Agents of Innocence

29

Beirut; June 1971

They followed Amin Shartouni until he led them, several days later, to the Bombmaker. Then they followed the Bombmaker.

Hoffman organized the surveillance. It was, he said, the most interesting and complicated surveillance problem he had encountered. How do you track someone, with the utmost discretion, when you can’t use your usual trackers? Borrowing people from the Deuxieme Bureau was out of the question. Most of the other agents available to the CIA station would be too obvious. It was like trying to play chess without chessmen.

Eventually, with Fares’s help, they put together a small team, gathered mostly from Ankara, that could maintain loose surveillance on the Bombmaker. They also obtained photographs of him and some of the people he met. The results of this exercise were as startling as anything that Rogers had come across in more than a decade of intelligence work. When the evidence was ready, he took it to Hoffman and briefed him in detail.

Hoffman was standing at his open window when Rogers arrived for the briefing. The station chief was feeding bits of a chocolate eclair to a pigeon that had landed on the window sill.

“Show-and-tell time?” asked Hoffman.

“Yes, sir,” said Rogers.

“Awaaay we go!” said Hoffman. He scooted over to his desk with a dancelike motion similar to the one made famous by the comedian Jackie Gleason. Looking at him, Rogers wondered whether perhaps the station chief was becoming more eccentric than a government official could afford to be.

“This is the man known as ‘the Bombmaker,’ ” began Rogers.

He handed Hoffman a grainy photograph taken from a distance with a high-powered lens. It showed a heavyset Arab man with a stubbly beard and a mustache. He had a bald spot on his head and was wearing thick glasses. There were bags under his eyes and a look of perpetual sleeplessness. He was wearing what appeared to be an expensive silk shirt, open at the neck. Because he was overweight, the fabric was pulling at the buttons. Around his neck, matted in the hair on his chest, was a large gold ingot.

“So this is the face of evil,” said Hoffman. “He looks to me like your average fat slob.”

Rogers handed Hoffman the next photograph.

“This is a picture of the apartment building where he lives,” said Rogers. The photo showed a modern building, with clothes hanging from some of the balconies and children in the courtyard.

“Where is it?” asked Hoffman.

“West Beirut,” said Rogers. “Off the Corniche Mazraa, near the Palestinian camps.”

“But I thought you told me this guy was a Christian,” said Hoffman.

“He is,” said Rogers.

“Well, then, why in the Sam J. Hill is he living in the middle of a bunch of Palestinians?”

“Because he’s a Palestinian.”

“Now listen, Rogers. Don’t fuck with me. I’m warning you.”

“I’m not,” said Rogers.

“Well, then, what is he? A Christian or a Palestinian?”

“He’s both. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He’s a Christian Palestinian. His family is from Bethlehem.”

“Oh,” said Hoffman.

“His real name is Youssef Kizib. He studied electrical engineering at Cairo University ten years ago and he was the best student in his class, by far. His teachers still remember him. He was the student who could build anything. He was working on his doctorate when he got in trouble with the Moukharabat in Egypt. They thought he was working with one of the Palestinian underground groups. He fled to Lebanon in 1964 and has been here ever since, except for occasional trips to Cannes, where he lives like a pasha.”

“Attractive fellow,” said Hoffman.

“Now here’s the interesting part,” said Rogers. He handed Hoffman another grainy, telephoto-lens picture. It showed the Bombmaker in a dimly-lit room. Standing near him were Amin Shartouni and several other young Lebanese.

“This is the Bombmaker with his Lebanese Christian pupils,” said Rogers. “We tracked them to the place where they do their training in the mountains. This picture shows him giving his final lesson.”

“What’s that?” asked Hoffman.

“How to make bombs that are hidden in the lining of a suitcase, that will explode when an airplane reaches a certain altitude.”

“Why in heaven’s name do the Lebanese Christians need to know that?” asked Hoffman.

“They probably don’t,” answered Rogers. “But it’s part of the curriculum.”

“Asshole,” said Hoffman, looking again at the heavyset face with the stubbly beard.

“Guess where this next picture was taken?” said Rogers as he handed Hoffman another photograph. This one showed the gray exterior of a modern office building on a hill overlooking Lebanon. In the foreground of the picture was a short man dressed in an army uniform.

“I give up,” said Hoffman without looking at the picture.

“It’s the headquarters of army intelligence, formerly known as the Deuxieme Bureau. The man in the foreground is a Lebanese Army major who happens to be a cousin of the president.”

“The Squirrel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So what?” said Hoffman.

Rogers handed him the next picture. It showed the same Lebanese intelligence officer sitting in a cafe talking with the Bombmaker, Youssef Kizib.

“We photographed them together a week ago. Then we began to look around. It seems that Kizib maintains regular contact with several members of army intelligence. They know exactly what he’s up to with the Lebanese Christians and, in fact, they seem to have given him their blessing. That’s how he gets some of his explosives.”

“Now let me get this straight,” said Hoffman. “We’ve got a Palestinian who’s training a bunch of Lebanese Christians to kill other Palestinians, with the blessing of the Lebanese Army.”

“More or less,” said Rogers. “But the best is yet to come.”

Rogers handed another black-and-white photo to Hoffman. This one showed the Bombmaker walking down a narrow street, framed by rough cinderblock buildings.

“This was taken in Tal Zaatar refugee camp,” said Rogers. “Our man is paying a secret visit to another set of his friends. Guess who they are?”

“In Tal Zaatar, they must be Palestinians,” said Hoffman.

