David Ignatius - Agents of 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.

June-September 1970

Beirut; June 1970

The Lebanese election season had begun by the time Rogers returned to Beirut from his misadventure in Cairo. A new president was to be elected in August, and both sides were prophesying the destruction of Lebanon if the other side won. To a disturbing extent, both sides were right.

The Lebanese electoral system mirrored the national condition. It was based on an unwritten “understanding” that had been reached among the leading politicians in 1943, when Lebanon became independent from France. The agreement was a menu for sectarian government. It provided that the Christians would get the largest slice of the pie-the presidency and a majority of the seats in parliament-and that every other religious group would get at least a small sliver, too.

The ballot allocated seats in each parliamentary district by religious sect. Voters in the Shouf district southeast of Beirut were required to select three Maronites, two Sunnis, two Druse, and one Greek Catholic. Voters in Zahle, in the Bekaa Valley, had to select one Maronite, one Sunni, one Shiite, one Greek Catholic, and one Greek Orthodox. Similar formulas prevailed for every district of the country. Religious discrimination was not simply permitted by the parliamentary system, it was required.

The Lebanese system for electing a president married the sectarianism of parliament to the other great Lebanese political tradition: corruption. The president was elected by parliament, not the people, which meant that every six years there was a carnival of bribery as the eager parliamentary deputies auctioned off their presidential votes. What made the 1970 election ominous was that the most popular bribes that year seemed to be shipments of weapons and ammunition for the illegal militias that were springing up around the country.

Rogers spent several listless weeks at the office, busying himself with routine work. Tasks that he normally ignored or delegated to others now seemed to preoccupy him. He arrived early each morning and read the overnight cable traffic from Washington, a tedious and generally unrewarding job. He spent hours auditing the accounts of agents under his supervision. He checked and rechecked the station’s watch lists and surveillance reports. Had anyone asked him whether he was depressed, he instantly would have denied it.

At home he was restless and short-tempered, even with his son. The boy’s games of roughhouse and ball-playing, which Rogers usually enjoyed, now gave him a headache. Mark would quiz him about who was leading the Lebanese Soccer League and Rogers would answer dully, “I don’t know.”

Rogers would go into his study immediately after dinner to read. But when the door was closed, he often found he had the energy only for reading newspapers and magazines. Depression was a stranger to Rogers, which was why he found the encounter with it so disorienting. His career had left him unprepared for failure.

Jane Rogers, who had never seen her husband in such a prolonged melancholy, was uncertain how to deal with it. Over cocktails, she would wait for him to light the spark-to speak about a small event at work, or something he had seen on the way home, or a trip they would all take to the country, or some other flicker of conversation. But the spark didn’t come, leaving Jane sitting in silence with a drink in her hand, wondering what was wrong. She didn’t ask, of course. That was against the rules.

Jane eventually tried various gambits to bring her husband out of his gray mood. She embarked on conversational jaunts of her own, chatting about plays and novels and the latest news from the ladies at Smith’s grocery. She experimented in the kitchen, cooking elaborate Lebanese dishes with garlic and yogurt. She even bought a manual of sexual instruction from a bookstore on Hamra Street and, following its advice, picked up her husband one evening after work dressed in a raincoat with absolutely nothing underneath. In the car on the way home, she unbelted the raincoat and let it slip open till it revealed the curve of her breast and her bare thighs. They made love lustily that night, beginning in the stairwell on the way up to the apartment, and Jane thought she had found a cure.