Agents of Innocence

32

Beirut; July 1971

Through the spring and summer of 1971, Jamal was the dog that didn’t bark. He slipped quietly in and out of Beirut, was rarely seen in public, avoided old friends from Fatah, and even altered the conduct of his amorous adventures. As a concession to security, he stopped bringing women home. He went instead to their apartments or hotel rooms or palaces, slept with them once, and then disappeared. He felt virtuous for this modest restraint.

Jamal travelled ceaselessly, relearning languages he had half-forgotten. His passports usually said he was Algerian. They were real Algerian passports, provided by a cooperative member of the Algerian Embassy in Beirut. This particular Algerian could be trusted, Abu Nasir had advised Jamal, because he had never been tortured by the French. That was one of Abu Nasir’s peculiar rules: Never trust a man who has been tortured, regardless of whether he cracked. A victim of torture sees the very worst about the world, in himself and his torturers. He loses something.

Jamal made a plausible Algerian, with his dark black hair and continental manners. He was Chadli bin Yahiya or Omar Sahnoun or Tariq bin Jedid. The names became like new layers of skin, masks on top of masks.

Jamal’s task was to solve a riddle. Abu Nasir had told him to build a solid structure that was invisible, to develop the infrastructure of an organization that would not exist, to plan operations that would appear to have no planning-operations that could be denied plausibly by the very people who had ordered them. It was crucial, said Abu Nasir, that Black September should have no address and leave no footprints. In the aftermath of each bombing or assassination, there should be only the blackness and anonymity of pure terror.

Anonymity meant cut-outs. Layers of people, witting and unwitting, interposed between the word and the deed. It meant establishing dead drops in the major cities of Europe for discreet communications. A boite postale in Paris. A fictitious company in Zurich. A string of flats in London. It meant working with a few trusted Arab intelligence officers, all Soviet-trained, to establish a communications network using embassy codes and the diplomatic pouch.

Building a network meant expanding the frail infrastructure Jamal had been building for many months. It meant recruiting sleeper agents from among the thousands of Palestinian students in Europe. The recruits were kids, most of them, full of hatred for the Israelis and the false courage of youth. Jamal’s spotters would identify the best prospects. A recruiter would meet them, swear them to secrecy, offer them a small stipend, and tell them that in return the Revolution would someday ask for a favor. Then Jamal would test the novitiates. He would send someone to try to worm and wheedle out of them what they had talked about with the recruiter. Those who divulged the secret, or even hinted at it, were dropped immediately from the list. Those who said nothing remained. There were very few who passed the test, and even those few often proved maddeningly indiscreet.

Jamal struggled to create a competent intelligence organization out of this uncertain band of recruits. It was an agonizing and occasionally infuriating process. Jamal would fix a time for a covert meeting in a European capital and hear his agent respond, “Insha’Allah”-If God wills. He would repeat over and over the need for security only to hear one of his men boast to a fellow Arab in a crowded cafe that he was doing “secret work” for the Revolution that he could not discuss. He would ask one of his agents to bring him a detailed diagram of, say, an Israeli-owned oil facility in Rotterdam and receive a messy pencil sketch that might as well have been a map of the Pyramids in Egypt!

Jamal grew sick of Arabs who were tardy, undisciplined, imprecise, easily corrupted, and self-deceiving. That, however, was his raw material, and he was determined to create from it an organization that worked. So he hammered and pushed and prodded. If the Jews could create the powerful state of Israel from the detritus of 1945, he told himself, then it shouldn’t be impossible to transform several dozen Arabs into a reasonably efficient underground network.

Jamal recruited his lieutenants in Europe from among the Palestinian intelligentsia. In Paris, he selected a balding history professor. In London, a prominent businessman. In Madrid, a distinguished professor of physics. In Rome, a long-haired musician. Like Jamal, they were all aristocrats of a sort-at once proud and ashamed of their elite status.

Long before Jamal, Lenin had understood that such people make ideal recruits for a secret organization. They think in abstractions and turn the mundane stuff of politics-land, statehood, the exercise of power-into idealized images. Soon these images become so pure and fine, so embued with romance, that the death of mere mortals seems like nothing if it advances the sacred cause. The Palestinian intellectuals were perfect recruits: hungry for secrets, motivated by the noblest ideals, capable of the most extreme acts of violence.

