Agents of Innocence

19

Cairo; May 1970

Holding the next meeting in Egypt was Jamal’s idea. Rogers thought it was crazy. Why hold a supposedly clandestine meeting in the heart of enemy territory, surrounded by thousands of gumshoes from the Egyptian Moukhabarat? Why travel to the center of Soviet influence in the Middle East?

Jamal insisted that Egypt would be safe. He knew the Egyptian security service from his training there, he told Fuad. He knew how they tapped phones and how they conducted surveillance. They were incompetent. Rogers shouldn’t worry. It was almost as if Jamal wanted to demonstrate his proficiency as an intelligence officer. Rogers reluctantly agreed to meet in Cairo and packed his bags once again.

They set the meeting for early May, when Jamal had to be in Cairo on Fatah business. Fuad gave Jamal the address of a CIA safehouse in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. It was an apartment on a quiet street in a Coptic Christian neighborhood where the Nasser regime had few friends. Jamal should proceed to the apartment, use the agreed password, and enter. If no one answered, he should return the next day, an hour earlier, and try again. Avoiding surveillance on his way to the meeting would be Jamal’s problem, Fuad said. Jamal scoffed at the precautions.

Rogers arrived in an Egypt that was hobbling along in the waning days of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was like visiting the locker room of a baseball team that has lost twenty straight games. The Egyptians were surviving on their good humor. The dreams and illusions of Nasser’s revolution had been shattered by the 1967 War, when Nasser’s boasts about Arab military power had been revealed as puny lies. Yet the good-natured Egyptians forgave their leader everything. When he spoke, the masses still chanted: “Nasser! Nasser!” The name translated as: “Victory! Victory!” Perhaps they meant it as a joke.

A thin veneer of Nasser’s socialism overlay Egypt, but it was warping and peeling at the edges. Beneath were the residues of so many other cultures-British, French, Ottoman, Bedouin, Roman, Greek-left behind by each wave of invaders that had sojourned in Egypt since the days of Pharoah. Walking around Tahrir Square downtown, Rogers felt as if he was suspended in several centuries at once. Above him were the French-style facades of the old commercial buildings, their ornate moldings and capstones barely visible under the grime of the city; ahead were the modern Egyptian bureaucrats and businessman in their sharp suits, mopping their brows in the Cairo heat; below, in the shadows, were the fellabin, the peasants from the villages of the Nile Delta, ragged and barefoot, relieving themselves in alleyways and on doorsteps, laughing and telling crude jokes. All around was the incessant noise of cars honking their horns and merchants peddling their wares and pedestrians bantering in musical Egyptian Arabic.

Rogers was staying at the Nile Hilton, a grand American hotel along the river that had become, paradoxically, the favorite haunt of President Nasser. It was an island of sanity and efficiency in the middle of chaotic Cairo. Egyptian novelists came to the air-conditioned Coffee Shop to write their books in the cool and calm; Moslem brides held their wedding receptions in the crowded lobby, blushing as a chorus sang tales of the wedding night. It was the place where all Cairo met and socialized.

Rogers arrived a day before his meeting and practiced losing the Moukhabarat surveillance teams, the little men in baggy suits who waited in clusters outside the hotel. He found that it was easy and wondered whether perhaps Jamal had been right.

The day of the meeting, Rogers slipped out the back door of the hotel and walked several blocks up Kasr el-Nil Street to Talat Harb Square, where he hailed a taxi. He had the taxi drive to Dokki, across the river. He stopped there, checked for surveillance, and took another taxi back toward the center of town. He shifted cars one more time before heading to Heliopolis. When he finally arrived in the neighborhood of the safehouse, he had the taxi drop him a block from his true destination and walked the rest of the way, stopping twice to check for little men in baggy suits.

Jamal arrived on schedule an hour later. Rogers barely recognized him. He was dressed like a bawab, a humble doorman, in a dirty gray gallabiya, muddy leather sandals, and a turban-like scarf that covered his head and most of his face. It was a discordant sight: the dark lustrous hair and fine features of a movie star, wrapped in the rags of a beggar. Rogers found the outfit faintly comical and said so.

“I count on the snobbery of the secret police,” said Jamal. “They would never imagine that anyone dressed like this would be worth following.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Rogers, walking toward the window.

The drapes were closed to prevent surveillance from across the street, leaving the room nearly dark at midday. Rogers opened the drapes slightly. The street looked quiet. In the building across the way he saw women and children. In one apartment, a young man was sitting alone reading a newspaper and looking idly out the window. He looked harmless. Rogers closed the drapes.

He offered Jamal a whisky. The Palestinian smiled and said no, tea would be fine. They made small talk for only a few minutes. Jamal seemed eager to do business. From the folds of his dusty gallabiya, he removed two sheets of paper covered with dense Arabic writing and handed them to Rogers with a flourish. The shyness of Kuwait had vanished.

