Agents of Innocence

43

Beirut; October 1978

Fuad sat in his hotel room, waiting for Rogers. He said a prayer silently, not on the floor facing Mecca but in his T-shirt, facing the mirror. Fuad missed his old apartment, but what could he do? It was gone, the victim of a stray artillery shell from Christian East Beirut.

Rogers was coming! It was a great event. They hadn’t told Fuad why Rogers was coming, but they never did these days. They just said that Rogers was coming to Beirut on a brief mission, and that he wanted to see Fuad as soon as he arrived. What could that mean? Fuad hoped it didn’t have anything to do with Camp David, which had already become a curse word in West Beirut.

A few minutes after 8:00 A.M., Fuad saw a familiar figure in the distance. It was Rogers, unmistakably. Tall and slim, his hair blowing slightly in the wind, his face intent and detached at the same time. Rogers neared the hotel. He was dressed in a gray flannel suit, a blue striped shirt open at the collar, and a pair of cowboy boots. To Fuad, he looked ageless and rumpled in the relaxed way of the Americans. There was a half-smile on his face and an absent expression. He disappeared from Fuad’s view as he entered the hotel.

Fuad listened for Rogers’s footsteps. He knew the sound by heart from a hundred meetings in safehouses and hotel rooms. Rogers would take the stairs, not the elevator, to make sure that no one saw which floor he stopped at. There would be the sound of his shoes reaching the top stair, a pause as he looked around, a slow amble for a few steps, then a quicker pace. Then a soft knock and the code words.

There was a knock.

“Am I early?” said the voice outside the door.

“No, you are right on time.”

The American entered the room, closed the door firmly, and then opened it a crack to make sure that he hadn’t been followed. The hall was empty. The two men, case officer and agent, embraced each other, exchanged pleasantries in Arabic, and offered each other cigarettes.

“You have come back!” said Fuad.

“There isn’t much left to come back to,” said Rogers. He walked to the window and pulled back the drapes a few inches to survey the ruined city. It had all changed. The American gazed out toward the kidney-shaped swimming pool of the hotel, now filled. with debris, and to the skyline beyond, which became increasingly pockmocked with shellholes as it moved toward the Green Line that divided the Moslem and Christian halves of the city. There had been considerable new damage in the last few months, caused by artillery duels between the Christians in East Beirut and the Palestinians and Syrians in the West.

Rogers cursed under his breath.

“I am glad that you have come back,” said Fuad. “I knew that you would! It is part of your nature.”

“No it isn’t,” answered Rogers. “It’s part of my job.”

He gestured toward the window. “This country has gone mad.”

“Yes, it is your nature,” said Fuad, continuing as if he hadn’t heard. “It is inescapable.”

Fuad pointed to a Koran on the coffee table and recited something in Arabic. It was a sura from the Koran: God is the light of Heaven and Earth. His light may be compared to a niche which contains a lamp, the lamp within glass, and the glass shining as if it were a star of pearl.

“You are becoming more religious, Fuad,” said Rogers. “That’s sensible.”

“We are all prisoners of fate.”

“Have it your way,” said Rogers. “But I should warn you that I’m not staying for very long.”

They sat down on the couch and reminisced. As they talked, Rogers was struck by the passage of time and the changes it brings. Even in someone like Fuad, who had seemed impervious to time. Rogers could remember the eager young Lebanese agent of 1969, in love with America and everything it stood for, eager to discard his Arab identity like an unwanted skin, ready to help America liberate the Arab world from its torpor and backwardness. The Fuad of 1969 would no more have quoted the Koran than jumped out the window. But times had changed.

“I need your help on something,” said Rogers.

“I am at your service,” replied Fuad.

“I need to see Jamal Ramlawi in a hurry. This week. In the next few days if possible.”

“Why not? I think he is in town. I will see what can be arranged.”

“Don’t ask him,” said Rogers. “Tell him!”

While Rogers waited for Fuad to arrange the meeting, he paid a call on Samir Fares. Fares had been named head of the Lebanese Deuxieme Bureau two months earlier. When Rogers had heard the news back in Washington, he had been delighted. But it had reminded him of a promise he had made to Fares long ago.

Fares suggested that Rogers pick him up at his new office, in the Presidential Palace in Baabda, in the hills above East Beirut. The Beirut station provided a car and a driver, a tough little Christian named Youssef. The trip gave Rogers a quick and depressing tour of the city. It was like visiting a person who is dying.

The journey began in the shopping district of Hamra, once the elegant meeting place of East and West, now as faded as the cosmopolitan ideal it represented. They drove past the shop where Rogers had bought birthday gifts for his wife, and past another shop where he had once bought, in a reckless moment, a string of pearls for Solange Jezzine. Both stores were now shuttered and closed.

