The Cairo Affair (8 page)

Sophie blinked, trying to clear her sight, but it was hard. She felt a lump in her throat. “All yesterday you were with me. Ray came for dinner.”

“It’s hush-
hush,
Sophie. I shouldn’t even be telling you now.”

“But you knew?”

“Not until we got home. Ray told me.”

“Who is he?”

A shrug, then Glenda reached for her Cosmo again. “I don’t know. Albanian, though. Some Albanian prick.”

“And?”

“And nothing. That’s all Ray would give me. Maybe he knows more, maybe they’re just kicking around in the dark, but that’s all I know.”

Sophie closed her eyes, blocking out everything, then opened them again, but it was all the same. That zebra print, Glenda with her drink, and, in the distance, one of the tinted windows just above the sidewalk, where high heels and cheap casuals hurried by. She felt the same way she had felt twenty years before on the Charles Bridge, mourning the loss of her Lenin—ignorant, an outsider, an object of scorn.

“I need to make a call,” she said, taking her shoulder bag as she stood.

Glenda made a worried expression. “Not angry?”

She shook her head.

“Sisters?”

Sophie gave her a smile that felt entirely false. “Sisters, Glen. I’ll be right back.”

She climbed to the front door, stepped outside, the cold descending on her, and continued up to the sidewalk. There were two City Taxis coming up Üllői, and she waved at them. The second stopped. She climbed inside and said, “Ferihegy.” As they moved, she took out her phone and dialed Andras Kiraly’s number.

“Kiraly Andras.”

“Sophie Kohl.”

He took a breath. “Mrs. Kohl, how may I help you?”

“I’d like the name of the man who killed my husband.”

Another breath, a cough. “You haven’t been told this?”

“I suppose my friends forgot to mention it.”

He waited, as if his patience would convince her to hang up. It wouldn’t. She watched the dirty buildings pass by, shadows of a grander age. She had all the time in the world.

Finally, he said, “He has a Hungarian passport under the name Lajos Varga. However, his real name is Gjergj Ahmeti, and he is Albanian by birth. He is a known criminal, usually hired to kill people.”

“An assassin?” she said, but kept her voice low so that the driver wouldn’t hear.

“Yes.”

“Does he work for the Serbs?” she asked without thinking through the question.

“Why would you ask that, Mrs. Kohl?”

“I…” She wasn’t ready to share with him what she hadn’t shared with the embassy—or anyone, for that matter. She wasn’t ready to trust Andras Kiraly. “Sorry, I have to go now.” She hung up. Immediately, the phone began to ring. It was Glenda. She disconnected her friend, then turned off the phone.

SOURCE: WikiLeaks.org
“Cablegate: 250,000 US Embassy Diplomatic Cables”
AUTHOR: Harold Wolcott
9 December 2009

O 261214Z DEC 09

FM AMEMBASSY CAIRO

TO SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 1752

INFO NSC WASHDC IMMEDIATE

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 CAIRO 001403

STATE FOR F

AID FOR AME

STATE ALSO FOR NEA/ELA

E.O. 18239: DECL: 12/09/2019

SUBJECT: FALSE PREDICTIONS RE: STUMBLER

Classified by DCM Frank Ingersoll for reasons 1.4 (c) and (d).

¶1. (C) Summary and Key points: This is an analysis of the May 2009 draft proposal, AE/STUMBLER. Based on present assessments of the regime in Tripoli, the primary assumptions behind STUMBLER are in doubt. It is the belief of this embassy that the operation should be abandoned in favor of more assured goals.

ASSUMPTIONS

¶2. (C) Signs that the assumptions of instability, outlined in the May 2009 proposal by Jibril Aziz (CIA), are mistaken include:

--The failed September 2009 protests in al Jabal al Akhdar Governorate, dealt with by government forces in less than 24 hours.

--A November 2009 increase in salary to the Revolutionary Guard, which reports say have solidified the regime’s control.

--Most importantly, the recently signed oil contracts between the regime and China’s CNPC, which has made the regime more flush with cash than in recent years, and would facilitate the easy purchase of mercenary support from throughout Africa.

