Agents of Innocence

27

Beirut; April 1971

As the Deuxieme Bureau crumbled, the CIA station tried to pick up useful pieces of the debris. There were so many angry and frustrated officers that the hardest problem for Hoffman and his colleagues was deciding which of them was worth trying to recruit.

Hoffman ignored most of them. He had a rule about buying members of another intelligence service: Don’t recruit the ten people in the field who are gathering information. Recruit the one man at the top who runs the network. With the surge of walk-ins, Hoffman added another rule: No more Lebanese agents at all, unless they had vital information or access to it.

For Rogers, the top priority was getting access to the Christian militias. He focused his attention on a bright young army officer named Samir Fares. Though only in his mid-thirties, Fares had gained a reputation as one of the Deuxieme Bureau’s ablest intelligence officers. He had the look of an intellectual: balding, smoking a pipe rather than the ubiquitous Lebanese cigarettes. But he was a tough operator. His current assignment, Rogers had learned, was to recruit agents from among the militias and secret political organizations of Christian East Beirut.

Rogers decided to set up a meeting with Fares. He asked Elias Arslani, a retired history professor who had been Fares’s mentor at AUB, to arrange a meeting at his country home in the mountains near Jezzine, in southern Lebanon. Dr. Arslani was the sort of person the American Embassy called on to make discreet introductions: a distinguished academic, a pillar of the Greek Orthodox community, a man who believed in the establishment of a modern and liberal Arab world. He was not an agent, not even an “asset.” He was simply and forthrightly a friend of the United States.

Rogers drove south on a spring day, navigating the hairpin turns that looped up and down the steep hills like thin strands of yarn, till he reached the village of Watani and the professor’s large, red-roofed villa. The professor, known to the villagers as “Sheik Elias,” greeted Rogers at the door. He was a gaunt, erect old man, dressed in the uniform of a Levantine gentleman: a crisp white shirt, a well-tailored gray suit, and a red fez. Standing next to him was Samir Fares, dressed in a baggy seersucker suit and looking more than a little uncomfortable.

Dr. Arslani apologized to his guests for making them travel to the mountains. He rarely went to Beirut anymore, he said. He found it too depressing. His goal as a professor had been to help train a modern civil service in Lebanon, the old man explained. But when he went to Beirut now and saw what had become of the Lebanese bureaucracy, he felt that his life’s work had been a failure.

“They are pickpockets,” Dr. Arslani said scornfully.

In his lapel, the old man still wore the fading emblem of the Order of Lebanon, awarded years earlier for his services to the republic. Looking at him, Rogers felt he was seeing a remnant of a vanishing era. Dr. Arslani excused himself after a few minutes and left Rogers and Fares alone to talk.

The conversation began awkwardly, since neither man wanted to admit, at this early stage of their discussion, what they had come so far to talk about.

“How is the new regime treating you?” asked Rogers.

“Well enough,” said the Lebanese Army officer. “They pay my salary.”

“Is it much different from the old?”

“We do the same things,” said Fares. “But we have stopped believing in them.”

“Why?”

“Because our job has become absurd,” said Fares. “We are charged with protecting the security of a state whose citizens no longer trust the state to do anything. So we are protecting something that is, in reality, nothing.”

“Why is this country unravelling?” asked Rogers, posing the question as much to himself as to the other man.

“Ask Dr. Arslani,” answered the young Lebanese. “He’s the professor.”

“You were his student,” continued Rogers patiently. “What do you think he would say?”

“He gave me a book once, years ago,” answered Fares. “It was a history of the Weimar Republic in Germany. It tried to explain how democracy collapsed in Germany. Inflation, demoralization, the growth of extremism. It was a story of how a country lost its center and collapsed from within. When Dr. Arslani gave me that book fifteen years ago, I wondered why. What could this possibly have to do with Lebanon? Now I’m beginning to understand.”

“What should a sensible German have done?” asked Rogers.

“If he had known what was coming?”

“Yes.”

Fares smiled thinly, almost grimly. He could see where Rogers was leading.

“He would have worked to strengthen the political institutions of his country,” said Fares.

“And if that was hopeless?” pressed Rogers.

“He would have left.”

“Where, do you suppose?”

Fares laughed.

“To America,” he said.

“Yes,” said Rogers. “I agree. That is what a sensible German would have done.”

Rogers decided then that he liked the young Lebanese and, what was considerably more, that he trusted him. The two men talked for another hour, still in vague and general terms, before emerging from the closed drawing room and joining Dr. Arslani for a pleasant lunch on a terrace overlooking the mountains and the sea far beyond.

Rogers and Fares met twice more before they concluded an arrangement. Fares was a professional, and he had no illusions about what he was doing. It was treason. The only mitigating factor, he told Rogers, was that the way things were going, in a few more years there wouldn’t be a Lebanese nation left to betray.

Rogers explained what he wanted: access to the underground movement that was developing among the Christians of Lebanon.

“Let’s be clear on one thing,” said Fares. “All I can do for you is to make introductions. I have my own network of agents in East and West Beirut, and I hope that they can help me to penetrate these organizations. But it won’t be easy. The militias are very secretive and their members are intensely loyal to each other. It is like trying to recruit one member of a family to provide information about his brothers. So don’t get your hopes up.”

“We need to see inside the cave,” said Rogers. “We’re seeing shadows on the wall, but we don’t know whether they are made by a giant or a dwarf.”

“I know what you want,” said Fares. “You want to know who makes the bombs.”

“Yes,” said Rogers. “But I also want to understand why he is doing it.”

“Those are good questions,” said Fares.

To Rogers, that sounded like a deal.

“I insist on two things,” said Fares, when they were down to the final bargaining. He was puffing on his pipe, releasing a cloud of fragrant smoke into the air with each puff.

“First,” said Fares, “I want an annuity that will allow my wife to live comfortably abroad and my children to complete their studies in America if anything happens to me. And I want it done in a way that neither my wife nor my children ever know that you are providing the money.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Rogers. “We do this more often than you might imagine. We have accountants who can buy the annuity and establish a trust fund for your children, and brokers who can manage the money, all very quietly. We even have our own offshore banks and mutual funds in the Caribbean to handle the paperwork. What’s the second request?”

“It’s more complicated,” said Fares. “You may find this strange, given what I am doing, but I still love my country.”

“I don’t find that strange,” said Rogers.

“Good, because then you will understand what I am asking,” said Fares. “Several years ago, my commanding officer told me that someday I would run the Deuxieme Bureau.”

“I hope he’s right,” said Rogers.

“Personally, I doubt it. But if it should ever happen, I want your promise that the agency will terminate me immediately as a controlled agent and allow me to serve my country honorably.”

Rogers thought a moment.

“I can make you that promise,” said Rogers. “What matters is that you believe me.”

Fares looked at him warily.

“We’ve been down this road before,” Rogers said matter of factly. He explained that the issue came up surprisingly often. People recruited by the agency when they were young men, studying in the United States or serving in junior positions in their governments, inevitably rose in the ranks. Some of them rose to the very top. The agency had dealt with the problem often enough that it even had a phrase for agents who did so well that it became embarrassing. They called it “the prime minister syndrome.”

“So you will never betray me,” said Fares.

“That’s right.” said Rogers.

“I suppose I should find that reassuring,” said Fares, extending his hand toward Rogers. “But even America cannot suspend the laws of human nature. Let us say that you will never betray me unless it is absolutely necessary.”