who woulda thunk it.

He stood and tossed his boss an offhanded salute. “Aye-aye, sir.”

Vince cracked a smile. “You wouldn’t be spelling that ‘c-u-r,’ would you now, Stu?”

“No way, Boss. I save that for the diplomats.”

“Then get the hell outta here. You have your sailing orders. Go make the diplomats unhappy. I’ll do the same for the Pakistanis.”

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