Body of Lies (15 page)

Hani paused, to register the words. "And how could you be sure of that?" The voice was as impossible to escape as a dream.

"You know the answer. You know, you know."

"Of course I know, but I want to hear it from you. You are an important man. I must hear it from a sincere man I respect, like you."

"Thank you,
sidi
. We were sure he was a traitor because he was in contact with their man. With Hussein Amary, who works with the Americans in Indonesia. That is how we knew that Karami must work for the Americans."

"Yes, the Americans." Hani's eyes were hard points of rage. "But how did you know?"

"We knew because Karami contacted Amary. At first it was the other way around. Amary calling Karami. He even asked us about it. Who is this Hussein Amary? Why is he calling me? But then, later, we learned that Karami had contacted Amary. He wanted to help Amary to travel to Europe, to meet with some of us. He asked about someone named Suleiman. And then we knew: You and the Americans were trying to insert him into our network. That was your trick. You were using Karami to put someone into our most secret places. That was when we knew that Karami could not be trusted. He was working for the Americans. And for you."

Hani was staring at the prisoner. Ferris could see the tautness in his face as he struggled to maintain his composure.

"Why didn't you kill Amary?" Hani asked.

"We tried to, but we could not find him. He disappeared. The Americans were clever. They hid him. They are very clever, the Americans. But they are Satan, and God will punish them."

Hani looked toward the glass mirror, at the spot where he knew Ferris must be sitting. "Yes," he said quietly. "The Americans are very clever." He rose from his chair and left the room. There was a suppressed violence in his step, like a professional boxer walking toward the ring.

He opened the door to Ferris's listening post. Ferris wondered if the Jordanian was going to shoot him right there. Hani was clenching his fists--not as a prelude to violence, it turned out, but to regain control of his emotions.

"I do not ever want to speak with you again," he said, his voice wavering slightly. "We had a good and careful plan for Karami. He could have been a great asset for us both. Perhaps he could have taken us where we want to go. And now he is lost, because of your foolishness and your lies."

He looked at Ferris, still in shock. How could the Americans have been so stupid? He shook his head. It was over. He turned toward the door and then stopped and looked back at Ferris.

"I know what you have been doing. We have an expression for it in Arabic, called
taqiyya.
It comes from the time of the Prophet. It is the lie you tell to protect yourself from the unbelievers. They are the ignorant ones, so you can tell them any lie you want. That is what you and Ed Hoffman have been doing to me with your deceptions.
Taqiyya.
But you have made a very bad mistake."

"I am sorry," said Ferris.

"Do not say another word, Mr. Ferris. If you speak to me again, I will kill you." He turned again for the door and walked out, leaving Ferris in that foul pit deep in the mountain.

Through the window, Ferris watched as the guards unshackled the prisoner Ziyad and took him away. They would exploit him now that he had cracked, bleed him of every contact he'd ever had, every pot he'd ever pissed in, but the Americans would know none of it.

Ferris waited for a time, wondering if someone was going to fetch him or if he would be left there to join the detritus that was rotting under the ground. Eventually two soldiers came to collect him. They were the same two who had escorted him when he first arrived. They led him out a different way, down corridors that were dirty and ill-lit, and stank of shit. He could hear screams from cells as he passed, people who were in pain, or who had been here so long they had simply gone mad.

They came finally to an old gated elevator, big enough to hold a herd of cattle. This was the prisoners' elevator, Ferris realized. It reeked of men who had shat their pants in fear as they descended into the house of the dead.

The elevator made a slow, clanking ascent. The door opened to more dirt and debris, foul smells of captivity, a few faces caught in the lurid fluorescent light. The guards walked him toward a bolted door. A prisoner was pleading with Ferris, thinking he was a foreigner who might save him. The door opened and the guards gave Ferris a nudge. Darkness had fallen, and there was no moon in the bitter sky.

His SUV was across the road. He got in and started the engine, half expecting that it would explode. But no, that wasn't Hani's style. Ferris drove back to the embassy, sent a cable to Hoffman in the special channel and then, an hour later, talked with the division chief briefly by secure phone. Hoffman sounded upset, but not contrite.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Ferris was on a flight back to Washington. He stopped at Alice's apartment and woke her up on the way to the airport. She could tell that something dreadful had happened.

