The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (12 page)

The ambassador squirmed uncomfortably in his chair and stood up.

“Criticism of Pakistan’s nuclear program is probably the sorest point of dialogue with the United States,” the ambassador said. “They feel threatened by India and they allege we invariably take India’s side, including giving a wink and a nod to India’s nuclear program while raking Pakistan over the coals for the ‘Islamic bomb’.”

“I didn’t say it would be easy,” Wheatley said.

“It’s almost a non-starter, especially now, just weeks after we shoved their nose into the OBL thing. Even the most pro-American Pakistani politician is mad at me.”

“But this doesn’t involve any Pakistani bomb,” Wheatley said defensively. “Mahmood made a special effort to tell Mortie Feldman that it wasn’t one of theirs.”

“Well, I think this is one you better pursue on your own. I am still in full damage-control mode because of OBL, which was basically a CIA operation...”

Approved by the White House,” Wheatley said gently.

“Nonetheless—you’ve already demonstrated that you have a kind of relationship with Mahmood. He agreed to see you when Pasha wouldn’t. He had a tour of duty at Maxwell AFB in Alabama, so we know there is some empathy for our point of view. Before I get involved, you should have another crack at him. Then we’ll reconvene and see where things stand.”

Wheatley took out a pack of 3” by 5” index cards on which he had written notes about his meeting with Brigadier Mahmood.

“OK, I’ll take another crack at him,” Wheatley said. “But I want to run something by you: Mahmood told me that an ISI employee, if only a lowly carpool driver from Peshawar, was involved in the kidnapping.”

“That’s what you told me this morning,” the ambassador said blandly.

“Put yourself in their shoes for a minute,” Wheatley said. “Can you imagine, if a CIA employee or someone at State, no matter how low in the food chain, were involved in the kidnapping of a foreign spy chief, that we would tell
anyone
in a foreign intelligence service of that fact? No way! We’d keep it under wraps for as long as possible, and yet Mahmood just came right out with it. It’s been bothering me all day.”

“Look, Olof, you’re the intelligence guy. I’m pretty old school myself. I still believe that gentlemen ought not to read each other’s mail.”

“I’m prepared to believe that ISI was involved in kidnapping Mort Feldman, but I’m not prepared to believe that they would willingly admit that fact to me. Unless there is something going on here that we’re missing, something terrifically important.”

The Pat Tillman USO Center at Bagram Air Base was named for the 27-year-old Army Ranger and former Arizona State linebacker and NFL pro footballer who was killed in Afghanistan by friendly fire in 2003. His football jersey hangs in a display case there (Arizona Cardinals, Number 40, retired). The Tillman Center is the only part of Bagram that has Wi-Fi, and since military personnel are restricted from using government equipment for surfing the web, Tillman is always crowded with off-duty base people using laptops. The Wi-Fi system is glacial.

Kate Langley keyboarded a few brief messages to friends and family back home on her personal laptop and then turned it off, taking in the chaotic scene around her. She was exhausted by the sixteen hours she had spent in the cargo hold, with sixty Air Force grunts, of the C-17 Globemaster that had carried her from Andrews AFB, with refueling stopovers at Ramstein and Doha, to Afghanistan.

And yet, despite her jet lag and fatigue, she felt comfortable back in her khaki slacks and jacket, loose-fitting clothes she had not worn since her departure from Islamabad six weeks earlier. It was good to be back in the field, even in this replica of a small Midwestern town set a mile above sea level in the dusty Shomali Plateau north of Kabul, an American mini-metropolis complete with Weber grills, hot dogs, a Burger King, traffic jams, USA-style street signs, and its own talk-jock radio station. All that was missing was beer, prohibited for deployed military at Bagram.

Kate had the run of the base, including special access to two areas most visitors never saw—Bagram Detention Center, a small supermax prison protected by razor wire fencing and a nine-foot wall that was known as ‘Gitmo East,’ and the secure area reserved for the Special Operations Forces, which included a pod of offices for CIA.

An Agency staffer in the Special Ops center, Keven Smyth, had greeted her when her giant plane had taxied to a stop behind a reinforced revetment after landing on Bagram’s new 11,500-foot runway, but he soon excused himself to deal with his emergency-of-the-day. This involved reporting back to Washington on a two-day siege in Kabul that had killed 75 Afghans, blown up two government ministries, and paralyzed the American Embassy’s telecom equipment with rocket-propelled grenades. The Pakistani Haqqani network was thought responsible for the attack, he told her.

