Agents of Innocence (30 page)

“When you called me, Father, you said that you had something you wanted to discuss.”

“Oh yes,” said the priest. “I do indeed. Most definitely.”

He waited for the priest to begin. When he didn’t, he prodded him.

“Well, what was it?”

“What?”

“What you wanted to ask me.”

“Ah yes, of course,” said the priest. “What I wanted to ask you was, what do you think about the leadership of the Palestinian guerrilla group, Al-Fatah?”

That’s an odd question for a Maronite priest to be asking me, thought Rogers.

“That depends on who you are talking about,” he replied. “Some of the Fatah men strike me as dishonest braggarts. Others strike me as sincere. Some are intelligent and others are fools. From what I can gather, most of them are corrupt.”

“Yes, to be sure,” said Father Maroun. The answer apparently was not exactly what he had wanted. The priest had taken off his Tyrolean hat, and Rogers could see that his brow was covered with sweat.

The Lebanese priest lit another cigarette, swallowed hard, and continued.

“What do you think of Jamal Ramlawi?”

Rogers didn’t miss a beat. There wasn’t a twitch of the nostrils or a movement of the eyes out of the ordinary.

“My impression is that Ramlawi is bright and capable, but I don’t know much about him,” he answered evenly. “What’s your impression?”

“Me?” asked the priest. “Oh my goodness. I don’t really know. I don’t know too much about him myself.”

“Then why do you ask?” queried Rogers.

The priest was looking more and more uncomfortable. Looking at Father Maroun, sweating in his leather pants and kneesocks, Rogers had an odd thought: Is it possible that the padre is wearing a wire?

“I was just wondering,” said the priest, “whether this man Ramlawi is perhaps someone we could, I mean, possibly in the future, quietly of course, with complete discretion on our side, perhaps…”

“What?” asked Rogers.

“Talk to,” said the priest. “About the situation in Lebanon.”

“I have no idea,” said Rogers. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

“That is so awkward. You know how Lebanon is. We cannot talk with other Lebanese, let alone with Palestinians. We need a mediator. An interlocutor.”

“Sorry, Father, but we can’t help on that one. We only know one side in the transaction. Which is you.”

“I see,” said Father Maroun.

“Perhaps,” said Rogers, feeling slightly peeved and malicious, “your Israeli friends can help.”

The priest looked for a moment as if he might fall off his walking stick.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just a thought,” said Rogers. “If you ever meet any Israelis, you might pose the question to them. I gather they have awfully good contacts with some of the Palestinians.”

“They
do?
” asked Father Maroun, his eyes widening.

“I believe so,” said Rogers. “Perhaps they can help you.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” The priest shook his head. He had the look of a man who has heard, for the first time, a suggestion that his sweetheart may be two-timing him. He looked pale. His expression had gone from the nervousness of a few minutes ago to one of shock.

Rogers felt sorry for him. But not sorry enough to do anything about it.

“Perhaps we should be heading back,” he suggested.

“Yes,” said the priest with relief. “Let us go back at once.”

They walked down the rocky slope in silence. Rogers turned the strange conversation over in his mind. If the Israelis had sent Father Maroun on this fishing expedition, it was an unusually sloppy operation. Perhaps it was simply their way of putting the agency on notice, firing a warning shot at the Beirut station. Or perhaps, thought Rogers, it was not an Israeli gambit at all. Perhaps Father Maroun was completely genuine. He was a religious man, who cared deeply about his country. Perhaps he truly wanted to establish a quiet channel of contact between the Maronite Church and the fedayeen. If so, Jamal Ramlawi was an obvious candidate. Sophisticated, close to the Old Man. Perhaps Father Maroun’s nervousness was simply the discomfort that any outsider would feel wandering into the secret world without knowing the rules. Perhaps his naivete was the clearest sign that his intentions were pure.

Either way, Rogers concluded, it was probably best to assume that the Israelis would hear about the conversation. He would let Hoffman, who was edgy about anything involving liaison with Mossad, file the cable back to Langley about the unlikely overture from the Maronite cleric.

When Rogers returned to the office that day, he had another odd communication. There was a note waiting for him from Solange Jezzine. It was written on cream-colored stationery, so firm and heavy that it seemed to have been starched, and it smelled faintly of perfume. A red ribbon was tied in a bow at the top of the notepaper, like a red garter atop a pair of silk stockings.

The note itself was as provocative as the package. Solange invited Rogers to come pay a visit, alone.

