Callahan was tall and lean and had Langley written all over him. He had cropped grey hair and the eyes of one who’d spent a lot of his time peering around corners and not liking what he saw, but was capable of dealing with it. He seemed relaxed, but I could tell he was wound up tight. A man under pressure.
‘That was good work you did in Tehran,’ he’d started out, after we’d been served coffee from a Starbucks down the street and got over assessing each other. ‘Getting Bagheri out of there in one piece was a hell of a feat.’
‘You were in on it?’
‘I was an observer. It was an important mission. Pity it didn’t get us the information we needed, but at least we — you — saved an important man and got him out alive.’ He looked squarely at me as if trying to get in my head. People in his position do that a lot, I find. ‘You’re a hard man to pin down.’
I didn’t respond to that. I don’t advertise my services, and few people know where to find me. But those that do are connected and word soon gets down the line. It’s not exactly the Better Business Bureau method but it works well enough for me.
‘Have you been watching the news?’ he asked.
‘Some. I take it you don’t mean the showbiz segment.’
The smile didn’t quite work, but he tried. ‘I wish. We’d all make more money and sleep better at night.’ He tapped the desk. ‘I think this is your kind of job. I hope so, anyway. You can pull out of this anytime during the initial briefing — but only up to the point of names, places and times.’
‘Which is when?’
‘I think you’ll know soon enough. Can we proceed?’
‘Go ahead.’
His brief was simple. A foreign policy statement by Secretary of State John Kerry had made it clear that the US would stand by Ukraine during its problems involving pro-Russian separatists and a growing show of non-cooperation from Moscow in spite of talks in Geneva in April 2014 to rectify the situation between them. To that end, the White House had decided that there was a need to talk to the increasingly beleaguered Ukrainians as a show of support. But there were problems with that. In the same way as in Syria, Iran and Egypt during and after the Arab Spring, there were different factions involved, each with their own agenda. It was a nightmare of tactics, diplomacy and judgement, and someone, somewhere was going to end up unhappy.
In this instance the talks had to be low-level, which meant without any media presence, flexible in nature and ready to ship out at a moment’s notice and run for home if things got hot. Moscow was keeping a close eye on US and European Union involvement so it wasn’t going to be easy.
‘It was supposed to be a one-man operation,’ Callahan explained, ‘in and out with the minimum of noise. What the State Department calls “exploratory in nature and designed to move talks forward with various parties to find out who controls who”. What that means is finding a way of leveraging a safe outcome without getting us all involved in a messy civil war — or worse. Once Moscow goes in with all guns blazing, nobody will be able to predict the outcome.’
‘What’s the likelihood of that?’ I could guess, I suppose, but it’s always useful hearing an insider spook’s take on world events.
Callahan played it cute. He prevaricated. ‘Who knows? Our best analysts are still working on it. Putin played hardball with Georgia over South Ossetia, but scaled things back quickly. He might do the same again long enough to gain control elsewhere, but the scenario is not the same. Ukraine is a mix, some pro-Moscow, some against. The country is already divided, and the best outcome is seen by some as a split. It wouldn’t be easy but if it avoids open warfare it would be better than tanks rolling down Main Street, Kiev anytime soon.’
Good luck with that, I thought. But their intentions were good — on the surface. If the State Department wanted to help cool things down, and they had a man ready and willing to go do this, it was difficult to fault their commitment. How it would turn out was anybody’s guess. Which prompted a question.
‘You said this was supposed to be a one-man operation. What did you mean?’
He hesitated and I got a sudden sense of where the stress was coming from. This wasn’t a plan in the making, something they were sketching out on a mission board; it was a done deal. The train had already left the station. Callahan confirmed it.
‘Our man’s already in place, but under house arrest and imminent threat. I need you to go in and pull him out.’
FOUR
I did a tour of the room for a couple of minutes while he sat and waited. It was pretty much a dance routine; we both knew we’d reached that point where I either went to the door and walked away, or stayed and listened to a full briefing of names, details, dates and other data. After that I’d be committed.
What Callahan was describing was not an escort job, but a rescue operation.
I sat down again.
The person they’d sent in was a State Department officer with some field experience and a brief career in the military. It was a wise choice — as far as it went. Long-time desk-jockey staffers don’t usually have much of a handle on field action, which can be good and bad. Good means the caution factor keeps them from taking risks; the bad comes when they have a little knowledge or experience and think they can talk their way out of anything.
My own opinion was that while this negotiator wasn’t expected to get physical, some experience of moving around in hostile areas wouldn’t do him any harm. The simple truth was, they’d sent a man to a region where he could be picked up and locked away without warning if he stuck his head down the wrong rabbit hole.
And by the sounds of it, he’d done just that.
‘Where are we talking about?’
‘I’ll come to that.’ Callahan took a folder out of a drawer and slid it across the desk. It held a colour photo of a man named Edwin Travis. The career summary told me he was forty-five years old, married with two kids and lived outside Washington D.C. It was almost nothing in real terms, but since we weren’t exactly going to meet up and be best buddies, I didn’t need to know more. Too much unnecessary information would merely cloud the issue and not help me watch over him. All I needed to do was recognize him when I saw him.
The photo showed a man in apparently good physical condition, with fair hair going thin and close cut at the sides. He had the confident, stern-jawed look of a man who had been out there and done stuff. But photographs lie. I could tell instinctively that he was no action figure, unless it was on the sports field with his kids. My instinctive impression was that it would have been better if he’d looked a little more average. Average is bland; average gets you by almost anywhere in the world and gets overlooked. It’s the confident or brash that gets pulled out of a line-up.
Callahan must have read my thoughts. ‘We put him through an intensive course in how not to stick his head in a noose, but that was as far as the State Department wanted us to go.’ He gave a cynical smile. ‘I guess they didn’t want him exposed too much to the dark arts, in case he turned rogue on them.’
‘What happened?’
‘He got through the first round of meetings in Ukraine, gradually working his way around the various groups and their decision-makers, up to the potential leaders of tomorrow. Then two days ago he was a guest at a late-night meeting in the city of Donetsk, in the east. As he was leaving, a bunch of armed men lifted him off the street and took him back to his hotel. They were described as militia — local men in uniforms stolen from a nearby barracks. They didn’t explain why, but told Travis not to leave the building or he’d be shot on sight. He’s been held there ever since.’