The guys didn’t talk much on the ride back to FOB Jackson. When they did, they cursed Hamza Ali and the Taliban, and Fowler, too, for his bad luck. Everybody figured he’d died in a freak ambush. He was the kind of guy who worried so much that he attracted his own trouble. Bad karma. Coleman Young didn’t say a word. But as he sat on the bench next to the empty space where Fowler should have been, he wondered who had killed Fowler. Rodriguez and Roman couldn’t have. The shot had come from behind the squad. Which meant someone else in the platoon was involved.
Young went through the likely suspects in his mind. One name stood out. He wondered what he should do. If anything. Three months left on this tour. Coleman Young closed his eyes and thought of home.
4
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
T
he floors at CIA headquarters were not created equal. Take the third floor of the New Headquarters Building, home to the unit once called the Directorate of Administration and now known as the Directorate of Support. On its public Web site, which existed mainly as a recruiting tool, the CIA did its best to make the DS sound exciting: “Our job is to ensure that all our mission elements have everything they need for success . . . while the support we provide may be invisible—the results certainly are
not!”
Invisible indeed. The agency’s more glamorous divisions hardly noticed the DS’s existence. But the directorate’s employees soldiered on, administering health plans, making sure the agency wasn’t overcharged for printer paper, and approving the world’s strangest expense reports:
Six vials cobra antivenom: $360.
No one but DS employees ever went to the third floor of the NHB.
Which made it the perfect place for a sterile room.
BC1-3-114 had once been a supply closet. The evacuation plans that the DS so meticulously maintained still identified it as one. The only clue to its new use came from the keypad and thumb reader that opened its magnetic door lock. Inside, it held a steel desk, two battered chairs, a phone—and a computer that with the right passwords could access any agency database. Even ones that were supposed to be available only on much more important floors.
* * *
SHAFER HAD JUST EXPLAINED
the setup to Wells, who was back at Langley for the first time in almost a year. He’d come directly from Montana, not even stopping in New Hampshire for a change of clothes.
“Doesn’t a room like this violate every rule of computer security ever created?”
“
Every
and
ever
are redundant, John. And have you been studying network architecture in your spare time?”
“Seriously, Ellis?”
“Seriously. First, you need passwords. Both on this end and for the database you’re accessing. Second, the mirroring software works only in this room. Third, and most important, nobody knows it’s here.”
“Who exactly is nobody?”
“Me, Vinny, a couple others. We installed it last year, and it’s been used only twice, in situations like this, when we want to get somebody up to speed quietly. This way, you can read every file from Kabul station and nobody will know.”
“I
get
it, Ellis.” Despite all Wells had done, Shafer still sometimes treated him like a quarterback who needed extra time in the video room.
“Okay, you get
it.”
“What I don’t get is what I’m looking
for.”
“Just read.”
* * *
THE CASE FILES
from Kabul painted a bleak picture. The station was the ultimate hardship post. Officers left their families on another continent and risked kidnapping and assassination every day. Unlike the Army or Marines, the CIA was a civilian organization that couldn’t order its employees to take dangerous jobs. Most officers stayed a few months, just long enough to put an Afghan posting on their résumés.
Building real relationships with the tribal chiefs who ran Afghanistan took much longer. That work fell to a cadre of hard-core operatives who lived in Kabul for years. By mid-2009, their efforts were paying off. They were a long way from the leaders of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but they were moving up the ranks.
Then Marburg showed
up.
The Marburg reports covered sixteen hundred pages and included scores of photographs, everything from the first surveillance shots of Rashid to the carnage at Camp Holux. A separate file contained the video from the Karachi hotel where Marci Holm had met Ahmad Rashid. The file ended with the eighty-nine-page after-action report from the agency’s internal investigation.
The report’s language was passive, but its meaning was clear. The agency blamed Manny Cota and Marci Holm for the disaster.
SUMMARY/CONCLUSIONS
MARBURG penetrated Holux due to avoidable operational error. It is true that some agents initially reject physical searches. The successful case officer must overcome those doubts and convince the agent that a pat-down protects both CO and agent. Holm never established those ground rules with MARBURG. Holm did not explain in her case reports why she did not insist that MARBURG be searched. Other officers recall that Holm said she found MARBURG personally charming.
