David Ignatius - Agents of Innocence

“I trust our man,” said Rogers. “Besides, he’s all we’ve got.”

“Send the cable,” said Hoffman.

The Beirut station looked good the next day when the gunfire around the Tal Zaatar refugee camp stopped and the Lebanese prime minister, a Moslem, issued a statement declaring that the crisis was over.

Beirut; April 1970

It took Rogers several weeks to complete the Personal Record Questionnaire, or PRQ, formally proposing that Jamal be enrolled as an agent. The real work was already done. The contacts had been made in Beirut, Amman, and Kuwait. Jamal, whatever his status, was already providing timely information. But none of that mattered to the bureaucracy. Their triumph was to reduce the mysterious and often sublime relationships of the intelligence world to an orderly flow of paper.

Rogers loathed this sort of paperwork. The PRQ was a lengthy document that was itself compartmentalized for security reasons. Part I was a seven-page biographical summary, much like the resume that a normal job-seeker might present to a prospective employer. It included the subject’s name, birth date, and home address; the names of his parents, his educational background, his hobbies; it also summarized his drinking habits, drug usage, and sexual history. Part I used true names throughout.

The PRQ Part II had the juicy operational details. It explained how the subject had been spotted and assessed, how the information about him in Part I had been gathered, and most important, how the case officer intended to use him. It was a sort of operational game plan, outlining how the agent would be run and what intelligence he would be expected to provide. Part II referred to the agent only by a cryptonym. The segregated parts of the PRQ went into the agent’s basic file in the central registry, known as the “201 file.” In theory, the people who had access to the real names of agents hadn’t any access to their operational records, and vice versa.

The agency had borrowed many of these bookkeeping practices, along with so many other details of running a secret service, from the British. The British, however, took the business of secrecy far more seriously than the Americans. In the early days, they didn’t even like to use code words in their operational records and preferred, where possible, to use numbers. Rogers had read of an SIS man who had been reprimanded for a security breach years ago. His crime was that in a message home he had identified Berlin as the capital of the country known in SIS jargon only as “12000.”

A six-letter cryptonym was assigned to the case. Agents in Lebanon all had code names that began with “PE.” Jamal Ramlawi became, in agency-ese, an agent with the code name PECOCK.

The portrait of PECOCK that emerged from the biographical material suggested that he had the makings of a quite remarkable agent. Indeed, the Americans could not have invented a better target for recruitment.

PECOCK, the documents explained, was a sort of Palestinian aristocrat, with the self-assurance and disdain for conventional manners that are typical of the children of prominent families around the world. In 1964, after graduating from Cairo University, he had attended the founding session of the Palestine Liberation Organization in East Jerusalem. At that meeting he accosted some of the leaders of Fatah, then a small underground network based in Kuwait, and asked to join them. Several of the elders tried to convince him to go to graduate school instead, but he would have none of it. He moved to Kuwait in 1965. Because of his easy bearing and his knack for languages, he was used often as a courier in Europe.

Like so many aristocrats, the young man gravitated toward intelligence work. Perhaps the visible world bored him. He moved to Amman in 1967 and worked under Abu Namli, vetting new recruits to Fatah. The next year, the Egyptians quietly offered to help Fatah form a security service. PECOCK was among the ten members of Fatah who went to Cairo in mid-1968 for a six-week training course in intelligence. The course covered recruitment and control of agents, surveillance and interrogation techniques, and the preparation of intelligence reports and estimates.

The ten Cairo graduates, who returned to Jordan in late 1968, formed the nucleus of a new Fatah intelligence organization, known as the Jihaz al-Rasd, or “Surveillance Apparatus.” Like many security services, it was divided into two parts: one responsible for counterintelligence and the other charged with collecting information and conducting special operations. The chief of the Rasd, from 1969 on, was Mohammed Nasir Makawi, known as “Abu Nasir.” PECOCK was one of his three top assistants. He was thought to be the most influential because of his relationship with the Old Man, who treated the handsome young Palestinian like a son.

Why had the Old Man placed such trust in Jamal? Rogers asked himself. Why had this relatively junior intelligence officer been singled out and given responsibility for Fatah’s most sensitive operations? Perhaps because the Old Man couldn’t trust anyone his own age, who might be a potential rival.

Suspicion was the universal sentiment of the Arab world, Rogers believed. This was the land of the stab in the back, a culture that believed the admonition: “Fear your enemy once, fear your friend a thousand times.” The bond of friendship among Arab men was intense, but it never lasted. Confidences were always betrayed, pledges of trust and fidelity always broken. Look at Islam. Within a few years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed, his followers were at daggers, hatching assassination plots against each other. The same problem had afflicted Arab politics ever since. The suspicions and rivalries were so intense that it was difficult to trust anyone long enough to build something solid, like a political party or a nation. An Arab man trusted only one other man completely: his son. Even his brothers were potential rivals. The Old Man had no son. But he had Jamal.

The rest of the PRQ Part II summarized operational details. It was obvious that agent PECOCK had access to Fatah’s most important secrets. The only question was how to run him.

Here Rogers made a recommendation that he knew would upset headquarters. PECOCK should be regarded initially as an asset, rather than a controlled agent. He should be encouraged to believe that the CIA accepted his definition of the relationship-as “liaison” between two potentially cooperative intelligence services-and didn’t view him as an American agent. Rogers drew on the conversations in Kuwait. He noted that the young Palestinian had been directed by the Old Man himself to work with the United States. The agency should appear to accept this approach. It should enhance PECOCK’S stature and encourage the fiction of a two-way relationship, by providing him with a regular flow of low-level intelligence that might be useful to Fatah. There was a strong chance that PECOCK could eventually be recruited in the usual way, paid a stipend, and run as a controlled agent. But only if the agency was patient.

“We shouldn’t get greedy,” Rogers stressed in a cable to Stone that accompanied the PRQ. “The operation may collapse if we insist at the outset on complete control and reliability. We should make no effort to buy or compromise PECOCK, and we should not, at this point, ask him to submit to a polygraph.”

For now, recommended Rogers, the Palestinian should be handled discreetly. The Lebanese contract agent who had spotted him and helped develop the case should continue as the courier and intermediary. His cover as a Lebanese leftist with strong pro-Palestinian sympathies would give him easy acesss to Fatah without arousing suspicion. Rogers should meet regularly with PECOCK, but outside Lebanon whenever possible.