Protect And Defend

46

Irene Kennedy lay on the dirt floor and tried not to move. She was wearing only her bra and panties, and was partially covered by an itchy wool blanket. A foul, canvas bag was tied around her head. Even though she desperately needed to go to the bathroom, she was not about to ask her captors. They had already savagely kicked her for attempting to sit up. The man who had been watching her didn’t bother to say a word. Just delivered a swift boot to the ribs. He didn’t need to. The message was clear. Stay put. If we want you to get up we’ll let you know. Kennedy’s inventory of her surroundings was bleak. She was almost certain they had her underground. The floor was dirt, and even through the filthy canvas bag she could smell the must.

The attack had been horrifying. Kennedy saw the vehicles in front of them get blown to bits, and then her own Suburban was hit. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the explosion might have knocked her unconscious. The next thing she remembered after the series of explosions was the vehicle filling with smoke. Her bodyguards on either side were yelling into their radios calling for help, but none came. She didn’t know if the doors had been pried open or if her bodyguards, gasping for air, had decided they had no choice but to abandon the armored vehicle. She had been grabbed roughly and slapped the second her foot hit the pavement. She remembered having the presence of mind to at least look calm. And then the man who had hit her forced her to watch as he shot three of her bodyguards in the head.

They had traveled no more than a block when she was shoved down onto the floor. The hood was placed over her head, and the men went to work with knives, cutting away her clothes. After that they bound her wrists, knees, and ankles. A few minutes later, she guessed, they pulled into a garage where she’d been transferred from one vehicle into the trunk of another, although, it was possible they had simply moved her to the trunk of the same car. She guessed that for a good thirty minutes the car drove around the city. She could tell by the motion and noise that they were stuck in traffic. At one point she heard the men in front arguing. They were talking in Farsi. They said something about roadblocks and having to abandon their original plan. Shortly after that they dumped the car. The men wrapped her in a blanket and moved her from the trunk to her current location.

One man had carried her over his shoulder, and she got the sense they had walked down several narrow flights of stairs. Every time the man hit a landing, he would turn and the hood on Kennedy’s head would brush against the wall. She’d heard an old door open with a creak and then she was dumped on the floor like a sack of fertilizer. Kennedy rolled onto her side and attempted to sit up. That was when one of her captors kicked her in the ribs and flipped her onto her back.

The pain of what she thought was most likely a broken rib was a bit of a blessing. It gave her something else to worry about. It had been nearly twenty-five years since she’d gone through her training at The Farm near Williamsburg, Virginia, but she remembered it very well. In fact one lecture stood out all too vividly in her mind. It was about the kidnapping of CIA Beirut station chief Bill Buckley in March of 1984. Buckley had been a Special Forces officer in the army before joining the CIA and was no wilting flower. One week after his kidnapping the first of dozens of CIA spies went missing. Buckley’s Hezbollah interrogators broke him and began selling the information to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and other countries in the region. They brutally tortured him for more than a year and then hanged him. The CIA had managed to get their hands on some of the tapes Hezbollah had made of the torture sessions. The instructors at The Farm made Kennedy and her fellow classmates watch the tapes twice-once before they started their classes on interrogation and again at its two-week conclusion. Showing Buckley’s horrible experience was intended to make two simple points. The first was that everyone breaks. Even the toughest of the tough. All you can do is hold out as long as possible to give your colleagues time to move agents and operatives out of harm’s way. The second lesson to be learned was simple yet important-don’t get caught.

It was obviously too late for that, but Kennedy was attempting to order certain facts in her mind so as to protect the CIA’s most important assets as long as possible. She knew, by both code name and real name, virtually every current spy on the CIA’s payroll. For the moment Asia and Africa were of little concern. The two most immediate problems were the Middle East and Europe. Kennedy was going down a list in her mind, country by country, of who had been most effective and who had been the least valuable. She basically inverted the list, putting least helpful at the top. Then she added suspected double agents and those the CIA suspected to be on Russia and China’s payroll.

By far it was more difficult to rank her own clandestine operatives-employees of the CIA who worked abroad without diplomatic cover. Some were more effective than others, but they were all her fellow countrymen. Kennedy attempted to compile a list, but didn’t get far. They had told her all those years ago that everyone broke. She knew it was true, but she had to hold on to hope. She was still in Mosul, surrounded by the American military and sympathetic Kurds. And then there was Rapp. The thought of Mitch put a smile on her face. He would stop at nothing until he found her. Just the thought of him in the city put her momentarily at ease.

For a second she even pitied the men who had taken her. What if they were simply a band of local militia looking to collect some ransom? If that was the case, they were in way over their heads. For the first time since being attacked, Kennedy began to seriously question who her captors were, when she heard the muffled voices of two men talking. The squeaky wooden door opened with a bang, and Kennedy had the horrible feeling it was about to start.