The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (19 page)

“They clearly have the money and the will, but I’ve never believed they had the technical resources,” Mahmood said. “This is my own field, nuclear engineering, and I must tell you that in my whole career, I have yet to encounter personally a terrorist who even remotely seemed capable to me of assembling a nuclear device.”

Mort Feldman was pleased with the relaxed way the conversation with Mahmood was going. The Pakistani general, usually so stiff and formal, seemed almost unnaturally at ease. Was it the pleasant, mountain picnic? Or Feldman’s decision to bring Kate Langley back to Pakistan, at least for a few days? He was not sure.

“What I was hoping we could do today,” Feldman said, self-consciously clearing his throat, “was put our cards on the table when it comes to what we jointly know about this most recent effort, the LeClerc transaction, or the
Moscow Bomb
, as we have been calling it in-house. I wanted you to hear from our point person on this, Mahmood. Kate Langley has been working this case exclusively since the week she started work in Virigina. She has been Wheatley’s direct report on
Moscow Bomb
, and she’s collated a lot of material, along with Treasury, about what we’ve been able to learn. Kate, why don’t you take us through it.”

Kate paused to collect her thoughts before beginning to speak. She had reviewed the facts concerning the bomb, they were deeply imprinted on her memory. The only thing missing was where those facts led—and the location of the bomb itself.

“We got wind of bomb chatter the week after Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad. Internet chat rooms, random electronic chatter picked up by the NSA—nothing we hadn’t heard before and nothing specific, but enough to get our attention. The first specific piece of real data that we acquired was the report of an $11 million cash package being shipped from Kabul to Paris via Dubai.”

“This is what you learned from your Treasury Department’s informant at Kabul International Airport?” asked Mahmood.

“Exactly,” Kate said. “It was an unusual transaction, given that the
hawaladar
in Paris to whom the money was shipped usually did not insist on collateral. This told us something extraordinary was being traded for the cash. The cash shipment put us on to Minh Kwang and BanKoNoKo.”

“Then we got lucky with the Moscow police,” Feldman said. “They let us know about a British national named Simon Wantree, and Wantree’s homicide in Moscow.”

“We know that Wantree was an associate of Jacques LeClerc,” Mahmood said. “So Wantree’s death suggests to me that some sort of disagreement arose in Moscow before the bomb left that city. Perhaps that may be significant?”

“We still need a lead as to the source of the bomb,” Feldman said. “We have zip,
bupkis
. But ISI discovered that Yasser al-Greeb was negotiating with LeClerc months before the OBL takedown. That means that the beginning of this story predates the month of May and Osama’s death.”

“Everything you say ties in with my own working theory,” Mahmood said, “which is that Yasser Khalidi al-Greeb, as an agent of Al-Zawahiri or someone else very high in the Al Qaeda hierarchy, has been working hard for the last year to acquire a nuclear device in time for detonation on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Sheikh Osama’s death may simply have accelerated the planning cycle, or given it additional impetus, especially since world media have suggested Al Qaeda is all washed up.”

“So where is the bomb now,” Feldman said, “or failing that, where is the last place we can put it with a high degree of confidence?”

“That’s the question we have been working on,” Mahmood said. “Here, let me show you. This is where we must direct our efforts.”

Brigadier Mahmood held out his hand to Raza, and Raza handed him a very detailed map of metropolitan Karachi.

Halfway between Richmond and the naval port of Newport News, on the verdant banks of Virginia’s sleepy York River, lies a 9,250-acre block of rich Virginia farmland—almost 15 square miles—prized since the days of colonial Williamsburg, itself only three miles to the south.

Known officially as the Armed Forces Experimental Training Activity, the property encompasses Porto Bello, the private hunting preserve of Lord Dunsmore, the last British governor of Virginia Colony. All but 800 acres of this huge tract is undeveloped prime riverine land, rich in small game, fish, and waterfowl that make their home in pristine marshes, fields, forests, and the river itself, all in much the same circumstances today as at the moment of American independence. In the warmer months, it is a Garden of Eden just an hour or two from downtown Washington.

In World War II, this parcel was used by Navy Seabees as a training facility and given the name of Camp Peary. Late in the war, it was converted to house POWs from a Nazi submarine that had reached American shores. Then, in the early 1950s, the property was secretly deeded to CIA as a training facility. In the sixty years since, it has been known simply as The Farm, serving as the main CIA training base and academic retreat. What goes on there is off limits to the public. Indeed, ‘The Farm’ does not officially exist.