"What's wrong, darling?" she asked. That was the first time she had ever called him darling.

"Something bad at work. They want me to come home, talk to people at the State Department."

"Are you in trouble? Something awful has happened, hasn't it? I can see it."

He looked at her stray wisps of hair across her sleepy face. "Nothing is wrong. Nothing that matters. But I have to sort out these work problems. And talk to my wife."

She nodded. "When will you be back?"

A muscle twitched in Ferris's face. He shifted weight off his bad leg. He didn't know when he would be back. If Hani meant what he had said, it might be never.

"As soon as I can," he answered. "I'll call you whenever I can while I'm away. Is that okay?"

"Of course. So long as you're really coming back."

He didn't answer at first. Pledges of commitment, in his experience, were only spoken if there was reason to doubt someone's fidelity. He thought of what Hani had said: Every extra word adds a measure of insincerity.

"I don't want to leave you." Each word carried the emotion he felt.

"Oh, Roger." She shook her head. There were tears in her eyes. "Promise me something. If you decide you're not serious about me, you must tell me. I don't want to be hurt. I have a good life now that makes me happy, and I don't want to be unhappy again."

"I could never hurt you," said Ferris. She nodded, and then turned her back. As she walked away, Ferris thought to himself: So this is what it feels like. This helpless feeling, this is love.

11

LANGLEY / WASHINGTON

A
CAR BOMB EXPLODED IN
Frankfurt while Ferris was on his way back home. He called the watch officer in NE Division during his stopover in London, asking whether he should turn around and return to Jordan and was told no, that Hoffman wanted him in Washington, ASAP. You could tell, just by watching people at Heathrow, how frightened they were. They were crowding around the televisions in the airport lounges to watch the news. Several flights were canceled, because of the heightened security alert.

Ferris called Alice from London. She hadn't heard the Frankfurt news yet. Ferris told her to be careful, and she laughed out loud. "Me?
You
be careful. I'm not the one making the trouble." Ferris laughed, but it ached. He wanted to be back home with her. Not once in his marriage with Gretchen had he wished to hide away with her and let the world disappear. She was of the world; that was the point about Gretchen. She was mint-perfect, coin of the realm. Alice was in another space, still mysterious to Ferris, and he wished he could be there now.

Ferris brooded on the long London-Washington leg of the trip. They were losing ground. They had bungled their few, precious chances to get inside the enemy network. Ferris himself was no better than Hoffman. He had been impatient and greedy, and he had lost the trail of his adversary. The thought of returning to CIA headquarters was depressing. It wasn't the flat, linoleum feel of the place, or the instantly dated, 1960s "modernist" look of the architecture. It was the civil-service culture that permeated the corridors like dry rot. Ferris had heard the elite, band-of-brothers rhetoric when he joined. The agency had to be less smugly bureaucratic than Time, Inc., he reckoned, but he had been wrong. It was worse. It was a culture that had been lying to itself for so long that people had lost the ability to differentiate between what was real and what wasn't. Failure wasn't acceptable--so, as far as the agency was concerned, the CIA never made mistakes. These were people who believed their own PowerPoint presentations.

Ferris had brought along a book from the British Council library, and he read it now for comfort. The Brits had bungled, too--damn near crumpled in 1939 in the disarray of Dunkirk. Yet when they realized their very survival was at stake, they had found a raw ruthlessness in their character. The fumbling chess players and common-room eccentrics proved to be killers. That was the message of the intelligence histories Ferris liked to read. Facing an enemy they couldn't defeat head-on, the British found other ways. They raised lying to a form of warfare. They stole their enemy's Enigma cipher machines and recruited Britain's oddest and brainiest to break the codes. They captured German agents and played them back, creating a network of lies so intricate and believable that, for the Germans, it became reality. Knowing that they would not prevail unless America entered the war, they launched a covert action program to destroy the isolationists in America, spreading lies and gossip to defeat members of Congress they didn't like. The Brits maintained their guise as genial, patrician bumblers, until they bumbled their way to Berlin. They succeeded, lie by lie, day by day.