At safehouses across Europe, Jamal began to assemble his operational files. The schedule of an Arab League meeting planned for Cairo in November; the floor plan of a German factory that built electric motors for the Israeli defense industry; photos of the Jordanian embassies in Paris and Berne; a map showing the route travelled by the Jordanian Ambassador to London on his way to work; airplane schedules and train timetables for a dozen cities in the Middle East and Europe; stacks of false passports and piles of untraceable cash.

As far as the world could see, Fatah was in disarray, still in a period of drift and disorientation after the Jordan debacle. Fatah leaders issued conflicting statements: one day calling for the overthrow of the king, the next day urging reconciliation. There was a search for scapegoats, with the Syrians blaming the Old Man and the Old Man, in turn, blaming a grand conspiracy that included the Jordanians, Americans, and Israelis. Rather than conduct a rigorous critique of his mistakes in Jordan, the Old Man proclaimed that “unity” would solve the PLO’s problems.

It was the silly season. Egypt’s new president announced that 1971 would be “the year of decision”-war or peace-and then did nothing at all. In that same spirit of confusion, the PLO debated in private whether to face reality and accept the existence of Israel and then voted at a PLO congress in Cairo in February 1971 to reject any solution short of the destruction of the “Zionist Entity.”

The Old Man’s outward actions were so clownish and counter-productive that a sensitive analyst might have been suspicious. Was it possible that these public antics were really a sideshow? Was something happening in the shadows? There were tiny fragments of evidence. A hint of a new Fatah underground emerged in May 1971, when the Jordanian government disclosed what it said was a secret PLO plan to assassinate Jordanian officials. But nobody paid much attention. It was too easy to believe that the Old Man was as incompetent as he looked.

The first person on the CIA payroll to notice anything peculiar was Fuad. He had maintained sporadic contact with Jamal ever since the disastrous meeting with Marsh the previous summer in Rome. At one of these infrequent meetings with Jamal in mid-1971-arranged simply as a reminder that the Americans were still in the game-Fuad sensed that something had changed in Jamal. The freewheeling playboy had turned serious. The question was why.

The meeting took place in a coffeehouse in Fakhani late on a Thursday afternoon, the start of the Moslem weekend and the traditional boys’ night out in the Arab world. In the old days, Fuad and Jamal had often met on Thursday evenings for coffee, then whisky, then food, then women.

Fuad arrived late, looking sleek in a pair of wraparound sunglasses. He greeted people in the coffeehouse. They smiled and called his name. Fuad was, by now, a regular in the Fatah-controlled neighborhood of Fakhani. Everyone knew him. He was a rich Lebanese leftist, a friend of the Revolution.

Jamal was already there waiting, smoking a cigarette with one hand and drumming his fingers on the table with the other. He looked tired and overworked, with deep circles under his eyes. The young Palestinian scolded Fuad for being several minutes late. He glanced frequently at his wristwatch.

“You’re behaving more like an American than an Arab,” said Fuad jokingly after a few minutes of desultory conversation.

“And what is wrong with that?” answered Jamal. “There is much that we could learn from the Americans.”

“There is?” asked Fuad, unable to mask his surprise.

“We need help! Sometimes when I watch my Arab brothers, I think maybe we should contract the Revolution out to the Americans. Or the Germans. Or even the Swiss!”

Fuad laughed. But he wondered: What is Jamal telling me? Why is he so tense?

“Do you know what the Arab national slogan should be?” asked Jamal.

“What?”

“ ‘Fut aleina bukra’,” said Jamal. Stop by tomorrow! It was a favorite expression of the time-wasting Egyptians, an Arabic equivalent of manana.

“What is keeping you so busy these days?” asked Fuad.

“Administrative work.”

“What kind?”

“Paperwork,” answered Jamal wearily. “The Old Man asked me to help with the finances. The Martyrs’ Funds. Investments. Money from the Saudis and the Kuwaitis.”

“A lot of money?” asked Fuad.

“Millions,” said the Palestinian. “Tens of millions. The Revolution is rich. But the work isn’t very interesting. It is bank accounts and deposit slips and paperwork. I find it dull.”

