Agents of Innocence (5 page)

Beirut; November–December 1969

The CIA, which had a system for everything, had a lengthy procedure for assessing potential agents.

The first step, every young case officer was told, was “spotting” a potential agent who had access to useful information. Then came a sometimes lengthy period of “development,” when the prospective recruit was watched and encouraged and bonds of trust were forged on both sides. Eventually there was “assessment,” when the case officer had to decide whether to initiate a formal proposal to recruit the candidate as a controlled agent.

If the answer was yes, then a new bureaucratic procedure—known as the Headquarters’ Operational Approval system, or HOA—took over. The case officer filed detailed biographical information on the recruit, including a two-part Personal Record Questionnaire, or PRQ. Rogers suspected that this cumbersome routine was modelled on the Yale admissions process.

The Jamal operation was barely past the “spotting” phase. But before going any further, Rogers took some simple precautions to protect Fuad, himself, and the agency if things went sour.

He outlined for Fuad a new set of work rules. Fuad should stay away from the American Embassy or any known American official other than Rogers, his case officer. He should immediately adopt countersurveillance procedures at his hotel, in the street, and on the telephone. The station would monitor the Soviet Embassy for any sign that they had been tipped by Jamal to Fuad’s identity. The station’s liaison officer would also make a discreet check of the wire-tapping logs compiled by the intelligence branch of the Lebanese Army, known as the Deuxième Bureau.

Jamal’s silence about Fuad’s links with the Americans would be the best sign of his bona fides. They would proceed with the operation only if they were confident that Jamal hadn’t blown Fuad’s identity.

In the meantime, stressed Rogers, Fuad should live his cover. He was a Lebanese Sunni Moslem with strong leftist convictions. He had been living in Egypt but wanted to return to Beirut for family reasons. He was meeting with Fatah officials because he supported the Palestinian Revolution as the road to liberation for all the Arabs.

If the operation was blown at any point, endangering Fuad’s status in Lebanon, Rogers pledged that he would arrange his relocation and termination in the United States. With the safety net out, Rogers felt more comfortable. He didn’t like making mistakes, especially when they put his agents at risk.

The next step, Rogers decided, was to try for a second meeting with Jamal. If the Palestinian agreed to meet Fuad again, knowing of his links with the United States government, then they might have a live fish on the line.

Rogers sweetened the bait for the second meeting. With permission from Hoffman and the Near East Division back home at Langley, he gave Fuad a draft of the current U.S. peace plan for the Middle East and told him to give it to Jamal.

It was chicken feed. The same draft had already been circulated to the Lebanese, Egyptian, Jordanian, and Israeli governments. A version had even been leaked to
The New York Times
. Indeed, Fatah officials were already denouncing it on the grounds that it rejected their demand for an independent Palestinian state. But they hadn’t seen the text. Rogers hoped that a leaked copy of the plan would convince Jamal that the Americans were willing to take the Palestinians seriously. Among revolutionaries, Rogers had noticed, the hunger for respectability was often nearly as strong as the drive for power.

Fuad and Jamal met this time at an Italian restaurant called Quo Vadis, near the Beirut red-light district.

The Palestinian arrived in a red Ferrari convertible, driven by the same bosomy blonde Fuad had seen emerging from the office in Fakhani. Jamal kissed her on the mouth while the poor Shia boy who parked cars looked on enviously. Then he strolled up the stairs and into the restaurant.

Fuad shook his head as he watched this grand arrival through the window. His Palestinian friend was not a man who seemed to value discretion. He’s going to get himself killed, Fuad thought, as he watched Jamal strut into the dining room.

When they were seated and had lit up their cigarettes, Fuad got to the point.

“You were right, of course, about my friends,” Fuad said quietly. He did not want to speak the word “Americans.”

“Of course,” said Jamal. He had his eye on a brunette across the room.

“I have a gift from my friends,” said Fuad. He took from under his arm a copy of the morning edition of the pro-Egyptian Arabic paper,
Al-Anwar
, and placed it on the table. Inside it was the U.S. document.

