The Janson Directive - By Robert Ludlum Page 0,237

My former colleagues in intelligence would tell you that men like him can be valuable assets, as long as they are tightly constrained by the situations in which they're placed. The error of the Mobius planners is that they placed him in a context that didn't just permit but actively called upon his skills at fluid and freeform improvisation. A context in which an immensity of wealth and power was placed just out of his grasp. He played the world's mightiest plutocrat. Only the rules of the game prevented him from truly being that person. So he threw himself into trying to overcome the program's safeguards. Eventually, he did."

"It was not predicted."

"Not by the Mobius planners. Incredible technical prowess combined with extraordinary stupidity about human nature - typical of their breed. No, it was not predicted. But it was predictable."

"By you."

"Certainly. But not only by me. I suspect you, too, would have seen the risks."

Secretary-General Zinsou walked over to his enormous desk and sat down. "This monster, this man who threatens us all - you may know him as well as you think you do. You do not know me. And so I remain puzzled. Forgive me if I say that your confidence in me undermines my confidence in you."

"That's not very diplomatic of you, is it? I appreciate your candor, all the same. You may find that I know you a little better than you imagine."

"Ah, those intelligence dossiers of yours, compiled by agents who think people can be reduced to something like an instruction manual - the same mind-set that gave rise to your Mobius Program."

Janson shook his head. "I won't pretend that we were acquainted, you and I, not in the usual sense. But the thrust of world events over the past couple of decades did mean that we ended up patrolling a few of the same rough neighborhoods. I know what really happened in Sierra Leone, that week in December, because I was there - monitoring all communications from the head of U.N. Peace-keeping in the region and the head of the special delegation appointed to coordinate the U.N. response. Not much peacekeeping was happening, needless to say - the bloody civil war was raging out of control. Special Delegate Mathieu Zinsou was asked to relay the commander's report and intervention request to New York. The designee was a U.N. high commissioner who would then present it to the representatives of the Security Council - who would have refused it, forbidden the intervention."

The secretary-general looked at him oddly but said nothing.

"If that happened," Janson continued, "you knew that maybe ten thousand people would have been massacred unnecessarily." He did not need to detail the situation: A cluster of small-arms depots had been identified, freshly stocked by a Mali-based dealer. The U.N.'s on-the-ground commanders had received reliable intelligence that the rebel leader was going to use them to settle a tribal feud - in the small hours of the very next morning. The rebel leader's men would use the arms to launch a deep incursion into the Bayokuta region, shooting his enemies, demolishing villages, amputating the limbs of children. And it could all be prevented by a swift, low-risk sally that would eliminate the illegal arms warehouses. The moral and military calculation was not in doubt. But neither was the bureaucratic protocol.

"Here's where it gets interesting," Janson went on. "What does Mathieu Zinsou do? He's the consummate bureaucrat - just ask anybody. A perfect organization man. A stickler for the rules. Only, he's also a fox. Within an hour, your office sent a cable to the High Commission for Peacekeeping consisting of 123 reports and action items - every insubstantial bit of paperwork you had at hand, I'd guess. Buried in the cable, item number ninety-seven, was an 'Unless Otherwise Ordered' notification, spelling out the proposed U.N. military action in the blandest terms and giving the exact time during which it would be executed. You subsequently told your general stationed outside Freetown that the U.N. central command had been notified of his plans and had voiced no objection. This was literally true. It was also true that the high commissioner's staff didn't even stumble on the relevant advisory until three days after the operation."

"I can't imagine where this is leading," Zinsou said, sounding bored.

"At which point, the event was part of history - an impressive success, a casualty-free raid that averted the death of many thousands of unarmed civilians. Who wouldn't want to claim credit for it?