It was odd how the Pak-Afghan border served as a kind of force-multiplier for terrorists. The Pakistani groups tended to sow mayhem in Afghanistan, and the Afghan-based groups usually attacked mainly in Pakistan. They knew full well that the border was more porous to terrorists than it was to either government, or to the United States, which was regarded with suspicion by all.

Kate told Smyth to check back with her when he had filed his reports, which probably meant she would not see him until morning. Meanwhile, she unpacked her single duffel in a one-room unit assigned to her in a renovated concrete two-storey barracks refurbished from the Soviet era, tried unsuccessfully to take a nap, and then wandered about the base, eventually winding up in the Tillman rec center.

Kate felt strangely unnerved by Bagram, whether because of the thin air or because of the surreal quality of the mountainous vistas—giant murals of distant snowy peaks that seemed painted on the sky—she could not tell at first. It was only when she was writing a note to her mother in California announcing her safe arrival that she recognized that the air base brought back mixed memories of her childhood migration through the series of Army bases that had constituted her father’s career ladder. He wound up at retirement as a one-star at the Pentagon, a very successful career, and she started her working life in another sort of quasi-military bureaucracy. Bagram made her realize how rootless she really was. No U.S. military base was ever really home to anyone. Transition to the Central Intelligence Agency had been easy. So many CIA employees had grown up as Army or Navy brats.

***

“Do you know where the term ‘money laundering’ comes from?”

Keven Smyth, the young CIA agent who had welcomed Kate to Bagram the previous day was pushing a spare desk next to his so that they could share a computer for the few days she was on TDY in the Special Ops center. Smyth looked the ex-Navy SEAL that he was—granite-jawed, a neck thicker than Kate’s thigh, 200 pounds of toned muscle in a 5 foot 11 inch body. Like many big men, he spoke in a soft voice. Kate had to concentrate to hear him.

“Actually, my best friend in Washington works at Treasury,” Kate said, “and she told me it traces back to Al Capone, who owned a string of coin-operated launderettes in Cicero, Illinois. When the Feds got him on tax evasion, they demonstrated that those machines would have had to operate 100 hours a day to generate the cashflow they were allegedly bringing in through his launderette business. He was dumping prostitution and gambling income onto the books to show a legitimate source. Hence the idea of ‘laundering’ money. How’s that for a good story?”

“That’s a myth,” Smyth said, “but you get a gold star for originality and for plausibility. Actually, the first time the term appears is in connection with the Watergate scandal back in the early ‘70s. Some newspaperman at the
Times
or the
Post
probably invented it.”

“I like my story better,” Kate said.

“I saw the paperwork on the $11 million at Kabul International Airport that you and Wheatley wanted to track,” Smyth said. “You lucked out. Afghanistan is not a hard place to trace digital bucks, or paper bucks, for that matter.”

“How so?”

“The short answer is called ‘FinTRACA,’ the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Center of Afghanistan. It was set up in 2004. Because of the invasion after 9/11, the U.S. has had a lot of influence in setting up financial controls in this country. We were the occupying power, in effect if not in name. Compared to Pakistan, Afghanistan has the financial transparency of a lemonade stand.”

“Well, the sooner I can get a handle on the source of the payment to Jacques LeClerc in Paris, the sooner we’ll be able to nail down what they were buying. I was expecting it to be very hard here, just as it was in Pakistan. I’m really surprised.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t get your hopes raised too high,” Smyth said. “I’m just saying that we have some tools we can use here to work with. That’s more than we usually have. There is a strict ‘Anti-Money Laundering and Proceeds of Crime’ law, the main purpose of which is to protect the integrity of the Afghan financial system.”

“But Afghanistan is known as a center of international drug smuggling second to none,” Kate said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“That’s because the government wants it that way, or rather, because President Karzai gets a lot of pressure from the people who make narco-profits to keep them in business—or else. But anyone within the government who wants to know what’s going on has the tools he needs to do it. There is a Financial Intelligence Unit housed within the Central Bank of Afghanistan that is modeled on our own oversight system at Treasury and arguably more effective.”

“So what have you learned?”

“Your guy is a Vietnamese banker, Minh Kwang—the name means, ironically, ‘bright reputation’—who runs the BanKoNoKo office here, the Bank Of North Korea. A sort of successor organization to the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, BCCI, of the 1980s.”

