John Weisman: Direct Action

Sass and McGee were older and both former Special Forces. Sass had retired as a sergeant first class out of Fort Campbell after twenty-five years of soldiering. McGee, who was the shift leader, was an E-7, too. But he’d spent nine years on the far side of the fence with Delta. Plus, he spoke three-minus Arabic and kitchen Pashto. Rumor had it McGee spent time in Afghanistan as a part of a hunter-killer element of combined CIA/Delta shooters. Gossip was he’d spent eight months pursuing UBL and the AQL, which was how Pentagon memo writers referred to Usama Bin Laden and the al-Qa’ida leadership.

Last time he was back in Virginia on a week’s home leave, Sass heard whispers that McGee’s final Delta assignment was a joint U.S./British op in Iraq: he’d been a squad leader for one of the Coalition’s preinvasion insertion groups-the sneak-and-peekers who spent two weeks clandestinely designating targets just prior to D-day. RUMINT, which is how they referred to urinal gossip at the DynCorp cafeteria, had it McGee’d spent nine days in Baghdad setting up phone taps and positioning laser target designators.

But that’s all it was-rumor. Because McGee never said anything about Afghanistan, or Iraq. He was pretty closemouthed. About himself in general, and about his time with the Unit, as he called it, in particular. “Been places and done things,” is all he’d ever say, in an accent that was tinged with North Carolina but originally could have been from just about anywhere between Miami and Detroit except New England.

Sass Rodriguez wasn’t closemouthed. He was a professional Texan from San Antonio-hence Sass, call-sign shorthand for Tex-sass. And he had an opinion about everything. Sometimes two or three opinions, all voiced in a lackadaisical Paul Rodriguez Tex-Mex drawl that McGee, O’Toole, and the rest of the DynCorp crew swore got thicker with the addition of any significant quantities of beer. Sass had been in Afghanistan, too. The big, barrel-chested blankethead worked the mountains with the Northern Alliance-Sheikh Massoud’s boys-on horseback and shot himself a lot of Taliban. The CENTCOM commander-General Tommy Franks himself-had pinned a Bronze Star with combat “V” on Sass’s blouse. Sass carried a picture of that event in his wallet.

O’Toole’s arm stretched between Sass and McGee. “There’s our escort,” he snorted derisively.

McGee shifted the M4’s collapsible stock, which was resting against the snuff can in the cargo pocket of his tan Royal Robbins trousers, and snugged it between the glove compartment and the door trim. He plucked the instant-focusing field glasses from the console and held them to his eyes. A hundred yards beyond the Israeli side of the crossing, two dirty, mud-encrusted black Subarus with dinged quarter panels, bald tires, and Palestinian Authority plates sat idling, thick, noxious-looking exhaust farting from the rusted tailpipes. Half a dozen sloppily uniformed Palestinian gunsels cradling banana-clipped AKs were leaning up against the cars, sandaled feet idly pawing at the dust.

McGee examined their faces up close and personal. Then he dropped the binocs back where they belonged, swiveled and glanced back through the Suburban’s rear clamshell doors to make sure the second embassy FAV, the one containing the junior-grade consular officer and driven by Jonny Kieffer, the fourth man in today’s detail, was positioned where it should be. Jonny caught McGee’s eye through the tinted glass and threw him an A-OK wave. McGee gave Jonny an upturned thumb.

It was a visual pun. In Arab culture, the upturned thumb wasn’t the good-to-go sign. It meant “up your ass.”

McGee turned back, shifting his body so the Sig-Sauer P-229 that rested just behind his right hip didn’t get between him and the seat back. Today was a milk run. They’d hightail past the Israeli-controlled industrial zone on the Gaza side of the checkpoint, then drive straight through Beit Hanoun to Gaza City.

McGee caught himself up. Driving straight through anywhere in Gaza was an oxymoron. The roads-and he used the term loosely-had been ruined by neglect and war. There were axle-snapping potholes and huge gouges made by tank and armored personnel carrier tracks. Palestinian drivers were worse than Beirutis-huge trucks belching black clouds of noxious fumes would cut through intersections without pausing for oncoming traffic. And there were other hazards, too: donkey carts, bicycles, and the deerlike Palestinian kids who paid no heed to the anarchic traffic but sprinted between cars willy-nilly and more than occasionally got themselves smacked like Bambi.

Well, they’d creep and crawl past Beit Hanoun, then weave their way off the garbage-strewn main road to a dusty municipal office next door to the crumbling Red Crescent headquarters on El-Nasser Street, where the consular kid was interviewing some Palestinian honor student about a Fulbright. The route was highlighted on the clear plastic cover of the map McGee’d tossed up on the dashboard.

It was all bullshit of course. Smoke and mirrors. Cover for action. The consular kid was a wet-behind-the-ears Agency case officer. And the honor student was some nineteen-year-old Fatah rock-chucker who was going to be cold-pitched. In English, of course, because the spook didn’t speak much Arabic past min fadlak and shukran . The whole episode was going to be an exercise in futility.

So the only real development to take place this morning was that another Tel Aviv CIA case officer’s identity was going to be blown to the Palestinian Authority-not that the PA had had any doubts in the first place about who was Agency and who wasn’t. It was laughable. No, it was pitiful. The whole goddamn situation was textbook absurdity.

And it wasn’t the people. There were a few good folks at CIA. Hard workers. Risk takers. McGee had operated with some of them in Afghanistan. But the leadership sucked. There was no leadership at CIA these days. CIA had devolved into a huge, unwieldy, risk-averse, molasses-slow bureaucracy. Just like McGee’s beloved Army, CIA was controlled by managers, apparatchiks, and bean counters. The Warriors all took early retirement.

That’s the way things went in Afghanistan back in 2001. For the first few weeks, the war was executed by black-ops Warriors and unconventional forces. Then Washington declared victory, the staff pukes took over, and the paper started flying. Among the first directives: all Special Forces were henceforth to reassume military grooming standards. That meant no more beards or native garb. It also meant that hundreds of SF personnel became obvious targets because they were no longer able to blend into the indigenous woodwork. The casualty rate went up. But the two-star who issued the order didn’t give a damn. He had an MA in public administration, he lived in Tampa, and by God, he was going to make those hairy-assed SF mavericks over there con form .

Same sort of numbskull thinking was going on at CIA these days. And the situation wasn’t going to change, either. Not in McGee’s lifetime. McGee plucked a Styrofoam cup from the dashboard cup holder, spat tobacco juice into it, then used the rim to wipe his lower lip. He cocked his head in the direction of the Palestinian escort. “Y’know, you can tell from how professional they look they were trained by da Company.”

“Nasty, nasty.” O’Toole stifled a giggle as McGee replaced the cup. But it was true. As a part of Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet’s plan for cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, CIA had trained more than a thousand members of Yasser Arafat’s security forces in everything from sniping and close-quarters combat to bomb disposal, defensive driving, interrogation, threat assessment, and counterintelligence.

The two guys who headed what the Palestinians called their Preventive Security Services, Jabril Rajoub and Mohammad Dahlan, were even flown as honored guests to Langley, where they were ushered into the DCI’s seventh-floor private dining room. Rajoub and Dahlan ate lamb tenderloin, haricots verts, and garlic mashed potatoes on bone china emblazoned with the DCI’s seal. They toasted the latest road map to Middle East peace with Opus One drunk from Baccarat stemware. After the second of these lunches went right according to plan, Tenet even allowed a few of the PSS’s upper-echelon trainees to be brought to the holy of holies: Camp Peary, the Agency’s clandestine facility outside Williamsburg, Virginia, for a few hours of instruction.