“Then come quickly,” the PM said. “And be safe.”
“Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.”
General Mohsen Jazini stood in the shadows in the corner of the garage, lighting up a Cuban cigar and watching the proceedings with great interest. Jazini said nothing, but Jalal Zandi had no doubt the general was monitoring his every move. Zandi could have done without the open flame as they were topping off the gas tanks of both ambulances and loading in the two large wooden crates, one into the back of each vehicle. The warheads he was not worried about. Those could not be set off without the proper codes. But he couldn’t help imagining himself dying in a petrol-induced fireball because the commander of the Caliphate couldn’t control his nicotine fix for five more minutes.
They didn’t die. By five o’clock on the nose, the fuel tanks were full. The warheads were safely loaded. Eight more heavily armed Revolutionary Guards had arrived in the past hour, detailed to this mission from a nearby base. Two IRGC counterassault team members climbed in the back of each ambulance to babysit the warheads. Two more Guards took the front seats, one to drive and the other to navigate. All that was left was for Jazini and Zandi to climb into the trail car — a brand-new charcoal-gray Toyota Sequoia, which Jazini’s men had commandeered from the widow of the base commander, who had been killed in the recent air strikes — along with their driver and Jazini’s security detail. By 5:10 p.m., they were on the road.
“So,” Zandi asked, “where exactly are we headed with these things?”
He assumed the missile bases either in Kerman or in Rasht but was stunned when he heard the answer actually come out of Jazini’s mouth.
“Damascus.”
Supplying satellite phones to the upper echelons of the Iranian political and military leadership had seemed like a masterstroke at first. Now it seemed to Eva Fischer like a millstone tied around her neck.
With Eva’s help, David had personally smuggled dozens of satphones built by the Thuraya corporation, located in Dubai, into Iran — and the Agency had managed to send in scores more. Thuraya’s system was comprised of forty-eight LEO, or low earth orbit, satellites operating at an altitude of about 1,400 kilometers — roughly 870 miles above the earth. The company also operated four more satellites at all times as backup units. The satellites transmitted calls to one another in the frequency band of 22.55 gigahertz and 23.55 gigahertz, while the Thuraya phones themselves used L-band transponders, allowing callers on the ground to talk to one another using frequencies in the band of 1616 to 1626.5 megahertz. Each phone Eva had supplied to David to give to the Mahdi and his associates operated on a specific, designated, and trackable frequency on one of 240 separate channels, allowing the NSA to intercept the calls off the satellites in real time without installing a bug that could be detected by Iranian counterintelligence and without the intercepts being detectable by the Thuraya corporation.
The problem was, the plan was working too well. Now that much of Iran’s power grid was down because of the Israeli air strikes — and now that much of Iran’s mobile phone system had been knocked out as well — the Mahdi and his top commanders were no longer using landlines or mobile phones. Rather, they were using the satphones almost exclusively. That meant nearly every call they made was being recorded and transcribed by the National Security Agency.
In theory, that was a godsend, allowing the NSA and then the CIA to listen to every call and thus tap into a good deal of the discussion under way within America’s most dangerous enemy. In reality, however, the U.S. intelligence system was being severely overloaded, and it was creating the risk that incredibly valuable material would be lost.
It wasn’t just the sheer magnitude of material that was coming in that made their lives so difficult, however; it was that the NSA and CIA Farsi translators — of which there were only a dozen — often didn’t know who was talking to whom. Hundreds of calls were being made each hour. Thousands upon thousands of calls were being made each day. Some of the calls were between high-ranking officials. But most were between colonels and majors or between lieutenants and sergeants or between bodyguards and drivers or between advance men and pilots, and so forth. Much of what was said was too cryptic or too brief to be properly understood.
Moreover, the translators often had no idea where the calls were being physically placed from or where they were being physically received. If, for example, a caller said he was going to be sending a truck loaded with more Scud-C missiles to the recipient of the call, it was often unclear where that shipment was going to come from and where it was going. It was, therefore, not actionable intelligence. It was not information that could be used to any real or serious effect to destroy that shipment of arms. Which made it worse than irrelevant because it was a distraction from the intercepts that did provide actionable intelligence. But it still had to be read and translated and assessed, and that took time, of which Eva and her team had precious little.
That said, several days of trial and error — mostly before Eva had been released from detention — had helped the translators pinpoint the frequencies of some of the specific phones being used by the Mahdi himself and by Ayatollah Hosseini and President Darazi. Every time a transcript of a call was made, across the top of the page was printed the time the call was made, the time the call ended, the precise frequency of the phone making the call, and the precise frequency of the phone receiving the call — if the receiving phone was a satphone. One call early on, for example, that had been positively identified as occurring between the Mahdi and Ayatollah Hosseini had helped the translators identify which phones had been assigned to the two men by the frequencies printed at the top of the transcripts. The translators had then asked the NSA computer geeks to route calls with those specific frequencies to a special computer database that they could prioritize more highly than all the other calls.
But now a new problem had arisen: over the last forty-eight hours or so, the translators began noticing that other, lower-ranking officials were using those frequencies, rather than the Mahdi, Hosseini, and Darazi. The top brass at Langley were desperate to know why, but the translators couldn’t provide a solid answer. Their best guess was that the Iranian leaders were being handed satphones by their subordinates when they needed to make or receive a call, but either the subordinates were being rotated, or the phones they were using were being rotated, possibly to recharge them every few hours due to heavy usage.
Whatever the reason, neither Zalinsky nor Fischer — the architects of the intercept strategy — had planned or prepared for such contingencies. Their plans had been built around stopping an Israeli-Iranian war from happening, not around processing the Niagara Falls of intelligence that was pouring in in the midst of such a war. They didn’t have the manpower to manage the deluge, and they were now drowning in their good fortune.
Eva knew she didn’t have the time to translate every single printed transcript of every single intercept in the stack that was already in her office, especially not when new batches of intercepts were being dropped off on her desk every fifteen to twenty minutes. Her only hope was to quickly skim each transcript, mark any interesting tidbits with a red pen, and put them in different baskets on her desk. Basket one was top-priority material — any call that seemed like it might be from or to the Mahdi or a senior Iranian official that also contained specific points of interest (i.e., references to specific operations, flights, meetings, or war plans of any kind) that might be actionable, especially if compared with similar transcripts that other translators might be working on. Basket two was top-priority material from unidentified callers — callers that specifically were not the Mahdi, the Ayatollah, or the president — but contained actionable or potentially actionable intelligence. And so forth.