They drove on past blocks of bombed-out buildings, a noman’s-land inhabited now only by snipers and Kurdish refugees, which signalled the approach of the Green Line. Rogers lit a cigarette. So did the driver. In Lebanon, Rogers remembered, smoking was a kind of ritualized sacrament, administered several dozen times a day.

Rogers had crossed the Green Line before, but he still found it unsettling. Rogers hated snipers. They were a symbol of the sickness that had seized the country: bored teenagers, hiding behind sandbags on either side of the line, gobbling speed to stay awake, earning $100 a month plus a chance to swagger around town with automatic weapons, shooting at people without knowing who they were. The only consolation, Rogers thought, was that their aim wasn’t very good. In that regard they were Lebanese. Better at the show of things than at the substance.

They were near the line. Rogers heard the sound of gunfire a block or so away. He slouched down low in his seat as the Lebanese driver put the accelerator to the floor, and held his breath until the car was safely across to the other side.

Across the Green Line lay the Christian strongholds of East Beirut and the mountains beyond. Here there was more evidence than in West Beirut of orderly government and prosperity: the municipal parking lots and trash dumps organized by the Phalange Party, the bumper-to-bumper traffic of BMWs, Jaguars, and Mercedes-Benzs. But it was still thug-land.

As they climbed the hills toward the Presidential Palace in Baabda, Rogers could see the city spread out below like a ragged quilt. He could see the layers of destruction that had been inflicted over the past four years, marking the recent history of Lebanon as precisely as layers of sediment.

The damage began at the core of the city and radiated outward like a hail of machine-gun fire. The first casualties had been the grand facades of the old business district, where buildings had been shelled from both East and West during the worst days of the civil war. Now the fine buildings were crumbling ruins, covered with ferns and moss, and weeds grew in the streets.

Next came the battered walls of the residential neighborhoods near the Green Line-Sioufi in East Beirut and Ain el-Mreisseh in West Beirut-which had been shelled heavily in the recent renewal of the Christian-Moslem bloodletting. Then to the southwest, the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla. Shelled by the Christians, bombed occasionally by the Israelis, yet still the boisterous capital-in-exile of the Palestinians. And finally in the distant southern suburbs, the seemingly random destruction of the Shiite-Moslem slums-deprived, brooding, ready to explode.

Rogers surveyed the devastation with a sense of resignation and disgust. He remembered a phrase that one of the Christian militias had popularized a few years earlier. “Al Arab Jarab”-The Arabs are leprosy.

The Presidential Palace, modern and gleaming white, seemed to Rogers almost a parody of Lebanon’s condition: grand but empty. It was a place of soundless, marble-clad halls; of vast desks at which the few Lebanese government officials in evidence pretended to work; of suites of offices that, on inspection, housed only people to make tea and coffee for the pasha down the hall.

Rogers disliked visiting the palace and was relieved when he saw Fares waiting at the entrance. The Lebanese intelligence chief was dressed much as before, in a tweed jacket and bow tie, looking like a fugitive from an Ivy League faculty lounge. He looked healthy but overworked.

Rogers suggested that they take a drive, alone. He dropped the embassy driver at a cafe near the entrance to the palace, and took the wheel.

“Mabruk!” said Rogers, using the Lebanese word for congratulations. “You’ve done it!”

Fares smiled graciously and put his hand over his heart.

“I am grateful to my friends,” said Fares.

“We had nothing to do with it. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“It is a dubious honor, actually,” said Fares. “I am the head of an intelligence service that doesn’t have a country. We are like a brain with no body.”

Rogers told him he was being too modest. They made small talk for a few minutes, asked about each other’s wives, traded gossip about old friends. Eventually Rogers got around to the point.

“I wanted to see you for a reason,” he said.

“Knowing you, I did not expect that it was just a courtesy call,” said the Lebanese.

“Years ago I made you a promise. Do you remember what it was?”

“Of course I do.”

“I promised you,” said Rogers in a slow cadence, as if he was reciting a catechism, “that if you ever became head of your service, we would release you from the arrangement you had made with us and allow you to serve your country with a clear conscience.”

“Yes,” said Fares. “That is what you said.”

“I want to keep that promise.”

“I’m touched,” said Fares. “But it is not that simple, is it?”

“Why not?”

Fares looked at Rogers curiously.

“Let us be honest. You can tell me that I am free, that I am no longer under your control. But what will happen when you find yourselves in extreme difficulty, when you need a favor? You will come to me, at least I hope you will come to me, and you will ask me to help. You will tell me that I am free to say no, but we will both know better.”

