Agents of Innocence

20

Beirut; June 1970

The Lebanese election season had begun by the time Rogers returned to Beirut from his misadventure in Cairo. A new president was to be elected in August, and both sides were prophesying the destruction of Lebanon if the other side won. To a disturbing extent, both sides were right.

The Lebanese electoral system mirrored the national condition. It was based on an unwritten “understanding” that had been reached among the leading politicians in 1943, when Lebanon became independent from France. The agreement was a menu for sectarian government. It provided that the Christians would get the largest slice of the pie-the presidency and a majority of the seats in parliament-and that every other religious group would get at least a small sliver, too.

The ballot allocated seats in each parliamentary district by religious sect. Voters in the Shouf district southeast of Beirut were required to select three Maronites, two Sunnis, two Druse, and one Greek Catholic. Voters in Zahle, in the Bekaa Valley, had to select one Maronite, one Sunni, one Shiite, one Greek Catholic, and one Greek Orthodox. Similar formulas prevailed for every district of the country. Religious discrimination was not simply permitted by the parliamentary system, it was required.

The Lebanese system for electing a president married the sectarianism of parliament to the other great Lebanese political tradition: corruption. The president was elected by parliament, not the people, which meant that every six years there was a carnival of bribery as the eager parliamentary deputies auctioned off their presidential votes. What made the 1970 election ominous was that the most popular bribes that year seemed to be shipments of weapons and ammunition for the illegal militias that were springing up around the country.

Rogers spent several listless weeks at the office, busying himself with routine work. Tasks that he normally ignored or delegated to others now seemed to preoccupy him. He arrived early each morning and read the overnight cable traffic from Washington, a tedious and generally unrewarding job. He spent hours auditing the accounts of agents under his supervision. He checked and rechecked the station’s watch lists and surveillance reports. Had anyone asked him whether he was depressed, he instantly would have denied it.

At home he was restless and short-tempered, even with his son. The boy’s games of roughhouse and ball-playing, which Rogers usually enjoyed, now gave him a headache. Mark would quiz him about who was leading the Lebanese Soccer League and Rogers would answer dully, “I don’t know.”

Rogers would go into his study immediately after dinner to read. But when the door was closed, he often found he had the energy only for reading newspapers and magazines. Depression was a stranger to Rogers, which was why he found the encounter with it so disorienting. His career had left him unprepared for failure.

Jane Rogers, who had never seen her husband in such a prolonged melancholy, was uncertain how to deal with it. Over cocktails, she would wait for him to light the spark-to speak about a small event at work, or something he had seen on the way home, or a trip they would all take to the country, or some other flicker of conversation. But the spark didn’t come, leaving Jane sitting in silence with a drink in her hand, wondering what was wrong. She didn’t ask, of course. That was against the rules.

Jane eventually tried various gambits to bring her husband out of his gray mood. She embarked on conversational jaunts of her own, chatting about plays and novels and the latest news from the ladies at Smith’s grocery. She experimented in the kitchen, cooking elaborate Lebanese dishes with garlic and yogurt. She even bought a manual of sexual instruction from a bookstore on Hamra Street and, following its advice, picked up her husband one evening after work dressed in a raincoat with absolutely nothing underneath. In the car on the way home, she unbelted the raincoat and let it slip open till it revealed the curve of her breast and her bare thighs. They made love lustily that night, beginning in the stairwell on the way up to the apartment, and Jane thought she had found a cure.

But the next morning the emptiness and sense of failure returned for Rogers. Jane wished that he would be less polite and scream out his unhappiness. But that was against the rules, too.

What saved Rogers from utter despair in those weeks was his daughter Amy. Her health preoccupied Rogers. He took her to the doctor, checked her temperature and pulse every morning, tested her reactions with a silver mallet. And he rejoiced when the signs from all these tests confirmed what the doctor said. She was getting better. Rogers found that some days his daughter was the only person in the world he truly wanted to see. He would sit with her in his lap in the evening and rock her slowly to sleep. Sometimes he would even bring her with him into his study after dinner and let her play on the floor while he read. It was as if her physical illness and Rogers’s spiritual wound had combined in Rogers’s mind and become extensions of each other.

Jane resolved to see the difficult period through. She gave Rogers room to brood, made few demands on him, and waited for the clouds to clear.

