The Chameleon Conspiracy (15 page)

I shrugged. The days I’d had to report to anyone but my boss about my movements had passed the minute the judge signed the
divorce decree. That was a long time ago, but sometimes it felt as though it were just last week.

“We’ve got results from Dr. Feldman at the NSA. He received the Agency’s formal request for assistance, and here are the initial
results.”

Nicole held a one-page document. “We may be on to something,” she said cautiously, and read from the document:

Bahman Hossein Rashtian, forty-four, is a senior officer of Department 81, an ultrasecret unit of Iranian security services
in Tehran. He’s a Shiite Muslim and a fanatic follower of Ayatollah Khomeini’s doctrines. Soon after the Islamic Revolution
in 1979, the Iranian ayatollah in charge of state security started Department 81 for several covert purposes, including training
and sending agents to infiltrate the United States. Further information shall be provided as additional search is refined.

“So is Department 81 the enigmatic Atashbon?” I wondered.

“Could be,” said Nicole. “Or maybe Department 81 was a provisional name indicating the year it was started? But no, not if
it was started soon after the ’79 Revolution. It’s all guesswork.”

I called Casey Bauer on the secure phone and reported the finding. “I’ve also asked Benny Friedman to run a check on that
name. Can I share the information I’ve just received on Rashtian with Benny?”

Casey thought for a moment. “Yes, you may, but need I mention that you shouldn’t disclose who provided us with the information?”

“No need. I know the rules.”

I called Benny. “Are you still in Paris?”

“Yes, what’s up?” Judging from his tone, he was no longer in a bad mood.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Meet me in one hour at Café Rosebud, 11 rue Delambre, in the 14th arrondissement.”

“Another fancy place?”

“Not at all. In fact, it’s where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre escaped to for private conversations.”

As I walked into the café, Benny was sipping coffee. We sat in the corner. “Anything new on Rashtian?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was about to call you about that.” “Then tell me,” I suggested.

“Bahman Hossein Rashtian is an Iranian security-services officer. We’ve information showing he was orchestrating penetration
of his agents into the U.S. by using false identities stolen from young American tourists.”

“Department 81,” I muttered.

“So you already know,” said Benny.

“I know very little about that,” I conceded. “This is a big hunch based on small intelligence.”

“Go ahead,” said Benny eagerly.

“I believe that unsuspecting Americans were either lured into Tehran or were visiting neighboring states when their passports
and other identification documents were taken.”

“Right,” said Benny, picking up the information flow. “And then they were videotaped by Bahman Hossein Rashtian’s interrogators
telling their life stories and giving minute details about their families, friends, places of study, and work. Thereafter,
they were probably executed and buried in unmarked graves.”

“So you support my speculation?” I asked curiously. Benny nodded.

“That son of a bitch,” I mumbled. “I know you’ll never answer me in a million years, but just in case, how did you establish
that?”

“Refugee interrogation,” said Benny curtly. He didn’t add other information, and I knew I shouldn’t press the issue. He had
told me what he could. Obviously, I wanted to know if he had any information on Rashtian’s trained agents, and whether they
were in fact successful in infiltrating the U.S., and why they were planted there in the first place. But knowing Benny, I
was certain that if he had that information, he’d
trade it with the CIA in exchange for information that Israel needed. The information was vital. Sleeper cells tend to wake
up at one point and carry out a mission. It could be financial fraud, but more likely something more ominous and heinous than
just stealing money. These days the writing was on the wall, and it said
terror
. When, where, and how? I had no clue, but I felt the urgency to find out.

I returned to the safe apartment and sent an encrypted message to Casey Bauer. Hours later a response came through the system:
“Dan, I’m arriving in Paris tomorrow afternoon with Casey Bauer. Bob Holliday.”

“Before they come, I think we need something more solid than the hunches and rumors we have,” said Nicole.

“Like what?”

“Like stronger evidence on the identity of the Chameleon.” I stopped myself from asking her if she was nuts. The U.S. had
been trying to find him for over twenty years, and now she wanted to solve the mystery in a day? Instead, I kept silent for
a few minutes.