“Bureaucracy is the curse of the Arabs,” said Fuad.

“You are wrong, my friend,” answered Jamal. “The curse of the Arabs is the Arabs.”

Fuad looked at him curiously.

“You said before that you need help. Do you mean it?”

“From who?”

“From my friends.”

Jamal laughed. Was he thinking of Marsh and the look on his face as a briefcase of hundred-dollar bills tumbled at his feet? The Palestinian lowered his voice and spoke to Fuad.

“I don’t ever want to see your American friends again. And I warn you: If they come after me, I will kill them.”

Fuad nodded. He changed the subject. What did Jamal think of the new Lebanese cabinet? It was a joke, a scandal. Everyone was for sale. Fatah probably had more Lebanese on the payroll than did the Lebanese Ministry of Interior. And the Sunni politicians in West Beirut, they no longer even pretended to be independent. They just did what Fatah instructed. Lebanon would be better off if it was run entirely by the Palestinians! They drank a friendly toast to the Revolution. A few minutes later Jamal broke off the meeting. He had a headache, he said. They would meet again in a few months.

Fuad watched Jamal walk away toward one of the anonymous apartments in Fakhani where he now stayed when he was in Beirut. It was useless to try to follow. Worse than useless. It was suicidal.

The next day Fuad sent a message to Rogers. He left it in the drop at the Souk Tawile.

Fuad’s message was simple but inconclusive: Our old friend is up to something. He is telling transparent lies about his activities, but that is to be expected. What is strange is the way he looks. He is tired and tense. His eyes say that something is different. He is angry. He talks of killing Americans, but I don’t believe it. Watch him if you can, because I think he is going underground.

But there was nobody to do the watching. The Beirut station had lost two diplomatic cover slots and 10 percent of its budget. The Middle East was on the back burner again. The war in Indochina was taking up more and more of the agency’s resources. There was no time or money to mount a new surveillance operation against a Palestinian intelligence officer simply because a Lebanese contract agent thought that he looked tired and tense.

Rogers received a peculiar call in midsummer from Father Maroun Lubnani. Peculiar, Rogers thought, because they had not seen each other in months.

The Maronite priest invited Rogers to join him for a walk in the hills above Kaslik. It would be a chance to talk, he said. Rogers, dressed in tennis shoes and blue jeans, arrived at the gate of the University of the Holy Ghost at the appointed hour. He was surprised to see Father Maroun waiting at the gate, dressed in a full Alpinist’s uniform of lederhosen, kneesocks, and a Tyrolean hat. The priest was sitting unsteadily on the silver perch of his walking stick.

Rogers tried to think of something to say about this outlandish costume that wouldn’t sound insulting. Nothing occurred to him, so he kept his mouth shut.

Father Maroun greeted him stiffly in French.

The American intelligence officer and the Lebanese priest set off in tandem up the steep slopes of Kesrouan. The priest, though bulky as ever, was surprisingly agile. He seemed to enjoy clambering up the trail at high speed and then pausing to wait for the American to catch up. They climbed for nearly an hour. Father Maroun led Rogers across a mountain stream, along a narrow ledge, through a dense stand of pine trees, and then into a clearing that was completely hidden from below. It was a high meadow, covered with the softest, greenest grass. Below was the university, the seacoast, and the blue Mediterranean.

Father Maroun stopped and flipped open his walking stick. Rogers sat down on the grass and lit a Marlboro. The priest, to Rogers’s surprise, took a pack of Camels from his leather shorts.

“I didn’t know you smoked, Father,” said Rogers.

“All Lebanese smoke,” said the priest.

They sat there, the priest on his walking stick and Rogers on his haunches, smoking their cigarettes and gazing at the matchless beauty of the Lebanese mountains in midsummer.

“This is magnificent,” said Rogers.

The priest looked at him and nodded solemnly.

“You must remember this,” Father Maroun said, “when you are wondering to yourself someday: What are those crazy Lebanese fighting about?”

Rogers nodded. He wondered whether he was in for another recitation of the torment and triumph of the Maronite Church.

“When you called me, Father, you said that you had something you wanted to discuss.”

“Oh yes,” said the priest. “I do indeed. Most definitely.”

He waited for the priest to begin. When he didn’t, he prodded him.

