Six weeks later, in the Mossad headquarters building that sits across the main highway from the Tel Aviv Country Club, Reuven had been presented with Mossad’s Israel Prize, given only to those few combatants who lead the most successful and high-risk operations.
Tom could claim no similar background. As a case officer trainee, he’d had a total of three weeks of paramilitary training. He’d jumped out of a plane-from twelve hundred feet. He’d taken a one-week course in land navigation skills. He’d been given the basic explosives course in North Carolina. And he’d had the Agency’s weapons familiarity courses on pistols, rifles, and automatic weapons. But all of that had been before three years of Arabic language training and his first posting, to the consulate in Cairo. He hadn’t touched a weapon in more than a decade.
Indeed, like most of the case officers of his generation, Tom Stafford had never served in the military. His old boss in Paris, Sam Waterman, was a former Marine who’d served in Vietnam. So had the CEO of the 4627 Company, Antony Wyman. And of course there was Rudy-the paramilitary veteran with whom Tom had recruited Jim McGee. Rudy was a Navy veteran who’d seen combat in Vietnam, too.
And it wasn’t that Tom felt incapable of violence. Two deaths in less than three days had taken their emotional toll on him. There was a new-found fury in Tom’s gut-MJ’s father had called it white heat and the phrase stuck with him-that burned for revenge. It was simply that CIA had never trained him in the way Israel had trained Reuven. Sure, CIA engaged in what was euphemistically and neutrally termeddirect action. But direct action-DA, as it was usually called-was the rare exception to the hard-and-fast rule: thou shalt not kill thy country’s enemies without a Lethal Finding signed by the president, and a ton of paperwork.
He’d never thought much about it before, but now he realized that the whole goddamn American intelligence community was built around strictures-thousands upon thousands of thou-shalt-nots. There was Executive Order 12333, which prohibited the Agency from carrying out political assassinations. There were still Clinton-era rules of engagement in force that prevented case officers from pursuing Russian targets. There were Kafkaesque guidelines governing the development and recruiting of agents. And there was an ever-expanding catalog of preposterous controls, absurd limitations, and cartoonish constraints imposed by the dithering, idiotic dilettantes of the congressional intelligence oversight committees.
Even now, when, in the midst of the global war on terror, the Agency needed more flexibility, nimbleness, and lethality than ever, the numbskulls up on Capitol Hill were trying to add new layers of management to CIA’s already top-heavy bureaucracy and dummkopf rules that would, in effect, add hundreds of hours of case officer record keeping for every new agent spotted, assessed, developed, recruited, and run.
That’s what had made such sense about the 4627 Company: 4627 was built like OSS during World War II. It was lean. It relied on inventiveness and ingenuity. It was mission-driven. At 4627, Tom’s marching orders could be reduced to one biblically simple commandment: “thou shalt not fail.”
Like the old Mossad. The way Tom saw it, Mossad had historically operated under two succinct rules of engagement. The first was “thou shalt have no limits” and the second was “thou shalt not get caught.”
Even now, more than two years after 9/11, the American intelligence community leadership was still refusing to think that way. But changing CIA’s modus operandi was like turning a supertanker around. You couldn’t do it overnight. Not without the right personnel. And CIA just didn’t have enough experienced old hands to do the human intelligence gathering, fight the global war on terror, and supply the military with the kind of actionable intelligence it needed to fight the two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Indeed, limits, constrictions, and lack of competent personnel were three of the reasons Langley was forced to subcontract such a sizable chunk of CIA’s historic responsibilities to outside firms these days. Some independent contractors, or ICs, provided security for CIA case officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Others provided CIA with language-capable interrogators and translators to accompany the junior case officers who’d been pushed through training without the ability to speak anything except Gringo.
And then there were the black-ops ICs. International Alternatives, one of 4627’s main K Street competitors, for example, was currently running a covert program for Langley and DOD, sending sheep-dipped Delta operators into Iran with teams from the Mujahedin-e Khalq (the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, or MEK), a group listed by the State Department as a terrorist organization, in the hope of providing eyes-on information about Iran’s nuclear weapons development program. And a precious few ICs, firms like 4627, were paid extravagantly to covertly collect, interpret, analyze, and then disseminate the holy of holies, intelligence product itself, to Langley.
Intelligence product because CIA lacked the capabilities to fulfill many of its obligations these days. CIA was peopled with so many layers of managerial deadwood it simply did not have enough qualified personnel to get the job done. And then there was the deniability angle. In the politically correct world of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, outsourcing gave CIA deniability. That was because the Agency’s major ICs, firms like 4627, were, in point of fact, cutouts.
ICs operated in the black. More to the point, private contractors were under no obligation to inform the House and Senate intelligence committees about what they did-and to whom. There was huge potential for abuse, of course. Not at 4627, where Tony Wyman, Charlie Hoskinson, and Bronco Panitz maintained a strong chain of command. But other ICs weren’t so well run. Tom had already heard gossip about abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And what if something did go wrong-what if Tom mucked up? Well, as Tony had said more than once, the bottom line is that 4627 and all its people were disposables. He had said as much to Tom the day he’d recruited him. “We can’t afford to screw up,” is what Tony said. “Because unlike your time at Langley, we work out here without a net. Just like the guys inMission: Impossible, ‘The secretary will deny any knowledge…’ You know how the mantra goes.”
Which was one reason the thought of hunting and killing made Tom Stafford just a little uncomfortable.Well, he didn’t have to like it.
Besides, they weren’t anywhere near the direct-action stage yet. “There’s a lot to nail down before the hunting season opens, Reuven.” Tom took a long pull on the cigar. “First things first. Check with Shin Bet on the explosives-see if they’ll run supplemental tests for you. And Shin Bet is holding two prisoners I want to interrogate. The ones Shahram told me about. The guy from Jerusalem-the one with no hands. Then the bomber from Tel Aviv. Set it up for me first thing in the morning.”
“First thing in the morning?” Reuven drained the cognac and poured himself another. “First thing in the morning, my friend, I am going to drive you and your lady friend to Jerusalem so she can walk through the Old City and feel some of the magic of this country-and tell her not to worry about the Intifada because she’ll be a lot safer in Jerusalem than she would be in much of Washington, D.C. Then we’ll drive back to Tel Aviv so I can take the two of you to a great fish restaurant in Jaffa for lunch. After lunch, we go up the coast to the Roman ruins in Caesarea. And for dinner, I have a friend from Shayetet 13-the Israeli SEALs-who opened the best restaurant in Herzlyia.”