As she lay awake in bed on one of these somber evenings, Jane thought of a boat in the fog. It was a boat her parents had chartered one summer, and they were cruising off the coast of Maine. In the thick fog she could hear the sound of waves breaking against the rocks on the shore, and the sound of foghorns from other boats, and the occasional clanging sound of a buoy marking the channel. But she couldn’t actually see anything beyond a few feet, the fog was so dense. She saw her father, staring at the ship’s compass, glancing from time to time at a chart, steering a course toward the next mark. He was muttering to himself as he tried to keep the boat on its compass heading.

I know where I want to be, her father had grumbled, but I don’t know where I am.

That muttered remark in the fog off the Maine coast was the very heart of the truth, Jane thought to herself. You could hear and feel the world around you, but you couldn’t see anything clearly. You did your best to steer a course by dead reckoning, with no certainty even that you were heading in the right direction.

Rogers ignored Fuad. The Lebanese agent was part of an operation that was dead, as far as Rogers was concerned. Rogers approved his expense vouchers and signed a weekly report for the auditors, but otherwise he left Fuad alone. Eventually, after a few weeks, Fuad became restless and left a message in one of the dead drops requesting a meeting with his case officer.

“Have I done wrong?” asked Fuad when they met. “Why do you ignore me?”

“I’m sorry,” said Rogers. “I’ve been very busy.”

Fuad nodded. Rogers was, for him, such a towering figure that it would not have occurred to him that the American might have problems of his own. It would have been easier for Fuad to imagine the sun not rising.

“I am at your service,” said Fuad. “If there is any project you would like me to undertake, I am ready.”

Rogers heard the eagerness and loyalty in Fuad’s voice and felt ashamed. Agents are like children, he thought to himself. They are utterly dependent on their case officers for work, protection, meaning, survival. They cannot live alone. The part of them that was independent has been destroyed by the process of recruitment.

“Fuad,” said Rogers in as commanding a voice as he could summon. “There is one thing I would like you to do.”

“What is that, Effendi?” asked Fuad. He already looked a little happier.

“I am going to be very busy with other work for a while. So I won’t be able to meet with Jamal. I’ve asked other people to help out on that.”

Fuad nodded. He was disappointed, but trying not to let it show.

“I would like you to keep an eye on Jamal for me,” Rogers continued. “Make sure that he is adequately protected. That he has enough bodyguards, that he isn’t spending money too wildly. That he isn’t leaving himself vulnerable to anyone. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Effendi,” said Fuad. His posture had changed. He was a man restored.

Rogers was not. After rousing himself to deal with Fuad, he fell back into his numbness. Indeed, the brief discussion of Jamal only made him sorrier that his role in the operation had ended in failure.

Hoffman, who had been watching Rogers’s melancholia mount day by day, eventually decided that he had had enough. There was room in the station for one prima donna, and that post was already filled by Hoffman himself. One afternoon in late June, the station chief called Rogers into his office.

“Sit down, my boy,” said Hoffman when Rogers arrived. “Listen to me carefully, because I’m going to tell you three crucial words that will matter a great deal in your career.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rogers dutifully.

“Illegitimi non carborundum,” said Hoffman, reciting a Latin phrase.

“What?” asked Rogers.

“Illegitimi non carborundum,” repeated Hoffman. “Those are the three words.”

“What do they mean?” asked Rogers.

“They mean: ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’ ”

“Where did you learn that?” asked Rogers, rousing himself slightly.

“Harvard,” said Hoffman.

“Harvard?” said Rogers sitting up straight in his chair. “I didn’t know you went to Harvard.”

“I didn’t,” said Hoffman. “I went to Holy Cross. But we used to play Harvard in football.”

“So?”

“So when we played in Cambridge, I made a practice of listening to the Harvard band. They were the smart ones, you see, and they liked to sing in Latin just to show everybody how smart they were. When everyone else sang ‘Ten Thousand Men of Harvard,’ they sang their Latin number, ‘Illegitimi non carborundum.’ Would you like me to sing it for you?”

“No thanks,” said Rogers.

Hoffman started singing anyway, bobbing his large head until Rogers finally cracked a smile.

“Gaudeamus igitur,” sang Hoffman vigorously.

“Veritas, non sequitur!” His hands were gesturing in the air like a conductor’s.

“Illegitimi non carborundum. Ipso, facto!” He bowed slightly in Rogers’s direction when he had finished.

“Not bad,” said Rogers.

“Don’t let the bastards get you down,” repeated Hoffman.

There was a brief interlude of silence. Hoffman resumed his tune, humming it sotto voce.

“God damn it!” said Rogers, raising his voice above the sound of Hoffman’s humming, finally allowing himself to get angry at something, in this instance Hoffman’s relentless good humor.

