Robert Baer - Blow the house down

I knew exactly what was going on. Ames's arrest had set Congress's hair on fire. The burning hair begat the Counter-Espionage Center (CEC, as it's known in the Agency), funded to the grotesque tune of $300 million so the Agency could go through the motions of cleaning up its act. The money and the center and the nearly thousand people who worked there, deconstructing and reassembling old leads, begat the bullshit charges, and the bullshit charges begat today's meeting. It was like some miserably updated version of Genesis: the Langley Bible. The Russians thought they could use Ames to steal the crown jewels, but he'd done a lot more damage by conning us into slitting our own throats in the aftermath.

Their dot connecting, or matrices, or whatever the CEC called it these days had yet to catch a spy. Ames, Nicholson, Pitts, and all the other turncoats were hauled in the old-fashioned way, by recruiting spies in our ene-mies intelligence services: messy human beings who knew messy human secrets. Still, they couldn't have been more pleased with themselves. It was a|l so much more tidy and cost effective than running spies. Webber would lever have to explain to the House Intelligence Committee why he happened to have on his payroll a Hizballah shooter who sent a bullet into his Tegnant sister's face at point-blank range. The dot connecting had reduced e shock factor almost to zero, but all they'd accomplished thus far was to estroy a lot of careers. Mine, too, apparently, although at this point my areer needed only a gentle shove to go careening over the edge.

"And you're stacking these flimsy leads up against twenty-five years of service to this organization?"

Silence. I'd hit a nerve.

I flipped the black-and-white glossy back across the table, unfortunately with a little too much force. It skimmed the table like a Frisbee, rising and hitting Scott in the middle of his paunch, which was draped over the table.

"There's more," Scott said, undeterred.

"More?"

He picked up a yellow legal pad from the table, licked his finger, and flipped a page with it.

"Theodore Hew-Chatworth."

"Harold-"

"Harold what?"

"He was born Harold Pooters. Theodore Hew-Chatworth came later."

Scott looked up and gave me a hard stare.

"Suspected heroin dealer," he read. "Probable contacts to Cabrillo family. Mr. Waller"-the "Mr." was drawn out for effect-"managed to find time in his busy Manhattan schedule to pay Mr. Hew-Chatworth a visit."

"I was borrowing his phone."

"And then there's Mr. Mohammad-"

"Jamal?"

"Offshore accounts. Jamal's real talent. Stopping by for a little tutoring?"

Shut up, I told myself. Say nothing. Definitely not the time to kick the dog.

"And-"

And? It was Jim's turn to take over the show.

"And," he began in a thin, stuttery voice. "And we have reason to believe that Mr. Cabrillo's Afghan heroin trafficking ran through the Fergana Valley, through a place called Osh."

"There's a surprise," I said, completely missing where this was all going.

Scott almost jumped out of his chair to shut me up this time.

"You'll have your chance, Waller!" And then in a much softer voice to Jim: "Could you be more specific?"

"Of course. Specifically, we believe the Cabrillo family, an Afghan heroin cartel, and a smuggling network in Osh"-he turned the page of a pocket notebook and studied an entry-"were assisted by a Russian major based in the Pamirs."

Ah, now I could see where this segment was headed. In the early nineties I'd been detained driving through the Pamirs: the raw edge of the crumbling periphery, as we used to call it, wall to wall with Islamic rebels, drug cartels, and rogue Russian military units. One of the Russian units had stopped my wheezing Neva outside of Osh and found a CZ nine-millimeter semiautomatic tucked behind the radio. Before I could talk the major who led the unit into letting me go, Moscow sent Jim to spring me. That was it: the sum total of the story until this moment.

"And what might be the significance of that?" Mary Beth asked in a stage voice.

"Well…" Whoever was sitting just in front of Jim seemed to dig an elbow into his knee. "Mr. Waller's trip through the Pamirs, we believe, was tied to a narcotics deal."

To his credit, Jim looked green at the gills as he spoke. I'd actually come to like him on our flight back from Bishkek. His first child, a girl, had cystic fibrosis. I knew the stakes. He needed a promotion, a fact I was sure hadn't been lost on Webber.

"Is there more?" Mary Beth prompted. "Anything else you feel might he pertinent to our line of inquiry?"

"Well…" That same stall, even more painful now. "During the damage assessment, Mr. Waller was, um, unclear about his connections with tne Russian major and how he was able to get himself released."

A lie, of course. Jim knew exactly what had happened. He'd spent the night guzzling vodka with me and the major. It was in the morning, too hung over to care, that the major set me free.

I found myself looking from face to face, trying to figure if everyone around the table was in on it. Probably not. I knew Rosetti would eat a

bowl of wriggling intestinal worms before he'd stake his squeaky clean on this assembly. For the first time I was confused. Now it really was time to back off.

"So what's next?" I asked.

"A polygraph," Mary Beth said, now back to her normal low simmer. "It'll put us on the road to clearing this up"-in the same way, I suppose, that removing a brain puts us on the road to clearing up brain cancer.

"Fine," I said, Til take a polygraph. I'll take as many as you like. And you have my permission to go through my stuff, here, at home."

"Our people are going through your office right now," Scott shot back, feeling at last that he had the upper hand. "I understand you'll have some explaining to do."

Knowing security was ransacking my office on a sunny Friday morning in front of everyone who worked for me wasn't exactly reassuring. I made a quick mental inventory of what they would find in my safe: the three spiral notebooks from Beirut and some other notes I'd collected on Mousavi, Iran, and Buckley's kidnapping. So what? It was a security violation at worst, definitely not a firing offense. Better to worry about where all this was headed, not what was already happening.

For a start, the public ransacking was loaded with meaning. The seventh floor clearly intended to make the break between me and the Agency as visible as possible-a warning to anyone inclined to help me. The ransacking also told me that the entire system was about to come down on my head, and there was no point in my resisting. If I was going to have any chance of surviving, I absolutely needed to find out one last thing before I was escorted to the front gate. I'd have to kick the dog after all.

"Maggie," I said, drawing the nickname out as long as I dared, "do you know how much the Gobi desert grew in the last five years?"

"What?" She knew she was being set up and didn't like it.

"Twenty thousand square miles. You know how we know that? We compared the satellite photography from 1994 and 1999."

"Waller…"

"It's only one hundred and fifty miles from Beijing today."

She was gripping the table. "If you think we're here to listen to your-"

"Maggie, I'm talking about an unchallengeable proposition. Facts. That's supposedly what we trade in. So, why are we pussy-footing around here? Do a financial on me, sift through my credit-card bills, decree one more background investigation, or whatever it is you do to ferret out bad apples. But with the evidence you showed me today, you've got shit."

Mary Beth leaned forward over the conference table and pointed her finger at me just the way my maternal grandfather used to when he lectured me on the sanctity of preserving principal. Just like Mother's sainted dad, she also called me by my last name while she delivered her lecture.