See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (18 page)

Weird as it might sound, the Jacques and Becky story was symptomatic of where the CIA was heading. When we weren’t choking on political correctness, we were hamstrung by our own new laissez-faire, anything-goes attitude.

In Paris, we once came across fragmentary evidence of a secret Iranian intelligence station located off the Avenue de la Grande Armee. I proposed going after it, but Paris’s young case officers, many of whom had never run a serious operation, just laughed. There was no conclusive proof the station really existed, they said; hence, we shouldn’t bother. I was stunned. Two years earlier, Iranian operatives had been setting off bombs all over Paris and killing our diplomats and agents. It was worth the candle.

Undeterred (okay, pissed off), I found a French government telephone technician who agreed to install a tap on the suspected Iranian station’s telephone. A couple months of eavesdropping, I figured, and we could tell whether we needed a full-court press. The PTT tech failed his polygraph, but who cared, I argued. If it turned out the tech was working for the French, we would simply say that since they hadn’t been doing their job policing Iranian terrorists, we had to do it on our own. The European Division was aghast. I was ordered to jettison the PTT tech immediately and forget the clandestine Iranian station.

Another, better opportunity soon came along. In November 1990, we discovered that France was secretly hosting three Abu Nidal students in Besancon. The French government paid for everything - tuition, food, lodging, apparently on the theory that it was better to have Abu Nidal inside the tent pissing out than the other way around. When I proposed going after them, or at the very least tapping their telephone, I was looked at as if I were deranged. ‘State will never let it happen’ was the response.

To be sure, Paris went through the motions of spying, but it was only for appearances’ sake. Case officers met their agents and wrote reports, but the information was poorly sourced, irrelevant, and often already public. A few case officers trolled receptions, but the only thing they really wanted to do was meet official contacts. No one was going to throw you out of a country for cooperating with a friendly government, and you were home by dinner.

Paris case officers spent most of their time fighting over housing, attending training seminars and rambling meetings in the secure ‘bubble,’ writing long-term perspectives, and whatever else occupies a government bureaucracy in mid-age. On Saturday morning most everyone in Paris drove up to the US base in Mons, Belgium, to shop at the PX.

And then there was the language problem. The older officers spoke good French; the younger ones didn’t. French agents, like their countrymen, hate slowing down for someone who can’t bother to learn the language properly. French snobbery was another barrier: Hush Puppies, Brooks Brothers trench coats, and neon fanny packs offended the host sensibilities. Paris’s case officers were frozen out of French society. All they could do at night was watch videos.

Something else I noticed: As the DO went into decline, satellites, not agents, became the touchstone of truth in Washington. Few things are more satisfying for a policymaker than to hold in his hand a clean, glossy black-and-white satellite photo, examine it with his very own 3D viewer, and decide for himself what it means. Not only could he do without analysts, he could do without agents, too. And thank goodness. Agents were messy. They sometimes got things wrong, even occasionally lied. And they definitely had the potential to cause ugly diplomatic incidents.

As a fatal malaise settled over the CIA, case officers began resigning in droves, and some of the best left first. In Paris - beautiful, bewitching Paris - the attrition rate was running about 30 percent. Convinced by all the outward signs that spying was no longer a serious profession for serious people, they went home to find a job in investment banking or any other profession America took seriously.

If I had stayed in Paris much longer, I would have ended up resigning, too. I needed to go someplace the CIA still operated like it used to.

I stuck the handset of the STU-III, a secure telephone, out the window of what passed for a CIA XXXXXXX the headquarters duty officer could hear the battle going on outside.

‘Listen to it,’ I hollered just as a tank in the street behind the Oktoberskaya Hotel fired a round from its main gun. A long burp from a heavy machine gun and a couple of explosions followed in quick succession. Only a stone’s throw away from the hotel, Dushanbe’s main mosque kept belting out the same Koranic sura over its PA system. Every once in a while someone would break in and scream,’ La Allah illa Allah’ - there is no God but God.

