John Weisman - Direct Action

The whole raison d’être of an embassy-to be able to soak up information that allows your nation to make intelligent foreign policy-had been perverted. From the CIA viewpoint, it was crazy. A majority of all successful agent recruitments began with a walk-in. But the embassy compound and its environs had been turned into a zone sanitaire and the obscene level of security made walking in virtually impossible. Indeed, between the barriers, and the watchers, and the ID checks, and the DST informers at the gatehouse counter…it was madness. Sheer madness.

3:19P.M. Tom spotted Margolis as the tall, gangling youngster pushed through the embassy’s front doors, loped down the stairs, and headed for the gatehouse. Margolis was in his late twenties with longish, dark curly hair. His befuddled, deer-in-the-headlights expression was accentuated by a pair of professorial round tortoiseshell eyeglasses with pink-tinted lenses. He wore a baggy blue pinstripe suit, button-down shirt, rep tie, and rubber-soled maroon-cum-brown leather Rockports, all of which pegged him immediately as a junior-grade American diplomat. Margolis’s overall appearance, combined with the awkward gait and pouty lower lip, reminded Tom of the simpleton twit who’d been chief State Department spokesman in the second Clinton administration.

Margolis unlocked the gatehouse door with the pass that dangled around his neck on a long leash and made his way up the ramp, right hand outstretched, to where Tom was standing. “Adam Margolis. Sorry to keep you waiting but it’s been a bear of a day.”

“Tom Stafford. No problem.” Tom looked at the young case officer, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, Tom said, “Adam, can we go somewhere to talk?”

“Talk?” Margolis blinked uncomfortably as if no one had mentioned to him that Tom might want to actually converse. “What about right here?”

Was he insane? Tom nodded toward the two French security guards. “I’d rather go somewhere a little more private.”

“Well, we can’t go up to my office.” Margolis’s head moved birdlike, herky-jerky left, right, up, down. “It’s restricted.”

Tom felt like rolling his eyes. “It’s all right.”

The case officer’s eyes blinked wildly. “How about the commissary?” He looked over at the French security officer. “I can take him to the commissary, can’t I?”

“You will need a pass, Mr. Margolis.” The officer reached under the counter and extracted a laminated blue badge with a huge black V on it. “You must wear this visibly at all times,” he said as he painstakingly annotated the badge’s six-digit number in a ledger. He looked over at Tom. “Your passport, please, monsieur.”

Tom had no intention of passing through the metal detector. He focused on Margolis’s face and winked. “How about we take a walk? I’ll buy you a drink up the street.”

Blink-blink. Tom could actually hear the gears inside Margolis’s head engaging. Then the CIA officer’s head cocked in Tom’s direction. “Okay. But I have to go back and get a pad and paper.”

3:35P.M. They walked east through the security checkpoints in silence. As they approached the corner of the rue Boissy-d’Anglas, Tom said, “So, how do you like Paris?”

“It’s okay,” Margolis said. “French are pretty standoffish these days, given the political situation.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ve had a hard time meeting people.”

“How’s your French?”

“About a two.”

That wasn’t anywhere near fluent-it was something akin to high school French.

“Arabic?”

“Here and there.” Margolis shrugged. “But I’m a three-plus in Spanish.”

That would be helpful…in Madrid. Tom shook his head. And this kid was supposed to keep an eye on Islamists?

“Maybe you should take French classes. Or Arabic.”

“Why?” Margolis’s shoulders heaved once again. “Washington won’t pay. And with the euro so high…” His voice trailed off. “Was it like that when you were here?”

“Not really.” Tom’s small trust fund had made it possible for him to augment his meager CIA housing allowance and rent a decent two-bedroom apartment in a high-ceilinged courtyard building just off the rue de Courcelles in the seventeenth. Plus, he’d spoken four-plus French and four-minus Arabic by the time he’d arrived in Paris. “Where do you live?”

“I’ve got a studio in Cormeilles-en-Parisis.”

Tom winced. That was perhaps a thirty-five-minute ride on the sardine-can commuter trains followed by a couple of stops on the metro every morning. Given the fact that walk-ins weren’t a possibility these days, how the hell were young officers like Margolis supposed to do their jobs properly-their jobs being to spot, assess, and recruit spies-when they weren’t provided with the right tools?

Yes, tools. In this city, a nice apartment in central Paris was a tool of the trade. Because in the style-conscious City of Light, where you lived, how you dressed, and how fluent in French you were all mattered. No self-respecting functionary from the Ministry of Defense was going to take his chicly turned-out wife for cocktails chez Margolis if they had to take two or three metros from their flat in the seventh, then ride the local from Gare St. Lazare twenty-five kilometers northwest to some anonymous suburb, only to sit on a daybed, sip California jug wine, and eat microwaved rumaki bought at the embassy commissary. The French weren’t big on white Zinfandel and pizza rolls.

Worse: if the kid worked the normal embassy hours, which was nine to six, how the hell was he supposed to run a two-hour cleaning route, meet with an agent for a couple of hours, then run a second cleaning route, go back to the office and write a report, then take a cab all the way home because there were no trains to Cormeilles-en-Parisis at two in the morning?

The problem was ubiquitous. CIA spent billions willy-nilly on technical espionage but counted every penny when it came to setting up their clandestine service personnel in a manner that would allow them to operate effectively. CIA’s junior case officers, for example, were regulated by the same draconian rules on housing and expenses as their State Department colleagues. So everyone below the GS-15/FSO-1 level lived on the cheap. Housing was assigned by the number of people and grade. Young Adam Margolis, who was single-the studio apartment was Tom’s evidence-was obviously a GS-10 or perhaps an 11. Income? Seventy thousand dollars. It might sound like a lot, but it wasn’t enough to do the job in this expensive, cosmopolitan city, where each dollar bought only eighty euro cents-sometimes less.

“Got a car?”

Blink-blink. “I only wish.”

“What about a motorcycle?”

The kid looked at him with wounded eyes. “I never learned how to ride.”

Margolis was screwed. Full stop, end of story. Because the bottom line, when you crunched the numbers, was that central Paris was a financial impossibility. Therefore, Adam Margolis, American spy, would be forced to live in roughly three hundred square feet of space at a rent that could not exceed four hundred dollars a month and compelled by further economic constraints to commute by public transportation to and from his domicile. And entertainment? Tom guessed the bean counters at Langley had screamed bloody murder the first time the kid spent eighty-five euros taking a developmental to lunch. Naturellement young Adam Margolis didn’t meet anyone. And just as naturellement, therefore, the intelligence product he produced-if he produced any intelligence product at all-was going to be second or third rate at best.

Sure, you could recruit agents on the cheap in Cairo, Dushanbe, or Kinshasa. And Tom had spent his share of time in the City of Light’s Lebanese and Algerian restaurants, steakhouse chains, and fast-food cafés. You fit the level of entertainment to the lifestyle and social comfortability of the person you were trying to seduce. But there were times when a bottle of champagne at the George V or a meal at La Butte Chaillot were a necessity-and those cost money. So did a car-or even a motorcycle. Without your own transportation, going black became a lot more complicated. By forcing the kid to exist under such incredibly stupid limitations, Langley was dooming him to failure.