The Director

32

The second name on Graham Weber’s stress-test list was Earl “Black Jack” Beasley, the chief of the Clandestine Service. Beasley was born to be a cardplayer or a spy; it had been his good luck to be both. He might have been a child of the East, in the sense that he lied so easily and believably that it was very hard even for a polygraph to register deception.

Beasley was in fact a son of the Bronx: His father had been a doorman in a building on Fifth Avenue, one of the first black men to crack the Irish Mafia’s hold on those plum blue-collar jobs. The old man was always perfectly dressed and punctual. One of the tenants took an interest in him and his family; Beasley got a spot in a fancy private school, then a scholarship to Princeton. One day the prodigal son skipped class and took his handsome face and photographic memory into a casino in Atlantic City, and began the life that many of his colleagues described with the shorthand the “black James Bond.”

But Black Jack Beasley was much more interesting and complicated than that double-barreled stereotype. He had traveled to the most extreme limits of risk without blinking. Weber wasn’t sure he could make Beasley sweat. People said the chief of the Clandestine Service was like Smokey Robinson, the lead singer of Smokey and the Miracles, in that people had never, ever seen him perspire, even under the hottest stage lights.

Weber had been wary of Beasley as a figure of the old guard. He had been appointed to head the Clandestine Service by Jankowski, and there were rumors that Beasley had known about Jankowski’s skimming of money, and perhaps more. The FBI director gave Weber a private briefing the first week, and he mentioned the Beasley rumors: He explained that when the first whiff of Jankowski’s activities was in the air, Beasley had made an “operational” trip to Cyprus to see the station chief. The FBI suspected that Beasley had gone there to retrieve his own money and stash it somewhere safer, before the scandal began to shake the walls, but they could never prove it.

Beasley had been the subject of another investigation that was recorded in the files. During the early days in Iraq in 2004, there had been a diversion of operational funds: The agency at the time was bribing tribal leaders in Anbar Province with stacks of hundred-dollar bills that were air-freighted into Al-Bilad on wooden pallets. It was a covert-action program with loose controls — handwritten receipts, often in wobbly Arabic script. One of the agency’s most trusted Iraqi agents reported to the station chief in Baghdad that tribal leaders were paying kickbacks to his chief of operations, who at that time was one Earl Beasley.

The inspector general launched an investigation. But it hit a wall after they polygraphed Beasley. He passed the lie-detector test on all the key questions. And after that, the Iraqi informant clammed up. When the Near East Division chief confronted Beasley about the missing money, Beasley called him a racist. Jankowski wanted him in Iraq, so they let him stay on. And in truth, he was a brilliant operator, first to last. He had shot his way through Al-Qaeda checkpoints more than once when Iraqis saw the black face in civilian clothes and assumed, correctly, that he must be a CIA officer. Beasley was a gunner.

Beasley had Russian friends. That was also on paper. He had been recruiting Russian agents on his first assignment to London in the 1990s, after the Berlin Wall came down. Moscow was the Wild West. People were looting everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor, and some of what was, and then bringing the cash to London.

Beasley’s technique was to troll for recruitment prospects in casinos. He was Mr. Lucky: He would dress up in his tuxedo, handsome as a movie star, and go to the craps table and start throwing money around. The big fish always gravitated to him; he was the best floor show in the casino. Always some of the high rollers were Russian. Beasley would lose a hundred thousand dollars with them, or win it, it didn’t matter; and then he and the Russians would get drunk. Before the sun came up, they would begin spilling their stories and Beasley would have them. He’d unwind them for a week, and then move on to the next casino.

In 1993, Beasley had recorded more annual recruitments than any case officer in CIA history. Corridor talk had it that some of the money stuck to Beasley’s fingers; that he and the Russian oligarchs shared secret bankers. That was part of the Cyprus rumor, back when the Jankowski scandal began throwing off smoke. But Beasley was too good; or possibly he was actually honest. He was such an artist that you couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was innocent.