I had been up for most of the last forty-eight hours, and fatigue was setting in. It didn’t help that I’d been on the road the entire week before, including five days waiting in Kiev for a flight to Dushanbe that didn’t exist. Every morning I went to the airport expecting to board the Dushanbe plane, which was advertised to leave on time. Every day the plane never left. Finally, on the fifth morning the airport manager took pity on me, pulled me aside, and spilled the state secret that the Kiev to Dushanbe flight had stopped flying six months before. ‘No airplanes, no gas,’ he said, shaking his head sadly. I made a mental note to tell the clowns back in the travel section to stop booking people on the Kiev to Dushanbe flight. I wasn’t even going to think about why Aeroflot let me check in every day, but I was starting to get an inkling why the Soviet Union had collapsed.

Without a Russian visa, I was forced to backtrack to Frankfurt, where I slept a few hours in a chair at the Rhein-Mein Air Base, then rode into Dushanbe on top of a cargo palette in the back of a freezing US Air Force C-141 Starlifter. The pilot came in low, below the twenty-five-thousand-foot peaks that cover nearly all of Tajikistan - the same mountains that so awed Alexander the Great that he turned south and marched east through Afghanistan rather than try to cross them.

There followed two long nights drinking vodka with a couple of Tajiks. My second day on the ground, I caught a bad cold. The only thing that could have awakened me at 6:09 on the morning of the third day did - the throaty growl of a ZSU-23 antiaircraft gun firing outside my window. At first I couldn’t remember where I was, but when you think you’re taking incoming fire, it doesn’t really matter. My inclination was to take cover in the bathtub, except there wasn’t one. Someone seemed to have stolen it, maybe while I slept. Only then did I fully remember where I was - Tajikistan: the remotest, poorest, most isolated republic in the former Soviet Union. The edge of the crumbling periphery.

Lying in bed as I listened to the gunfire, I wondered what exactly I’d gotten myself into this time. After Paris, I had been assigned to Rabat, Morocco, for a three-year tour. With its big houses, mild climate, clay tennis courts, and emerald-green golf courses, Rabat was a plum post. There was even skiing in the Atlas Mountains outside of Marrakech. I’d had a good job, too - deputy chief of XXXXXXX the management track. Three years in Rabat, and I could take full command of a midsize XXXXXXXXX the next time around.

The fact is, though, that I was bored. The war in the western-Sahara was over. Worse, everything important in Morocco went on inside the royal family, and the only figure of any significance inside that closed circle was King Hassan II, a man who kept his own counsel. When Hassan II wanted access in Washington, he went through a K Street lobbyist, not the CIA. Essentially, we didn’t know what was going on in Morocco until we read it in the newspapers.

That left the Soviet target, but in early 1992, Uncle Milty, my old Khartoum boss and now chief of the Central-Eurasian Division, informed Rabat that Russia would henceforth be treated like Germany, France, Italy or any other friendly country. The cold war was over. Period. As for our old nemesis the KGB, we could just take it off our target list. If the KGB rezident in Rabat were to walk in and volunteer to tell us everything he knew, we weren’t authorized to give him even a nickel to catch a bus back to his embassy. None of this squared, of course, with the subsequent arrest of dozens of Russian spies, from Rick Ames to Robert Hannsen. To give another example, it meant the CIA had to turn away Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who then volunteered to British intelligence and provided information that led to the identification of dozens of spies, including a US colonel. You figure the logic in that.

The bottom line: If Rabat were to turn out the lights and close up, it would be a long time before anyone noticed. I wanted back in the action, and Tajikistan seemed to be the ticket. It was a country in the throes of an Islamic revolution, and it looked as if Islamic fundamentalism might spread from there to the rest of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea, maybe even up into Russia. Stingers and heroin were coming north across the border from Afghanistan, and all sorts of sophisticated weapons were going back the other way, mainly to Iran. The place seemed to offer everything: terrorism, drugs, and nuclear-weapons, the three demons the CIA could still use to justify its budget. Besides, my other career choices - a resume-building desk job back in Langley or maybe, if I could dress myself up well enough, a staff position with one of the congressional intelligence committees - were seeming less and less like any me I wanted to be. If Tajikistan couldn’t hold my interest, I figured, no country could. When I went back to Washington to volunteer, I was all but handcuffed to make sure I wouldn’t get away. The ranks of adventurers in the CIA were thinning fast.