NEXT STEPS

¶3. (C) Given the low probability of success with STUMBLER, this office suggests the following course of action:

--Continued support of underground resistance groups within the country, including the ALF and the WRAL.

--Support for the IFG, which, despite central policies that contradict our own, could be moved into our sphere of influence. They have on numerous occasions attempted Muammar Gadhafi’s assassination.

--Support to a variety of exile groups in order to pave the way for a post-Gadhafi regime educated in the methods and practice of democracy. See the list included in section 3.

CONCLUSION

¶4. (C) With all that has been stated above, and will be detailed in section 2, the prospect for STUMBLER’s success is, in all likelihood, doomed to failure. To go forward would cost not only money and lives but American influence within the Arab and Muslim worlds, as Gadhafi would certainly use a failure to maximum propaganda effect. Instead, this office proposes a continuation of support for democracy groups within Libya, and the rise in funding of exile groups based in Washington, London, Rome, Geneva, and Paris.

WOLCOTT

PART II

WE SHOULD LOOK AT OURSELVES

Stan

1

He first discovered Emmett’s treachery in March 2010, though he had been following clues for at least a month. In early February Langley had sent a classified directive via one pale, sweating official from Internal Affairs who waited at Stan’s apartment, holding a file flown over in the diplomatic pouch. He sat in the kitchen while Stan called Virginia for verification, then in the living room he opened the file and laid out four pieces of intercepted communications from three Washington embassies, with the simple explanation, “The Bureau passed this on to us.” Syria, Libya, and Pakistan had been using material from top-secret communications that had originated in Harry’s office, material that covered aspects of trade, military analyses, and in two cases undercover operations. One was still in play, while the other—an exfiltration from Libya a month ago—had ended when the operative’s body was discovered, cut into pieces, in the desert outside Homs.

“Christ,” Stan said as he went through the papers. He had personally known the dead undercover agent, whose names—both his birth name and the one on his documents—were right there in capital letters. Yet the emissary was treating this like business as usual. “Who’s selling us out?”

The emissary shrugged. “That’s why we’ve come to you.”

“I’m that squeaky clean?”

“The easiest. We don’t have the manpower to send over a team at this point, so we decided to clear one of you and have you continue the investigation.”

Stan knew what he meant by “easiest”—his father, Paolo Bertolli, was a legend in Langley circles, and the Bertolli name still carried weight eight years after his death. Stan said, “You want me to do this on my own?”

The emissary smiled. “Is it really true your father spent six years undercover in the Brigate Rosse?”

“What do the files say?”

“Six years, entirely on his own.”

Stan scratched at his nose. “Is this what the office told you to say? In case I resisted?”

The emissary shrugged. Of course it was.

He and Sophie had been involved for three months by then, meeting twice a week in their Dokki hotel, and for this reason it didn’t occur to him to focus on Emmett. He was already cuckolding the man; he felt no desire to ruin him completely.

He first examined members of the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Section, in particular his boss, Harold Wolcott, and the other submanagers—Jennifer Cary, Dennis Schwarzkopf, and Terry Alderman. This took longer than expected, and while no amount of vetting could clear an individual with absolute certainty he decided eventually to move on. He expanded his search to include embassy staff who’d had access to the compromised trade, military, and undercover materials. Emmett made that list, but so did eighteen others from various embassy departments. He eventually discovered, from one year earlier, the surveillance photos taken by Terry’s men of Emmett meeting with an unidentified woman in a restaurant soon after his arrival in Cairo. No one had followed up on her identity—a note with the photo suggested it was a business associate, or a friend—so Stan sent Langley two shots of her face, with Emmett cropped out, and asked for an ID. Three days later he received the reply: Zora Balašević, suspected employee of the
Bezbednosno-informativna agencija
—the BIA, Serbia’s intelligence agency, which was run out of their Cairo embassy by a clever old man named Dragan Milić.

Was it really possible that Emmett Kohl was selling them out to the Serbs? Even then he doubted it, for everything he knew about Kohl suggested otherwise. But Stan had come up empty on everyone else; he had no choice but to push on.

