The Increment: A Novel - By David Ignatius Page 0,18
touch him. We send something to him, unmarked, that could only come from us. Perfume for his wife. Medicine for his kids. Something that says ‘America loves you.’ Something that says ‘Even right here in the center of fucking Tehran, in the goon capital of the world, we can put something on your doorstep.’”
Vitter’s eyes were wide as saucers. This was how he wanted the CIA to be. All-powerful, able to navigate every alleyway on the planet.
Marcia Hill brought them back to reality.
“We don’t have an address, remember? We don’t know where the guy lives or works. We don’t know if he’s young or old. We don’t know if he has a wife or kids, let alone whether they like perfume or need drugs. As a matter of fact, dear boys, we do not know whether Dr. Ali is a man or a woman. What if she is reading Lolita in Tehran this summer and thinks it’s a turn-on to send messages to the CIA? Consider that.”
“You’re a pain, Marcia. You know that?” Pappas smiled. “Let’s start again. This time, let’s assume that our boy doesn’t want to make contact at all. No meet. No address. No cov-comm device. No nothing. He’s too scared. What do we do then?”
“We let him write the rules,” said Marcia. “He’s going to do that anyway.”
“No way!” said Harry. “Without a handle on him, we can’t evaluate what he says. He may be playing us. How would we know? We have to find him.”
“How, Harry?” Her voice was respectful but insistent.
“I don’t know,” admitted Pappas. “I’m thinking about it.”
Pappas still had to kill Dr. Ali in the cable traffic. He had to cover the tracks so that people wouldn’t ask questions about the Iranian VW or pass along corridor gossip. And Harry was a good liar: as a young officer, he had felt uncomfortable with that part of the job, until he realized that was the job.
The CIA had burned too many Iranian agents already. Like the postal screwup, in which the same translator had written the SW letters to the whole string of Iranian agents, all addressed in the same neat script. They spent hundreds of hours finding accommodation addresses all over Germany to receive the “secret writing” correspondence, but somehow nobody thought to wonder if the Iranians would notice so many messages in identical handwriting. And a dozen years later came the dead-drop screwup—in which an agent was told to collect a message from a site in a Tehran park that was so blindingly obvious that officers from MOI—the country’s intelligence service—staked it out and waited for the poor fool to show up. The Iran task force had made so many mistakes over the past twenty-five years, it was astounding that any Iranian still thought of sharing secrets with the CIA. That was the kicker with Dr. Ali: Was he stupid, or reckless? Or was he the most dubious case of all—a spy who just wanted to do the right thing?
Pappas’s first phony message was to Fox in Counter-
Proliferation, with copies to the rest of the distribution list, asking if they could advise about the mysterious message from Iran. In the special channel of the new SAP, he sent Fox a prepared response. It said that the CP Division had examined the document and concluded it had been used in a set of Pakistani centrifuge specifications that were widely available on the Internet. That was sent to the full distribution list as well. The implicit message was that the Dr. Ali case, BQTANK, looked like a bust—a promising initial contact that turned out to be a hoax.
Pappas waited a few days and then had the head of the Information Operations Center send out another message, again to the full distribution list. The computer center had done some technical work inside the Hotmail servers, the message said. The “doktor.ali” account had been opened by a computer in Tehran that had been purchased by the Ministry of the Interior. That was a lie, too. The IOC had tried to establish the precise origination of the message, but they couldn’t. Dr. Ali was too clever.
That nailed it, in terms of the legend. So far as anyone outside the SAP compartment would know, Dr. Ali was a hoax—worse, even. He was probably an Iranian provocation, created by the MOI. Pappas made it official by sending out a “burn notice” that all agency personnel should avoid any contact, electronic or otherwise, with the Iranian. Any attempts by