Weber knew that he needed leverage on Beasley, or Black Jack would float away once again.

When Weber got home the night after meeting with Ruth Savin, he put another SIM card in the Nokia and called a very particular friend. Walter Ives was the deputy chief of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, who had responsibility for national security cases. He had been in that section since he’d left law school in the 1980s. Weber knew him because they had been classmates in college. Weber had been a lacrosse jock; the rough, portly Ives had been the team manager. Weber had made only a handful of good friends in college, but Ives was one of them.

Ives handled all the sensitive matters for Justice: the espionage cases, the surveillance and warrant applications; the prosecutions of intelligence officers that had to be dropped because the information was too sensitive to reveal. He was bald, with a large belly and the demeanor of a career civil servant: He bought his suits at Jos. A. Bank. He lived simply in a house in Silver Spring that was the nicest he could afford on his Justice Department salary. His compensation was that if there was one man in government who was trusted with all the secrets, it was Walter Ives.

Weber called Ives at home and asked to meet that night at a bar on G Street behind the FBI building where they used to go drinking when Weber came to D.C. for visits early in his business career. Ives didn’t ask why; he hadn’t seen Weber since he had taken the CIA job, but he knew he wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t important.

The bar was a dingy old Irish pub that had survived in seedy decay even as the surrounding neighborhood became chic. This was once a place where broken Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents used to spend the afternoons pretending they were out doing casework, before the invention of the cell phone made such subterfuge impossible.

Ives shambled in. He was wearing a denim work jacket and a pair of trousers held up by suspenders, which made his stomach look round as a medicine ball. He wore thick glasses, and he looked from a distance like he might have wandered in from a homeless shelter. Weber looked ten years younger than his classmate.

When Ives sat down in the booth across from Weber, he smiled contentedly. He liked the fact that Weber, whom he had always regarded as a straight shooter, had become CIA director. Ives regarded misuse of government office as an outrage.

Weber ordered a whiskey; his guest requested a 7UP. That was another thing about Ives: He liked to hang out in bars, but he didn’t drink.

“You’re handling the Jankowski prosecution, correct?” asked Weber, after they had shared pleasantries.

“Jankowski is a jerk. That guy has driven his last Mercedes convertible, if I have anything to do with it.” Ives still spoke with a New York accent, a vestige of his boyhood in Queens.

“Is he going down?”

Ives nodded. “He’ll plead out. I have fifty counts of wire fraud before I even get started with conspiracy. A jury would eat him alive.”

“I need a favor,” said Weber.

“I don’t do favors.”

“Then this isn’t a favor. It’s a matter of national security.”

“That’s different,” said Ives. “What do you need?”

“What have you got on Black Jack Beasley? Do you have enough to charge him in the Jankowski investigation?”

“Probably not. He’s smarter than Jankowski.”

“Is he cooperating?”

“A little. He says he doesn’t know anything big, but he has given me some names and dates. He and his lawyer act like they’re my best friends. Listening to them, you’d think Beasley was working for Common Cause.”

“What’s the best you’ve got on him? Not necessarily that you could prove in court, but that you feel in your gut.”

“I have to be careful, pal. Even with you. What you’re asking is a no-no. The judge would crucify me.”

“What about the Russian connection?” pressed Weber. “It’s in the files at the agency. Some of it, at least: The gambling relationships. The Cyprus accounts.”

“Shit, if you have that already, why do you need me?”

“Because it’s old, and people already know it, and Beasley’s already made up a story to cover it. I need something new.”

“Christ, Graham. What did he do to you? Bang your girlfriend?”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” muttered Weber. “Give me a break.”

“Sorry,” he said. “What do you need it for?”

“I need Beasley’s help on something big. But I’ve got to make sure he’s not working for somebody else. I need to bust his balls and see what he does.”

“You think he’s working for the Russians? Shit, wire him up to the box. Don’t waste your time asking me. Grill him yourself.”