Both Holm and Cota believed that MARBURG had extremely high-value intelligence. In their eagerness, the officers missed warning signs, most notably the ease with which MARBURG supposedly penetrated AQ. It is simply not credible that an outsider such as MARBURG would meet Ayman al-Zawahiri so quickly.
Once the officer who picked up MARBURG questioned whether he might be wearing an explosive vest, prudence and protocol dictated a physical search. Either Holm or Cota should have insisted on such a search.
RECOMMENDATIONS
1) Case officers must inform ALL sources/agents that they will be patted down before being allowed onto any secure facility. If an agent protests, his or her officer will explain that the rule must be followed without exception.
2) No more than five agency officers/contractors shall be present at any meeting with an agent. A closed-circuit video link may be provided for additional officers. Authorization at the DD or higher level shall be required to override this rule.
3) Case officers shall encourage agents to take regular polygraph tests. If an agent resists, cash compensation may be offered.
The recommendations continued for several pages. Some made sense, like limiting the size of meetings. Others were irrelevant, like the suggestion that all spies should be polygraphed. That idea might have sounded good at Langley, but it had nothing to do with the way case officers actually worked.
All in all, the report was what Wells expected. The agency had to hold someone responsible for this disaster, if only so that it could tell its political masters what it had learned from its mistakes. Holm and Cota couldn’t defend themselves, so they’d taken the blame. The nastiest line in the report was a throwaway, that Holm “found MARBURG personally charming.” The implication was obvious.
In the video from Karachi, Rashid had impressed Wells as smooth and convincing, right down to his supposed concerns about his family. Wells wasn’t sure that he would have known Rashid was a double. But he would have searched Rashid before letting him inside Holux. Pat-downs were a part of life these days. For whatever reason, Holm had let him through. Two-plus years later, Kabul station was still recovering.
Duto had appointed Jimmy Wultse to replace Cota as station chief just seventy-two hours after the bombing. The choice had seemed solid. Wultse, the chief for Tajikistan, knew Afghan politics intimately. Unfortunately, he also had a drinking problem. He’d managed it in Dushanbe, but the stress of Kabul turned him into a full-blown alcoholic. After four months, Duto ordered him back to the United States for rehab.
Duto’s next choice was Gordie King, an agency veteran who’d spent most of his career in South America. Wells understood the choice. King had a reputation as an old-school butt-kicker. Unfortunately, King didn’t speak Pashtun and disliked Afghanistan intensely. He rarely left his office when he was in Kabul. Making matters worse, he refused to choose a deputy.
Under King, the station slipped into crisis. Case officers cut their tours short and were not replaced. Senior officers in Afghanistan’s intelligence service began skipping their weekly meetings with the agency. Two top sources in eastern Afghanistan were assassinated. Fifteen months after Marburg, the CIA’s intelligence-gathering effort in Afghanistan existed mostly on paper. Its operations consisted of drone strikes and payoffs to supposedly friendly tribal chiefs.
In the medium term, the problems made little difference to the war. The soldiers and Marines in Kandahar and Helmand provinces didn’t need the CIA’s help to kill Taliban guerrillas. But in the long run, the CIA’s role was crucial. Military intelligence officers weren’t supposed to spy on the Afghan government or explore the relationships between the insurgents and Iran and Pakistan. Those jobs belonged to the CIA. But as the agency slipped, the Defense Intelligence Agency began recruiting its own sources in Kabul and all over Afghanistan.
Duto faced an unpleasant choice. Replacing King would mean admitting a big mistake, and Duto hated admitting mistakes. But he hated losing turf even more, especially since Afghanistan had always belonged to the CIA. The agency had helped battle the Soviets in the 1980s. After September 11, while the Pentagon dithered, CIA operatives helped push the Taliban from power.
And so Duto sent King home barely eleven months after naming him as station chief. In his place, Duto appointed Ron Arango, a solid officer who had served in Pakistan and Russia. As deputy, he chose Peter Lautner, who had been in Kabul for seven years. Lautner was known as especially aggressive. He had reason to be. He’d lost his wife and his brother to Marburg.
Under Arango and Lautner, the station seemed to be recovering. Lautner had rebuilt relationships with tribal leaders. Arango had taken five top Afghan intelligence officers to a counterinsurgency conference that was a thinly disguised bribe, an excuse for a vacation in Paris.
