Robert Baer - Blow the house down

"I dug it out of Archives."

"Did you ever see the 201 file that went with it?"

"Lost."

"Wrong. The 201 never existed. That was mistake two. You never checked around to confirm if it was a real 201. You wanted it to be Mur-taza Ali Mousavi's picture so bad, you never confirmed anything. All you cared about was moving an inch closer to your grail. You wore it on your sleeve."

"What are you saying?"

"It was me who found the photo and cut out the head. I had someone fiddle with the records and insert the photo into the system for you to find. Bait."

"I don't believe it."

"Wait a second," he said. He left the shotgun resting on the chair. He had more trust in me than I had in him.

Frank was back in five minutes. He handed me the Peshawar photo, but here the headless man in the salwar chemise had a face-Oliver Wendell Channing's.

Frank had sat back down. He was smiling, no doubt amused by my confusion.

"Why?"

"Because the only way to stop Channing was from the outside."

The shock of what Frank was saying must have drained the blood from my face, but suddenly it fell into place. I'd been manipulated, lied to, seduced, betrayed, and set up-the same thing I'd done day to day for the last twenty-five years.

I was trying to put it all together in my head when Frank put his hand on my shoulder. "Let's have a drink." We moved to the table next to the Henry Moore, and Simon brought us a pair of Bas Armagnacs.

"Let me tell you how it happened from the beginning." In late 2000, Frank was in Islamabad bidding on a natural gas pipeline when he ran into an old informant who'd fought in the Afghan war. After dinner, the informant pulled out a box of old photos. They were pretty much all the same, mostly mouj posing with AK-47's, except the one: Oliver Wendell Channing posing with Osama bin Laden and three others.

"Christ, we all knew Oliver was a loose canon," Frank said. "Worse than you. He never reported nine-tenths of the people he met. He spent his vacations in the back of beyond, in places we weren't supposed to go to. By

the end he was completely out of control. I wasn't all that surprised to see him in a picture with bin Laden."

A week after Frank got back from Islamabad, he ran into Millis at a dinner on the Hill. The two hadn't seen much of each other in years, but they had Peshawar in common, so Frank told Millis about the photo. When he was through, Millis spun Frank around and pushed him out of earshot of everyone. The National Security Agency, Millis said, had just intercepted a call from David Channing, Oliver's son, to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who by then had an arrest warrant on him. There wasn't anything substantive in the intercept, but it was clear David Channing hadn't called a wrong number.

Curious, Millis went out to Langley to ask about David Channing. No one wanted to touch it. David Channing was too big a political player in Washington to go after lightly. Also, it was an election year, and Channing was showering money on the neocons. If they got the White House, whoever had crossed Channing was sure to pay. The seventh floor had no intention of sticking its nose in that manure heap.

Millis was savvy enough to know he couldn't go after Channing based on one call to KSM. He was about to let it drop, write it off as a coincidence, but then one afternoon a CIA analyst knocked on his door with a story to tell. In 1996, after the Manila police rolled up KSM's networks, the analyst did a profile on options purchased around the time the planes were supposed to go down. It was just a hunch, but he came across a cluster of trades going short on the airline stocks, betting their stock would fall. The analyst couldn't decide whether it was one person buying the puts or it was all just a coincidence. They'd been made through dozens of traders, enciphered accounts, layered transactions, and complicated swaps. He enlisted the National Security Agency to see if they could reconstruct the calls to and from the traders, intersecting them with the purchases of puts. It wasn't easy. The buy orders came in on different phones, from all around the world, but there was one thing that got his attention: a phone number in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Right after KSM's accomplices were arrested in Manila, someone calling from the Maine number contacted a trader, who immediately canceled some airline put options. The analyst reverse-traced the number to BT Trading, and followed BT Trading to David Channing. That's as far as he'd gotten. He knew he'd walked into a mine field. Without backup, he wasn't going to go any further. When he heard about Millis's nosing around headquarters asking questions about Channing, he decided on his own to go see Millis.

"Why didn't Millis and the analyst take it to the FBI?" I asked.

"You'd have to see the stuff," Frank said. "It was too dense and complicated to open a criminal case. Instead, Millis decided to enlist me. I was on the outside. I didn't have to file reports. I traveled in that world, options trading."

Frank dug around and found out that Michelle Zwanzig was Chan-ning's Swiss fiduciary. To get a foot in her door, Frank opened an account with her. Not that it did any good. She never talked about Channing's business. The only thing Frank was able to do was get the layout of her office and a look at the outside of her safe.

"So that's where the key thing came in," I said. "The McGuffin to encourage me to break into Michelle's office and make sure I invited India to Geneva."

Frank smiled.

I wondered for a moment if Frank had been listening on another line when India and I had talked. If so, he must have worked hard to keep from laughing, but Frank was already back on Channing.

He said he'd thought about presenting the evidence to the seventh floor himself, but he would have gotten the same reception Millis got: blind fear of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue once the election was settled. Neocons are nothing if not vindictive.

"Besides, the evidence was still too flimsy, and there's no way an inside investigation could have been hidden from Webber," Frank said.

"You knew about Webber that long ago?"

"Everybody knew he was angling for a job with Channing. That's the only reason Applied Science got a contract with the Agency."

"I knew it," I interrupted again. "It was Webber who shit-canned the

stuff from Kuwait, the SIM chips and the interrogation of the two Saudis they arrested. 'Not credible.' I can see him brushing it off his desk with a flip of his hand."

"You're wrong about one thing, though," Frank said, stopping me. "Webber doesn't know about Channing and KSM's plans. He's really just the cleanup crew. Once Millis and I decided that the seventh floor wasn't going to act, we read three people into this. Maggie was one of them; the other two you won't ever need to know. We knew the investigation had to be done from the outside-you."

It only now occurred to me that I'd been outsourced, put on the same level as Applied Science and the thousands of Agency retirees working on the Dulles Corridor. Only I was never given the choice.

Frank must have seen my look. "Max, what would you have done?"

"You had no idea I'd pick up the thread, find my way to Nabil and the prince. Without them I would never have ID'ed Oliver Channing in the

picture."

He answered me with a question: "After O'Neill told you the photo was found in Millis's motel room, would you have acted otherwise?"

"But it wasn't found there, was it?"

"No, we got someone in the FBI to pass on the lie to O'Neill."

"How did Millis die? I can't believe he was murdered."

"Maybe he wasn't. But the stuff about his brains not being where they were supposed to be-more bullshit we fed O'Neill."

"You set up O'Neill, too?"