“The Old Man sends greetings to the United States,” Jamal said.

Rogers touched his heart in a sign of gratitude.

“What’s in the papers?” Rogers asked.

“Part of our security cooperation,” said Jamal, still beaming.

“Tell me,” said Rogers. The tape recorder was going. He wanted a record for Stone.

“We are giving you the names of eight people who are attending a training camp in South Lebanon. There are four Palestinians, two Germans, and two Italians. They are studying techniques that could be used in airplane hijackings. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine organized the camp, but one of the trainers works for us.”

“Why are you giving us this information?” asked Rogers.

“The Old Man doesn’t like the fact that the Europeans are involved,” explained Jamal.

It struck Rogers as an odd sort of racism, the notion that it was all right for Palestinians to blow airplanes out of the sky but not Europeans. But he kept his mouth shut.

“The second page is the most useful,” said Jamal with the knowing smile that a lawyer or accountant might use in briefing a client.

The second page gave details about the passports that had been prepared for the eight by the PFLP’s documentation bureau. The four Palestinians would be travelling on real Algerian passports, the two Germans and two Italians on false ones from their home countries. The names and passport numbers were listed neatly.

“Thank you,” said Rogers.

Rogers was more pleased than he wanted to admit. The document was a bonanza. It would allow Western intelligence services to track the terrorists as they left the training camp in Lebanon, monitor their contacts with other operatives in Europe and the Middle East, and apprehend them before they killed anybody.

The American dreaded what he had to do next.

“The names and passport numbers are fine, as far as they go,” Rogers said in a measured voice.

“But they don’t tell us all that we need to know. They tell us who will try to hijack airplanes and discredit the Palestinian Revolution. But they don’t tell us when or where. For that, we must go further. I am sorry to push you, Jamal, but we must move to a new level of security cooperation.”

Jamal looked at him suspiciously. The enthusiasm had drained from his face. His lips were tight and his nostrils flared.

Rogers removed the paperweight from his pocket.

“This is a simple device that can help us save many lives. I’ll explain how it works…”

“Aaacchh!” Jamal cut him off with a sharp cry. It was almost a scream, a noise that someone might make to block out another sound he didn’t want to hear.

“Impossible! It is absolutely impossible! I told you in Kuwait that I will not be your spy!”

Jamal was almost shouting. Rogers was torn between concern for the Palestinian and worry about the racket he was making.

“Shhh!” said Rogers.

He walked to the darkened window again and pulled the curtain back a hair to see if the noise had roused anyone. After no more than a second he let it fall back in place.

Rogers groaned and bit his lip. He turned to Jamal and spoke in an eerily calm voice.

“My friend,” said Rogers. “Your problems are just beginning.”

In an apartment across the way, Rogers had seen the same man he had glimpsed before. Still in the same spot, still pretending to read a newspaper. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t Rogers realized it before? The man across the street was a watcher, and he was watching the safehouse. Somehow, despite all the precautions, the Egyptian Moukhabarat had them under surveillance.

Rogers took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He turned to Jamal.

“There is an escape plan,” Rogers said coolly. The apartment had been provisioned with this sort of contingency in mind. He led Jamal to a bedroom and pointed to the simple business suit and broad-brimmed hat that were in the closet.

“Put them on as quickly as you can,” said Rogers.

The Palestinian wordlessly obeyed.

“There are sunglasses in the pocket of the jacket,” Rogers said. “Put them on.”

Rogers looked at his feet and saw that he was still wearing the peasant sandals. There were no shoes in the closet. Never mind. It would have to do. Rogers led the Palestinian toward the front door.

“Listen to me carefully and do exactly as I say. If you follow these instructions precisely, there is no reason that anyone should identify you as having been here.

“Take the stairs down two flights to the basement. At the bottom of the stairwell is a door. Open it. The door leads to a tunnel that passes underground to the basement of the next building. When you come out of the tunnel, walk calmly up the stairs to the front door. It opens on a busy street where the Heliopolis streetcar line makes a stop. The stop is thirty yards from the building. Wait in the doorway until you actually see the streetcar coming. Then walk out quickly and catch it.

“When you get downtown, take a bus from Tahrir Square toward Giza. Stop at one of the clubs along the Pyramids Road where the whores work all day long. Go in and stay with one of the girls as long as you can. Give her a big tip so she’ll remember you. There should be some money in the jacket.

“When you get back to Beirut, Fuad will make contact with you. In the meantime I’ll try to find out what happened here.

“Any questions?”

Jamal looked at Rogers as if for the first time. He shook his head silently. In his eyes was a look of professional respect and deference, the look of a junior officer obeying his superior. Rogers opened the door quickly and peered down the corridor. There was nobody.