But despite the activity, the station was still foundering. Some of its recent intel had proven flat wrong. A month before, one of its best sources had reported that a senior Taliban commander wanted to defect. The “defection” was a hoax, leading to an ambush that killed an Afghan general. The station still didn’t know whether its source had lied or been used to pass along disinformation. Worst of all, the station had just lost another top agent, the deputy interior minister. A bomb hidden in a fuel tank had blown apart the minister’s armored 4Runner.
With all the problems, Wells wasn’t surprised that the station had largely been left out of the hunt for bin Laden. Langley and the Pentagon had directed the operation, with help from the NSA. Kabul had barely been involved.
* * *
SHAFER HAD OFFERED
to let Wells stay in a spare bedroom while he waded through the reports. But Wells wanted to read the files without having Shafer quiz him like an annoying high school teacher. So Wells was staying a few miles from Langley in a Courtyard by Marriott. He liked Courtyards and Hilton Garden Inns and the other three-star hotels that sat on suburban feeder roads, bland, efficient boxes where every room was identical and no one noticed anyone. Every day he woke at six and worked out in the Marriott’s underwhelming gym for ninety minutes. He reached the agency by nine o’clock and read files for twelve hours, until his eyes burned. Then he headed back to the hotel.
Wells had converted to Islam more than a decade before, but in the last few months he’d hardly prayed at all. He wondered whether he’d ever regain his fervor. Perhaps he’d grown permanently weary of battling jihadis
born into the religion he wanted to claim as his own. He kept his Quran on his bedside table, but he didn’t pray. Instead he watched baseball until he fell asleep, rooting for close games and miracle finishes, trading one faith for another.
After a week reading files, Wells had grown to sense the station’s different personalities. Arango, the chief of station, wrote in a businesslike, slightly bureaucratic tone. Lautner had an aggressive edge. Gabe Yergin, the number three, was hurried, almost sloppy, as though he were perpetually behind schedule, running between meetings.
By Friday night, Wells had nearly finished the files. His mouth was dry, his eyes scratchy from the closet’s stale air. Office work left him tired, but not in an honest, muscle-sore way. He wanted to put a pack on his back and hike for twenty-four hours straight. He looked up as the magnetic lock clicked open and Shafer stepped
in.
“You look dazed.”
“I thought we were trying to reduce the amount of paperwork the stations generate.”
“That’s a work in progress. Plenty of memos going around about it, though.”
Wells laughed.
“You caught
up?”
“Pretty much.”
“Duto wants to see you, talk about
it.”
“He works this late?”
“You kidding? He’s got some fancy dinner tonight. With Travers and McTeague, I think.” Congressman Raymond Travers and Senator Hank McTeague were the chairmen of the House and Senate committees that oversaw the CIA. “Duto will tell them stories about Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, make them think they heard something that they couldn’t have read on Page
Six.”
“Sounds like
fun.”
“Better him than us. Anyway, he’s coming by your hotel at ten tomorrow. I’ll be there, too. Try not to sleep late.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
* * *
WELLS STEPPED OUT
of
the Courtyard’s freshly mopped lobby at ten the next day, just as a black Chevy Tahoe rolled up the driveway. Inside the Tahoe, Duto and Shafer. Duto wore the weekend uniform of the powerful, gray windbreaker, blue shirt, pressed khakis. He was nearly sixty, and his hair had thinned since Wells had seen him. Otherwise he hadn’t changed. His handshake was firm. His smile was all lips and no eyes.
They rolled out, turned left toward D.C. Two identical black Tahoes followed.
“Subtle pickup,” Wells said. “You should just paint ‘CIA Taxi’ on the doors.”
Wells and Duto didn’t get along. Their mistrust wasn’t playful. It wasn’t a light banter that hid mutual affection. They simply disliked each other. Wells had quit the agency because of Duto. Yet they seemed to need each other. Several months before, the CIA had helped Wells on his mission to Saudi Arabia. Now it was Duto’s turn to ask for a favor.
“How are you, John?” Duto’s voice was quiet. Almost silky. Wells wondered whether Duto was taking vocal training. He had once been famous for his temper. But years as director had taught him restraint.
Let others squabble. The ultimate decision belongs to me. No need to show my claws.
Wells wanted Duto to go back to being a screamer, but so far Wells hadn’t managed to provoke
him.
“Fine.”
“And Anne?”