Then I stood up, grabbed my head with both hands, and exclaimed, “Of course. I think we can try that avenue.”

“What avenue?

“We’ve got the Chameleon’s fingerprints. I lifted them off his cup in Australia.”

“No, you have the prints of one Herbert Goldman,” she said defiantly.

“We already went over this,” I said, without losing my temper. “The guy in Australia is the Chameleon. I have it on authority
from Benny, and we’ve got his prints.”

“And you’re going to match them against what?” asked Nicole. I was at first defensive, but it was a valid question.

“I take it that the FBI had determined that the Chameleon wasn’t Albert Ward, because they couldn’t establish a match of the
prints I lifted at the hospital with any prints in their database, including Ward’s. So I suspect there’s no point in asking
them the same question again.”

“And we suspect he isn’t Herbert Goldman either, because his wife told that to the FBI,” said Nicole.

“Right. I tend to believe her because she was the one to expose him in the first place. Why would she lie here?” I asked.

“So we’re back at square one. Against what database are you going to match the prints you lifted?” Nicole demanded.

“The Iranians’,” I snapped, without having any reason or basis to support what I’d said, nor any feasible plan on how to achieve
it.

“Well,” said Nicole. “We can ask NSA to do that.” If she was joking, it didn’t sound like she was. And when no cynical smile
followed, I became convinced that I wasn’t the only daydreamer in the room. There were officially two of us.

I called Dr. Ted Feldman in Menwith Hill, using the secure phone.

“Can you match fingerprints against the Iranian security service’s database?”

His response was noncommittal. “Send me what you have. Make sure we receive it through your agency’s liaison office, and we’ll
see what we can do.”

“I’ll ask the FBI to send you the samples I gave them. That, together with samples the Australian Federal Police took and
sent separately.”

“That’s even better.”

The following evening, Casey Bauer walked into the safe apartment with Bob Holliday.

“Any answer on the prints yet?” I asked Nicole, hoping to give my new boss a welcome gift.

“Let me check,” said Nicole and went to the adjacent communication room. Ten minutes later she returned with a computer printout.
“It’s from the FBI,” she said. “The encrypted message just came in.”

She read the summary at the top of the page: “The prints received from Dan Gordon, as well as those received directly from
the Australian Police, matched the prints received yesterday from NSA marked as taken from Kourosh Alireza Farhadi,
DOB August 19, 1960. All three sets of prints match each other. They were all taken from the same person.”

“That’s great!” said Casey, in an unexpected burst of joy. “Read out the whole thing!”

“That part of the report came from NSA through Langley,” said Nicole, and read the text. “Top Secret/Eyes Only/Sensitive Compartmented
Information.” She raised her eyes and said, “Before any of you read this report, you must sign a Classified Information Nondisclosure
Agreement, a Standard Form 312.” She handed us copies.

I read the form. In it I acknowledged that I was aware that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by me could
cause irreparable injury to the United States or could be used to advantage by a foreign nation, and that I would never divulge
classified information to an unauthorized person. I further acknowledged that I would never divulge classified information
unless I had officially verified that the recipient was authorized by the United States to receive it. Additionally, I agreed
that, were I to be uncertain about the classification status of information, I needed to confirm from an authorized official
that the information was unclassified before I could disclose it.

I signed. So did the others.

Nicole continued reading it. “This report is based on documents contained in Farhadi’s file, including a limited number of
recently dated reports he had submitted.”

Farhadi’s file? Did NSA experts hack the Iranian security service’s computer? My level of appreciation for Dr. Feldman and
his team skyrocketed.

Nicole continued reading. “Please note that the most recent report Farhadi filed in Tehran was on December 13, 2003.”

“Guys, look at the date,” I intervened. “I saw the Chameleon in a Sydney hospital bed on August 17, 2004. Based on what we
just heard, and provided that all the reports were kept in one place and intercepted by NSA, it could mean that the Chameleon
was either infrequent in his reports to Tehran, or that he simply decided he had done enough for
Tehran, and now it was time to take care of himself. I guess from now on I’ll have to use his real name of Farhadi,” I said
in feigned sorrow.

