Dynamite Fishermen (5 page)

By the time the thought occurred to him to follow her outside, she had already entered the elevator and begun her descent. He started off down the stairs, taking two steps at a time, but gave up the pursuit after three flights. It was clear that he would not be able to overtake her. And he no longer knew what he would say if he did.

Chapter 3

Thursday

Prosser awoke to the muffled bursts of underwater explosions not far offshore. It was the dynamite fishermen again, landing their daily catch by tossing bundles of dynamite sticks wrapped in electrician’s tape over the sides of black rubber dinghies. In the five years since the Lebanese civil authorities had lost control over public life, these high-volume poachers had devastated the undersea life along the city’s shoreline, killing a dozen fish for every one that they sold to the busy open-air restaurants of Raouché, Ramlet el Baida, and Jnah.

Prosser swung his feet to the floor and sat up on the sofa where he had spent the night in his boxer shorts. Cool, moist morning air blew in through the wide-open French doors separating the living room from the broad terrace and chilled his naked shoulders. He stepped outside and stood at the iron rail to watch the street vendors set up their espresso machines and citrus presses at the backs of decrepit vans parked along the Corniche. Though it was barely half past six, the sun’s warm and soothing rays were already above the horizon and touching his skin.

He drew a deep breath. Often in the early morning, when the air was fragrant and still and free of clouds or haze, he would gaze out like this from his apartment across the mirror-smooth Bay of Beirut toward the peaks of the Sannin Ridge and ask himself why he found life in Beirut so satisfying. Many of the advantages that had long ago earned the city its reputation as an Eastern paradise—climate, culture, architecture and cuisine—remained intact five years after the end of Lebanon’s civil war.

But what set Beirut apart, he realized, was the danger. There was enough of it to serve as a tonic; but for a foreigner who did not take part in the war, there was not so much of it as to justify a rational decision to flee or to hole up inside one’s office or apartment. The most tangible threat facing Prosser was the same as that facing any other human being in Beirut, whatever his nationality, religion, or political affiliation. If he were killed, it would likely be from the random impact of a stray bullet or shell or from the indiscriminate devastation of the car bomb.

The Hala Building, in which Prosser’s apartment occupied the westernmost quarter of the fourth floor, stood on a north-facing ridge in West Beirut’s safest and most expensive neighborhood. Its apartments were spacious by American standards and finished expensively, albeit to Lebanese tastes, with locally quarried marble floors, wood trim of stained tropical hardwoods, and modern Italian-made kitchen and bathroom fixtures. Nearly every apartment had a full-length terrace and French doors on its northern and southern ends. Tenants were also given exclusive use of West Beirut’s only surviving rooftop swimming pool.

By the summer of 1981 the Hala Building had become almost entirely a Western enclave. A half dozen American diplomats, nearly as many American journalists, and an assortment of others from Japan, West Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Denmark, and Australia made it their home. In fact, owing to Lebanon’s rent-control statute, the building’s owner refused to rent to anyone but foreigners, who were exempted from the statute and willing to pay the extortionate rents demanded for accommodations at one of the city’s best addresses.

Aside from suites belonging to the Hala family, only two apartments held Lebanese tenants. One, across the hall from Prosser, belonged to a retired Greek Orthodox shipping agent who had been a boyhood friend of the landlord, while another, on the same floor but on the opposite end of the building, was occupied by an Alawite Muslim politician from the Bekaa Valley who not many weeks before had brought his Syrian-backed militia into West Beirut to compete in the major leagues of Lebanon’s national sport.

Prosser knelt at the entrance of the Hala Building to tighten the laces of his running shoes, all the while taking a careful look around him. Seeing nothing suspicious, he rose and began his daily exercise run in the barricaded alley behind the Saudi Arabian embassy. Prosser recalled vividly having been awakened from a sound sleep the previous December when pro-Iranian extremists had tossed a bundle of plastic explosives over the wall into the Saudi embassy compound. Ever since the incident, the alley had been closed to vehicular traffic. Jeep-mounted heavy machine guns of the Lebanese Internal Security Forces were now stationed at the front and back of the compound.

