John Weisman - Direct Action

There, he tucked his leather briefcase under his arm, braved the fast-moving rush-hour traffic on boulevard Berthier, traversed the pocked concrete of the pedestrian bridge atop périphérique, then stopped to linger over a café crème, a petit pain, and a grease-spattered copy of Le Matin at a no-name café on the corner of the rue 8 Mai 1945 that was so run-down it looked like an exterior set from the old Jean Servais movie Rififi . The coffee was weak and the bread was full of air but the interlude allowed Tom to countersurveil both people and vehicles for a quarter hour without appearing obvious.

Confident that he was clean, he dropped three euros’ worth of small change into the saucer, tore the check in two, and strolled up the boulevard Victor Hugo, walking against the traffic. Just past the Cimetière Parisien des Batignolles, he bolted across the four clogged lanes and jogged toward the oncoming cars in rue Fouquet. At the northern end of the street, he dodged the spray from a street-washing truck, crossed the wet pavement, and punched a four-number combination into the keypad next to the graffiti-sprayed entry door of number 38.

Forty-six-twenty-seven had safe houses in better neighborhoods, but Reuven had insisted on using this particular one because he wanted to fly well below DST’s radar. The French were damn good-and highly proprietary about foreigners running snatch operations on native French soil. In fact, DST usually became downright inhospitable when folks using aliases and false documents entered the country for nefarious purposes, as Reuven had just done.

Tom had flown on his own passport, of course-he’d arrived on the twenty-seventh and taken a cab directly from de Gaulle to rue Raynouard. He dropped his suitcase and went straight to the office. There, he made half a dozen phone calls on the secure office line. Starting the next morning, he’d resumed a normal schedule. He telephoned MJ once or twice a day, listened to her complain about Mrs. ST. JOHN, and pleaded with her to hold on and not do anything precipitous, just for a few more weeks. He trolled his sources. He checked with his contact at DST, who claimed there’d been no progress on Shahram Shahristani’s murder. He visited Les Gourmets des Ternes and commiserated with Monsieur Marie and Jeff about the Iranian. He made certain to cause no ripples.

But Tom also took precautions. His internal sonar told him he was being pinged, and even though the origin of these pings was indistinct and the identities of those doing the pinging unknown, he began zigzagging. He modified his daily routine so that his routes and agenda were unpredictable. He began to run cleaning routes. He placed intrusion devices at rue Raynouard (such precautions were always used at the 4627 offices) and had one of the company’s local contractors monitor his phone lines. On Thursday, he had one of the firm’s gumshoes run a countersurveillance pattern as he walked from his apartment to the 4627 offices. The results were inconclusive.

By the weekend, he was chomping at the bit. He wanted to move, to act, to get things under way . But it wasn’t time yet.

So much of intelligence work entailed watching and waiting. You spent days and days countersurveilling dead drops, letter boxes, and signal sites to see if the opposition had targeted them. You sometimes endured long breaks between agent meetings so as not to arouse suspicion. You spent weeks and weeks crafting SDRs and cleaning routes that might be used only once. You sometimes spent months creating the rabbit holes that allowed you to disappear in plain sight, should the situation warrant.

And you planned. Oh, did you plan. You always had a primary plan, a fallback plan, and a fallback for the fallback. Unlike Hollywood’s version of spycraft, where bravado and seat-of-the-pants improvisation commonly ruled, there was virtually nothing in real-world tradecraft that wasn’t scripted, vetted, and evaluated before the go-ahead was given. In Paris, Sam Waterman had spent hours with Tom helping him design rabbit holes; taking him through the fallback procedures for agent meetings; walking him through the intricacies of spycraft. Teaching him-forcing him actually-to be patient.

But Sam wasn’t available. He’d been pushed out. He’d been sent home persona non grata after the Baranov flap in Moscow, then exiled to one of CIA’s Northern Virginia satellite offices. He’d just vanished from everyone’s radar screens. After Sam took early retirement, Tom left a series of messages at his Rosslyn apartment. But Waterman had never returned the calls. And then last year, Sam had been involved in some nastiness with another Paris station alumnus, Michael O’Neill. O’Neill had gone postal and killed some senator on SSCI. After that, a memo had come down from the seventh floor advising all DO personnel that Waterman was completely out of bounds. Off-limits. DO NOT CONTACT.

Tom had followed orders. But he knew what Sam would say. Sam would say, “Stick with the plan, Harry.” Harrison W. AINSWORTH was Tom’s CIA pseudonym, and Sam habitually called his young officers by pseudonym, even inside the station.

Okay. Now the plan was to wait for Reuven Ayalon. So that’s what Tom had done. But he didn’t like it. Not one bit.

Tom was forced to wait because the Israeli took a much more circuitous route to Clichy. He had his reasons. First, he was on DST’s watch list. The French domestic security agency hadn’t forgotten that Reuven was the prime suspect for engineering a 1992 assassination under their very Gallic noses right in the middle of a busy Montparnasse thoroughfare filled with tourists. Second, and in Reuven’s mind more important, he had places to go, people to see, and equipment to obtain.

So, on Tuesday, October 28, dressed as a flight engineer and carrying nothing more than a black leather attaché case, Reuven flew on a charter flight from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Just before touchdown, he changed clothes in the cockpit and exited with the rest of the passengers. Upon leaving the airport, he ran a six-hour cleaning route to ensure that he wasn’t being tracked by al-Qa’ida’s Turkish cells, or MIT, 19the Turkish intelligence and security service. Once he felt secure, he used a pay phone to call the commercial attaché at the Israeli embassy. Ninety minutes later, the attaché brush-passed Reuven the keys to a safe house in the Sirkeci district near the train station. There, Reuven changed clothes, hairpieces, and identities.

Then, using a cell phone with a prepaid SIM card he’d brought from Tel Aviv, he dialed a number in the Üsküdar section of the city and left a short innocuous message after the beep. Then he reset the intrusion devices and left the safe house to run another cleaning route. The Turks were competent, and Reuven wasn’t about to take chances.

Six hours later, wearing the skullcap of a devout Muslim, Reuven made contact with one of his former agents in a café in the city’s bustling Fatih neighborhood on the western side of the peninsula. Sipping thick sweet coffee from tiny cups, the two men spoke in Turkish, their heads inclined toward each other, their lips barely moving.

The meeting lasted less than seven minutes. The agent departed first, disappearing into the crowded street, heading toward Askaray. Reuven sipped his coffee then called for another, countersurveilling the other tables and the passersby for any hint he was being tracked. Half an hour later, he, too, left and made his way back to the safe house by a roundabout route.

Wednesday morning, his Israeli passport along with several other forms of identification concealed in the lining of his attaché, Reuven walked past the jammed fast-food joints, bookstores, and electronics shops toward the Istanbul train station. About halfway there, he sensed surveillance. But he displayed no outward sign of concern. He went in the main entrance, walked straight to one of the ticket counters, and bought a second-class fare to the town of Saray.