“A promise is a promise,” said Rogers.

“That is just the problem, Tom,” replied Fares with a sad smile. “A promise is a promise. And no more.”

Rogers looked stung. He had come a very long way to try to settle accounts with people he cared about, and his first check was bouncing. Fares saw that he was upset and tried to patch the conversation back together.

“You are worrying too much about this,” said Fares. “You are acting like it is the kiss of death to work with the Americans in the Middle East. But it isn’t. It is very valuable. I am the proof! Everyone in Lebanon knows that I am friendly with the Americans. They do not know the precise details, but it is no secret that I am well connected with the American Embassy. And do you know what? It helps me! The Syrians take me more seriously. The Egyptians take me more seriously. Because they suspect that I work for the CIA.”

“Baloney,” said Rogers. “Nobody trusts a spy. Not even in Lebanon.”

“You are wrong,” said Fares. “In Lebanon, we do not take someone seriously until we know that someone in the West is prepared to buy him.”

Rogers had a look of exasperation. He wanted to resolve the problem.

“I have a proposal,” he said. “I have cleared it with the Director. The deal is this: You are terminated, as of now. The annuity for your wife and children remains in effect. But you don’t owe us anything anymore. We will assume that our relationship is finished.”

“Fine,” said Fares. “And I will assume that our relationship continues.”

“I give up,” said Rogers.

They reached Ashrafiyeh in East Beirut and headed up the coast road toward Jounie, toward the apartment along the beach where they had once met with a frightened young Lebanese Christian boy named Amin Shartouni, who had talked of something called la puissance occulte- and had eventually been killed by it.

Rogers was lost in thought. Fares was glancing at his watch.

“I’m afraid I have a meeting back at the palace,” said Fares apologetically. Rogers changed direction and headed back toward Baabda.

“By the way,” said Rogers, “whatever happened to the Palestinian Christian who trained Amin Shartouni? The man we called the Bombmaker.”

“We see his bombs, but not the man himself. He has gone deeper underground in the last few years. They all have. It’s much harder now to find out what’s going on. When you pick up a rock now, you don’t see the bugs underneath. You just find dirt.”

“The Bombmaker is still alive?” asked Rogers in a tone of disappointment.

“Most certainly. From what little we pick up, he is busier than ever. All of the groups use car bombs now, and he is the master.”

“You would think someone would kill him,” said Rogers.

Fares laughed.

“Who would kill him, Tom? Everyone deals with him a little when they need him. What purpose is there in killing him? He doesn’t know anything, except how to make bombs. And even if he died, his students are everywhere, in all the groups. There are many, many people in Lebanon now who know how to make bombs.”

Rogers shook his head. They drove back to Baabda mostly in silence. As they neared the gate to the Presidential Palace, Fares spoke up.

“Do you remember a woman named Solange Jezzine?” he asked. “The wife of my predecessor?”

“Of course I do,” said Rogers. “She is not a woman that you forget.”

“You knew her a bit, didn’t you?” asked Fares. He spoke matter-of-factly, as if he knew the whole story.

“A bit,” said Rogers. He thought of her sharp eyes and soft body. “Whatever happened to her?”

“She’s remarried,” said Fares.

“Oh really?” said Rogers. “To who?”

“To a very rich young man. He is an arms dealer, the agent of the Saudi minister of defense. It is a very lucrative job, as you can imagine. He’s very active in Lebanon, too. Sells guns to both sides.”

“Does she still live in Lebanon?”

“No. She mostly lives in Paris now. And Marbella. Would you like her address? I am sure they can find it back in the office.”

Rogers paused to think. Did he want the address, the passion, the exhilarating plunge from a high place, and the long convalescense?

“No,” said Rogers eventually. “I don’t think so.”

They reached the entrance to the palace. Rogers stopped the car. Fares sat in his seat for a moment, trying to think of what he wanted to say.

“We have a saying in Lebanon,” said Fares, “Like so many other things, it is something that we borrowed from the French.”

“What is it?” asked Rogers.

“ ‘Seule le provisoire dure,’ ” answered Fares. “ ‘Only the temporary lasts.’ Goodbye, my friend.”

As Fares watched Rogers’s car leave the palace grounds, it occurred to him that Rogers was an unlikely spy. He was a man who yearned for permanency in a business where that was impossible. He seemed to want relationships that were built on trust, honesty, a sense of mutual responsibility. Fares suspected that it was this quality of idealism that made Rogers seem so American-and perhaps also dangerous to those who worked with him. Rogers had a will to believe things that were not always true.