The Pakistan Conspiracy, A Novel Of Espionage (5 page)

“That may pose problems,” Marchenko stated. “You understand my need for secrecy.”

“We’ll have to work something out,” LeClerc said firmly. “My buyers are not collectors. They will expect a working weapon. I will have to guarantee that, and the penalty for failure will not be one I am willing to pay.”

“You will have an operable nuclear device with the yield I mentioned,” Marchenko said coldly. “We will work out a procedure that is acceptable to both of us, I am sure of it. But this is not a flea market. It may take us some weeks to arrange the details.”

LeClerc allowed himself for the first time to calculate what a 17-kiloton atomic bomb would actually fetch on the black market. He figured at least ten million dollars, perhaps twice that.

“May I ask, dear Colonel, why you have waited until now to put this device on the market?”

“Certainly you may ask.” This was a question Marchenko had long thought about. “It was mainly a question of psychology, of calculating when a real prospect for its use might arise. Sometime in the last decade or so, after the affair of 9/11 in America, I have sensed escalation in the levels of violence terrorists are willing to take to their game. The time is right. I am confident that several groups have the resources to pay. I do not plan to negotiate with them myself, and for that I am willing to take a discounted price from you. You are the salesman, not I. But let there be no doubt: the time is ripe. 9/11 was merely the overture in the terrorist symphony. Now the world must prepare for the main movement.”

“And you have no qualms about being a party to this?”

“None whatsoever. Men have created the world they deserve,” Marchenko said grimly.

“On that we are agreed. I, for one, plan a long retirement somewhere where the fallout cannot reach me.”

“For me, Marbella beckons,” Marchenko said. “Please don’t sell this damned thing to the Basques!”

“They likely cannot pay!” LeClerc agreed.

The cavernous warehouse echoed with harsh laughter.

Kate’s honeymoon at headquarters lasted a week. The volume of investigative work undertaken every day by the platoons of analysts simultaneously following leads from all over the world was overwhelming. The world’s most sensitive eavesdropping equipment aligned with its highest resolution cameras gathered billions of bytes of data. Banks of computers trolled phone lines, Internet traffic, and wireless signals—radio and microwave—for key words, phrases, key names, to be highlighted and flagged for human eyes.

Field agents from overseas stations were not heroes in this world of SIGINT, computers, and windowless rooms. The CTC had a decidedly high tech, academic atmosphere and its practitioners looked down on HUMINT as something from the Stone Age. In the cafeteria, Kate had overheard Mortie Feldman referred to as a ‘dimwitted cowboy’ and a ‘knuckle-dragger who shoots first and asks questions too late.’ She kept her own counsel and her mouth shut. After all, back in Islamabad, these techie headquarters types were mocked as coddled deskbound paper-shufflers, computer geeks who would wilt if ever confronted with armed Al Qaeda agents practicing real espionage in Pakistan. ‘CIA equals Clowns In Action’ was the sobriquet given to the more outspoken CTC analysts by Mortie himself.

Kate let this internecine animosity slip away like water off a duck. She had no time for pettiness. She understood that she was at CTC temporarily and she was determined to make the most of it while antagonizing as few people as possible. She wanted to learn, and learn fast, so as to do her job. To do that she needed allies.

Her guide at the CTC was the man she found in the cubical next to hers, Phillip Drayton, an analyst who specialized in South Asia. Kate had seen his name in cable traffic but had never met him until now. Drayton was a tall, thin, bespectacled young man with short blonde hair in his mid-30s, clearly more academic than athlete. He was new to CIA, a recent graduate of SAIS, the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins, which maintained a campus across the Potomac not far from Dupont Circle. Kate had heard that more than half of CIA’s 20,000 employees had been with the agency less than six years, a consequence of the hiring boom in the Tenet era.

“I can help you get up to speed on Yasser al-Greeb,” Drayton told her. “I’ve been following him for months.”

“Olof Wheatley thinks he’s the key to finding Al-Zawahiri,” Kate said.

“That could be. Al-Greeb is a physician like Al-Zawahiri, and that has created a bond, even though Al-Greeb is not an Egyptian and doesn’t have much invested in Al-Zawahiri’s effort to settle old scores.”

“Does Al-Zawahiri need a doctor? Is he sick?”