Rogers sighed and shook his head. What an extraordinary woman! He penned a brief note saying no, thank you. I’m awfully busy just now. The worst thing about work, Rogers wrote, was that it left too little time for play. Perhaps another time. When he walked out of his office that afternoon, Rogers thought he saw his secretary, who had brought the Jezzine letter up from the front desk, smiling at him as if they shared a secret.

The Fatah campaign of terror began in Cairo on November 28, 1971, when a team of four Palestinians murdered the Jordanian prime minister. They shot him in broad daylight, in front of a crowd of other dignitaries, as he was entering the lobby of the Cairo Sheraton. Witnesses said that one of the gunmen kneeled over the body of the dying Jordanian official and licked his blood. The assassins were immediately captured by Egyptian police. They said they were members of a previously unknown organization called Black September, which took its name from the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan in September 1970.

The next target was the Jordanian Ambassador to London. As the Jordanian official neared his office one day in December, a gunman standing on a traffic island shot at his Daimler limousine with a submachine gun. The ambassador survived. The gunman, an Algerian, escaped. The Jordanians attributed the operation to the same network that had murdered their prime minister. Fatah spokesmen denied responsibility and blamed Black September. Investigators rushed to gather evidence about this new terrorist faction, but they came up with nothing but rumors. The group was frighteningly discreet. It was like an animal that left no tracks.

A few months later, the bombs began to explode in Beirut. They weren’t large devices; often they were little more than sticks of dynamite, meant to confuse and demoralize the Lebanese. Beirutis blamed their favorite villain—Palestinian, Syrian, or Israeli—depending on their political perspective. The painful truth was that nobody really knew who was responsible. It was the year of the bombs.

Black September soon struck again in Europe. This time they attacked targets linked to Israel. Israeli-owned oil facilities in Rotterdam and Hamburg. An electronics plant in West Germany that did extensive business with Israel. They also executed five suspected members of the Jordanian Moukhabarat. The terrorists were becoming heroes in the Arab world, spawning a series of copycat operations. There was jealousy within Fatah, as various lieutenants tried to develop their own terrorist networks.

The Israelis soon escalated their attacks against Fatah. After a fedayeen raid inside Israel, the Israeli Army invaded South Lebanon. The Israelis stayed for four days. Officials in Jerusalem claimed they had struck a decisive blow at the guerrillas. The Israeli operation exacerbated the Lebanese political crisis, as poor refugees from South Lebanon—mostly Shiite Moslems—streamed into the slums outside Beirut. The Lebanese pleaded for decisive action, which their corrupt and paralyzed government couldn’t provide.

Black September continued its campaign of revenge. The group attacked a Jordanian airlines office in Rome, a Jordanian airplane in Cairo, the Jordanian Embassy in Berne, the Jordanian Embassy in Cairo. The group also staged a spectacular but ultimately disastrous operation against Israel. Members of Black September hijacked a Sabena Airlines flight to Tel Aviv and held the passengers hostage at Lod Airport. Israeli commandos, disguised as mechanics, stormed the plane and killed two of the four hijackers.

The Israelis attacked Lebanon again, this time with air strikes against Hasbayah, Marjayoun, and other towns and villages in South Lebanon that had become guerrilla bases. The Israeli raids produced heavy casualties among Lebanese civilians. The Lebanese government briefly considered buying antiaircraft missiles from France to protect its territory. The deal collapsed when Lebanese fixers began demanding huge payoffs for certain interested Lebanese government officials.

The new wave of Palestinian terror became the favorite spectator sport of the Western world. The Fatah leaders, who had nearly disappeared from public view, suddenly found journalists arriving by the score from Europe and America, clamoring for interviews. The Palestinians had become, once again, figures of horror and fascination. The Old Man appeared on magazine covers in his dark glasses and stubbly beard. While his acolytes in the West urged him to shave and dress respectably, the Old Man stuck to his guerrilla garb. He understood that the whole point of the exercise was to look like an outlaw, a blackguard, a despicable and terrifying symbol of violence. Jamal understood it, too. As he made his rounds in Europe and read the extravagant accounts of Black September’s terrorist exploits that were appearing in the newspapers, he could only laugh. Abu Nasir had been right. The ability to create fear is a powerful weapon.

Rome; April 1972

Omar Mumtazz was arrested on April 7 at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. A plainclothes customs official noticed him nervously chain-smoking while waiting for his baggage on a flight arriving from Beirut.

When the nervous-looking Arab grabbed his luggage and headed toward the green “Nothing to Declare” exit, the customs officer stopped him and pointed him toward one of the uniformed officers in the red line. Omar Mumtazz still might have made it if he had kept cool. But when the Italian customs official asked to see his passport, Mumtazz slipped a hundred-dollar bill inside the document. This is a Mediterranean country, he told himself. This is how we do business in the Mediterranean.