There was something to take care of first, though. I’ve been tight-lipped, I realize, about personal matters. The CIA doesn’t encourage a lot of openness where family is concerned, and I’ve had plenty of reason not to advertise the fine details of my life. Suffice it to say that I got married while working in a Middle East capital I’m not allowed to mention I ever lived in, to a woman I’m now divorced from. In the balmy days of our marriage, though, my wife and I brought three children into the world. When I was working in Beirut, my family lived at first in Cyprus but moved to Belgium when a couple of Libyan thugs started following me. This time around, I wanted to make sure they had a more permanent address, so before I started out for Dushanbe, my wife and I bought a postage-stamp-size vineyard on Burgundy’s Cote d’Or in France. On it was a charming, dilapidated farmhouse that sat on the side of the hill, in the middle of the vines, with a sweeping view of the Saone Valley. The property caught my eye as I was driving back from an agent meeting. I didn’t even know it was for sale until I saw it advertised in the next village. The same afternoon I called my lawyer in Paris to make the owner an offer. I figured it would be the perfect rear base to stash my family while I was on the frontier, serving in the armies of civilization.

The headquarters duty officer back in Washington whistled in appreciation as he listened to the fighting going on around us. When I got back on the telephone, I told him State was bringing in an evacuation flight to take everyone out, including the CIA. Problem was, I still had to call McDill Air Force Base to ask for the C-141.

‘Dushanbe? Never heard of it,’ the duty officer at McDill said. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

I read off Dushanbe’s eight-digit coordinates from an air chart. When he found Dushanbe, he laughed.’ You assholes really are out in the middle of nowhere.’

‘About our plane?’

‘When the money’s in the bank, you’ll get your plane,’ he said as he hung up.

The standing agreement between State and the air force was that an evacuation plane was paid for in advance. The air force must have been stiffed in the past.

Assuming his masters would pony up, Stan Escudero, the ambassador - who by then had a pistol strapped to his side - deputized me to round up the Americans and bring them to the embassy. It wasn’t going to be easy. The fighting hadn’t let up; worse, we didn’t know where all the Americans were. By the end of the day, though, we had managed to let most of them know they were to assemble the following morning at the Tajikistan Hotel. Luggage would be limited to one carry-on bag each.

To transport everyone to the airport, the ambassador borrowed three BTR-80 armored personnel carriers and their crews from the 201st Motorized Rifle Division, a Russian regular army unit that stayed on after Tajikistan got its independence in 1991. Lowering myself into the hatch of the first BTR, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Ten years before.

I would have paid an agent a lot of money for the plans to one of those things. Now I had one of my own.

The BTR driver didn’t pay much attention to the rules of the road. He drove down sidewalks, rammed a couple of cars, and knocked down at least two iron fences before driving right up the stairs in front of the Tajikistan Hotel. I must have been a sight, nursing a hangover and disheveled, as I stood talking on a Motorola radio in the BTR’s turret like I was Rommel in the Libyan Desert.

The Americans and about fifty other foreigners were waiting in the Tajikistan Hotel’s dark, dreary lobby.

‘I’m from the US government, and I’m here to help you,’ I started. I admit it wasn’t very funny, but it was the best I could do at the moment. There wasn’t a smile in the whole lot.

‘I’ve got good news. A plane is on its way here to evacuate us. You’re all welcome to leave on it, including citizens of the European Community.’

Before I could finish, they started arguing with one another whether to stick it out or leave.

‘Listen up,’ I interrupted.’ I also have some bad news. Before we let you on the plane, you will have to agree to reimburse the US government up to $10, 000 to defray the cost of the airplane.’ In fact, it was State regulation that civilians had to pay for a seat on an evacuation flight. In practice, though, State rarely billed anyone, as I tried to reassure them.

