a gift, but it wasn’t for free. It told a truth, but not the one that you might at first have anticipated.
Why was he doing it? He couldn’t really have answered that, even to himself. It was an emotion more than a word. It was the sting of an insult repeated, the way they were now insulting his cousin Hossein. His cousin had been their faithful servant. He was one of the boys, the bach-e-ha. But still they had destroyed him. That was part of it. And there were his father’s words, always in his ear, and his example. His father had stood for something, and never wavered. Truly, the young man could not live as the person he had become. He was suffocating. He was losing respect for himself.
His bet was that the people he was contacting would not be stupid. Was that wise, with outsiders? It was like shaking hands; in Iran, the hand was limp and soft—deceptively submissive. But with these foreigners, they sometimes squeezed your hand so hard they might break the little bones—even though they meant it as a sign of friendliness. It had happened so often in Germany, that crushing greeting. It was barbaric, but forgivable. The culture of the West had so much to prove; it did not know how to hide. The young man began to type. If he was careful, and continued with what he had planned and no more, he would remain invisible. He would drop his pebble, and then he would wait.
Would they understand, the people at the other end of the pond who saw the motion in the water? He was frightened, but he tried to embrace this emotion. Fear can make you strong. His father had told him that, too, before he died. Fear is your master until the day you make a stand, and then it becomes your teacher and guardian. It guides you into the shadows; it instructs you in your lies. It is the cloak you wear as you prepare your revenge and your escape.
WASHINGTON
The Americans called him “Dr. Ali.” He was, in the technical terminology of the Central Intelligence Agency, a “virtual walk-in.” He arrived late at night, logging on to agency’s public website, www.cia.gov, and then clicking on the little tab marked “Contact CIA,” which took the visitor to a bland invitation to commit treason: “If you have information which you believe might be of interest to the CIA in pursuit of the CIA’s foreign intelligence mission, you may use the form below. We will carefully protect all information you provide, including your identity.” Below that, for additional reassurance, was a notice that the agency used a special “secure socket layer” encryption system. No explanation was offered of what this impressive-sounding system actually did. But this visitor didn’t need help. He knew precisely what he was doing.
The electronic visitor uploaded his message in plain text so bland and obvious that it was easy to miss. Then he disappeared back into the ether. He left no footprint, no clue as to his motivation, no hint of why he had risked everything to whisper his secrets across cyberspace. He didn’t exist, really, except for these few bits of computer code.
It was a muggy night in late June. A rainstorm had swept the city, and a humid predawn mist was rising over the trees that surrounded Main Headquarters. The handful of clerical workers who monitored the agency’s public website during the night shift were already packing up. They had spent the evening processing emails, most of them the equivalent of crank calls, looking for the one that might contain a scrap of real intelligence or a warning of a terrorist attack. The secret bureaucrats were tired; they wanted to find their cars out in the Brown Lot and Yellow Lot and get on home.
An African-American woman named Jana who had been working for the agency just three years was the first to notice the point of origin. The message had come from an Internet service provider in Iran. The first clerk who processed the message had missed it altogether. It was late, he was tired. He had already sifted a hundred messages. But Jana took a last scroll back through the incoming traffic as her shift was ending, and this one caught her eye.
Jana’s colleagues were already heading for the door, but she told them to go ahead; she would come along in a few more minutes. She was a single mother, going home to