“It won’t work with Beasley. The machine can’t read him. That’s what people tell me, people who’ve been through this with him before. It’s not lying that moves the needle with him, it’s telling the truth.”

Ives sighed, like a man resigned to do the right thing despite the rules.

“Okay, I’ll give you something you can use. This isn’t grand jury information, technically.”

“Whatever you say. I’m listening.”

“Jankowski tried to use Russian contacts to hide his money. We think he got the contacts’ names from Beasley.”

“Jesus, Walter, that’s pretty good. You got any details I can work with?”

“Some. You’re right about Cyprus. That’s where it started. Beasley knew a lawyer there who had handled money for him once. He was the Goldman Sachs of money laundering, this guy. He had connections everywhere. He knew how to set up trustee accounts that had no traces. No name behind the number; just a law firm. The firm would place money in different locations: a hundred million here; fifty million there; two hundred million a third place. Never so much that people got really suspicious. And you know where this magical law firm was based?”

“New York City.”

“Close enough. Stamford, Connecticut. And what do you suppose they would say, whenever we made inquiries?”

“Attorney-client privilege.”

“You got it: A lawyer in the States has ironclad protection. Honestly, Graham, the Cayman Islands can’t touch America when it comes to money laundering. Jankowski had already used cutouts before it got to the lawyer anyway, thanks to Beasley’s man in Cyprus. The Cypriot banker would collect the money for Jankowski, then distribute it to trusts, all of which had power of attorney that resided in the vicinity of Stamford, Connecticut. Nice, huh?”

“Sweet. How did you crack it?”

“The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a great piece of legislation. That’s all I have to say on that subject.”

“So Beasley gave Jankowski the name of Mr. Fixit in Cyprus?”

“Correct.”

“What else do you have on him? I need to really scare the shit out of him, Walter.”

“I have one more thing. We did turn up a Russian connection. His name is Boris Sokolov. He used to be mobbed up with the scariest people in Russia and Ukraine. Then he got so rich he went straight, more or less, and moved to London. He’s in the software business, in addition to every other business you can imagine. I think he was one of Beasley’s agents once upon a time. Black Jack clammed up when I ran the name by him: National security matter, can’t discuss it. I pushed him; I mean, look, my clearances are higher than Beasley’s, for Christ’s sake. But his lawyer asked to talk to the judge in camera, and we dropped it.”

“What’s the Sokolov connection to Jankowski?”

Ives leaned toward Weber across the table in the little booth, so that their heads were nearly touching.

“I can’t prove this. But I think Sokolov is an agency asset, right? He’s also wired into the SVR, probably handling money for people in the Kremlin. This is a guy who doesn’t make enemies. So Jankowski and Company must have had contact with him as a source, right? But he’s also investing with Jankowski through one of those numbered accounts. That I can prove. They have investments in a Russian database company that NSA doesn’t like. I know that, too.”

“Are you going to take it to the grand jury?”

“Nope. The AG decided it was a reach. That’s how delicate it was, it went all the way to him. Don’t ask me if the White House was involved, because I don’t know. But the bottom line is we decided to let it rest. I told Beasley’s lawyer that his client wasn’t a target a month ago. Very hush-hush; even Ruth Savin doesn’t know about the case. There. That’s everything you need to know, which I told you only because I got a special legal waiver from the deputy assistant attorney general for national security.”

“Which is you.”

“Correct.” Ives finished the rest of his 7UP. “I have to go. I’d like to flatter myself by thinking that my wife is worrying that I’m off with another woman, but she probably just thinks I’m lost.”

Ives turned to go and then stopped.

“It’s nice to see you, Graham. I’m worried about you. The word is that you’ve got some serious headaches.”

Weber shrugged. “Just doing my job, like you.”

“You want some advice?”

“From you? Always.”

“Find yourself a nice girl. That’s what my wife would tell you. This shit will chew you up, if you’re all alone.”

Weber smiled, for the first time that night. “I’ll think about it,” he said.