Ferris read the slim volume he had brought along about one particularly audacious piece of British deception, and as he turned the pages, he thought about his own adversary. Lacking a face to put to the name "Suleiman," he saw pure black when he closed his eyes. But he heard the sound of explosions--car bombs in Rotterdam, Milan, Frankfurt and coming soon, no doubt, to Pittsburgh and San Diego. The failure to destroy Suleiman wasn't the agency's failure, it was his own. He had grabbed at one of the far-flung roots when he recruited Nizar at the beginning of the year in Iraq. In Berlin with Hani, he had touched one of the nodes. And with Hoffman, it had seemed so easy to insert a probe into the enemy's flank. In his mounting frustration, he had imagined he could tease the enemy out of hiding in Amman. But all he and Hoffman had accomplished with their schemes was to sever the few connections they had. And all the while, the bombs kept going off.

They were back to the starting point, and they were running out of time. The Frankfurt bomb would make people panicky all over again. It was a particularly brazen act, in the middle of Europe's financial capital. It told people there was a network so cleverly constructed and well hidden that the CIA and its friends didn't know where to look. Your shield is gone, these car bombs said; you are helpless before your enemies.

In the drowsy stump of the long flight, Ferris pondered what Hani had said about
taqiyya,
the necessary lie. In the Islamic texts he had studied back at Columbia, the term usually applied to Shiites, who were taught to dissimulate when necessary to avoid danger. Indeed, this slipperiness was one reason Sunnis viewed them as inveterate liars. But there was a deeper meaning that went back to the Koran. It concerned a companion of the prophet named Ammar bin Yasir, who was imprisoned in Mecca with his family after the Prophet fled to Medina in the
hijrah.
Bin Yasir's parents were tortured and killed for their allegiance to Islam. Bin Yasir was more devious: He tricked the infidels by pretending to worship their idols, and then escaped to Medina, where he rejoined Muhammad. When he asked the Prophet if he had done the right thing by lying, Muhammad assured him that he had done his duty. Bin Yasir had surrounded the truth with a bodyguard of lies, as the British put it many centuries later. He had treated the infidels with the contempt they deserved. He had gone into the heart of their encampment and deceived them, so that he could fight another day.

In the time of the Prophet, deception was the essence of survival. Another story concerned the head of an Arabian tribe who was plotting to kill Muhammad. The Prophet advised his companions that the assassin's weakness was his vanity. So when they visited him, they complimented the sheik on his fine perfume, and asked him to lean a little closer, so they could savor its pleasing scent, and a little closer, handsome sheik, and a little closer. And then they chopped off the vain man's head. The story illustrated an eternal truth of warfare. Facing a difficult adversary, it is sometimes best to play upon his arrogance. Lure him forward; draw him in. The right pressure on just the right spot and he will collapse from within. That was what the Muslims had done to America in Iraq, wasn't it? But it could work in reverse.

The British book was still open on Ferris's lap, and he returned to it now with greater attention. The operation it described had been as much theater as warfare. In 1943, the British had needed to disguise their true plan to attack in Sicily by convincing the Germans they would be landing in Greece. They had created an illusion so perfect that the Germans had leapt at it, thinking they were discovering a great secret--not realizing that it was a lie. And it had worked.

Ferris sat upright in his airplane seat. He ordered some black coffee from the flight attendant and began scribbling notes to himself. By the time the plane landed at Dulles, Ferris had the beginning of an idea.

H
OFFMAN WAS
sitting gloomily at his desk when Ferris arrived. He looked awful. The ruddy face had turned doughy, and there were dark ruts under the eyes from too little sleep and too much drinking. Even his brush-cut hair was limp. He didn't look like a tycoon anymore, but a bookie whose bets had come up wrong. His deputy was sitting at the conference table looking at a thick binder, but when Ferris arrived, Hoffman asked the deputy to leave and closed the door.