John Weisman - Direct Action

Now her interest was really piqued. She went back to the group shot. They were slightly older than the crowd of gawking teenagers who inhabited most of the photo. Three of the men had beards-the kinds of unkempt beards MJ had seen in pictures taken in Beirut’s southern suburbs, Afghanistan, and northern Iraq. Two others had thick, fierce, Saddam Hussein-like mustaches. The last, who was older, darker, and heavier than the others, was clean-shaven. His shirt was tucked into his trousers, which were held up by a wide black belt with a big oval metal buckle.

MJ enlarged the cropped section of the photo another 16 percent. Now she was able to see that five of the six men were carrying weapons-only the clean-shaven individual was not. But they weren’t toting the AKs common to most of the Palestinian security personnel. She enlarged one of the guns as much as she could, outlined it, right-clicked, and moved the weapon onto the weapons database icon.

Thirty-nine hundredths of a second later she learned these guys were hefting Heckler & Koch MP7A1s, three-pound, microsize machine pistols that fire a 4.6 × 30mm round capable of penetrating most body armor. Intrigued, MJ searched the BigPond database and discovered that the weapon was currently issued to some of the retired Special Air Service soldiers employed as bodyguards and drivers by the Saudi Royal family.

MJ had made herself something of a specialist on the Palestinian Authority and she knew for a fact that none of the PSS units carried MP7s. Still, she double-checked the database just to make sure, and BigPond confirmed that the gun was not in use by the PSS.

She checked further and discovered that worldwide sales of the unique, armor-piercing 4.6mm ammunition were restricted to elite military and law enforcement units. Aside from the two-plus dozen of the Saudi crown prince’s bodyguards, the MP7 was carried by only two active-duty units: Britain’s SAS, which had replaced its mini-mini Uzis with MP7s, and Germany’s elite counterterrorist Wehrmacht unit, the Kommando Spezialkräfte or KSK.

By now MJ was totally wired. She enlarged the cropped area once more to see if she could find what the six men were doing-where and how they fit in the particular instant in time frozen in the photograph. She worked as methodically as if she were examining the contents of a petri dish or a lab specimen preserved under the glass slide of a microscope. It took her half an hour or so, but she finally realized what the six men were doing.

They were bodyguards. For a seventh man. A Palestinian security officer from the look of his uniform. That was odd. PSS officers provided security, they didn’t receive it.

She hadn’t paid much interest to the guy before. But now she lavished her attention on him. Except he wasn’t entirely visible. The Palestinian’s face was partially obscured by the red-and-white checked kaffiyeh he’d wrapped around his head and shoulders.

Just under two-thirds of his face could be seen. MJ’s eyes crinkled. “Not for long, Buster Brown.” She brushed her shoulder-length, butterscotch-colored hair out of her eyes, pulled it straight back, and trussed it with a rubber band. Then she took the photo crop, saved it as a separate jpg file, opened her Adobe Photo Shop software, and started playing with the editing tools. This son of a bitch was going to be hers .

1:14P.M. MJ glanced up at the wall clock that was just visible over the top of her cubicle. Christ, Mrs. SJ was going to have a fit. She expected her C-PIGgies to go through a minimum of sixty photographs a day. MJ had scanned only eight. Well, things had taken longer than expected. But there he was, in living color.

MJ examined the face. The guy was about fifty-maybe a couple of years either side. Olive skin. He sported a thick mustache. But the more MJ stared at the mustache, the more she became convinced it was fake. His eyebrows were thin, and the rest of his face didn’t support the weight of the huge brush on his upper lip. It was out of balance to the rest of him. She enlarged the picture so she could see everything more clearly.

Several details bothered her. The picture had been taken at midday. Most men shave in the mornings. There were light traces of five-o’clock shadow at the edges of the man’s cheeks. But the upper lip area adjacent to his mustache had no discernible hair. That meant it was clean-shaven. But his cheeks weren’t. Paying special attention to one area of the face when shaving was, she knew, consistent with wearing a disguise or a prosthetic. She’d seen Tom prepare disguises and that’s how he did things.

Okay, let’s assume disguise . She played with the software for a while. After half an hour she had composited seven distinct full facials. There was one with mustache; one with Ayatollah-style beard and another with close-cropped Yasser Arafat stubble; one barefaced, one with full head of hair, another one balding, and a final one with shaved head. After MJ finished playing with noses, chins, and cheekbones, she had more than forty images. Then she keyed up the IdentaBase facial recognition database and let it do its magic.

3:26P.M. This made no sense. No sense at all. None of the more than twoscore composites had caused the recognition software to hiccup.

MJ sighed. Back to the drawing board. She focused on her first composite-the one in which she’d erased the kaffiyeh and reconstructed the left side of his face.

By now, she’d given him a name. She called him Khalil, because that was the name of a Palestinian terrorist in John Le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl, a book she’d read in college.

Okay, Khalil, MJ posited as she stared, what if you had plastic surgery so the Israelis couldn’t identify you?

She blew up the photo, then scanned it as closely as she could to see if Khalil’s face bore any signs of cosmetic alteration. When she saw-or at least thought she saw-possible changes, she tried to conjure up what he’d had done to himself.

It took her hours of trial and error, but she finally put together something she was happy with. The Khalil she now stared at certainly was different from the man in the original photograph-and yet he was the same man. She’d made small but significant changes: enlarged his upper lip, reduced the prominence of the cheekbones to make his face slightly more oblong, extended the hairline just a tad lower onto the forehead, and taken the Roman-like hook out of the nose.

6:45P.M. MJ sent Khalil’s image to the IdentaBase software. Six minutes later, she’d gotten the hiccup she was waiting for. The software pulled ninety-two points and a name.

The name was Imad Mugniyah. MJ went white. Imad Mugniyah was the world’s second most wanted terrorist. The founder of the Islamic Jihad Organization. The man who’d blown up two American embassies in Lebanon and killed 241 U.S. Marines. The man who had kidnapped and tortured to death CIA’s Beirut station chief William Buckley.

She’d once seen one of the CIA’s two photographs of Imad Mugniyah-and the guy in that picture, which dated from 1988, looked nothing like either the individual in the Reuters photo or the composite she’d sent to IdentaBase.

And yet there it was in black-and-white: ninety-two points. Holy Mother of God.

Just to make sure, MJ logged onto BigPond and pulled up the original picture. The photo had been obtained in September 1988 by a Hezbollah penetration agent working for a Beirut-based Arabic-speaking case officer named. 8It showed Mugniyah, surrounded by seven of his IJO colleagues, watching CNN’s coverage of the aftermath of the July 1988 shoot-down of a civilian Iranian Airbus by the USS Vincennes .