Body of Lies (25 page)

After Singh had been in Amman for about ten days, he asked Ferris for a meeting. He seemed quite excited, and Ferris was curious what he had cooked up. They met in Ferris's office, late that afternoon.

"I see the
nodes
," announced Singh with an unusually big smile. He was wearing a T-shirt that said "Hysterics," advertising a New York punk band he liked, and a yellow bracelet that made a striking contrast with his dark skin.

"Good man," said Ferris. He had no idea what the young Indian was talking about.

"The nodes," Singh repeated. He looked disappointed at the possibility that Ferris might already understand what he was going to say. "I've found the nodes for this network you're trying to penetrate. Or whatever you're doing. Don't tell me. I don't need to know. The point is, it's all there. I've been working it over with Sami and his people back home, and we totally
get it
. Your nice architect Mr. Sadiki has visited a
ton
of jihadi Web sites. We're inside the servers of about half the ones he has visited, so we know who else is using them. And we know which ones are just day-trippers and which ones are serious. So we have this picture of, like, his community. His virtual community, I mean. Isn't that cool?"

"Very cool. But I want you to focus on his fellowship group at the mosque, the Ikhwan Ihsan. Those are the links we have to start with. They're airtight. He knows those people. They make the legend real."

"For sure. I've cross-tabbed the people in his group--
and
their brothers and first cousins--against my list of visitors to jihadi Web sites that we know have received and posted operational messages from Al Qaeda. We're running their names and credit-card records against our algorithms back home. If they ever bought a souvenir in Karachi or made a call from a pay phone near a Salafi mosque in Birmingham, we'll know. We have a real network here. Now we just have to light it up."

"Cool," said Ferris again, with genuine appreciation. "But remember, we need to make Sadiki believable as a jihadi. Not just someone who visits Web sites, but someone who is planning and carrying out operations."

"Ye-aa-ah." Singh drew out the word, as kids often did, as if to say, obviously. "So what I'm ready to do now is send messages from Sadiki to some of the people in that community, some of the nodes, who are real jihadis. I've created an account for him that he'll never see. But I need help. What messages do you want me to send? You have to write them. I'm just the technician."

Ferris thought a moment. The messages had to be suggestive, but also vague. They had to imply that Sadiki had higher authority from someone, without being explicit. And they had to point toward the operational date he and Hoffman had set, which was December 22, just before the Christmas holidays.

Ferris thought it over for perhaps 30 seconds, made some rough notes and then wrote out three short sentences in Arabic, which he read aloud to Singh: "The teacher has told me to prepare the lesson. We are looking now for the right place to preach. We send greetings to our brothers and ask for God's help."

"Nice," said Singh. "The teacher. The lesson. That works."

"We're going to need a couple more, so everybody doesn't get the same one. And we need some answers, to send the people who write back. Give me a while to think." Singh put his earphones on and listened to music while Ferris doodled in Arabic.

"Listen to this," said Ferris several minutes later, tugging on the cord of Singh's headphones to take him out of his rock-and-roll reverie. "In the name of God, we thank the brothers who have prepared the path for us. The feast day is coming. God is great."

"That totally works," said Singh.

Ferris labored for another hour writing messages and follow-ups. Singh took them away and began sending them out as e-mail messages from Sadiki to a dozen or so people they had selected from the virtual community of their virtual agent. To each, Singh attached a message in Arabic that said, "Dear brother, if we meet, you will forgive my silence." That way, if anyone actually did query Sadiki directly--and heard him protest that he had sent no message--they would assume he was just covering his tracks.

Singh waited for the electronic harvest. A few people didn't respond at all. Others replied to what they thought was Sadiki's e-mail account--with their messages instead going to Singh. He responded with the brief, tantalizing responses Ferris had written--which hinted at further details of the Christmas plot. Three of the recipients forwarded Sadiki's original message to other e-mail addresses with curious comments that said, in effect: Is he ours? Is this real? That gave Azhar's team more e-mail addresses and servers to monitor, and an electronic path that was moving them closer, byte by byte, to Suleiman.

