¶1. (C) Summary and Key points: This is an analysis of the May 2009 draft proposal, AE/STUMBLER. Based on present assessments of the regime in Tripoli, the primary assumptions behind STUMBLER are in doubt. It is the belief of this embassy that the operation should be abandoned in favor of more assured goals.
ASSUMPTIONS
¶2. (C) Signs that the assumptions of instability, outlined in the May 2009 proposal by Jibril Aziz (CIA), are mistaken include:
--The failed September 2009 protests in al Jabal al Akhdar Governorate, dealt with by government forces in less than 24 hours.
--A November 2009 increase in salary to the Revolutionary Guard, which reports say have solidified the regime’s control.
--Most importantly, the recently signed oil contracts between the regime and China’s CNPC, which has made the regime more flush with cash than in recent years, and would facilitate the easy purchase of mercenary support from throughout Africa.
NEXT STEPS
¶3. (C) Given the low probability of success with STUMBLER, this office suggests the following course of action:
--Continued support of underground resistance groups within the country, including the ALF and the WRAL.
--Support for the IFG, which, despite central policies that contradict our own, could be moved into our sphere of influence. They have on numerous occasions attempted Muammar Gadhafi’s assassination.
--Support to a variety of exile groups in order to pave the way for a post-Gadhafi regime educated in the methods and practice of democracy. See the list included in section 3.
CONCLUSION
¶4. (C) With all that has been stated above, and will be detailed in section 2, the prospect for STUMBLER’s success is, in all likelihood, doomed to failure. To go forward would cost not only money and lives but American influence within the Arab and Muslim worlds, as Gadhafi would certainly use a failure to maximum propaganda effect. Instead, this office proposes a continuation of support for democracy groups within Libya, and the rise in funding of exile groups based in Washington, London, Rome, Geneva, and Paris.
WOLCOTT
PART II
WE SHOULD LOOK AT OURSELVES
Stan
1
He first discovered Emmett’s treachery in March 2010, though he had been following clues for at least a month. In early February Langley had sent a classified directive via one pale, sweating official from Internal Affairs who waited at Stan’s apartment, holding a file flown over in the diplomatic pouch. He sat in the kitchen while Stan called Virginia for verification, then in the living room he opened the file and laid out four pieces of intercepted communications from three Washington embassies, with the simple explanation, “The Bureau passed this on to us.” Syria, Libya, and Pakistan had been using material from top-secret communications that had originated in Harry’s office, material that covered aspects of trade, military analyses, and in two cases undercover operations. One was still in play, while the other—an exfiltration from Libya a month ago—had ended when the operative’s body was discovered, cut into pieces, in the desert outside Homs.
“Christ,” Stan said as he went through the papers. He had personally known the dead undercover agent, whose names—both his birth name and the one on his documents—were right there in capital letters. Yet the emissary was treating this like business as usual. “Who’s selling us out?”
The emissary shrugged. “That’s why we’ve come to you.”
“I’m that squeaky clean?”
“The easiest. We don’t have the manpower to send over a team at this point, so we decided to clear one of you and have you continue the investigation.”
Stan knew what he meant by “easiest”—his father, Paolo Bertolli, was a legend in Langley circles, and the Bertolli name still carried weight eight years after his death. Stan said, “You want me to do this on my own?”
The emissary smiled. “Is it really true your father spent six years undercover in the Brigate Rosse?”
“What do the files say?”
“Six years, entirely on his own.”
Stan scratched at his nose. “Is this what the office told you to say? In case I resisted?”
The emissary shrugged. Of course it was.
He and Sophie had been involved for three months by then, meeting twice a week in their Dokki hotel, and for this reason it didn’t occur to him to focus on Emmett. He was already cuckolding the man; he felt no desire to ruin him completely.
He first examined members of the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Section, in particular his boss, Harold Wolcott, and the other submanagers—Jennifer Cary, Dennis Schwarzkopf, and Terry Alderman. This took longer than expected, and while no amount of vetting could clear an individual with absolute certainty he decided eventually to move on. He expanded his search to include embassy staff who’d had access to the compromised trade, military, and undercover materials. Emmett made that list, but so did eighteen others from various embassy departments. He eventually discovered, from one year earlier, the surveillance photos taken by Terry’s men of Emmett meeting with an unidentified woman in a restaurant soon after his arrival in Cairo. No one had followed up on her identity—a note with the photo suggested it was a business associate, or a friend—so Stan sent Langley two shots of her face, with Emmett cropped out, and asked for an ID. Three days later he received the reply: Zora Balašević, suspected employee of the Bezbednosno-informativna agencija—the BIA, Serbia’s intelligence agency, which was run out of their Cairo embassy by a clever old man named Dragan Milić.
Was it really possible that Emmett Kohl was selling them out to the Serbs? Even then he doubted it, for everything he knew about Kohl suggested otherwise. But Stan had come up empty on everyone else; he had no choice but to push on.
After verifying that Emmett had had access to all four pieces of wandering intelligence, he spent another week following him through endless meetings and scouring his cell phone records. In their shared hotel bed, he asked Sophie about their past. He knew that she and Emmett had spent a week or two in Yugoslavia at the beginning of its long civil war, so he asked about their connections. She shrugged and told him that their Serbian relationships had faded soon after they returned to the States. “When you leave you’re convinced you’ll see your new friends again, but absence doesn’t really make the heart grow fonder, does it? It makes it colder.”
She also told him that on the morning of March 29, the following Tuesday, she and Emmett would be joining the consul general at the Sayed Darwish Theater for a performance of The Nutcracker by the Moscow Stars on Ice, followed by a reception at the Russian embassy. So that Tuesday morning he arrived at their apartment a little after eleven, typed in their alarm code, and went inside. He tethered his computer to Emmett’s laptop with a FireWire cable and began to copy his hard drive. Though he didn’t imagine that Emmett would have kept evidence of treachery lying around, he searched the apartment anyway, finding things he shouldn’t have looked at—old love letters between Emmett and Sophie that she had dutifully kept in a shoe box, faded photos of the two of them when they were much younger and, it seemed, much happier, and, in a secret box behind Emmett’s underwear, naked shots of Sophie in bed, smiling. As soon as the copying was finished, he disconnected the cable, reset the alarm, and left.
Emmett was a diplomat, not a spy—he had no idea how to cover his tracks. While deleting a file was enough to deny Stan access to the file itself, he was still able to find the record of its existence, and Emmett had never thought to rename anything. So among the deleted items he found W090218SQR and W090903SQB and W090729SQL—three top-secret documents that Langley believed had been the source of the compromised intelligence, items that were forbidden outside embassy walls.