“Well, what was it?”

“What?”

“What you wanted to ask me.”

“Ah yes, of course,” said the priest. “What I wanted to ask you was, what do you think about the leadership of the Palestinian guerrilla group, Al-Fatah?”

That’s an odd question for a Maronite priest to be asking me, thought Rogers.

“That depends on who you are talking about,” he replied. “Some of the Fatah men strike me as dishonest braggarts. Others strike me as sincere. Some are intelligent and others are fools. From what I can gather, most of them are corrupt.”

“Yes, to be sure,” said Father Maroun. The answer apparently was not exactly what he had wanted. The priest had taken off his Tyrolean hat, and Rogers could see that his brow was covered with sweat.

The Lebanese priest lit another cigarette, swallowed hard, and continued.

“What do you think of Jamal Ramlawi?”

Rogers didn’t miss a beat. There wasn’t a twitch of the nostrils or a movement of the eyes out of the ordinary.

“My impression is that Ramlawi is bright and capable, but I don’t know much about him,” he answered evenly. “What’s your impression?”

“Me?” asked the priest. “Oh my goodness. I don’t really know. I don’t know too much about him myself.”

“Then why do you ask?” queried Rogers.

The priest was looking more and more uncomfortable. Looking at Father Maroun, sweating in his leather pants and kneesocks, Rogers had an odd thought: Is it possible that the padre is wearing a wire?

“I was just wondering,” said the priest, “whether this man Ramlawi is perhaps someone we could, I mean, possibly in the future, quietly of course, with complete discretion on our side, perhaps…”

“What?” asked Rogers.

“Talk to,” said the priest. “About the situation in Lebanon.”

“I have no idea,” said Rogers. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“That is so awkward. You know how Lebanon is. We cannot talk with other Lebanese, let alone with Palestinians. We need a mediator. An interlocutor.”

“Sorry, Father, but we can’t help on that one. We only know one side in the transaction. Which is you.”

“I see,” said Father Maroun.

“Perhaps,” said Rogers, feeling slightly peeved and malicious, “your Israeli friends can help.”

The priest looked for a moment as if he might fall off his walking stick.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just a thought,” said Rogers. “If you ever meet any Israelis, you might pose the question to them. I gather they have awfully good contacts with some of the Palestinians.”

“They do? ” asked Father Maroun, his eyes widening.

“I believe so,” said Rogers. “Perhaps they can help you.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” The priest shook his head. He had the look of a man who has heard, for the first time, a suggestion that his sweetheart may be two-timing him. He looked pale. His expression had gone from the nervousness of a few minutes ago to one of shock.

Rogers felt sorry for him. But not sorry enough to do anything about it.

“Perhaps we should be heading back,” he suggested.

“Yes,” said the priest with relief. “Let us go back at once.”

They walked down the rocky slope in silence. Rogers turned the strange conversation over in his mind. If the Israelis had sent Father Maroun on this fishing expedition, it was an unusually sloppy operation. Perhaps it was simply their way of putting the agency on notice, firing a warning shot at the Beirut station. Or perhaps, thought Rogers, it was not an Israeli gambit at all. Perhaps Father Maroun was completely genuine. He was a religious man, who cared deeply about his country. Perhaps he truly wanted to establish a quiet channel of contact between the Maronite Church and the fedayeen. If so, Jamal Ramlawi was an obvious candidate. Sophisticated, close to the Old Man. Perhaps Father Maroun’s nervousness was simply the discomfort that any outsider would feel wandering into the secret world without knowing the rules. Perhaps his naivete was the clearest sign that his intentions were pure.

Either way, Rogers concluded, it was probably best to assume that the Israelis would hear about the conversation. He would let Hoffman, who was edgy about anything involving liaison with Mossad, file the cable back to Langley about the unlikely overture from the Maronite cleric.

When Rogers returned to the office that day, he had another odd communication. There was a note waiting for him from Solange Jezzine. It was written on cream-colored stationery, so firm and heavy that it seemed to have been starched, and it smelled faintly of perfume. A red ribbon was tied in a bow at the top of the notepaper, like a red garter atop a pair of silk stockings.

The note itself was as provocative as the package. Solange invited Rogers to come pay a visit, alone.