Olof Wheatley was deeply concerned at Mort Feldman’s resolve to work closely with Brigadier Mahmood, but the paperwork backed up on his desk when he came back from Pakistan prevented him from giving those doubts his full attention. A week after his return, he made a scheduled twice-yearly trip to Camp Peary to meet with soon-to-graduate recruits and talk to them about the CTC. Away from the office, he had time to think.

In Olof Wheatley’s world, deals were made on a handshake. A sense of personal trust was paramount in forging relationships. Wheatley could therefore not bring himself to renew his confidence in a man who had played him for a fool in Pakistan before revealing, in a bizarre and poorly explained change of heart, that ISI itself had been responsible for kidnapping the CIA station chief in Islamabad.

Mahmood had succeeded in pulling the wool over Wheatley’s eyes only too well. Having briefly trusted him and been deceived, Wheatley would surely never trust Mahmood again. And yet Mort Feldman, CIA’s top man in Pakistan, now proposed to make Mahmood the lynchpin of CIA strategy in that country. As he turned the problem over in his mind on the long drive down from Washington, he could find no way out of this dead end. He would just have to overrule Feldman.

And now there was the added risk that Mahmood would be given a second bite at the apple, possibly working a conspiracy with the people who had stolen a Russian tactical nuclear bomb. Rather than help Mort Feldman and Kate Langley find the device, what if Mahmood used his relationship with CIA to send them down blind alleys until it was too late? Indeed, what if Mahmood Mahmood
was
the enemy? That was the gist of it.

The Farm had become so famous—or infamous—in Beltway cocktail conversation that CIA had learned decades ago that it could be used as powerful leverage on Capitol Hill, an important and potent public relations tool. Senators and congressman who sat on intelligence committees, key military officers, and other civil servants whose decisions could affect the Agency, were often invited down to The Farm for weekend briefings and social mixing with senior CIA.

Senior foreign intelligence chiefs from friendly sister networks were likewise also occasional weekend guests. Such invitations were cherished and rarely turned down. ‘Last week I was down at CIA’s secret facility, The Farm, discussing such-and-such with so-and-so...’ made for a highly-desired conversational aphrodisiac.

To wine, dine, and house these VIPs, CIA management built a series of luxury log cabin hunting lodges that were patterned after those at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland. These occupied a sequestered glade overlooking the York River, away from the main training center. The lodges were also used to house senior CIA officials when they overnighted at The Farm.

If a Congressional delegation was at The Farm, then Wheatley would likely be called in to socialize with the guests and help lobby for whatever CIA management needed the legislature to do for it at the moment. Wheatley loathed such PR duty. When he checked into Donovan Lodge, named after the legendary head of the OSS during World War II, he was pleased to see that he would be sharing the facility only with Hendryk Warsaw, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who often gave guest lectures on military theory and strategy to CIA, both at The Farm and at headquarters on the Potomac.

Wheatley went on to his afternoon meetings and lecture in the main administration building. He ran into Warsaw at the end of the workday on the wooded path from the training center back to the Donovan Lodge. Warsaw greeted him enthusiastically.

“I hope my CARE package to Islamabad was useful?” Warsaw said.

“Immensely! That book opened the door to see a very important Pakistani general. I’m so grateful to you. His whole attitude toward me changed the second he saw your book.”

“That must mean I’ve aged well beyond my ‘sell-by’ date,” Warsaw said. “I feel that way whenever I come down here and spar with these young kids who could easily be my grandchildren.”

“I know the feeling.”

“In fact, I remember Mahmood Mahmood, come to think of it. This was twenty years ago, but he impressed me. By his intellectual rigor, especially, and his good manners.”

“I was impressed by him too, though in a different way. This is strictly between you and me, but it was the ISI behind the disappearance of our man in Islamabad, not the pablum you read in the newspapers.”

“And Mahmood was involved?”

“Up to his eyeballs, though he claims not. In fact, he asserts that it was he who convinced the ISI leadership it was a bad move, and that they should end it by releasing Feldman.”

“Perhaps you should consider believing him. If he’s the same man he was when he attended the Air Force War College, then he has an iron-willed intellectual integrity.”

“He spent hours in a car with me from Islamabad to Peshawar then showed me an Al Qaeda camp, yet he never gave me a hint that he knew where Mortie Feldman was being held captive. It was impressive in its own way. He’s a master of the poker face. No tells.”

“He may have felt divided loyalty. His senior command had approved Feldman’s takedown you think?”

“Of course they did! I understand that he was caught between a rock and a hard place. The only reason I’m concerned is that Mort Feldman thinks he’s our best contact within the ISI.”

“But Feldman has worked with the Paks since the ‘80s,” Warsaw said. “Who understands the ISI better than he does?”

