Man In The Middle Part 19

"Well . . . our friends in the press seem to have manufactured the unfortunate impression that the Agency was largely responsible. Then again, they have their own credibility issues, don't they?"

"Where would the press get this idea?"

He did not reply.

"From sources inside the White House? From sources inside the Defense Department?"

Don did not reply to this either. Regarding this line of inquiry, Was.h.i.+ngton has an amazing cornucopia of more than a dozen different intelligence organizations. To an outsider this might sound superfluous and maybe absurd--an insider knows knows it's insane. But they all are ostensibly indispensable on the basis that each does something different, or employs different collection means, or offers a unique perspective, or serves different masters with differing needs. it's insane. But they all are ostensibly indispensable on the basis that each does something different, or employs different collection means, or offers a unique perspective, or serves different masters with differing needs.

It's a little like medieval Venice with all those interlocking families sharing the same cramped turf, warily coexisting, sensitive to slights, and completely paranoid about their own territory, prestige, and existence. Bureaucratic drive-by shootings and political poisonings aren't out of the question.

Yet, despite this excess of riches, before the war, Tigerman and Hirschfield had decided to add one more, their own in-house intelligence hothouse, and Clifford Daniels was brought in from DIA as a founding member. The expressed mission for this small cell was to cull through the raw intelligence provided by other agencies, to question, to reinterpret, to determine if anything vital had been missed, misinterpreted, or overlooked. But there were critics who claimed the reason was to cook, customize, and ma.s.sage the raw intelligence to justify an invasion, and a war.

Don had known about this, and I now knew about it as well. The policy wonks in the Pentagon had muscled their way into the intelligence business, and a larger bureaucratic war was going on here, a battle for tax dollars, for influence, for reputations--and now a battle over blame--and I wanted to know where Don stood on it. Well, I already knew where he stood; I just wanted him to admit it. Then, when the bulls.h.i.+t flew, we would all all know where he was coming from. know where he was coming from.

I looked at Don. "In any event, we all know the Agency has been made the public scapegoat. Does that p.i.s.s you off?"

"Personally? Why should it, Drummond? Just business."

Bulls.h.i.+t. "How did Charabi end up as the Pentagon's man?" "How did Charabi end up as the Pentagon's man?"

"That's a long and complicated story."

"You're a clever guy. Come up with an abbreviated version."

"All right." He offered me a strange smile, like he was measuring my coffin size.

As I mentioned, Don was full of himself--arrogant, actually--and that nearly always equates to thin-skinned. Also, he would tell us what he he wanted us to know unless I p.i.s.sed him off enough to provoke a few inadvertent truths from his lips. Sizing him up, he was a cool customer, a world-cla.s.s bulls.h.i.+tter, and he affected a certain imperturbable coyness. He actually seemed to be enjoying this game of cat and mouse, and he obviously liked being the center of attention. wanted us to know unless I p.i.s.sed him off enough to provoke a few inadvertent truths from his lips. Sizing him up, he was a cool customer, a world-cla.s.s bulls.h.i.+tter, and he affected a certain imperturbable coyness. He actually seemed to be enjoying this game of cat and mouse, and he obviously liked being the center of attention.

He stopped smiling and said, "Charabi approached us after the first Gulf War." He paused and appeared thoughtful. "Late 1993 . . . maybe early 1994. I, myself, met with him."

"What was the purpose of this meeting?"

"It was in the nature of a negotiation."

"Go on."

"He was offering to provide intelligence about conditions inside Iraq. It sounded attractive. In fact, it sounded great. The truth is, getting and keeping good sources inside Iraq was . . . difficult. Saddam was--surely you've read this--almost insanely paranoid and ruthless. A lot of our sources ended up in graves. This was not helpful for recruitment."

He paused and looked at Bian. She said, "So it sounded good. What happened?"

"His offer came with stipulations. For one, we had to agree to emanc.i.p.ate his people from a monster."

"I thought that was our policy."

"It was. Later. But then--and even later--we were . . . let's just say, concerned concerned about Charabi's additional conditions." about Charabi's additional conditions."

Bian suggested, "He wanted you to put him in power."

He nodded. "He wanted to be king." He paused, then said, "He claimed he had hundreds of Iraqis in his pocket, exiles, and also people in country willing to help. And of course these were Iraqis--very cliquish, very clannish. You get one, you get dozens of relatives and tribal members. They would gather intelligence, and after Saddam was gone, they would form the base of his power. Also, he's s.h.i.+te, as are about 60 percent of Iraqis. Better yet, he's a secular s.h.i.+te, so the Kurds--and maybe even the Sunnis--might find him palatable."

Bian commented, "For the situation, that sounds like an attractive resume."

"The perfect perfect resume. So, yes . . . I agreed to meet with him." He paused, then added, "I brought along another gentleman. An Agency psychiatrist who specializes in quick profiles of foreign leaders. He's quite good at it. Would you care to hear his a.s.sessment?" resume. So, yes . . . I agreed to meet with him." He paused, then added, "I brought along another gentleman. An Agency psychiatrist who specializes in quick profiles of foreign leaders. He's quite good at it. Would you care to hear his a.s.sessment?"