Rogers sighed and shook his head. What an extraordinary woman! He penned a brief note saying no, thank you. I’m awfully busy just now. The worst thing about work, Rogers wrote, was that it left too little time for play. Perhaps another time. When he walked out of his office that afternoon, Rogers thought he saw his secretary, who had brought the Jezzine letter up from the front desk, smiling at him as if they shared a secret.

The Fatah campaign of terror began in Cairo on November 28, 1971, when a team of four Palestinians murdered the Jordanian prime minister. They shot him in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of other dignitaries, as he was entering the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. Witnesses said that one of the gunmen kneeled over the body of the dying Jordanian official and licked his blood. The assassins were immediately captured by Egyptian police. They said they were members of a previously unknown organization called Black September, which took its name from the expulsion of the PLO from

Jordan in September 1970.

The next target was the Jordanian Ambassador to London. As the Jordanian official neared his office one day in December, a gunman standing on a traffic island shot at his Daimler limousine with a submachine gun. The ambassador survived. The gunman, an Algerian, escaped. The Jordanians attributed the operation to the same network that had murdered their prime minister. Fatah spokesmen denied responsibility and blamed Black September. Investigators rushed to gather evidence about this new terrorist faction, but they came up with nothing but rumors. The group was frighteningly discreet. It was like an animal that left no tracks.

A few months later, the bombs began to explode in Beirut. They weren’t large devices; often they were little more than sticks of dynamite, meant to confuse and demoralize the Lebanese. Beirutis blamed their favorite villain-Palestinian, Syrian, or Israeli-depending on their political perspective. The painful truth was that nobody really knew who was responsible. It was the year of the bombs.

Black September soon struck again in Europe. This time they attacked targets linked to Israel. Israeli-owned oil facilities in Rotterdam and Hamburg. An electronics plant in West Germany that did extensive business with Israel. They also executed five suspected members of the Jordanian Moukhabarat. The terrorists were becoming heroes in the Arab world, spawning a series of copycat operations. There was jealousy within Fatah, as various lieutenants tried to develop their own terrorist networks.

The Israelis soon escalated their attacks against Fatah. After a fedayeen raid inside Israel, the Israeli Army invaded South Lebanon. The Israelis stayed for four days. Officials in Jerusalem claimed they had struck a decisive blow at the guerrillas. The Israeli operation exacerbated the Lebanese political crisis, as poor refugees from South Lebanon-mostly Shiite Moslems-streamed into the slums outside Beirut. The Lebanese pleaded for decisive action, which their corrupt and paralyzed government couldn’t provide.

Black September continued its campaign of revenge. The group attacked a Jordanian airlines office in Rome, a Jordanian airplane in Cairo, the Jordanian Embassy in Berne, the Jordanian Embassy in Cairo. The group also staged a spectacular but ultimately disastrous operation against Israel. Members of Black September hijacked a Sabena Airlines flight to Tel Aviv and held the passengers hostage at Lod Airport. Israeli commandos, disguised as mechanics, stormed the plane and killed two of the four hijackers.

The Israelis attacked Lebanon again, this time with air strikes against Hasbayah, Marjayoun, and other towns and villages in South Lebanon that had become guerrilla bases. The Israeli raids produced heavy casualties among Lebanese civilians. The Lebanese government briefly considered buying antiaircraft missiles from France to protect its territory. The deal collapsed when Lebanese fixers began demanding huge payoffs for certain interested Lebanese government officials.

The new wave of Palestinian terror became the favorite spectator sport of the Western world. The Fatah leaders, who had nearly disappeared from public view, suddenly found journalists arriving by the score from Europe and America, clamoring for interviews. The Palestinians had become, once again, figures of horror and fascination. The Old Man appeared on magazine covers in his dark glasses and stubbly beard. While his acolytes in the West urged him to shave and dress respectably, the Old Man stuck to his guerrilla garb. He understood that the whole point of the exercise was to look like an outlaw, a blackguard, a despicable and terrifying symbol of violence. Jamal understood it, too. As he made his rounds in Europe and read the extravagant accounts of Black September’s terrorist exploits that were appearing in the newspapers, he could only laugh. Abu Nasir had been right. The ability to create fear is a powerful weapon.