Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

Zafaraniyeh,

Tehran, Iran

They picked Zahra up from a street stall in the square, crowded with Red Wednesday shoppers. One minute she was standing there, holding a handful of red tulips she had just purchased, and the next, three men had hustled her into a black Mercedes sedan and she was gone.

Scorpion, on a Kavir motorbike arranged by Ghanbari, weapons and backpack bundled on the seat behind him, didn’t hurry after them. He waited and checked the laptop on which he had installed his NSA and tracking software to follow her. In addition to tracking her cell phone via GPS, he had glued a GPS transmitter to the back strap of her bra, just in case. The bugs showed as an intersecting double dot moving toward Modares Highway. They were going north, back to North Tehran.

Alerting Langley had been a problem. He had been right that the Internet would be blocked for transmission outside Iran. As an emergency stopgap he and Shaefer had arranged to send e-mail via an encrypted Virtual Private Network, for his Swiss firm, Glenco-Deladier, to his supposed superior, a mythical Monsieur Henri von Bergen, which would be immediately rerouted to Shaefer. The problem was how to get to a server outside Iran that would allow him to complete the routing.

Fortunately, Ghanbari had been able to provide a workaround-a server at the military base at Lavizan. Because Ghanbari’s group needed outside Internet access to communicate with Asaib al-Haq in Iraq, the server on the Lavizan base provided Internet access outside Iran, even when all other external communications were shut down. Scorpion used it to bounce a VPN connection from Lavizan to an Asaib al-Haq server in Kirkuk in Kurdish Iraq, and from there to Glenco-Deladier in Switzerland using IP routing addresses from an NSA database.

He prefaced the message with uozthgzuu, Flagstaff, in the simple reverse alphabet code they were using, even though the VPN already provided encryption security. In less than a minute Shaefer got back to him with “Mendelssohn” for himself and “Capablanca,” the famous chess champion from the 1920s, which Scorpion immediately understood meant that Rabinowich, a chess fanatic, was on the e-mail thread.

Scorpion responded: Tango -reverse code for Golf, or Ghanbari- not the Gardener . That ought to set the fox among the chickens, he thought. When Shaefer and Rabinowich reported that, it would leave the whole DEFCON preparation hanging in midair. Washington would go berserk.

Rabinowich wrote back, ???! meaning, “Who is?” The exclamation point was recognition that he had just tossed them a bombshell.

Scorpion typed in the reverse code: uziamazmhzwvtsr. Farzan Sadeghi.

Head of ZJU? from Rabinowich, reversing the acronym standing for AQF. Al Quds Force. Good man, Scorpion thought. Rabinowich knew who Sadeghi was and understood the implications.

Kta’eb Hezbollah, Scorpion responded.

Power struggle within IRG? Shaefer asked. Iranian Revolutionary Guards. So Shaefer understood now why the Iranians had attacked the embassy in Bern. Kta’eb Hezbollah was taking over the Revolutionary Guards, doing it by forcing the issue.

Scorpion typed back: yrmtl. Bingo. Then added: instructions?

There was a three minute delay, Scorpion getting more anxious as the clock ticked. Every second that went by made it more likely that the Revolutionary Guards and Scale would track his location. Shaefer and Rabinowich were probably connecting with Harris, he thought. He wasn’t sure how long he could afford to wait. What time was it in Washington? He glanced at his watch: 11:30 P.M. in Tehran; 3:00 P.M. Washington time. Harris would be in the middle of a meeting, probably somewhere on the Hill, he imagined, stepping outside into the hall, saying, “Excuse me, Senator.” Harris had it down to an art form.

Ghanbari came over and glanced at the laptop screen.

“I was right. You are CIA,” he said. “I should kill you,” fingering his pistol.

“For the last time, I’m not. Not that it matters.”

“So you say,” Ghanbari said, then hesitated. “What does matter?”

“I can help,” Scorpion said. “Sadeghi won’t leave you alive to talk. Do you want to leave?”

Ghanbari straightened.

“You mean asylum?”

“I mean whatever. Do you want out?”

“This is my country. I have a family. Let that madar sag leave.”

Just then Shaefer’s response came.

It took Scorpion a couple of seconds to translate gvinrmzgv . It meant terminate.

So that was how the NSC and CIA wanted to end the crisis. Identify and eliminate the attackers, put it out to the world what had happened and that U.S. intelligence had eliminated the threat and punished the guilty inside Iran itself, letting the Iranians and the rest of the world know the CIA could strike anywhere, anytime. U.S. Navy ships and minesweepers would open the Straits of Hormuz. Net result: Iran loses face and the White House manages to avoid a nasty war while at the same time coming out of it looking like a hero, like the Bin Laden killing. There’d be a photo of the President and the NSC in the Situation Room looking determined on the cover of Time magazine and prime-time network news. Worth a few million votes come election time. Scorpion turned to Ghanbari.

“Last chance, Muhammad jan ,” he offered. “They want me to do something and then I’m gone. Are you coming?”

“You’re going to kill Sadeghi, aren’t you?” Ghanbari said. You had to give it to the Iranian; he may have looked like an academic, but he caught on fast, Scorpion thought.

“Whatever I do, they’ll call you a traitor. They’ll hang you for a Mossad or CIA spy,” he said.

“You know that’s not true.”

“What has truth got to do with anything in our business?” Scorpion said. “Last chance?”

“I’ll tell you after tonight,” Ghanbari said.

Scorpion nodded and typed: vcrg? Meaning what’s the exit strategy?

The answer was: xszofh . Scorpion translated: Chalus. A small Iranian port city on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea, not far from either the Azerbaijan or Turkmenistan borders. A pickup by boat or seaplane, he thought, and in a short time out of Iranian jurisdiction. Perfect.

He took a deep breath. Shaefer and Rabinowich hadn’t been idle. They’d realized the only way to secure the operation was to handle the tactical issues so the Iranians didn’t get their hands on him for a show trial.

May be more than one coming, he typed, thinking of Ghanbari and Zahra, and after a few more details ended the session.

“What was that about?” Ghanbari asked.

“It’s not just the Gardener,” Scorpion said. “Who’s behind all this and why? If Sadeghi goes, who comes after him?”

Ghanbari stared at him, his eyes round behind his glasses.

“Zahra was right,” he said. “You are a very dangerous man, Laurent jan .”

They brought Zahra to a four-story stone house on Baghestan 5 Street in the Zafaraniyeh district, an exclusive neighborhood in the foothills of the Alborz, west of Vali Asr, North Tehran’s main street.

Three men in suit jackets hustled her out of the Mercedes and up to an office on the top floor of the building. A window faced out to the tree-shaded street, a curtain partially but not completely covering it. The room was luxuriously decorated with custom Italian furniture, a red Varamin carpet on the floor, and on the wall, portraits of the Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Iranian Islamic Republic and Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.