I said, "Sure."

"A cla.s.sic narcissist, compounded by a manipulative personality cla.s.sification."

I looked at Bian and shrugged. She shrugged back.

Don was amused by our ignorance and with a snotty smile informed us, "Here's language even you'll understand, Drummond. A self-serving a.s.shole with a velvety tongue who will screw you for a nickel."

"Was that you, or Charabi? Or both?"

He gave me a long, hard stare. He turned to Phyllis. "Do I really have to put up with this?"

She advised him with some insight, "He's trying to taunt you. Ignore him and he'll stop."

I smiled at Phyllis. She ignored me, and to humor her, I stopped smiling.

Bian said to Don, "I have no idea how these things work. Presumably this was a vetting process and this snapshot psychoa.n.a.lysis was part of it. Right?" He nodded, and she asked, "Did this psychiatrist veto an arrangement?"

"That's not how it works. He offers insights; I decide. However, he cla.s.sified Charabi as a high-risk a.s.set. Specifically, he predicted Charabi would follow his own agenda, guided by his own scruples, which in the doctor's judgment were scarce and very elastic."

Incidentally, every time he spoke, Don's eyes flashed toward Bian. You knew exactly what was going through his filthy mind. Geez-- dogs in heat show more savoir faire than this guy.

Bian, for her part, seemed totally oblivious, or perhaps she mistook Don's interest as intellectual flattery. Message to Bian--it's not your mind he wants to get into.

I have known women who live for this kind of attention; others I know do nothing to invite it and are perilously blind to the signals. I don't mean that Bian was naive, or a naif, but she spent four years at West Point, where the boy-to-girl ratio is about ten to one. In such a male-dominated environment, I imagine the female either dampens her antennae or becomes a s.e.xual hypochondriac.

Anyway, I tried to catch Don's eye and said, "I haven't knocked over any foreign governments, so maybe this is going over my head. For replacing Saddam, isn't that a reasonable trade?"

"On first blush, Drummond . . . yes, sure . . . I might agree with you. A duplicitous liar for a pathological ma.s.s murderer. Sure. Why not?"

"That's what I asked you--why not?"

"I ran his background and he wasn't . . . credible."

Credible, for most people, concerns integrity and trustworthiness; these people, however, play by different rules, and more often it's about whether they can get a grip on his short hairs.

Having not spent time with Agency types, however, Bian found this concept elusive and asked, "Can you explain that?"

"Well . . . why do you think he fled Iraq in the first place?"

"The newspapers said--"

"I know what the media reported. He experienced some political squabble with Saddam and was forced to flee for his survival. Where do you think they obtained that story, Major?"

"I see. Then what did Charabi forget to include?"

"Charabi was a banker in those years. A midlevel account executive at the Iraqi national bank. A virtual n.o.body"--he smiled--"for Saddam, a nonent.i.ty. The man and his views were irrelevant."

"But Saddam later went through a lot of trouble to have him murdered. There had to be something."

"Over three million Iraqis went into exile during Saddam's rule. Many of these people were politically opposed to Saddam. He would've run out of bullets if he tried to kill all of them." He stared at Bian. "When he went to that much trouble, the motive was always personal."

"I see."

"But you still haven't guessed, have you?" He gave us both one of those triumphant, I-know-something-you-don't little grins and said, "Charabi was an embezzler. He moved about twenty million dollars from one of Saddam's personal accounts to his own personal account in Switzerland. It had nothing to do with politics." He added, "It was, for Saddam, a matter of personal honor, of principle."

Bian remarked, "That principle being that Saddam could loot billions from his own people, and they couldn't steal it back."

Don laughed and awarded her a wink. "Hey, I like that." He said, "Here's another insight I think you'll find fascinating. After the invasion, we found, inside Saddam's palaces, dozens of copies of The G.o.dfather The G.o.dfather videos." He added, "It seems Saddam perceived himself as a G.o.dfather figure--that formed his self-image, and that inspired his style of leaders.h.i.+p. Pathetic, isn't it? Life imitating art." videos." He added, "It seems Saddam perceived himself as a G.o.dfather figure--that formed his self-image, and that inspired his style of leaders.h.i.+p. Pathetic, isn't it? Life imitating art."

This was interesting; also, it was irrelevant. Returning to the topic, I said, "So you told Charabi you weren't interested. What happened next?"

"You never say no in this business. I just let it hang when I left." He stared at me a moment. "But Cliff Daniels, while still on the Iraq desk at DIA, also attended that meeting."

"I'll bite. Why?"

"There is, inevitably, something of a rivalry between our two agencies for good sources. As first among equals, we generally get first pick. Sometimes," he added, smiling, "sources we don't want end up in the arms of our friends across the river. Sloppy seconds."

On a hunch, I asked Don, "Did your shrink friend also a.s.sess Daniels?"

He paused, then said, "In fact, he did." It appeared to amuse him that I would pick up on this. He looked at Bian and said, "Pardon my French, it was in the nature of a sport f.u.c.k for him. You know how weird those guys are."

Don winked at Bian and with a sort of mocking smile turned back to me and, regarding that a.s.sessment, asked, "What do you think?"