“You’ve already traced the $11 million to a specific individual?” Kate said. “That’s impressive.”

“Not really,” Smyth said. “There are 35 million people in Afghanistan. Of those 99 per cent do not have financial accounts of any kind. This is an abacus society. Policing the financial flows within this entire country is no more difficult than providing fiscal oversight in a mid-sized American city. It’s just not that complicated, even with the use of
hawalas
and a large number of dishonest people doing business in Kabul.”

“If BanKoNoKo is a real bank, wouldn’t it have been easier to just wire the funds? Why did they do the transaction in cash?”

“That guarantees no electronic record is kept. Going through the
hawaladar
in Paris at least took it off the world-wide net.”

“So you can trace it to this Minh Kwang character, but he’s just a financial intermediary. What we really need to know is who his client is.”

“And I thought that should wait until you were on the ground,” Smyth said. “Kabul is less than 30 miles south of here, never more than an hour away, even on a bad day.”

“My kind of guy, Smyth,” Kate said.

***

Bagram Air Base is connected to the shallow, saucer-shaped valley that encloses metropolitan Kabul by the AH-76 highway, which curves to the west and south of the city. Keven Smyth drove the blue Ford SUV across the Shomali Plain like he was on the highway from Dallas to Houston, gunning the big car past slower traffic. The road was in excellent repair, even by American standards, the result of recent repaving at American taxpayer expense.

Tin-roofed shacks caked in dust and pushcarts loaded with fruit signaled the outskirts of the capital and a narrowing of the highway into Salang Road. Smyth took Salang to the five-storey Education Ministry, an easy-to-remember landmark, and then headed northeast on side streets to the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood just below Kabul International Airport.

The streets of central Kabul were home to more bicycles than cars. Children were playing stickball in gray, dusty vacant lots. A band of small brown boys balanced enormous bags of chicken feathers on their heads, probably on their way back home to their mothers to stuff pillows and mattresses. A roadside vendor was turning ears of corn-on-the-cob over a charcoal brazier for sale to passersby.

“We’re moving into the wealthiest part of Kabul,” Smyth said. “Lots of private homes for foreigners with cushy jobs, most of the big embassies, including ours, on the Bibi Mahru Road next to the Marriott, the major multinationals have offices here too. BanKoNoKo is in a respectable building next door to the Standard Chartered Bank, which does a lot of business for the big globals, donor agencies, NGOs.”

“Maybe they were hoping some of decorum would rub off on them?”

“I doubt it,” Smyth said. “Everyone knows BanKoNoKo is involved in dope and guns, stuff the legit banks won’t touch. We think Minh Kwang is also involved in unloading North Korean counterfeit Ben Franklins on the unwary.”

“It looks like the streets are laid out same as Islamabad, in a Westernized grid system.”

“Yeah, this is modern Kabul. Most of these two-storey buildings went up fifty years ago in the glory years of the last century, the 1960s and 1970s, a period of relative prosperity for the whole country. The most ancient part of Kabul is actually pretty tiny and organized like a Middle Eastern casbah.”

“Before the Soviets turned everything into dust and rubble.”

“The dust has always been here. Back before the invasion, Kabul was called the Paris of Central Asia. Women wore knee-length skirts and American hippies trekked through here on their way across the mountains to experiment with opium, or on their way to India to experiment with religion.”

“I expected more devastation,” Kate said. “The media makes it sound like a war zone.”

“The Soviets protected this part of town—they wanted these homes for themselves.”

Smyth pulled to a quick stop on the left-hand side of the road and pointed to a storefront.

“That’s BanKoNoKo, the Bank Of North Korea. Minh Kwang has an office in the back, but he prefers to call on clients at their offices rather than invite them to visit his.”

“Then let’s just go in,” Kate said.

“Nothing like being up-front,” Smyth agreed. “It’s the American way.”

A young Asian secretary stared at a computer screen at one of a pair of desks in the tiny storefront lobby. She looked up in what seemed to be surprise, as though walk-ins were a rarity. She stood by her desk. Kate thought she might be in her mid-twenties, not a North Korean national, perhaps from Hong Kong or Macao. Certainly from farther east than Afghanistan.

“May I help you?” the girl said, with a lilting British accent. She was thin and had long, black hair, held with a blue ribbon behind her ears. She could have been a schoolgirl.