“Correct,” answered Rogers. “He’s visiting one of the men who handles logistics for Fatah. We think he went there on behalf of his friends in East Beirut to buy rocket-propelled grenades-RPGs-for one of the Christian militias. This was just four days ago, so we’re still checking out some of the details. But as near as we can reconstruct the deal, the Fatah man agreed to sell Kizib one hundred RPGs, at eight hundred Lebanese pounds each. All out of Fatah’s stores of ammunition.”

“You’re shitting me,” said Hoffman. “A Palestinian from Fatah is selling grenades to the Christians to use in killing Palestinians!”

“You got it,” said Rogers.

“Humor me,” said Hoffman. “Explain to me why the Bombmaker is doing these odious things.”

“For money,” said Rogers. “And fun.”

There was silence.

Rogers had a mental picture of the arsenals that were being assembled in basements and warehouses across town. Homemade cluster bombs for residential neighborhoods; RPGs to shoot across the boundaries of East and West Beirut; car bombs for mosques and churches; sniper’s rifles to attack innocent civilians who happened to be the wrong religion; pistols with silencers to remove obstinate politicians; and the militias training in secret while the scoundrels who ran the country tried to squeeze the last piastre of graft from the dying system. And in the middle of it all, at the eye of the hurricane that was destroying Lebanon, stood a small group of professionals like the Bombmaker, who saluted all flags but sailed under none, who disdained ideology and sold their services to whoever was willing to pay the price.

“The question,” said Rogers, “is what we do about it.”

“That is indeed the question,” said Hoffman. “And I fortuitously have the answer.”

“Which is?”

“That we do nothing about it.”

Rogers looked at him, dumbfounded.

“You can’t mean that,” said Rogers.

“Wanna bet?”

“But for God’s sake, Frank,” said Rogers, his usually calm voice becoming insistent. “We should do something before things get out of control.”

“Like what?”

“Simple things. A media program to bolster moderate political opinion. Security assistance for what’s left of the Deuxieme Bureau. Contacts between Palestinian and Christian leaders. Recruit more people who can keep tabs on the gangs of thugs out there. Anything. But we should do something.”

“My boy,” said Hoffman. “Forgive me for saying this, but that’s a very American response. You see a problem on the horizon. Ergo, you want to solve it. I understand completely. I share your concerns. But forget it! Uncle Sam isn’t going to solve the problems of this fucked-up little country! So let’s not waste our time trying.”

“But this is serious!” said Rogers. “A friendly country is falling apart. Surely there is something we can do?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact there is,” said Hoffman. “We can stay the fuck out of the way! We can do our best to see that when this little papier-mache democracy falls apart, as few Americans as possible get hurt.”

Rogers looked away glumly.

“We aren’t the Salvation Army,” Hoffman continued. “Some of our colleagues tend to forget that sometimes. Like a few years ago, when people got sentimental ideas about saving democracy in another little turd of a country. Remember where?”

Rogers didn’t answer.

“I’ll give you a hint,” said Hoffman. “The capital is Saigon.”

“What about the Bombmaker?” asked Rogers quietly. “Isn’t there something we can do about him?”

“You tell me,” said Hoffman. “What can we do about him?”

There was a long silence. The words were on Rogers’s lips: Kill him. Deprive the demented bastard of his ability to build any more bombs. Just kill him. But he couldn’t say it, and he knew in that moment that Hoffman was right. There was nothing that they could do except stay out of the way.

“Saving the world isn’t our job,” Hoffman said gently to the younger man. “We aren’t priests and we aren’t assassins.”

Rogers thought of a Lebanese proverb he had heard from a Druse friend. It was becoming a kind of Lebanese national prayer, and perhaps it was Rogers’s prayer as well. The proverb said: Kiss the hand you cannot bite, but call upon God to break it.

Rogers was sitting at home one night late that summer, reading a book. There was a knock at the door, then the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor, then the sound of footsteps running away down the stairs and out the door of the apartment building.

Jane was closest to the door. She had risen from her chair to answer the knock but Rogers stopped her and went himself. He looked carefully through the peephole but saw nothing. Curious, he unbolted the door to make sure nobody was there.

“Oh my God,” muttered Rogers.

He closed the door and told Jane to go into the nursery immediately with the children and stay there. He placed a quick call to the security officer at the embassy. Then he went back to the front door.

There on the floor of the landing was the body of Amin Shartouni. The face was horribly distorted, caught in what seemed a final scream of anguish. Dried blood covered his mouth and chin and was crusted on his shirt. There was something on the floor next to the corpse. In the dim light of the hallway, Rogers could barely see it at first. It looked like a piece of meat, rough and red. He bent down and looked at it carefully and then felt a surge of nausea.

It was the boy’s tongue, which had been cut from his mouth and left as a warning.

The war of the bombs began a few months later, when a series of explosions rocked Beirut. The bombers hit a wide range of targets, from a pharmacy owned by the leader of the right-wing Phalange Party, to the offices of a leftist, pro-Iraqi newspaper.

What frightened the Lebanese was that the attacks were so random and anonymous. The Palestinians seemed the most likely perpetrators, since they had an interest in destabilizing Lebanon. But there were other theories. Some blamed the Jordanians, who wanted to force Lebanon to crack down against the fedayeen just as the king had done. Others blamed the Israelis, who also wanted to push the Lebanese to take a tougher stand. But the ominous fact was that nobody knew for sure who had done it and nobody was ever brought to justice. The bombings created a feeling of instability throughout Lebanon, a sense that something frightening was happening in the shadows.