The customs official opened the passport and watched the green bill float gently to the floor. He gave a thin smile and called to his captain. A few moments later Mumtazz was taken by three armed men to a cramped office, where he watched with mounting apprehension as a customs official cut through the false bottom of his suitcase. Out of the opening tumbled four fat packets of heroin.

Mumtazz made a terrible row. Though he had only an ordinary Libyan passport, he claimed that he was an intelligence officer who had done work for the Italians. He had powerful friends! He demanded to see someone—immediately!—from the Servizio Informazione Difesa.

The Carabinieri thought he was just another two-bit Arab hoodlum in a fancy suit. But he made such a racket, even after he was punched several times in the stomach, that a Carabinieri officer finally placed a telephone call. An hour later a bedraggled major from the SID arrived and the Libyan began to lay out his story.

“I know something that is very important,” he said. The major dully nodded his head.

“I know someone who is planning the worst crimes! The very worst! A Palestinian!”

“Dica. Dica,” said the bored major.

“I will tell the information to a senior officer. To him only!”

One of the Caribinieri kicked the Libyan in the shins. He screamed and looked around the room desperately.

“The president!” he shouted. “They are planning to kill the President of the United States.”

The SID major took Mumtazz to a basement cell at the Ministry of Defense on Via Venti Settembre. There, the Libyan told his story to a captain who listened intently and took careful notes.

The Libyan claimed he had information about a new Palestinian terrorist organization that was planning a string of spectacular operations culminating in the assassination of the American president. He said he had met the group’s chief of operations—a man who called himself Nabil—in Rome a few months earlier. He had provided Nabil with women, introducing him to several German girls he knew in Rome, and later with guns and explosives. As he narrated the tale, Mumtazz watched the Italian captain to gauge his interest and see if he was taking notes.

Mumtazz gave a brief physical description of Nabil. He was tall and strikingly handsome, with thick black hair and a clean-shaven face. He spoke several languages, including English and some Italian. He was aloof, secretive about his work, and highly intelligent. He liked to drink and smoke and seemed to have an inexhaustible appetite for European women.

When Mumtazz got to the Palestinian’s sex habits, he noticed that the Italian officer was looking at him dubiously.

“Every word is true!” protested the Libyan. “If you don’t believe me, ask one of your own men in the Italian Embassy in Tripoli. Giuseppe Rosso! He knows me! He will vouch for me!”

The captain wrote down the name. But as he did so, he arched his eyebrows high on his forehead.

“I have tapes!” said the Libyan, leaning forward as if sharing a great secret.

“Tapes?” asked the Italian captain.

“Yes!” said the Libyan triumphantly. “Tapes! Of Nabil talking to me on the telephone about his plans. In code!”

The SID man put aside his notebook and picked up the telephone to call a colonel.

“Immunity! I give you nothing without immunity!” shouted the Libyan as the captain dialed the number.

“No immunity, no tapes!”

Mumtazz told his story again, for the third time that day, to the SID colonel. The more senior his interrogator, the more details he provided. The colonel listened and then telephoned another colonel in a different department of the intelligence service. There were consultations. Mumtazz was asked to remain overnight and provided with hot food and a soft bed.

The next morning, when files had been checked and cables received from the Italian Embassy in Tripoli, the SID men met again for further consultations. Yes, said one of the colonels, the service did in fact have a tenuous relationship with a Libyan named Omar Mumtazz. He was from one of the wealthy old Libyan families that had collaborated with the Italians during the colonial period and prospered later under King Idriss. According to the SID man in Tripoli, Omar Mumtazz was a young dilettante, half-ideologue, half-pimp. He travelled in unusual Arab circles—the criminal underworld and the radical political fringe—and had provided occasional tidbits of information about Libyans, Syrians, Palestinians.

The Italian officials agreed that Mumtazz should be asked to confirm his story. If he could indeed furnish tape recordings of Nabil, then the SID would recommend to the Italian Ministry of Interior that the drug-smuggling charges against him be dropped.

The offer was conveyed orally to the Libyan. Feeling cocky, Omar Mumtazz asked for it in writing. Whereupon one of the SID colonels slapped him twice on the face and walked out of the room.

Mumtazz dropped his request. The tapes were in a safe deposit box at a branch of the Banca Commerciale Italiana, he said. He was taken there by two soldiers dressed in plainclothes. To their surprise, the Libyan emerged from the bank vault after several minutes smiling and clutching a reel of tape. The colonels back at headquarters were even more surprised when they played the tape and heard on it the voice of an Arab man, talking in English in what sounded like a private code. He said he needed four suits and ten pairs of shoes and would pick them up at eight o’clock.

