Haggai Harmon - The Chameleon Conspiracy

“Just like that?” I asked in disbelief.

“No basis to hold him,” Benny said. He was right. The third witness had probably assessed his diminishing survival options after hearing that the two others had gone missing.

I was fuming. “I can’t believe this bullshit,” I grumbled. Even if he wasn’t Ward, even if there hadn’t been local fraud charges, they could have held him on immigration charges. He entered Australia with a false passport. What kind of idiots were running the force there?

“They dropped the ball,” said Benny. He had had his time for rage and was merely calm. “By the time the Australian police rushed to get a new warrant, the guy was released.”

I paused to rearrange my thoughts. It was too much of a revelation to digest immediately.

“Chameleon-that’s what I’ve been calling this guy in my head. And I was right.” I scanned through my trip to Pakistan, trying to reread things with the knowledge I had just acquired. “So Khan’s agenda…He gave me those half-truths to get more money?”

Benny shook his head. “He did have an agenda, but not the one you think.” Benny-good friend, or not-had a way of being cryptic that sometimes got on my nerves. It was as if he were Socrates, and I, one of his pupils. I wished he would get to the point more quickly, but I knew damn well that wasn’t going to happen.

“What was it, then? It seemed pretty clear that his story about Al Taqwa trying to reverse the charge and get their money back from Ward’s account was bogus,” I said.

“What made you think that? You’re right, by the way,” asked Benny.

“This is home turf for me. It’s just not the way banks work. They don’t put in a lot of effort to get a measly $2,000 back three years later. Khan made it up because he thought I was losing interest.”

“Or,” said Benny, “he was trying to lure you to Iran, probably under instructions from Tehran. They told him they were sure you were an American agent. And they were interested in your Ward investigation.”

“So if the guy in the hospital bed wasn’t Ward or Goldman, who is he? Who’s the Iranian agent?”

“We don’t know yet,” he admitted. “It’s not going to be easy. Even the wife he married in Kentucky believed he was Ward.”

“I need to digest what you’ve just told me,” I said. “Anyway, it occurs to me one good thing has come out of this conversation.”

“What?”

“If you own Tempelhof Bank, can you tell me more about what kind of relationship McHanna has with it?” It wasn’t too late to score some points at home by unveiling a money-laundering operation in New York.

“Who?”

“You mean you don’t know him?” Benny shook his head. “He was a manager at the South Dakota bank that the Chameleon conned. Now he runs a financial-services company in New York, and I think he still is in contact with the Chameleon. I’ve got a piece of information linking him, using an alias, to Tempelhof Bank.”

“Let me find out,” said Benny. “But aside from that, I think we can agree to cooperate in finding the Chameleon.”

“Helping you out is a decision made above my head.” “You never had to ask permission before.”

“That’s true. But working for you without getting my superiors’ consent is a violation of my oath.”

“Hey, I didn’t say work for me,” he said defensively. “I said work together.”

“Like I said, I need to get permission.”

“You’ll get it.” He sounded alarmingly sure of himself. “What are you saying? That you already made a request through the proper channels?” His face confirmed that I was right. “Thanks for asking my opinion first,” I grumbled.

“Don’t give me that act, Dan. We both know that when we worked together the last couple of times, things worked out as they should have.”

“You could have at least asked me.”

“I was protecting you,” he said. “An official request by the Mossad to the U.S. government to cooperate is standard procedure. Talking to you first before asking your government would have complicated things. You’ve just confirmed that.”

I left it at that. “So what did my bosses have to say?” How odd that a foreign intelligence service would know about my forthcoming instructions before me. But pressing him further was not going to be fruitful; it would only make him dig in his heels that much more.

“We’re still waiting. American bureaucracy, you know.”

“Right. Well, let me see what my boss tells me. We’ve got a conference scheduled.”

Later that day, after Benny and I had parted, I got a call from the U.S. Embassy. “A cable came in for you.”

I was sure it was one of those routine memos circulated that the ever-helpful Esther kept sending me even when I was away.

“Can you deliver it to my hotel?” I had already taken off my shoes, stretched on the couch, and started reading the newspaper. The last thing I wanted to do was head to the embassy.

“Sorry, no. This is classified material that cannot leave this room.”

Why would I get that sort of document? I was investigating money launderers and white-collar criminals. Communications about them are sensitive, but not secret. They’re frequently called “sensitive but unclassified” (SBU), containing data that isn’t related to national security, but where their disclosure to the public could cause damage. My curiosity exceeded my laziness.

“I’ll be right over.”

I left my hotel room and walked a few blocks to the embassy on 71 Hayarkon Street, right on Tel Aviv’s shoreline on the Mediterranean Sea. I went directly to Pat, the secretary of COS-chief of station-CIA in Israel, who handed me an envelope. It contained a one-page document. I began reading immediately: Central Intelligence Agency

Directorate of Operations

Washington, DC 20505

Memorandum

To: Dan Gordon, OFARML/DOJ

CC: David Stone, OFARML/DOJ

From: Pamela H. Grace

Date: October 7, 2004

Priority: Urgent

Classification: Secret

Subject: TDY The Department of Justice has put you on a TDY to a CIA-led special task force on terrorist financing. A plenary meeting and briefing will be held for two days in France commencing on October 11, 2004. Travel arrangements have been made by the Tel Aviv embassy. Please confirm attendance. The scheduled meeting, its location, and its topic, as well as this memo, must be treated as secret.

An attached note informed me that I’d be met at the Paris airport by Matt Kilburn, an Agency representative. I returned the cable to Pat and signed a receipt that I’d read its contents. TDY meant temporary duty assignment. I was being put on an interagency transfer for a specific intelligence assignment.

Help was on the way from an unlikely source. The CIA had seldom been helpful in my efforts to retrieve money fraudulently obtained from criminal activities, which the U.S. government had to pursue under a federal statute. Usually the flow of information was unidirectional: from me to them. Maybe it would change now and, with their help, I could get moving on the Chameleon’s case. I was surprised, though, that I hadn’t received direct instructions from David or Bob telling me I was assigned to a CIA task force.

I went to the embassy’s travel office on the second floor. Guy, a skinny staffer, gave me an envelope with an El Al ticket to Paris, departing Ben Gurion Airport on October 10. I used the secure phone to call David Stone.

After the initial pleasantries, David got to the point. “Have you met your friend Benny yet?”

“Yes, I always meet him while I’m in Israel. He’s an old friend.”

“While you were still in Pakistan a request from the Mossad came through channels suggesting cooperation in discovering the Chameleon.”