“We’re not sure. Zawahiri has complained of a range of symptoms,” Drayton said, “and he has asked Al-Greeb for low-level medical treatment. Al-Zawahiri claims he is diabetic, but our own physicians here think it is more a stress-related situation.”

“Is this a one-time thing or do you think Al-Greeb really part of Al-Zawahiri’s inner circle?”

“He never uses electronic communication, so everything we have is based on copies of messages Al-Greeb wrote from Peshawar and sent to Karachi by hand in order to get particular medications that would be hard to trace back to the border areas. But I can tell you this: The symptoms and the diagnosis he wrote down, and the description of Al-Zawahiri’s health, matched records we obtained from the intelligence agencies in Cairo from his time there in prison. The illness seems genuine to me.”

“And so now Al-Greeb has an ongoing relationship with Al-Zawahiri?”

“That may be the best news of all. Al-Greeb has effectively become Al-Zawahiri’s physician. We think that he meets periodically with Mahmood Mahmood, who is relatively easy to shadow.”

“I have Al-Greeb’s bio up to around 2004,” Kate said. “But it’s totally unclear to me how he became radicalized and wound up in South Asia. It seemed to me he had every reason to stay in Amman with his wife, child, and medical practice.”

“Let me give you the file I’ve been developing for a briefing I’m working on,” Drayton said. “Maybe it will save you some time down in the registry.”

Kate was grateful for Drayton’s help. He handed her a folder about two inches thick, asking only that she return it the following morning. From these materials Kate could assemble her own file on Yasser al-Greeb to add to the skimpy background sketch she had already developed. Drayton had probably saved her a couple of days of research. She spent the afternoon at her desk trying to plot her own timeline of Al-Greeb’s biography after the completion of his medical internship and subsequent marriage.

The key document in the file from Drayton was a memorandum from the Deputy Director of the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan to Olof Wheatley. Kate knew that the GID, or Mukhabarat as it was more generally known, was considered within the CTC to be, along with the Mossad, the most professional of the Middle East intelligence services. CIA maintained a strong relationship with the GID, and Mukhabarat-provided intelligence was considered reliable at Langley.

The document revealed that Al-Greeb had stumbled onto the Mukhabarat’s radar in 2005 when he was identified through cyber-analysis in Amman as a daily contributor to the Al-Hesbah web forum, run by Islamist extremists. The quiet doctor, so respectable and mild-mannered in his outward life, had a secret Internet identity as an outspoken supporter of violent Islamist causes. He posted volumes of material, often spending four or five hours a day at his computer keyboard on the web. He was arrested in March, 2006, and interrogated at the feared Mukhabarat prison outside Amman, a grim dungeon known without humor as the ‘fingernail factory.’ Waterboarding was there considered to be a benevolent method of extracting information. Broken bones, third-degree burns from scalding water, and beatings with knotted electrical cords were the norm.

It was during three weeks of brutal interrogation at Mukhabarat headquarters that Al-Greeb’s transformation from physician to terrorist was accomplished. Humiliated and tortured by a government that might otherwise have treated him as a pillar of the Amman community—he was after all a respected doctor, well-educated, and a young family man—Al-Greeb rejected whatever residue of allegiance he might previously have felt toward the leaders of Jordan.

Kate had read of these sorts of conversions, usually on the part of intellectuals who felt betrayed by the humiliating corruption of public life in the Middle East. Despite his medical degree, Al-Greeb lacked the social cachet to be successful in a society where merit and IQ was less important than who you were related to by blood, or whose palm you could grease with a bribe. These communities coerced otherwise successful citizens into an embittered subversive underground, a subterranean jihadi elite.

The Mukhabarat in Amman released Yasser al-Greeb from custody on March 27, 2006. He had been so brutalized that his wife barely recognized him. He could not face his father and refused to speak to him. Three weeks later he was on a flight to Karachi. A month after that, he was in a Taliban training camp east of Khost. Yasser al-Greeb’s conversion from Internet blogger to active terrorist was complete.