“What’s bugging you, anyway?” asked Hoffman.

“What’s bugging me?”

“Correct,” said Hoffman. “You.”

“Isn’t that obvious?” answered Rogers. “They’re trying to take my case away from me!”

“My boy, they are not trying,” said Hoffman. “They are taking your case away from you. It’s done. Over. Finished. Kaput. So wise up, and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Thanks,” muttered Rogers. “That makes me feel a lot better.”

“It could be worse, my boy. They could have fired you.”

“They probably should have,” said Rogers. “I let them down-especially Stone.”

“Forget Stone.”

“He tried to help. When I went back to Washington a few months ago, he took me to dinner at his club and gave me a long lecture about control and self-control. He was on the mark.”

“Did you say he gave you a lecture about self-control?”

“Yes.”

“In this little lecture, I don’t suppose he told you his story about the Brit-‘C’-and how he cut off his leg with a penknife, did he?”

“As a matter of fact, he did,” said Rogers. “What of it?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Hoffman. “Except that the story is total bullshit.”

“It is?”

“Yup! ‘C’ lost his leg in a car wreck all right, but he didn’t cut it off himself. That’s a legend the Brits have been circulating for fifty years. Stone tells it to everybody. It’s his favorite story. But it ain’t true. So wise up. Nobody’s perfect. Not ‘C’. Not Stone. Not you.”

Rogers shook his head. He had no idea who was telling the truth: Stone, Hoffman, or perhaps, neither of them.

“Do you want my advice?” asked Hoffman.

Rogers didn’t answer.

“My advice is, fuck ’em. The whole lot of them.”

“That’s helpful,” said Rogers.

“Seriously,” said Hoffman. It was a word Rogers hadn’t heard him use. “I think you need a break from the Palestinian account. Change of scene. Catch your breath. Forget about how your colleagues in the front office are mistreating you. Let them screw things up for a while. How does that sound?”

“I don’t want a vacation, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Look, smart ass, if you think I can spare my best man just because he’s having an identity crisis, forget it.”

Rogers’s face showed a flicker of interest.

“What I had in mind,” continued Hoffman, “was that you spend some time on the other side, in East Beirut with the Christians. Prowl around. Make some contacts. See what’s out there. Something’s going on with them, or my name isn’t Nathan M. Pusey.”

“Like what?” Rogers asked.

“Like some kind of secret underground movement.”

“What in the world does that mean?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you, would I?”

“Don’t you already have people on that account?”

“Second-raters.”

“I don’t know,” said Rogers, still wary.

“Well, I do! Anyway, it isn’t a suggestion. It’s an order.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rogers. As he spoke, he was already making a mental inventory of what would be necessary for the task Hoffman had described.

“I’ll need access to the files. And I’ll need to know who’s already on our payroll, so we don’t buy the same people twice.”

“Permission granted,” said Hoffman.

“Thank you.”

“But I can save you a lot of trouble by telling you the simple truth, which is that our agents in East Beirut are a bunch of flaming assholes who are good at only one thing, which is stealing money.”

“So where do I begin?”

“If it were me,” said Hoffman, “I would begin with our esteemed colleague in the Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau, General Fadi Jezzine.”

“Why him?” asked Rogers. His image of General Jezzine, from dinner at the ambassador’s house months ago, was of an elegant, austere man in a tuxedo who seemed, to Rogers, to typify the political and economic system that was strangling Lebanon.

“Because the general knows where all the bodies are buried on the Christian side,” said Hoffman.

“Who owns a piece of him?”

“Everybody,” answered Hoffman. “And nobody. The good general sells information to us, the Israelis, the Syrians, the Egyptians. He’s a regular supermarket. He’s got something for everyone. Which means he’s never completely in the bag for any one customer. What’s more, he understands the first rule of the intelligence business.”

“Which is?”

“Which is: Don’t give anything away for free. When you have a piece of information, sell it, or trade it. But don’t give it away.”

“How am I going to get anything new out of him?”

“That’s your problem,” said Hoffman. “By the way, if you strike out with the general, try his wife. She’s a firecracker.”

“I know.”

“You know the lady?”

“Slightly,” said Rogers. “I sat next to her one night at a dinner party when she got drunk and denounced the Palestinians.”

“Excellent.”

Rogers turned and began to walk out of the office.

“Guadeamus igitur!” called out Hoffman.

“What does that mean?” asked Rogers.

“Let us make merry.”