After verifying that Emmett had had access to all four pieces of wandering intelligence, he spent another week following him through endless meetings and scouring his cell phone records. In their shared hotel bed, he asked Sophie about their past. He knew that she and Emmett had spent a week or two in Yugoslavia at the beginning of its long civil war, so he asked about their connections. She shrugged and told him that their Serbian relationships had faded soon after they returned to the States. “When you leave you’re convinced you’ll see your new friends again, but absence doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder, does it? It makes it colder.”

She also told him that on the morning of March 29, the following Tuesday, she and Emmett would be joining the consul general at the Sayed Darwish Theater for a performance of
The Nutcracker
by the Moscow Stars on Ice, followed by a reception at the Russian embassy. So that Tuesday morning he arrived at their apartment a little after eleven, typed in their alarm code, and went inside. He tethered his computer to Emmett’s laptop with a FireWire cable and began to copy his hard drive. Though he didn’t imagine that Emmett would have kept evidence of treachery lying around, he searched the apartment anyway, finding things he shouldn’t have looked at—old love letters between Emmett and Sophie that she had dutifully kept in a shoe box, faded photos of the two of them when they were much younger and, it seemed, much happier, and, in a secret box behind Emmett’s underwear, naked shots of Sophie in bed, smiling. As soon as the copying was finished, he disconnected the cable, reset the alarm, and left.

Emmett was a diplomat, not a spy—he had no idea how to cover his tracks. While deleting a file was enough to deny Stan access to the file itself, he was still able to find the record of its existence, and Emmett had never thought to rename anything. So among the deleted items he found W090218SQR and W090903SQB and W090729SQL—three top-secret documents that Langley believed had been the source of the compromised intelligence, items that were forbidden outside embassy walls.

The evidence was damning, yet it still took him two more days to accept the obvious. While “love” was a word he still struggled to use, he soon realized that his unspoken feelings for Sophie had been clouding his judgement. The facts couldn’t be ignored: His lover’s husband was a traitor. He thought of that undercover agent whose mutilated body had festered under the desert sun. How many other agents had been killed or kidnapped because of Emmett’s misdeeds? Stan’s own mideeds paled to insignificance, and he lost all sympathy for Emmett Kohl. He even allowed himself to hate.

He waited for Emmett on a street near the embassy. It was a warm day, and Sophie’s husband looked harried. Stan asked about
The Nutcracker,
and Emmett gave a noncommittal shrug. “Take a walk with me, will you?” Stan asked as he led him down a sweltering Cairo alley he had scouted beforehand, to a little courtyard café with yellow paint peeling off of old stone walls. Emmett had grown anxious by then, but Stan reassured him with aimless talk about personal problems he desperately needed help with until, finally, they were sitting across from each other at one of the plastic tables.

Neither of them had a lot of time—end-of-the-month meetings were filling both of their schedules—so Stan didn’t bother easing into it. He showed Emmett the photographs of his meeting with Balašević and a CD-ROM that he assured him proved that Emmett had been loading secret files onto his laptop. “Jesus,” Emmett said, seeming to shrink before Stan’s eyes.

“This is about as serious as it gets,” Stan told him.

Emmett looked like a little boy who was going to be sick, his round, smooth face preternaturally young. Hiding his contempt, Stan reached across the table and patted Emmett’s hand.

“Just consider yourself lucky that I’m the one who discovered it.”

Emmett couldn’t manage an answer.

“Let’s start with who this woman is.”

He gave Stan the name he already knew, Zora Balašević, then the name of her employer: BIA, the Security Information Agency.

“You want to tell me what she has on you?”

A firm shake of the head. For the moment, it didn’t matter. “But I refused,” Emmett said.

Despite himself, Stan let a smile slip into his face. “You don’t expect me to believe that, do you?”

“It’s the truth.”

“Listen, Emmett. I don’t need to come to you with this. The information you gave her didn’t sit around in the Serbian embassy—it
traveled
. The Serbs sold it on to at least three different governments. By now it’s common knowledge. With what I’ve got, Harry can send you home in shackles.”