Jamal picked up the paper and opened it enough to read the words “United States Department of State” written on the document. The Palestinian smiled like a boy with a new toy.

“Good news!” said Jamal, pointing to the paper. He called the waiter and ordered a bottle of wine.

They had a boisterous meal of spaghetti and veal. Jamal drank most of the bottle of Château Musar and told stories about his father’s exploits fighting the Israelis. The Palestinian seemed ebullient, and when Fuad proposed that they meet again in a week, he readily agreed.

“What gives with this guy?” Rogers wondered out loud after debriefing Fuad later that day.

“Either your friend Jamal is recruiting himself—jumping into our arms—or he’s running his own operation against us.”

Rogers lit a cigarette. He had the nervous look of a man who has just realized for the first time that someone may be setting him up.

“Jamal is flamboyant, said Fuad. “But he is not stupid.”

Rogers paced the room. He stopped at the bar, poured a whisky, and then put it down.

“I wonder,” said Rogers. “Is it possible that our new recruit imagines that he is recruiting us?”

Fuad clucked his tongue. That was how Lebanese answered questions for which they hadn’t any answer.

“I’ll tell you a secret,” said Rogers. “The secret is that it doesn’t matter what Jamal thinks he’s doing. So long as he plays the game.”

When he returned to the embassy that evening, Rogers set in motion some discreet inquiries about Jamal. The answers came back several days later from a Lebanese agent who worked in the registry of the Deuxième Bureau.

The Lebanese intelligence service, it turned out, had a thick file on Jamal Ramlawi. He was a security officer, with what appeared to be wide-ranging responsibilities. He was respected and feared by his subordinates. He was, just as Fuad had said, a favorite of the Old Man, who invited him to meetings with the senior Fatah leadership and solicited his advice. The Old Man, it was said, was cultivating Jamal as a leader of the younger generation of Fatah, someone who could work easily with the new wave of Palestinian exiles studying and working in Europe and the Arab world.

The evidence strongly suggested that whatever Jamal was doing, he had the Old Man’s approval.

There was another interesting tidbit. Jamal was reputed to be sex-crazy. He was currently having an affair with a blond German woman who was the mistress of a very rich, but aging, Lebanese banker.

The third meeting, a week after the luncheon at Quo Vadis, was more discreet. They met at a prearranged time in a park on the grounds of the American University of Beirut. The smell of the sea mingled with the scent of the eucalyptus and pine trees.

This time, Jamal brought a surprise of his own. He proposed regular contact between himself, on behalf of Fatah, and Fuad, on behalf of the United States. The purpose would be to discuss “matters of mutual concern,” a phrase as vague in Arabic as it is in English. He said the arrangement should be one of “liaison,” like the contacts the U.S. Embassy maintained with other embassies and political organizations around town.

Fuad, who had been carefully coached for the meeting by Rogers, responded that he wasn’t authorized to discuss substantive issues like the one raised by Jamal.

“I am here to listen,” Fuad said. “Only to listen.”

“That’s not enough,” said the Palestinian. “We are not interested in a one-way dialogue.”

“Maybe what you are seeking is possible,” responded Fuad. “But I cannot approve it. To make such an arrangement, you must talk directly with a member of the U.S. Embassy staff.”

Now it was the Palestinian’s turn to balk.

“Impossible! With an American agent? Do not ask for too much, my dear.”

The Palestinian then delivered a brief lecture about the perfidy of the Zionists and the Imperialists.

Fuad listened patiently and eventually concluded the meeting with a well-rehearsed pitch.

The Americans had offered a sign of their goodwill by providing a document that dealt with issues of concern to the Palestinians. Now it was time for Fatah to reciprocate. Before proceeding further, Fuad said, the Americans would need some sign of Jamal’s good faith.

The answer came on December 1, 1969, when Jamal delivered a public address to a gathering of students at the Lebanese Arab University. The local press was invited, and copies of their articles were sent the next day by the Beirut station to CIA headquarters in Langley, where they aroused considerable interest.