Prosser stepped up his pace as he turned the corner from the alley onto rue Bliss, the main thoroughfare of the Minara district. He noticed immediately that he was the only person on the street except for the ISF machine gunners, the Saudis’ local contract guards, and a solitary youth sitting at a sidewalk café across the street.

As he passed in front of the café before beginning the long descent to the Corniche, Prosser paid little attention to the handsome young Arab who sat drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. The youth had the trim physique of a runner or a swimmer and the relaxed self-assurance typical of the
jeunesse dorée
who made up the greater part of the student body at the American University of Beirut. Had Prosser paused long enough to look at him more closely, he probably would have supposed from the youth’s faded blue jeans, pink Lacoste polo shirt, and gold-rimmed Ray-Ban sunglasses that he was an AUB student stopping for coffee on his way to class.

But behind the newspaper were no books and only a single spiral notebook that was too small to be of much use in taking lecture notes. A few seconds after Prosser passed by, the youth flipped open the notebook and wrote, then pulled from a rear trouser pocket a black-and-white photograph of a tall, sturdily built foreigner dressed in a dark business suit who had bent forward to unlock a car door. Written on the back of the photo was a Ras Beirut address. The address was that of the Hala Building, and the man in the photograph was Conrad Prosser.

* * *

Edwin Pirelli, first secretary in the economic section of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, occupied a small, rear-facing office with a marvelous view of the action on the women’s tennis courts at AUB. The office was barely large enough for its battered oak desk, its late-model, four-drawer Mosler safe, and its ancient red-leather sofa.

After serving four years as a U.S. Army Ranger in the early 1960s, including eighteen months assigned to a series of hamlets in the Mekong Delta, Ed Pirelli had set two goals for himself: finish college and join the Career Training Program of the Central Intelligence Agency. Within three years of leaving the army, he had achieved both. As a combat veteran, an All-American third baseman, and a newly minted graduate of the University of Michigan with a major in Asian studies, Pirelli possessed a résumé that appealed strongly to Agency recruiters. Nor were they mistaken in their assessment of him, for Ed Pirelli turned out to be a superior intelligence gatherer and a natural recruiter of spies. Through consecutive tours of duty in Delhi, Karachi, Katmandu, Bombay, and Colombo, he had recruited an agent or two every year he had spent in the field, gaining rapid promotion from GS-7 to GS-14. Now, at the age of forty-five, he was the Agency’s chief of station in Beirut.

That he knew no Arabic had not figured as a major obstacle in assigning Pirelli to a post in the Arab Near East. The important thing was that he was an experienced officer who felt at home in a country torn by civil unrest and knew how to recruit. For his own part, Pirelli harbored no doubts about his ability to run Beirut Station as well as anyone. His ambitions, however, extended well beyond the next promotion. For he had read in more than a few news articles that the newly appointed director of Central Intelligence, reflecting the views of a newly elected Republican president, was a staunch supporter of Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies, the Phalange.

To Pirelli, this represented a God-given opportunity to be recognized as more than a mere recruiter of spies. From the day his assignment was handed down, he applied himself to the task of anticipating the Reagan administration’s policies toward the Middle East and, where possible, shaping the station’s reporting accordingly. If he succeeded in showing how the Agency could assist Israel with its Lebanese problems, the director could not help but notice. And once Pirelli elbowed his way onto the director’s short list of favored station chiefs, there would be no limit to the advancement he might achieve over the next eight years. Some insiders were already predicting the director’s elevation to secretary of state during the president’s second term. And on the strength of such predictions, Pirelli pictured himself with increasing frequency among the president’s senior foreign policy advisors at the White House or in Foggy Bottom.

Prosser knocked on the station chief’s door and walked in without waiting for a reply. Pirelli was seated behind his desk, lunch tray set before him, pouring ketchup onto a cheese omelet and French fries sent up from the embassy snack bar. He replaced the cap on the ketchup bottle and poured a chilled bottle of Almaza lager into a tall glass.