Mumtazz explained that in the code he had worked out with Nabil, the message meant that the Palestinian wanted four pistols with silencers and 100 kilos of plastic explosive, and would pick up the shipment at four the following day.

There were several other items on the tape. One was a conversation between Mumtazz and the Arab man about arrangements for a party; the other sounded like a man and woman making love. The panting and moaning went on for more than twenty minutes, and when the woman began praising the man’s sexual prowess in fluent Italian, one of the colonels turned off the tape.

Eventually they referred the case to General Armani. It seemed to be a potentially delicate matter. Something the Americans should know. Or perhaps, something the Americans shouldn’t know. The colonels weren’t sure. The general would know. He was everything an Italian general should be: tall and trim, silver-gray hair, suave and cunning. Even when he made mistakes, they seemed to younger colleagues to be the
right
mistakes. The general listened to the tape and then talked to Mumtazz.

“What evidence do you have about the plot to kill the American president?” demanded General Armani. “That is the most important thing you have told us, but there is nothing on the tape about assassination. I think you must be a liar.”

“Of course there is nothing on the tape!” said the Libyan. “Would the Palestinian be so stupid as to talk about such a matter on the telephone?”

They had discussed the plan to kill the president during a meeting in a café in Rome, Mumtazz explained. At the meeting, Nabil had asked him to obtain a sharpshooter’s rifle for the job. The plan was to shoot the American president during one of his foreign trips. The Palestinian didn’t say when or where.

General Armani nodded wearily, with a look that said: I believe nothing. In fact, he was unsure about the assassination plot. It was plausible. But then, it was also implausible. The general was certain of only one thing: he had something that would be of profound interest to the American Embassy. The Americans were obsessed about assassination plots. The one sure way to get their attention was to provide intelligence reports that someone was planning to take a potshot at the president. General Armani smiled.

“Basta!” said the general to Mumtazz. Enough.

“Excellency, please,” whined the Libyan. But the general was gone and the guards were taking Omar Mumtazz back to his cell.

General Armani made two copies of the tape. He took one with him to the American Embassy on the Via Veneto. He gave it to the American military attaché along with transcripts of the interviews with Mumtazz that detailed the assassination plot. The attaché said he was profoundly grateful to General Armani for his help and was certain that his fine work would be appreciated in the highest councils of NATO.

Spare me, thought the general.

The military attaché was the senior representative in Italy of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He sent a flash cable to the DIA operations center and forwarded the tape itself by overnight pouch. His cable included the stunning allegation—“a Palestinian plot to assassinate the president”—that started bells ringing and lights flashing all over Washington. There was much commotion within the national security bureaucracy, rousing the Secret Service, the FBI, the NSC—and, not least, the DIA’s crosstown rival, the Central Intelligence Agency.

General Armani put the second copy of the tape in his briefcase. He called his wife Anna and told her that he would be home late for dinner. When he left the office, he walked briskly down the Via Venti Settembre to Via Delle Quatro Fontane, where he ducked into a café and made a quick telephone call.

The general reached his Israeli contact at home. They met an hour later in a quiet café off the Via del Corso.

“We ran across something of interest this week,” said the general.

“And what is that, my friend?” said the Israeli. He was smiling and squinting at the general.

“We grabbed a cheap Arab smuggler at the airport. To save himself, the man told us an interesting tale. It involves a Palestinian who seems to be acquiring a small arsenal here in Europe.”

“Who told you these things?” asked the Israeli as if he had not quite heard the name.

“I cannot tell you who. It doesn’t matter, anyway. He is just a cheap hoodlum. I have something better for you.”

“And what is that, my friend?” asked the Israeli, still smiling and squinting.

“The Palestinian. On tape,” said General Armani. He nodded to the newspaper he had placed on the table when he entered the café. Inside it was a cassette tape of the Palestinian.

The Israeli nodded. Otherwise, his expression didn’t change. Still the squint. It was the very ordinariness of Israeli intelligence officers that made them trustworthy, the Italian general had concluded long ago. Their bad teeth, bald heads, squinting eyes, poor posture. They were too ordinary to play the self-deceiving games that led most intelligence services to disaster.

General Armani explained the meaning of the code used by the Palestinian. The suits and shoes, and how they really referred to pistols and plastic explosive. The only thing he left out, other than Mumtazz’s name, was the plot to kill the American president. Let the Italians get sole credit for that one.

General Armani left the tape in the folded newspaper when he got up from the table. The Israeli sent the cassette that night to Tel Aviv, where it was added to a growing Mossad file on the activities of Fatah’s intelligence service.