*** 

The National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, operates 114 spy satellites soaring from 200 to 22,000 miles above the earth’s surface. These satellites take photographs that can accurately resolve objects on the ground four inches across. They can eavesdrop on the microwave radiation that leaks from cell phone towers and on any other electronic communication of interest, from faxes to telephone calls to Internet traffic. It is difficult for enemies of the United States to conceal anything going on anywhere that the NSA thinks is interesting, but only if it can be photographed or overheard electronically.

In the wake of the OBL takedown, more NSA assets than usual were focussed on a band of geography roughly 200 miles wide and 1,500 miles long centered on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In mid-May, two dreaded phrases in Punjabi and Arabic began to appear in transcripts of conversations intercepted within this band: “our own nuclear device” and “soon we will be the tenth nuclear power.”

Reports of these intercepts were instantly transmitted to NSA’s fifteen American intelligence partners, including CIA.

Kate Langley was summoned to Olof Wheatley’s office three weeks into her assignment with the CTC. Wheatley looked haggard and seemed to have aged visibly since she had last seen him. His clothes were rumpled. He had probably spent the night on his couch.

“You’ve seen the chatter?”

“Bits and pieces,” Kate said. “Rumors of a nuclear device in the wrong hands.”

“Can you imagine? Al Qaeda as the tenth nuclear power? Can you see Al Qaeda in the same category as the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea?”

“I can maybe see them on a par with North Korea,” Kate ventured. “In fact, North Korean leaders are pretty much as nasty as Al Qaeda’s.”

“Hard to pin down something like that. NBC in Pakistan—nuclear, biological, chemical...”

Wheatley droned. He put his hands behind his head and his feet on his desk. “The worst downside I can imagine in Pakistan is that nuclear weapons come under the control of terrorists like Al-Zawahiri.”

“With respect, sir, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Well, hear me out,” Wheatley said. “Pakistan has a massively compromised security problem with their nukes and 190 million people, most of them impoverished and angry. It’s impossible to estimate how many Paks are actively jihadist. It’s not a small number. There is absence of civilian governance and decision-making at all levels. Grim economic and energy situations. Corruption everywhere. The only thing that seems to work in Pakistan is the Army.”

“And it’s the Army that has exclusive control of the nukes,” Kate said.

“But the Army is made up of individuals, people with beliefs and agendas. And some of those individuals surely have strong sympathies with Al Qaeda even at the level of brigadier and above.”

“That’s true, but would anyone with that level of authority let loose a nuclear bomb within Pakistan? We know for sure that it would take several co-conspirators to make that happen. No single individual could do it alone, not even the Chief of Army Staff.”

“OK, I agree with that. I could quibble with pieces of it. Permissive action links, the absence of a civilian chain of command. But I won’t. We’ve spent $100 million helping the Paks improve nuclear security since 9/11 and the Army always seems to have a lid on the nuclear sites.”

“It’s unimaginable to me that Al Qaeda would penetrate Pakistan’s nuclear sites.”

“Here’s a ‘what if’ for you: Let’s say the Pakistani Taliban engaged the Army in an area not far from a base where nuclear weapons are stored. The Army decides they need to move them, and the convoy is then incredibly vulnerable to capture.”

“Mort Feldman wrote a cable about that scenario a year ago,” Kate said. “He discussed it with Mahmood Mahmood, who served a stint in the Strategic Forces Command before he got his first star and moved to ISI.”

“That’s the outfit responsible for deployment of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons?”

“Exactly, based in Rawalpindi. Mahmood was a colonel back then. Served with the SFC for seven years. He showed us that their procedures for moving nuclear arms was well-thought-out, modeled on training we provided.”

“There’s always a weak point,” Wheatley said. “Moving your nuclear assets is always risky. What scares the hell out of me is that the Army says personnel assigned to nuclear facilities are all vetted by the ISI. And we know for sure that the ISI was instrumental in creating the Pakistani Taliban in the first place. There are moles within the ISI sympathetic to the militants. The bastards with the beards.”

“I don’t think anyone would guarantee that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are totally secure,” Kate agreed.

“So you have a situation, potentially, where despite the vetting procedures in place, Taliban or Al Qaeda manages to get work in a nuclear facility, somewhere like the A. Q. Khan lab, and steals enriched uranium or fissile material.”

“It’s a risk,” Kate agreed. “Vetting personnel isn’t foolproof. But access to fissile materials is not the same as access to a completed bomb.”