21

AMMAN

A
JIT
S
INGH AMUSED HIMSELF
with a new toy while Ferris prepared for his third meeting with Omar Sadiki. It had become something of a game within the intelligence community to build fake jihadist Web sites, but Singh thought most of them were useless. The graphics were too slick and the Islamist rhetoric over-enthusiastic. Sometimes the bogus sites would even suggest that new users "register" by providing useful data like their cell-phone numbers. Ajit wanted to build an Islamic portal that wasn't so obvious--that would include militant Muslim material streamed amid lots of other tame stuff about love and life. "Think of it as a cross between Osama and Oprah," he explained to Ferris. Ferris told Singh to go ahead, so long as it didn't take much time. But the young man had already been working on the project for days and was, in fact, nearly ready with a "beta" version.

The name Ajit had chosen was
mySunna.com
--the "right path" online, in Arabic and English. He built it like a commercial site, not too fancy, but with lots of useful features that would pull traffic. He included a pull-down electronic "Zakat Calculator," for example, so that devout Muslims could calculate the proper tithe. They would type in their total assets, including cash, bank balances, stocks, investment property and gold and silver, and then hit "Calculate Zakat," and,
Y'Allah!
For news with a Muslim tilt, he had RSS feeds from
Khaleej Times
in Qatar and the
Dawn
in Islamabad.

Once Ajit got going, he couldn't stop. He added a pull-down menu that invited visitors to enter a
mySunna
store. Inside "mysouk" were framed pictures of Osama, Zawahiri and Zarqawi; there were prayer rugs woven with bin Laden's image. Another click away was "mymovies," with a portfolio of videos shot by jihadist gangs across the Muslim world. The titles included
Iraqi R.A.W
. and
Iraqi R.A.W.2
, with amateur footage of fighters in Iraq setting off IEDs and firing mortars at U.S. bases. Another Iraq video was
The Lions of Fallujah
, taken from the insurgents' side during U.S. attacks. For those wanting jihadist action on another front, Ajit offered compilations from Chechneya--
Russian Hell
, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. There were bin Laden tapes, too, as originally broadcast on Al Jazeera. A last offering was
Riyadh Bombers
, a chilling compilation of the video "last wills" of the men who carried out the May 2003 bomb attacks in the Saudi capital. Ajit didn't bother filling orders--he forwarded traffic to other Islamic Web sites that were offering the same products.

Ajit was proudest of his Islamic advice column. "Talk to
mySunna.com
--What's haram and what's not? Your intimate Islamic questions answered." Users were invited to send in queries that would be answered online by a real sheik. He tried to make these as personal and tasteless as possible, to draw traffic. "Check it out!" said Ajit proudly when he gave Ferris a tour of the beta version. "This is going to pull some eyeballs!"

A
NAL
I
NTERCOURSE
:

Question: Is a Muslim allowed to have anal sex? Answer: This act is strongly Makrooh (but not actually

Haram). There is no objection to the couple getting pleasure from the entire body of one another. But it should be taken into consideration that some actions are beneath human dignity.

Question: When a women is in her period, can she have anal intercourse?

Answer: If wife is consenting to it, it is permissible. But it would be extremely abominable.

H
AND
- S
HAKING
:

Question: Is shaking hands with girls allowed?

Answer: It is not permissible.

M
ASTURBATION
:

Question: What about masturbation? Is it okay if there is no wife available?

Answer: It is not permissible.

Question: If the wife asks the man to masturbate in front of her, is it permissible?

Answer: It is permissible, but it is preferable if the wife uses her hands, and not the man.

M
IRRORS
:

Question: Can husband and wife have sex while looking at each other in a mirror?

Answer: It is permissible.

O
RAL
S
EX
:

Question: I am really sorry that I have to ask this type of question, but since I grew up in a Western country, I really don't know much about our religion. Brother, my question is, can we have oral sex?

