new recruits to wait sixty days before contacting the CIA again, to make sure there was no electronic or physical surveillance. But in this case, the need for communication was too urgent. The Iranian nuclear program was “an imminent threat to global peace and security,” according to the White House. The Iranians supposedly had halted their actual weaponization project a few years before, but nobody was really sure if that was true. There were people in the administration who wanted to go to war, now, to stop the Iranians from making any more progress. Pappas assumed that Fox was a member of this party of war, but he had never asked him, not wanting to hear the response. Policy was for downtown, and for ambitious men like Arthur Fox.
Where and when will we hold our next meeting? That was always the first question for an agent, virtual or physical. You asked it first because you never knew if contact might suddenly be disrupted. So in his encrypted response message, Pappas asked the basics: Can you travel? Can we contact you in your home country? Where do we reach you? He told Dr. Ali to wait fifteen days before responding to the secure web address using the agency’s encryption system. Fifteen days was too quick. Good tradecraft would have dictated a longer delay, to sanitize contact. But there wasn’t time.
Pappas summoned Marcia Hill again. He wanted to talk, but not with Arthur Fox or the director or anyone else who could come back and bite him if he said something wrong. Marcia was good that way. She had stopped believing in the institution a long time ago, and now her loyalty was to people only. He wanted one of the kids around, too, so he asked Martin Vitter, Marcia’s operations chief, who had just come back from Iraq and who reminded him, in his deadly seriousness about destroying “bad guys,” of his son Alex.
They gathered in Pappas’s windowless office. The admin officer had brought some coffee and cookies from the cafeteria to make it seem like a proper meeting. Pappas was edgy. He wasn’t comfortable with good news.
“How are we going to run this guy?” he began. “We’re going to need him five years from now as much as we do today, but how do we keep him alive? How do we find him, meet him, and train him? Otherwise he’s going to end up a dead man.”
“Duh! Let’s start with finding him?” said Marcia. “Right now we don’t have an agent, we have an email address.”
“Okay, so let’s assume Dr. Ali wants to play. He answers my message and tells us how to initiate contact. Let’s think about that. What do we do then? Do we try to meet him in-country?”
“Negative, sir,” cut in Martin Vitter. “They’ll make us, then they’ll make him. Then he’s dead. Meet him outside. Get him to Dubai or Turkey, where we have some operational control.”
“But suppose he can’t travel,” said Pappas.
“Everyone travels at Nowruz, right?” Nowruz was the Persian New Year.
“Wrong,” said Marcia. “The nuclear people are on a no-travel list now. Even at Nowruz. And besides, that’s nine months off. They don’t give these guys pilgrimage visas, even. I think we have to meet him in Iran.”
Pappas thought about it for a moment. The right answer was outside, but outside was impossible.
“I agree with Marcia. If he’s really part of the nuclear program, they won’t let him out. We have to poke him at home. So how do we do that?”
He wasn’t asking them, really. He answered the question himself.
“First we get him a cov-comm device in Tehran. Right? We don’t try to meet face-to-face at all. We leave it for him at a drop. In a park somewhere. We get someone who’s totally clean to lay it down. A traveler who has no record with us. Someone with a Turkish passport, maybe Kuwaiti. Someone with balls who will just go into the park, drop the toy, and get the fuck out of there. And then Dr. Ali picks it up, and bingo, we have communication. And then we go from there.”
“What kind of toy?” asked Marcia. “What does it look like?”
“I don’t know. A rock. A clod of dirt. A soda pop can. Whatever the tech people say will blend with the drop site.”
“Sounds kind of dry,” said Marcia. “Iranians like a kiss. Something to tell them you love them.”
“Okay. As soon as we know who he is, we reach out and