I thought Don needed ten pounds of saltpeter pumped up a catheter. But I recalled everything I knew about Daniels, his life background, Theresa's description of their marriage and their life together, his e-mails to his ex, and those to Charabi. "A cla.s.sic pa.s.sive-aggressive personality. Right?"

He seemed at first irritated by my guess, but eventually said, "Well, I suppose he's not that that difficult to figure out." difficult to figure out." Up yours, Don. Up yours, Don. "In fact," he continued, "Cliff was one of those people who stank of ambition and frustration. He kept trying to impress Charabi--dropping hints about his own importance, his own brilliance, his ability to make things happen." "In fact," he continued, "Cliff was one of those people who stank of ambition and frustration. He kept trying to impress Charabi--dropping hints about his own importance, his own brilliance, his ability to make things happen."

He turned once again to Bian and asked, "What do you get when you put a pa.s.sive-aggressive in the same room with a manipulative narcissist?"

Bian replied, "A marriage made in h.e.l.l."

Again, he laughed. Don had his own metaphors, however, and said, "It was like watching a leech attach itself. You know? Daniels was an accident waiting in the wings, and Charabi a hundred-car pileup in search of a busy intersection."

I liked Bian's metaphor better. Less wordy.

But recalling the letters I had just read from Crusader Two--that mixture of cloying friendliness and ingratiating coercion--any or all of these a.n.a.logies and/or metaphors seemed to fit what occurred. As they say, no man is more dangerous than he with a will to corrupt. Charabi was that man, and he had skillfully worked his seduction, and Daniels was so absorbed by his own ambitions and his own professional and personal frustrations that deciding between right and wrong meant only what was right for him him.

"How was this meeting arranged?" Bian asked.

He answered her question with a question. "Why do you think DIA was present?" So we thought about it, before he informed us, "Albert Tigerman--a few months before this meeting, he had met Charabi at a Georgetown c.o.c.ktail party, was impressed by the possibilities he presented, and thought it would be a smart idea to develop a relations.h.i.+p." He looked pointedly at me and noted, "This is what happens when neophytes dabble in intelligence work."

In fact, Don's suffocating air of superiority was p.i.s.sing me off. We were discussing, after all, how a manipulative liar weaseled his way into our intelligence system, how he misled us, fed us false intelligence, and caused incalculable damage.

Don should've felt some remorse over this, even been deeply embarra.s.sed. Yet in his mind this was just more proof of his own virtuosity. Don was smart, Cliff was an idiot; this was zero-sum gamesmans.h.i.+p, and Don won.

I knew I shouldn't, but I said, "You know what? I can't believe you still have your job."

"What the--"

"You were there, Don. At the beginning. Did you intervene? Did you keep Charabi and Daniels apart?"

"What are you--"

"You left that room knowing Clifford Daniels was an easy mark for this shyster. You allowed this to happen."

Don was a little put off by this charge, and he stared at me with those flat brown eyes. "That's utter nonsense, Drummond. I'm not the least bit responsible for what happened."

"Bulls.h.i.+t. After that meeting, Charabi turned Daniels into his boy toy. Over the next decade, Charabi got money from the Pentagon and inst.i.tutional support in Was.h.i.+ngton. Worse, he got a conduit to feed his lies and deceptions into, a river of lies that flowed straight to the Oval Office."

"You're forgetting something. The Agency made well-known our view that Charabi wasn't credible. On numerous occasions we conveyed this to the White House. We even went to the unusual length of leaking this to the press."

"That's covering your a.s.s, not preventing a disaster. The a.s.s you failed to cover was the country's."

"You don't know what you're talking about." Don was staring at me now with some intensity, I'm sure wis.h.i.+ng he had brought a gun to this meeting.

Phyllis snapped, "That's enough. We're not here to affix blame. Right now we need to understand what damage was done, and how it can be fixed." After a moment of reflection, she amended that. "If it can be fixed." it can be fixed."

Phyllis was right. Don and I exchanged looks. I think we both felt bad about our little display of bad manners, not to mention our failure to keep our eye on the ball. In fact, Don said to me, in a very apologetic tone, "f.u.c.k you."

"Up yours."

What this meeting needed was a commercial break, and on cue, Bian's cell phone began bleeping--it had one of those irritating musical ringtones. She flipped it open. "Major Tran . . . Oh, hi, Barry. You're working late . . . I--Well, hold on . . ."

She looked at me. "Detective Enders." She looked at Phyllis and Don. "Please excuse us a moment." She looked back at me. "It's important. Let's step out to take this."

Which reminded me; in addition to investigating Daniels's crimes, we were also investigating his murder. I got to my feet and reoriented my mind-set back to the A-to-Z mode.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We walked out and headed straight to the coffee bar, where we discovered a pot, quarter filled with gooey black tar. It looked like it had been brewing for a week. "Can I pour you a cup?" I asked Bian.

"You can't be serious." She appeared horrified. "It looks poisonous."

My a.s.s was really dragging, and if I didn't get a jolt of caffeine I would pa.s.s out. I filled a paper cup for myself, and when it didn't melt the paper, took a long sip. "Ummh . . . good."