Answer: Oral sex act is permissible, provided that no liquid is swallowed.

"Where did you get this stuff?" demanded Ferris. "It's hilarious. Did you just make it up?"

"No way. How would I know what's
haram
and what's just
makrooh
? No, this is all real."

"So where the hell did you get it? Did you pay some sex-obsessed imam?"

"You won't believe this, but I actually got it off a Shiite ayatollah's Web site. It's all there, man. They have a bunch of religious scholars in Najaf deciding whether it's okay to come in a girl's mouth. For real."

"Ajit, you have made my day," said Ferris. It was reassuring to think of the enemy worrying about the theological implications of anal sex.

A few days later,
mySunna.com
was up on the Web, with its online video boutique, and its Islamic advice column, and chat rooms that within a week were regularly visited by people wanting to exchange real messages. Ajit, the invisible face on the other side of the screen, had added some features that allowed the agency to monitor and manipulate that message traffic, too.

F
ERRIS HAD
his third meeting with Omar Sadiki, in Amman. He was careful about surveillance, operating by "denied-area" rules. It was crucial that Hani know nothing about his contacts with the architect. On the appointed day, Ferris left the embassy with a colleague in a car with darkened windows. They drove until Ferris was sure they were free of surveillance. As the car slowly turned a remote corner in Jebel Amman, Ferris opened the door and gently rolled from the passenger seat to the sidewalk. As he left the seat, a pop-up rubber doll inflated, filling the space where Ferris had been sitting. That trick had been used many times in Moscow. With the darkened windows, an observer couldn't have seen that Ferris was missing.

Another car was waiting for Ferris in an alley. He made his way to the underground parking garage of a large apartment building where the agency maintained one of its many Amman safe houses. Ferris took the elevator up from the basement; once in the apartment, he donned the disguise he had used in his two previous meetings with the Jordanian architect--the same wig, moustache, black glasses and padded gut. Ferris barely recognized himself when he looked in the mirror.

They met in a suite at Le Royal, a big hotel in the middle of town owned by an Iraqi billionaire. Sadiki looked as solemn and pious as ever. He presented the final bid documents, new plans and drawings, new details from subcontractors. Payments had already started flowing to Al Fajr for the work, thanks to the agency's cooperative relationship with Unibank. When it was time to cancel the contract in a few months, Unibank would pay Al Fajr a nice "kill fee" for the aborted project; that had been arranged, too.

Ferris was looking for signs of stress in Sadiki--anything out of the ordinary that would suggest he might be suspicious of his contact with "Brad Scanlon," or that some of Hoffman's deceptive schemes might have become known to him--an odd word at the mosque, or an anxious call from a relative, a tipoff from Hani's men. But there seemed to be nothing. Sadiki was as cool--and as bland--as before. The two spent several hours going through the paperwork, eating lunch in Ferris's suite while they talked.

Sadiki excused himself to pray in the middle of this meeting, just as he had in Beirut. Once again, he returned looking cleansed. This was the part of Islam that Ferris genuinely admired, even if he didn't understand it. For believers, the daily prayers were like bathing in a pool of spring water. There was a sense of release and purification that seemed to come from the rituals of kneeling, bowing, confessing, praising. That was what "Islam" meant--submission to God's will.

Ferris could have embraced these slaves of Allah, in another lifetime. But for him and his colleagues, it was now and forever the day after September 11, 2001. He made himself think about the people on the upper floors of the World Trade Center--the people who couldn't escape because the floors below had been destroyed by the impact of the hijacked airplanes. He made himself imagine how it had felt as the carpet under the victims' feet got so hot it began to burn, and the air around them filled with flames and smoke--and how the physical and mental anguish became so unbearable that these desperate people chose to jump from windows eighty stories up to splatter themselves on the ground, rather than remain in that living hell one more instant. This is a war, Ferris told himself. You are a soldier. More people will die unless you do your job.