“Not so fast,” said Holliday, making sure he retained command. “This isn’t the end of it. He might have used additional identities,
so for now, let’s stick to the name Chameleon. Let Nicole read out the entire report, so we can all have it at the same time,”
he added, realizing how eager we all were. “Maybe there’s an answer to that in the narrative.”

Nicole read on:

Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, an ethnic Iranian, was born in Tabriz, in northern Iran, on August 9, 1953. His father, Ghorbanali,
was a successful businessman in the rug trade; Kourosh Alireza Farhadi’s mother, Fariba, was a homemaker. Kourosh had two
siblings, Vahraz and Rad, born 1957 and 1959, respectively. In September 1959 Kourosh was sent to live with his paternal grandparents
in Tehran so that he could study at the American School. One year after his graduation in 1978, Kourosh was drafted to join
Department 81.

Nicole folded the paper and shredded it, but held on to the three additional pages of the report.

“Aha, we’re getting closer to him,” I said, realizing that this was in de pen dent confirmation of the info Benny had given
me.

“And how exactly do you find Farhadi?” asked Bauer.

It was time to reclaim my lost face and my smeared reputation.

“At the time, I reported from Australia that I had found the Chameleon in a hospital bed. But I was called on the carpet by
David when he got an FBI report refuting my finding. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t make a mistake in identifying
the Chameleon in the first place. I had found the right guy. The person I saw in Australia was the Chameleon,” I said, and
picked up the pages. “Now, now we have his name—Kourosh Alireza Farhadi. The FBI must have compared the fingerprints
they had in their database of the genuine Albert Ward with the prints of the guy in the hospital bed.”

“You mean the FBI’s lab goofed?” asked Casey. “I’m lost here. And you still say you got the right Albert C. Ward III?” Casey
was a very straightforward guy. He’d been in this business too long to be embarrassed when he didn’t understand something.
He wasn’t the kind of man who saw asking questions as a sign of weakness, and I liked that about him.

“No, the FBI lab was right. The prints didn’t match, because they were taken from two different people. When you steal the
identity of a person, you can take almost everything he has, but not his fingerprints. The perpetrator of the eleven fraud
cases was never Albert C. Ward III to begin with. That’s why the prints didn’t match—because they were compared with the
prints of Albert C. Ward, an innocent young American. The fundamental reason that the FBI failed to make the connection is
simple. He was an unremarkable young man who had no family to complain when he went missing, and unfortunately, there are
an awful lot out there like him. The Iranian imposter apparently didn’t use the Ward alias in committing any of the banking
scams. The Iranian devised a double-tier buffer. First, steal the identity of Albert C. Ward. Then assume another alias to
carry out the scam. That way, there’s no reason for the FBI to know about him in the first place. But based on what we just
heard, the identity of Albert C. Ward III was stolen and adopted by an imposter who conned banks using one or more stolen
identities. The real Albert C. Ward III is still missing, probably dead in Iran, and so are the other individuals whose passports
and identities were stolen by that imposter, or else by someone associated with him.” I paused. “We should also leave the
door open to the possibility that there could be a few imposters.” There was silence in the room.

I continued. “This report confirms that I actually saw the Chameleon in Sydney. So instead of faded pictures from the late
1970s of people who aren’t the Chameleon, we’ve got a positive identification and a recent location for him.”

Casey was the first to react. “He may have slipped away from Australia, and he isn’t stupid enough to return to the U.S. So
where the hell is the slippery bastard?” I noticed he had a habit of clenching his jaw tightly when he was thinking intently
about something.

“He could be back in Iran. Or the clue to where he is is there,” I suggested.

“Hold on,” said Nicole, breaking her silence. “There’s an important item in the Chameleon’s résumé. He graduated from the
American School in Tehran.”

“And why is it that significant?” asked Bauer, clearly engrossed in the affair.

“Because Iranian intelligence uses only ethnic Iranians who strictly adhere to the Ayatollah’s interpretation of Islam. That
means studying in their religious schools and undergoing the necessary indoctrination to guarantee blind loyalty. And here
we see an agent who spent twelve years in the educational institute of the Great Satan, and still he was recruited for a sensitive
assignment.”