I couldn’t help but interrupt to ask why Hassan divorced Sherima.
The Secretary of State shook his head. “The divorce was Sherima’s idea. She suggested it after the last attempt on Hassan’s life, but he wouldn’t hear of it. But she kept telling him that if he left her, the other Arab countries might take it as a sign that he was really on their side and call off their campaign to unseat him. She finally convinced him that he had to do it, if not for his own safety, for the sake of their little girls.
“Sherima also was the one who suggested he remarry right away — and she insisted his new wife be Arab. In fact, she was the one who picked the girl after scouting — around for an alliance that might link Hassan to a powerful military man in another country.”
“Why such concern for her safety here?” I asked. It seemed to me, I explained, that once she no longer was the Shah’s wife, she shouldn’t be in any danger.
The President turned to Hawk and said, “I believe you’d better handle this part of the explanation. It was your agency’s sources who provided the information on the plot to kill former Queen Sherima.” He turned from Hawk to me, then back again before he said, “And your agency discovered the part of the plot to ‘prove’ that all during her marriage she was acting as a secret agent of the United States government.”
Chapter 3
“You’re familiar, of course, with the Silver Scimitar movement,” Hawk began. He didn’t wait for me to acknowledge the fact — and I couldn’t blame him for trying to impress the President with the assumption that his top agent was, of course, familiar with all Mideastern goings-on; he was, after all, The Man when it came to getting us badly needed operating funds over the protests of the CIA and the Pentagon. He went on: “Since the time it originally was established as the enforcement arm of the Black September movement, the fanaticism of its members has increased almost day by day.
“In recent months, the extent of Scimitar atrocities has alarmed even Al Fatah. It’s reached the point where Black September, which supplies Scimitar with operating funds, is afraid to try to stop the bloodletting. One of the September leaders who did try pulling back on the reins was found murdered in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has kept the lid on how he died, but our Baghdad office learned the details of his ‘execution.’ He was electrocuted. A length of chain was wrapped around his body, after he had been stripped, beaten, and mutilated; then the terminals of an arc welding machine were attached to the ends of the chain and the current turned on. Every link burned its way into his flesh. Since that time, Scimitar has had its own way; no more protests.”
Hawk paused to chomp on his cigar, then continued: “The leader of Scimitar calls himself the Sword of Allah, and his true identity is known only to about two or three of September’s high command. Even they’re afraid to mention his real name. For some reason, he hates Shah Hassan and is determined to drive him from the throne. We know he was behind the most recent assassination attempt, and probably instigated the first one.
“Our office in Sidi Hassan captured one of the Sword’s top lieutenants and persuaded him to tell us what he knew of Scimitar’s plans—”
“How?” the President asked.
“Sir?”
“How did you persuade him?”
“We used the arc welding machine technique,” Hawk admitted. “Only we didn’t throw the switch. The man had taken part in the execution of the September leader and had seen its effects. He started talking when our man reached for the switch.”
There was a short silence, then the President said, “Go on.”
“Sherima was picked as the target for the attempted destruction of Hassan,” Hawk said. “When the Sword learned she was returning to the States, he came up with a brilliant plan.
“What if she were killed while she was in Washington? And at the same time, Hassan were presented with evidence — forged and false, of course, but almost impossible to disprove — that all during their marriage, Sherima had been a secret agent of our government.”
“But wouldn’t the opposite be true?” I asked. “If she were a United States agent, wouldn’t she be safest here?”
“That’s where the little kicker comes into the plan,” Hawk said. “From some source close to Sherima he has obtained a statement purported to be an admission. In effect, it says that she really came to Washington to tell her capitalist bosses that she was despondent over what she had done to the man she always loved and that she was going to tell Hassan the truth. Then, the Sword’s story would be that she was slain by the CIA before she could tell the Shah how she had used him. Her forged ‘admission,’ of course, would be in the Shah’s hands.”
“Would the Shah believe it?” the Secretary of State wanted to know.
“We know the deep extent of his emotional attachment to her — it’s hard to tell how a man that much in love will respond,” Hawk said. “If he could be persuaded that Sherima had pressed for the divorce as a means of getting out of the country because she no longer wanted to hurt him, he also might accept as logical the forged evidence of her involvement with the CIA.”
“Mr. Carter,” the Secretary said, “can you imagine what would happen in the Mideast if Shah Hassan were to turn against us? For many years, Hassan has been regarded as one of our best friends in his part of the world. More than that, his military forces have become almost an extension of our own in the thinking and planning of the Pentagon, in so far as an all-out war effort is concerned. It is vital that he remain a friend of the United States.”
On the way from the White House to AXE headquarters in the Secretary of State’s limousine, Hawk seemed preoccupied. He asked casual questions about my return flight, how I liked my room at the Watergate, and if the wardrobe he had ordered to be put together fitted me properly. I was pretty sure there was more he wanted to tell me, but he was taking no chances that the chauffeur might overhear, despite the heavy partition that separated us from him. The driver had been ordered to take us wherever we wanted to go, then to return to pick up the Secretary, who had more matters to discuss with the President.
By the time we were seated in Hawk’s office — the only room where he really felt secure, because he had his electronics experts check it out daily for surveillance devices — he had chewed the Dunhill to the length he felt most comfortable with. I relaxed in one of the heavy oak captain’s chairs that sat in front of his desk, while he hurriedly went through the latest in a never-ending stream of dispatches, coded messages and situation evaluation reports that flowed through his office.
Finally, the pile of papers had shrunk to three manila folders. He handed me the first, a thick dossier on Sherima that went back to her childhood in Texas and included just about everything she had done since that time. Calling my attention to the latest reports on the former Queen, he summarized them briefly, with instructions to memorize the information before morning. Shah Hassan had been exceedingly generous to the woman he divorced, Hawk said, pointing out that our Zurich office had learned that $10,000,000 had been deposited to her account on the day she left Sidi Hassan.
From AXE’s office in London, where Sherima went first after flying out of Adabi on the Shah’s personal 747, was a précis of several hundred hours of tapes picked up by our bugs. It revealed that Sherima was, as I already had been told, planning on buying an estate somewhere in the horse-farm countryside outside Washington. The Arabian stallions and brood mares she had lovingly tended at the palace in Sidi Hassan were to be flown to her when she got settled.
According to the report, Sherima would be arriving in D.C. in just two days. The Adabian embassy here had been instructed to arrange for a suite for her and her party at the Watergate Hotel. “It’s all set up,” Hawk said. “Your room is next to that suite. That wasn’t too difficult to arrange. However, we haven’t been able to bug that suite yet. The couple who are in it now won’t be leaving until the morning of the day she arrives and, unfortunately, the woman in it came down with a virus two days ago and hasn’t been out of the room since. We are going to try to get somebody in there before Sherima’s party arrives, but don’t count on the bugs for a day or two.”