The speech was unusual in itself. Fatah officials, other than the Old Man, rarely spoke in public. But it was the tone of the speech that was most surprising. In those days, Fatah’s pronouncements were usually ferocious blasts of revolutionary indignation. But Jamal’s speech was something different. The young Palestinian seemed to be signalling that he was a responsible, reasonable man, willing to do business.

“The commando groups will respect the sovereignty of Lebanon,” the newspapers quoted Jamal as saying. “Fatah will forbid our men to circulate in Lebanese cities and villages with their arms.”

The analysts at Langley regarded this statement as an attempt to reassure the United States and its conservative Arab friends that the commandos weren’t out to destroy Lebanon. The statement itself was demonstrably false. Fatah men were violating Jamal’s edict about carrying weapons even as he spoke the words. But it was interesting that he said it, nonetheless.

“Because Fatah is the biggest commando organization, it has a big responsibility toward world public opinion,” Jamal said. “We study every operation very carefully and make sure that it will not affect civilians.” This seemed to be a vague promise—and not a very convincing one—that Fatah would seek to restrain terrorist operations abroad.

Jamal was asked by someone in the audience about Fatah’s relations with Moscow. His answer was studied with special care back in Washington.

“The commandos don’t deal with the Soviet Union as if we are affiliated with it,” he said. No one back home was sure what that meant.

“Is this guy for real?” asked Hoffman when he read the transcript of Jamal’s speech.

“What he said yesterday was mostly nonsense,” responded Rogers. “But the man himself is serious.”

“How do you know he isn’t diddling us?”

“I don’t,” said Rogers. “But my instinct tells me he wants to do business with us.”

“Your instinct? Listen, junior, don’t tell me about instinct. Instinct can get you killed in this part of the world. Instinct isn’t worth shit. So far, from what I can see, we’re giving this guy documents and he’s making speeches.”

Rogers tried not to sound defensive.

“He did what we asked him to do. Which was to give us a sign of his bona fides. I’d like to try the next step.”

“Which is?”

“Which is to explore the kind of relationship he’s proposing, using Fuad as the intermediary.”

“Okay, my friend,” said Hoffman. “As we say in the espionage business, ‘It’s your ass.’ ”

Rogers nodded. He wanted to salute.

“By the way,” added Hoffman. “In case it slipped your mind, we’re going to need clearance from headquarters for this little stunt. You may have gotten away with this Lawrence-of-Arabia crap in Oman, but not here!”

Rogers thanked his boss.

“Have you talked to M&S?” asked Hoffman.

M&S was the agency’s Directorate of Management and Services, a housekeeping organization that supported agency operations. It had its own field office in Beirut, mainly to handle covert financial transactions in Lebanon’s foreign-exchange market.

Rogers said he hadn’t.

“Well, you’d better, because if this little plan ever goes anywhere, you’re going to need lots of help. Safehouses and surveillance equipment and couriers and travel funds. Not to mention whatever fat sum of cash it will cost to buy your little friend in Al-Fatah.”

Rogers stared at the floor.

“It’s an interesting scheme,” said Hoffman. “I’ll do my best to get it cleared.”

Beirut; December 1969

The climate back home was cool to new operations in the Middle East. The agency’s top officials were preoccupied with Vietnam and Laos. The senior analysts who prepared the National Intelligence Estimates regarded the Palestinian guerrillas as a passing phenomenon, irritating but ultimately irrelevant.

The real issues in the Arab world, the old hands insisted, were the same ones that had preoccupied the agency for the last fifteen years: Nasser of Egypt, known in the agency by the cryptonym
SIBLING
, and his endless flirtations with Washington and Moscow; the militant regime in Syria, which the United States had tried to topple in 1956 with Operation
WAKEFUL
, setting off a long string of coups and countercoups; and the King of Jordan, known in agency cables as
NORMAN
, who was sustained in part by CIA subsidies paid through a covert operation codenamed
NOBEEF
.

But the Near East Division chief, who regarded Rogers as a protégé, liked the idea. His name was Edward Stone, and he was a sturdy old ex-military man. In his many years of service, Stone had come to the view that when the analysts all agreed on something, they were nearly always wrong.