Several Iranian diplomats in the crowd seemed to miss this last nuance. They eagerly took notes and kept asking me for my name. I finally threw them a scrap. ‘Mr. Bob,’ I said. That night Tehran Radio broke in with a news flash that a Mr. Bob was selling tickets to poor, stranded refugees in Tajikistan, making an obscene profit. My image in the press wouldn’t improve in the years ahead.

We spent the rest of the day closing up. I’d received permission to go into a ‘phase three burnout,’ which meant everything was destroyed, from documents to the computer hard drives.

Right before destroying our crypto, I called the CIA’s operations center to let it know we were going off the air. ‘This is Dushanbe. We’re going tactical,’ I said, trying to make a joke of it. The young lady with the honey voice on the other end of the line didn’t get it. Like the guy at McDill, she probably didn’t know where Dushanbe was. Just then there was a crescendo of tank fire down the street. It sounded like the siege of Stalingrad. And then, right on cue, Jim Morrison’s voice filled the air. Wed been playing and replaying our five office CDs all morning to drown out the mosque. Now Morrison seemed to be telling Dushanbe’s story: This is the end, my only friend, the end. The woman at the operations center at least knew who Jim Morrison was. I heard later she sent a recording of our conversation to Tom Twetten, the director of operations.

We made it out safely, the ex-communists recaptured Dushanbe back from the fundamentalists, and we were able to open again for business in January 1993.

I reclaimed our rooms on the third floor of the Octoberskaya Hotel, but in our absence the Russian embassy had opened down the hall from us. We had to pass through its hallway to get in and out, which meant that the CIA’s office in Dushanbe was located inside the Russian embassy. I bet Uncle Milty never imagined that when he decided Russia was a friendly country, but it worked out fine. I got along with the Russians, including the KGB rezident, who would come down to our offices late at night and pound on the door looking for a bottle of Scotch.

Truth is, the only real game in town was the Russians. The 201st Division was the thin khaki line holding back a wave of Islamic fundamentalism that threatened to sweep across the southern tier of the former Soviet Union. We were reminded of it every few weeks. Each time the fundamentalists tried to mount an attack on Dushanbe, you could hear the tanks at the 201st’s cantonment start up their engines and head out into the mountains, the clattering of their treads echoing all over Dushanbe. From time to time you could see Russian bombers from Mery, Turkmenistan, pass over Dushanbe on their way to attack rebel positions in the mountains.

To me, it was clear that we needed a Russian source to tell us what the Russians were doing. Washington, for example, would need to know in a hurry if the Russians suddenly decided to pull back and leave Tajikistan to Islam. The Russians, though, had apparently never received Uncle Milty’s ukase that we were all friends. There was nothing they could do about the CIA office located in their embassy - we’d paid our rent a year in advance - but Russians were required to report all contact with Americans, especially with me, the CIA chief. And one report usually meant the end of the contact.

To find a way inside the friendly enemy camp, I took up skiing again. Russians love mountains just like Indian military officers love hunting. The conditions were primitive, a single rope tow. If you wanted a long run, you climbed a glacier. But I quickly became friends with several Russian skiers, and soon we were heading off almost every weekend to a pass with year-round snow.

It wasn’t long before the ploy paid off. In March I met Colonel Yuri Abramov, a Russian paratrooper assigned to Tajik paratroopers. Yuri was a world-famous jumper, holder of something like forty-nine international records. One night he invited me over to his apartment in Dushanbe. Out came the vodka, and the last thing I remember before taking a nap on Yuri’s couch was a toast to our mothers.

Early the next morning Yuri shook me awake: ‘We’re going now.’ I didn’t bother to ask where. It was still dark. An hour in a lumbering UAZ, a Russian military jeep, and we arrived at a military base in the mountains south of Dushanbe, about a five-minute flight from the Afghan border. In the middle of the sloped grass field was an ancient AN-2 biplane. Without saying a word, Yuri jumped out of the jeep, grabbed a parachute lying on the ground, and handed it to me. ‘Here, put it on.’ It was only then I remembered telling Yuri the night before that I had once parachuted.