“I’m concerned about him ‘going native,’ to use a phrase I haven’t heard in a while. Rather than representing CIA to the Pakistanis, sometimes I think Mort represents the Pakistanis to us! Somewhat like Stockholm syndrome.”

“That’s why it’s a standard procedure worldwide not to let anyone stay at one post too long,” Warsaw said.

“Exactly.”

“But from what you’re saying, it seems to me that its Feldman’s state of mind that you’re worried about, not Brigadier Mahmood.”

***

At nine in the evening, Olof Wheatley found himself deep in a butter-soft leather armchair in the oak-timbered library of Donovan Lodge. He was smoking an excellent—if illegal—
Montecristo Edmundo
cigar, Havana’s finest, and enjoying a 35-year-old Delamain cognac in the company of Hendryk Warsaw. Earlier in the evening, he had shared a simple but tasty dinner with his lodge-mate: roasted game fowl and vegetables, all freshly culled, including the birds, from Camp Peary grounds.

The cold war strategist had a deserved reputation as a brilliant conversationalist, and Wheatley was swept away for a time in the economist’s masterful verbal constructs, forgetting his worries. At the moment, he was pleased that he had remembered a story that Warsaw found amusing, no easy feat—namely that James Delamain was an Irishman, Dublin-born, who had immigrated to Jarnac in the 18th century to make his highly regarded French brandy. Warsaw was laughing at the joke.

The mood was broken by a young Navy Seabee, one of several attendants at the lodge, who came into the library to say that Wheatley had an urgent, secure phone call from Pakistan. Wheatley followed the young sailor to a small office nearby that was only slightly larger than an old-fashioned telephone booth, fitted with a tiny desk, telephone, and a scratch pad headed with the CIA crest.

The sailor closed a heavy, soundproof door, giving him privacy. On the other end of the line was Mort Feldman, speaking from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad.

“You’re either an early riser or late to bed,” Wheatley said when Feldman had identified himself. “What time is it down there?”

“It’s eight AM tomorrow morning,” Feldman boomed. “I’ve already had breakfast and gone through half the ladies in my harem!”

“Glad you’ve recovered from your ordeal,” Wheatley said, wishing he had stayed with his cigar and cognac.

“Look, we’ve got a situation down here you will want to know about. I’m going to write it up for CTC, but I wanted to give you a heads up personally before anyone puts you on the spot.”

Wheatley was thankful he had spent as much time as he had with Feldman in Pakistan, much as he found him a bit too larger-than-life. Personal relationships were everything. A couple of extra hour’s notice could mean a lot when bad news hit the wires.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

“It’s about an alert we got from Karachi. You may recall that our Department of Energy provided the Government of Pakistan with a nuclear radiation surveillance system for the port, designed to screen standard intermodal freight containers coming into and going out of the country.”

“I remember,” Wheatley said. “The funds were from the National Nuclear Security Administration, sometime in 2003 or 2004. Money well spent, I said so at the time.”

“ISI reports they got a hit two days ago on an outbound sea can, a high reading that can’t be explained.”

“So what was in the container?”

“That’s the problem. The surveillance unit requires rock-steady voltage and Karachi is notorious for voltage spikes, brownouts, and total power blackouts.”

“Those machines are equipped with UPS units aren’t they?”

“Yes, they have uninterruptible power supply backup,” Feldman said, “but in Karachi, the UPS units have kicked in so often because of the perennially bad line voltage that they are way beyond the point where they should be taken out of service and replaced. They were designed for Port of Long Beach or Port of Houston conditions, not Karachi. The system just shut down.”

Wheatley thought this was another case that he had seen, both in private industry and now in public service, where a technology fix sent overseas had not been properly thought through. The general idea was a good one, but the implementation was flawed.

“So you’re telling me that the intermodal box just slipped out of the net?”

“I’m afraid so,” Feldman said. “But we can narrow it down to one of about 50 containers that day, by matching the approximate time of the signal to the date and time stamps in the customs office.”

“And are any of those still in Karachi?”

“A few, but some have left port. There are six ships involved, to six different destinations.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Yeah, exactly.”

***

“The problem of asymmetric warfare,” Hendryk Warsaw said, “is well understood by the folks who are trying to move that cargo container, assuming that’s where your nuclear device is located.”

Olof Wheatley had concluded his telephone call with Mort Feldman and returned to his brandy and cigar in the library of Donovan Lodge. Given Warsaw’s security clearances and the help he had provided to a long line of CIA managers before him, Wheatley had had no qualms about telling him of the new predicament he now faced.