David Ignatius - Agents of Innocence

What drove Rogers was, in part, the insecurity of an Irish Catholic-a “harp,” as the Brahmins of Boston liked to call them-who had gained admittance to the court of the Yankee elite. Rogers never lost his sense of being an outsider. The more time he spent in the world of the establishment, the more he felt that he was not of it. That yearning had pushed Rogers from Springfield to Amherst, as long and chilly a trip as swimming the Irish Sea. And it eventually pushed him into the Central Intelligence Agency.

Rogers’s intelligence career began a few months after he was married. Like most of the recruits of the 1950s, he was initially spotted by a college professor and encouraged to contact a certain government official, whose title and agency were never precisely specified. He went to Washington full of enthusiasm, suffered through weeks of mumbo-jumbo about just who he would be working for and what he would be doing, and eventually was offered a job. It was 1958, a time when a new recruit could dream of using the enormous power of the United States, secretly and subtly, to make the world a better place. What’s more, Rogers didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t want to go to law school. He didn’t want to work on Wall Street or Madison Avenue. He liked the idea of travelling. So he became a spy.

Jane’s father, the Colonel, sensed that something was up when Rogers visited Morristown the Christmas after he joined the agency training program. What sort of work are you doing? asked the Colonel.

“Government work,” said Rogers.

“What agency?” asked the Colonel.

“What do you mean?” answered Rogers.

“I mean, where do you work?”

“Oh,” said Rogers. There was a long pause. “Uh, the State Department.”

“Balls!” said the Colonel. They never talked about it again, but the older man seemed delighted and gave Rogers his unqualified approval from that moment on.

Rogers began his CIA career with a mixture of ambition and idealism. The agency was a place, in those days, for doing good and doing well. Rogers had all the basic skills of a good case officer-the drive, the intelligence, the intuitive sense of how to manipulate others. And he had one thing more: the burr under his saddle, which left him never quite comfortable or content.

He fell into the Middle East almost by accident. The agency was offering a two-year training program in Arabic for interested new recruits. The only real qualification seemed to be a lack of prior involvement in the region. Rogers, knowing next to nothing about either Arabs or Israelis, was regarded as an ideal candidate. He leapt at the opportunity. The Middle East was as far from Springfield, Massachusetts, as he could imagine.

From the first, Rogers loved his work and excelled at it. His father, the police captain, had once confided to his son, as if it was a great secret, that every time he put on his uniform, he was an intensely happy man. It was a secret that Rogers shared. He regarded his work-the simple tasks of recruiting agents and gathering intelligence-as a sublime pursuit, combining duty and pleasure in equal measure. What more, Rogers occasionally asked himself, could a man want?

Rogers’s marriage survived some difficult tests in the early years. The worst moment, etched in his memory, was their arrival in Khartoum in midsummer 1963.

Jane was weak and exhausted from a month of sleepless nights. She had given birth to their first child only four weeks before and wanted to wait until fall, when it was cooler, before travelling to Sudan. But Rogers had insisted that they couldn’t wait. He was needed in Khartoum. There were rumors about a pro-Soviet coup. He was missing out on the action.

They had landed in Khartoum in the sweltering heat of July and unpacked their bags in an embassy house that didn’t have an air conditioner. When they opened the door, a lizard was crawling on the living room wall and there were large bugs in the kitchen sink. Rogers remembered that first night in Khartoum-Jane nursing the baby in the intense heat, sweat pouring off her breasts as the infant sucked and cried-like a nightmare. He fell asleep that night to the sound of Jane sobbing in the bathroom and promised himself that he would try to make up for the awfulness of that first assignment. He never quite did.

Khartoum was the first child. Oman was the second. In those first few months in Beirut, Rogers and his wife still didn’t like to talk about what had happened to their daughter in Oman. It was too painful, too much a symbol of what frightened Jane about the Middle East.

Jane coped. She learned to live with the privations of the Arab world. She studied Arabic, read and reread her beloved English novels, immersed herself in the world of her children. Surrounded by the deceit of the intelligence business, she somehow remained tender and vulnerable, as idealistic as she believed her husband to be.

As the years passed, Rogers’s fascination with the Middle East became more intense. He was an Arabist in his heart, as well as his head. He spoke the language fluently, understood the strange rituals and nuances of the culture, grieved at the stupidity and suffering of the Arabs. He felt the Middle East like a physical sensation on his skin: from the moist, dank air of Jiddah on the Red Sea, where clothes hung from the body like wet rags in midsummer, to the dry deserts outside Cairo and the crunchy taste of sand in the mouth and throat during the winter dust storms.

Unlike many of his colleagues, who served their time overseas chiefly to advance their promotion prospects back at headquarters, Rogers wanted to stay abroad forever. He was happiest trekking through the wilds of Dhofar in Oman to call on a tribal leader, or sitting in a parlor in Aden, chewing qat, as he talked Arab politics late into the night with a Marxist revolutionary.

Rogers tried, not always successfully, to keep from romanticizing his work. He reminded himself that, at bottom, it was a struggle for control, over his emotions and those of others. But there was also a restlessness deep down in him-that burr under the saddle-which was part of why he had been drawn to intelligence work in the first place. There were so many layers of self-control in Rogers that people usually didn’t see the yearning and the impulsiveness. But it was there.

Jane Rogers saw it and left it alone. If she worried about her husband, it was only that he worked too hard. She was the sort of woman who could not imagine character defects in someone she loved.

Beirut; November-December 1969

The CIA, which had a system for everything, had a lengthy procedure for assessing potential agents.

The first step, every young case officer was told, was “spotting” a potential agent who had access to useful information. Then came a sometimes lengthy period of “development,” when the prospective recruit was watched and encouraged and bonds of trust were forged on both sides. Eventually there was “assessment,” when the case officer had to decide whether to initiate a formal proposal to recruit the candidate as a controlled agent.

If the answer was yes, then a new bureaucratic procedure-known as the Headquarters’ Operational Approval system, or HOA-took over. The case officer filed detailed biographical information on the recruit, including a two-part Personal Record Questionnaire, or PRQ. Rogers suspected that this cumbersome routine was modelled on the Yale admissions process.

The Jamal operation was barely past the “spotting” phase. But before going any further, Rogers took some simple precautions to protect Fuad, himself, and the agency if things went sour.

He outlined for Fuad a new set of work rules. Fuad should stay away from the American Embassy or any known American official other than Rogers, his case officer. He should immediately adopt countersurveillance procedures at his hotel, in the street, and on the telephone. The station would monitor the Soviet Embassy for any sign that they had been tipped by Jamal to Fuad’s identity. The station’s liaison officer would also make a discreet check of the wire-tapping logs compiled by the intelligence branch of the Lebanese Army, known as the Deuxieme Bureau.