John Weisman - Direct Action

There was significance to this. In December 1988, Pan Am’s Flight 103 from London to Washington exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Among the 259 passengers were five CIA officers, including the son-in-law of the Agency’s deputy director for operations and, 9a former Beirut station chief who had come close to killing or capturing Imad Mugniyah twice. Despite the fact that the Libyan intelligence service had ultimately been convicted of bombing Pan Am 103, there were those at CIA-and MJ’s boyfriend Tom Stafford was among them-who believed it was the Vincennes incident that led to the bombing, that Iran was ultimately responsible, and that Imad Mugniyah was somehow complicit in the atrocity.

MJ printed out the BigPond photo and compared it with her afternoon’s work. There was a slight resemblance. Imad Mugniyah had been born sometime in the 1960s: 1962 or 1963 was what came to mind. He’d be in his forties now. Which was more or less the age of the man in the Reuters photograph. But Imad Mugniyah? At the site of a bombing in Gaza? Such things were way above her pay grade.

MJ decided to let Mrs. Sin-Gin handle the problem. She wrote a half-page single-spaced memo, clipped all of the photos together, slipped them into an envelope, which she sealed and then put inside an orange-tabbed folder. At 8:15P.M., MJ walked the folder down the corridor to Mrs. ST. JOHN’s office suite. The outer door was locked and the receptionist had long since left. So she pushed the file through the letter slot in the top of the receptionist’s secure documents repository, returned to her own cubicle, removed the hard drive from her classified computer, slid it into the safe that sat adjacent to her desk, put the pen drive with the original photos on top of the hard drive, locked the door, and gave the knob an extra twirl. Mrs. SJ could deal with Imad Mugniyah in the morning.

17 OCTOBER 2003

8:03 A . M .

MJ was still shrugging out of her coat when she saw the Mugniyah file on her desk. There were two light green Post-its on top of the file, both hand-lettered in Mrs. SJ’s distinctive penmanship. On the first was the single wordREJECTED. On the second, You have a daily quota of analysis to fulfill. Deviation could result in disciplinary action . MJ tucked the folder under her arm like a football and tore down the corridor toward the chief’s suite.

She made it as far as Mrs. SJ’s outer office. Sylvia N. HIGGINBOTHAM, the chief’s special assistant, looked up as MJ barged through the door.

“Is she in?”

Sylvia rose out of her chair and stepped between MJ and Mrs. ST. JOHN’s door. “I wouldn’t push this one, Hester.”

“Why?” MJ slapped the folder on Sylvia’s desk. “This has to do with Americans being murdered. Didn’t we all hear the president say we won’t spare any effort to track down and punish anybody who kills Americans?”

“Hester-don’t go there.”

“Why the hell not?” MJ stood her ground, fists clenched. “Christ, Sylvia, people died.”

“I know. And it stinks.” The special assistant flicked her head in the direction of Mrs. ST. JOHN’s office. “Who can tell. C’mon, Hester.” Sylvia took the file, came around the desk, put her arm around MJ’s shoulders, gave her a look that said, Don’t talk in front of the receptionist, and walked her out of the suite into the corridor, closing the door behind her.

She stopped when they were safely out of range and gave MJ back the file. “All I know,” she whispered, “is that Sin-Gin started making phone calls as soon as she saw what you’d done.” She inclined her head toward MJ’s ear and whispered, “She even called the seventh floor.”

“Who?”

“Who knows. She placed the calls herself. So maybe the big boss. Maybe the executive director. Maybe the DDI-maybe even the DDO.” Sylvia rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t matter who, Hester. But she got a call back. That much I know. And ever since, she’s been growling she has to get rid of you. Move you to another division.”

“The bitch.” MJ shook her head in derision. “I’ll grieve. I’ll file a grievance over this, Sylvia.”

“That would really drive her crazy.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.” Sylvia took MJ’s hands in her own. “But maybe there’s a better way.”

“Such as?”

“You’re scheduled for three vacation days, right? You’re leaving tonight. Visiting Tom in Paris. You’re not coming back to work until next Wednesday. So, you go-and I’ll see what I can do before then.”

“Do?”

“If I hint you might grieve, I think I can persuade her not to try to transfer you. Look, Mrs. SJ doesn’t like flaps. She won’t like the idea of you talking to somebody from the IG’s office about the fact that unless a picture has a one-hundred-and-twenty-seven-point match, it can’t be sent onward.”

MJ shook her head. “What’s wrong with her, Syl? What does she do, work for al-Qa’ida?”

“Perish the thought. I think she’s just old and set in her ways.”

“Makes me wonder if Tom’s right.”

“About?”

“This place. My job. Everything. How can we wage war when from the seventh floor down, they all keep people like me from doing my job?”

“Go to Paris, Hester. See your fella. Have fun. We’ll worry about Mrs. Sin-Gin when you get back.”

17 OCTOBER 2003

12:10 P . M .

87 BOULEVARD DE COURCELLES, PARIS

TOM STAFFORD PREFERRED TO SITat the far corner table in Les Gourmets des Ternes’ back room because the restaurant was constantly so jam-packed at lunch that it was just about the only table in the whole place where he could listen to whoever sat next to him without being bombarded by six or seven simultaneous conversations. The small, perpetually crowded bistro was vintage Paris: mix-and-match tables and chairs, paintings and prints stacked erratically on the walls, well-worn leather banquettes, Art Deco light fixtures, dusty fin de siècle mirrors in ornate varnished wood frames, red awnings that covered the sidewalk tables in the spring and summer months, and a ceaseless crescendo of conversation as the two undersize dining rooms filled up after the glass-paneled front doors were unlocked promptly at noon, Mondays through Fridays.

Tom ate lunch at Les Gourmets once a week or so. If he was doing business, he preferred the anonymity of one of Paris’s steak-and-frites or moules-and-beer chains like Hippopotamus or Leon’s, where there was less chance that DST, the French domestic security agency, had the tables wired. He brought his friends here, where the proprietor, Monsieur Francis Marie, a gray-haired bulldog of a man whom Tom greeted as “Monsieur Francis,” always had two bottles waiting on his table: the house Brouilly and a liter bottle of Evian.

Today, Tom was lunching with another Les Gourmets regular. Shahram Shahristani was in his early sixties. As a young man, the Iranian had been an officer of the shah’s military intelligence service, rising to the rank of one-star general in the months before the Pahlavi reign came crashing down in the spring of 1979. Shahristani had been peripherally involved in the Iran-Contra scandals of the 1980s. He’d conceived an elaborate shell game that had allowed the CIA to move TOW missiles through Portugal into Tehran in the misguided idea that giving arms to the mullahs would help free American hostages held in Lebanon by Iranian surrogates and their Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps advisers. Although Shahristani had advised CIA against the ploy, the White House had pursued it anyway-with bad results.