“Move!” he said, and Jamal was gone.

Rogers waited fifteen minutes and repeated the same escape procedure himself. Except that he didn’t go to the whorehouse on the Pyramids Road for his alibi. He went to the U.S. Embassy.

Four days later, the Cairo station managed to debrief its best agent within the Egyptian Moukhabarat about the incident in Heliopolis. The damage was less than Rogers had feared. It was the apartment that had been under surveillance, not Rogers or Jamal. Because of a lapse on the part of the Cairo station, the “safehouse” wasn’t so safe.

The Moukhabarat had photos of everyone who had gone into the building. They had made a tentative identification of Rogers, who the Egyptians remembered from the old days in South Yemen. But they were having more trouble with the other person who had been dressed in simple Arab garb and shielded his face. The pictures of him were fuzzy.

The Egyptians had tentatively concluded that Rogers had been meeting with a member of the “Ikhwan Muslimin,” the Moslem Brotherhood that bitterly opposed the Nasser regime. A half-dozen members of the the Ikhwan had been arrested in the last twenty-four hours in Cairo and Alexandria. They were being tortured for information about the group’s contacts with the CIA. Several had died protesting their innocence.

Rogers didn’t like mistakes. The botched meeting in Heliopolis wasn’t his fault, but that was little consolation. He had been unlucky. Rogers, who believed in luck, didn’t like feeling accident-prone.

The worst part about a botched operation was the postmortem that inevitably followed. The Heliopolis incident produced a string of inquiries, memos, and recommendations. Marsh himself flew to Beirut and Cairo and spent a week querying and admonishing everyone in sight. The counterintelligence staff sent its own man to conduct a separate investigation. He was a tall, cadaverously thin man who was unusually secretive and kept talking at odd moments about trout fishing. It was assumed that he prepared a report of his own, but nobody ever saw it.

By late May, the dust had begun to settle. The damage was considerable, but Rogers hoped it wasn’t enough to kill the operation.

The first question the specialists addressed was whether Rogers’s own usefulness as a case officer had been destroyed by the tentative identification of him in Heliopolis. The answer was no. The Egyptians and Soviets had tagged Rogers years ago as an intelligence officer; now they simply had more evidence.

The second question was whether Jamal’s contact with the CIA had been exposed. Every bit of evidence the agency could gather indicated that the Egyptians genuinely believed Rogers had been meeting with a member of the Moslem underground in Egypt. The Moukhabarat’s inability to find confirming evidence of the relationship only seemed to make them more worried about it.

The third question was how the location of the safehouse had been blown. That was Cairo’s mistake. Bad tradecraft. An Egyptian support agent had rented the apartment, it turned out, from a man who had a cousin in the security service. A junior officer under commercial cover in Cairo, who had supervised the rental of the safehouse, was rumored to be packing his bags.

Rogers didn’t escape criticism. He even provided his inquisitors with the evidence they needed. As he fled the apartment in Heliopolis that day, he had grabbed the tape recording of his aborted session with Jamal. During a postmortem in Cairo, Marsh played the tape over and over, especially the brief passage at the end when Rogers proposed the bugging operation.

“You sound almost apologetic,” said Marsh as he listened to the tape. “You don’t have to make any excuses about asking someone to work for the United States! This is a hard-nosed business and there’s no room for sentimentalists.”

Rogers kept his mouth shut. But he winced, later, when he heard Marsh, dressed in a seersucker suit, repeat one of Hoffman’s favorite lines.

“It is time to grab this Palestinian by the balls and start squeezing!” said the man from Langley. Coming from Marsh, it sounded nastier, and also less believable.

Rogers couldn’t quarrel with Marsh’s basic point: an effort to plant a bug had failed because the case officer didn’t have control over his agent. The agent felt free to say no!

Rogers urged a few more months of patience. “We need to wait for the scars to heal,” he told Marsh. “The relationship needs time to ripen. More pressure now may sever it altogether.”

But Rogers was becoming bored by his own arguments. He had made them a dozen times already. By now, they sounded weak and ineffectual even to him. Admit it, he told himself. You’ve failed.

Marsh listened with the aggravating politeness of someone who knows that he has won his bureaucratic battle and doesn’t need to gloat.

You bloodless bastard, thought Rogers, as he listened to Marsh thank him politely for all his time and hard work building the foundations of the case.

Eventually Stone cabled the bad news. The evaluation of PECOCK would be frozen temporarily, pending a review by senior staff of the Near East Division and the DDP. They would handle further development of the case.

The next step would be a meeting between the agent and a senior member of the NE Division staff. Beirut should handle the arrangements. The meeting should take place in a controlled environment, preferably a NATO country. The case officer involved in the initial phase of the case-meaning Tom Rogers-would not be present at the next meeting with PECOCK.