“I liked your report about the Phalange’s plans to move against West Beirut, Conrad,” Pirelli began when he saw Prosser enter the room. “It tracks with what I’ve been getting from Lebanese G-2 about a Phalangist move against Syrian positions in the Sannine Mountains. The Israelis can deny it until hell freezes over, but I’ll bet you a fifth of Chivas that those bastards are putting Bashir up to it and that he’s not smart enough to see they’re playing him for a pigeon.”

“You’re on,” Prosser replied as he moved toward the window and scanned the clay courts in search of AUB coeds in tennis whites. “If anyone is being played for a fool around here,” he continued, “I would put it the other way around. Bashir doesn’t have enough firepower to move against the West Side, and nobody knows it better than he does. That’s why he’s trying so hard to lure the Israel Defense Forces into Lebanon to do the job for him. If you’d like, I’ll sound out Maroun on that point. I’ll be seeing him again briefly tomorrow morning.”

Pirelli wolfed down a forkful of fried potatoes and shook his head emphatically. “No, don’t do that quite yet. Just tell him to keep his ears open and to report any messages being passed between Bashir and his pals in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, we’ve got to start reporting the story from the Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim angle. Headquarters will want to know what the IDF will face if they cross the Litani. Con, I want you to start collecting updated order of battle information from Abu Ramzi and Abu Khalil and your other sources here on the West Side. We need to know exactly what assets the Syrians have in Lebanon right now. The same goes for the Palestinians and the Lebanese leftists.”

Prosser was not pleased. “I’ll collect it, Ed, but this time I hope Headquarters won’t turn right around and give Abu Ramzi’s reporting to the Israelis the way they did a few months ago. If the Israeli air force goes out on Tuesday and bombs the living Jesus out of the positions Abu Ramzi reports to us on Monday, it’s not going to take him long to put two and two together.”

Pirelli took a mouthful of omelet and washed it down with beer. “Con, it’s not a good idea to try to tie Headquarters’ hands in a situation like this. We don’t know what kinds of deals are being made between Washington and Tel Aviv. You’ll just have to trust us on this.”

Prosser scowled. “I don’t object to Headquarters having a free hand in dealing with the Mossad, Ed. I just don’t want them to exercise it at my expense. Those pukes don’t have to ride along the Corniche at night with Abu Ramzi armed to the teeth and raving that I’ve sold him out to the Mossad. I’m telling you, if he gets the idea one more time that we’ve handed his material to our Yehudi pals...”

“I hear you, Conrad, but I think you’re overreacting. Anyway, there’s no point in arguing about it until we have something to report. Let me give you a little piece of advice that an old OSS hand once told me when I was a career trainee. He said no field operator ever made GS-18 by giving orders to Headquarters.”

“Eighteen, hell,” Prosser laughed bitterly. “I may not make it to twelve at the rate I’m going.”

“Don’t let it get to you, Con. So you had a bad tour of duty in Saudi. That sort of thing happens to everyone in this business—it just happened to you a bit early. Now, since you’ve been here, you’ve come a long way toward showing what you can do. But there’s no way around it, Con. If you want to make the next promotion, you’ll have to land a solid recruitment or two. There’s just no substitute. No matter how good a linguist you are and how much you know about the Arabs—even if your reports reach the Oval Office every goddamned day—the first thing the promotion panel is going to ask is how many scalps you took.”

“And if I come up empty-handed?”

“I suppose there might be a place for a non-recruiter in Central Files...” Pirelli dug his fork into the omelet and dragged it through a pool of ketchup before he looked up again. “Listen, Conrad, it’s never easy to land your first scalp, but the longer you put it off, the harder it’s likely to get. Let me tell you a little story. When I was in Delhi, I bagged a half-dozen recruitments, but they were all small fry—access agents, safe house keepers, surveillance team members—you know the kind.

“In Karachi, the station chief sat me down after I’d been there for about a month and told me to make a list of all the agent prospects I had spotted since I arrived. He pointed to the very first name on the list, an Egyptian second secretary, and he said to me, ‘I’ve had my eye on this one. I think what he needs is a best friend. Ed, my boy, you’re going to be the best goddamned friend that wog ever had.’ The chief told me he would give me all the advice I needed, but that he expected me to recruit the Egyptian by the end of the year.