Stone asked Hoffman to send along a cable explaining why the agency should get more involved in collecting intelligence about the Palestinian guerrilla groups. With that, said Stone, he might be able to sell the project to the Deputy Director for Plans, as the head of the clandestine service was known.

Hoffman drafted a long cable, outlining the “objective factors” that made Fatah an appropriate target for high-level penetration.

First, said the station chief, the commandos were becoming an increasingly powerful force in Lebanon. The previous month the Old Man had met secretly in Cairo with the Lebanese Army commander and signed an accord that would give the guerrillas responsibility for policing the Palestinian refugee camps and allow them to conduct military operations against Israel from designated areas of South Lebanon. The “Cairo Agreement,” as it was called, was a disastrous step for the Lebanese government, since it undermined Lebanon’s sovereignty over the commando groups. There were rumors that some of the Lebanese Army officers who had helped negotiate the agreement had received payoffs from Fatah.

A corollary of the Cairo Agreement, Hoffman noted, was that the Lebanese intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau, would be withdrawing its network of agents from the refugee camps and curtailing its operations against the fedayeen. That was also a disaster. The Deuxième Bureau, though controlled by Lebanese Christians, had agents in every Moslem sect and political faction. It had informants on every street corner in the Sabra and Shatilla camps. When they were withdrawn, warned Hoffman, the best source of intelligence about the Palestinians would be gone.

Second, Hoffman explained, there were diplomatic reasons why it made sense to have a back-channel line of communications open to Fatah. The United States was embarked on a serious effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict through negotiations. The new administration had contact with all the parties—except the PLO.

Third, the station chief said, the guerrillas were becoming more dangerous. When it was founded in 1964, the PLO was a nonentity, a propaganda forum sponsored by the Egyptians to keep hotheaded Palestinians under control. The organization had been transformed by Fatah’s ethic of revolution and guerrilla war. It had become, said Hoffman, a “loose cannon.”

The PLO’s guerrilla exploits thus far had been laughable, Hoffman stressed. Fatah’s daily communiqués were works of Arab poetry, boasting of imaginary battles and nonexistent attacks against Israelis. But the Arab papers printed the communiqués, and the headlines enhanced the guerrillas’ mystique. “Fatah Forces Wipe Out Israeli Patrol,” “PLO Commandos Destroy Israeli Mobile Unit in Jordan Valley,” “Commandos Down Israeli Jet, Attack Several Settlements.” The Fatah propagandists were shameless. A few days ago, the station chief noted, they had taken credit for the death of an Israeli colonel, claiming that he had been killed by a Fatah land mine when, in fact, the poor man had died in a traffic accident.

The problem, Hoffman concluded, was that the PLO leaders weren’t fooled by their own rhetoric. They knew that in the long run, guerrilla warfare against the Israelis was hopeless, and they were looking around for other weapons. The only one that worked, from their standpoint, was terrorism.

As an appendix to his cable, the station chief included the text of a recent communiqué issued by the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, titled “Final Warning to the World to Stay Away from Israel.” The document contained an unsubtle threat of airplane hijackings. It announced: “Don’t Travel to Israel! Stay Neutral! Be Safe! Keep Away!”

“The DDP says he doesn’t understand what he’s being asked to approve,” said Hoffman, when he had read the response to his cable. “Normally, I would tell him to go screw himself. But in this case, he has a point.

“To be frank, I’m not even sure I understand what we’re asking him to approve, and I wrote the fucking cable! So bear with me while I belabor the obvious.”

Rogers nodded.

“Is this an agent recruitment?” demanded Hoffman.

“No,” said Rogers. “Not yet.”

“Then what is it?”

“Our source is calling it ‘liaison.’

“Oh yeah? Well that’s bullshit, and you can tell him I said so. In the meantime, what are we supposed to tell Langley we’re doing out here?”

Rogers thought a moment.

“Tell them,” said Rogers, “that we are in the development phase of what we expect will be a penetration of the senior leadership of the Fatah guerrilla organization. For now, we are using a Lebanese agent as talent spotter.”

“Not bad,” said Hoffman. “It sounds almost plausible.”

And that was exactly what the DDP approved in early December 1969.