“For that the Pakistanis are useful. They can find parts for us, at least for now.” With that, Abdullah bin Rashid, Vice Chairman of the Shura Council of the Islamic Republic of Islamyah and Minister of Security, jumped into his personal Black Hawk. Beneath the tan-colored coating of the helicopter, the outline of the green seal of the Saudi Arabian air force could still be seen through the new paint.
As the Black Hawk rose, kicking up a dust storm, Ahmed placed the helmet on his head. He did not plug in the long cord that connected to the intercom system. He wanted to think, not to listen again to the incomprehensible babble of the crew. They flew low over the dunes, the Black Hawk’s rotors beating through the thin air, speeding toward a light that spread across the horizon.
The aircraft’s side door was open and Ahmed could see camels below, standing like statues, unfrightened by the aircraft’s noisy appearance. Off beyond the camels, Ahmed saw the towers of the refinery, shooting giant orange flares that danced in the night sky.
They are the problem, he thought, the towers and the corrupting blackness that oozes from below our sands. It gives prosperity for our people, he thought, but it is also like the blood of a wounded camel on the sand. It draws deadly scorpions. And, Ahmed thought, Islamyah is now like a wounded camel. The Americans, the Iranians, the Chinese smell the blood of this land, oozing out from below its sandy skin.
As the Black Hawk rose to match its flight with the contour of the giant dune below, Ahmed thought, these nations are like the scorpions. And the scorpions are coming again.
“It’s sixty-eight degrees on January 28th and the White House still claims that global warming isn’t a problem? The Artic ice cap is melting, the polar bears are dying, the Eskimos are drowning, the trees and flowers are blooming three months ahead of schedule, and they still say that there isn’t enough evidence?”
Russell MacIntyre flicked his wrist to see his watch. It was a cheap digital model that displayed the time in military style. It read 19:28, almost 7:30 P.M. He was going to be late meeting his wife at the Silversteins’ in McLean, again. “Anything left, Deb?” he said, looking over at his attractive assistant, asking her a question that was actually intended to evoke an answer, unlike so many that he posed about politics and weather.
“Ms. Connor is still waiting down there,” she answered, in a voice that suggested that the waiting young staffer had been sitting in the reception room for a long time.
“Shit,” he replied and instantly regretted it. Connor was one of the best of the crop of newly minted analysts that he had recruited from the nation’s top graduate schools. He had promised them an exciting job. He had promised them that they could make a difference. He had promised them access. MacIntyre sighed. “Okay, Debbie, please go get her and send her in.”
Russell MacIntyre was, at thirty-eight, the Deputy Director of the new Intelligence Analysis Center, or IAC. Although it was sixteen years since he’d been on the Brown swim team, he still tried to work out in the pool at the Watergate twice a week. There were only slight flecks of gray in his auburn hair, but his wife Sarah wanted to “touch them up.” The IAC, where MacIntyre was the number two, had been created as the final piece of the intelligence reorganization started by the report of the 9/11 Commission and the fiasco over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The combined failure of both the CIA and the new Director of National Intelligence to foresee the coup, or “revolution,” in Saudi Arabia had finally convinced Congress to do something about analytical capability. The IAC was that something. It was empowered to see everything gathered by all the branches of the U.S. government and to order those agencies to try to get whatever information IAC wanted.
At the insistence of Senate Intelligence Chairman Paul Robinson, the analytical function was separated from the intelligence collectors, so the analysts would be unbiased, uncommitted to their agency’s sources. Robinson also dictated that the new IAC have the resources to utilize open sources — press, blogs, academic papers, television from around the world. “I am determined that I will never again have to chair one of those ‘oh my God’ hearings after something critical happens that we should have seen coming, but didn’t,” Robinson had fumed on the Senate floor.
With an elite staff of two hundred handpicked specialists, the new IAC was bureaucratically independent from the intelligence collectors in the other so-called three-letter agencies: CIA, NSA, NGA, FBI, and NRO. The analysts were a mixture of old and young, top career specialists taken from longtime niches and new whiz kids who had just parachuted into their first government job. When Robinson and a group of key Senators and Representatives from both parties had essentially forced the President to name Ambassador Sol Rubenstein to head the new agency, the sixty-eight-yearold government veteran had almost turned them down. It was only after he’d gotten every possible operational and budget issue resolved in his favor that he’d turned to the issue of the location for his new agency.
When he had cocktails on the roof of what was then the new Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, over thirty years ago, Rubenstein had been fascinated by the complex of old buildings he had seen nearby on the hill above the Potomac. They sat across the street from the State Department in the Foggy Bottom section of the city. Called Navy Hill, it had been the first home of the Naval Observatory. After the Observatory had moved in the nineteenth century, the Navy’s Bureau of Medical Affairs had taken the Hill. In theory, they were still there, but at the outset of World War II some of the Navy buildings had been emptied out so that America’s first real intelligence agency, the Office of Special Services, the OSS, could move in.
Ambassador Rubenstein had insisted on the ten-acre site for his new agency. He took as his own office the suite on the ground floor that had been home in 1942 to Wild Bill Donovan, the first OSS director. Rusty MacIntyre, the first Deputy of the Intelligence Analysis Center, had the office next to his new boss. Both men loved their river views, but the two spent as much time as they could wandering through the three buildings they called “our little campus.”
MacIntyre had been Rubenstein’s first hire for the new agency. The silver-haired retired ambassador picked him out of the executive suite of a defense contractor because, as Rubenstein had said, “You have a reputation for getting shit done and not worrying about who you run over while you do it.” MacIntyre worked hard to live up to that reputation. Rubenstein had also been very clearly told by Senator Robinson that MacIntyre would be a good pick.
“I’m sorry that I pushed Debbie so hard to see you tonight, Mr. MacIntyre. I know you are busy with the Bahrain bombings, but you said that whenever we really needed…” Susan Connor was clearly nervous as she walked into the big room and sat on the edge of the couch, sweat showing on her high forehead.
“It’s Rusty. Mr. MacIntyre was my late father,” the Deputy Director reassured the attractive twenty-three-year-old African American. He then fell into his beaten-up leather chair by the window. “I said that whenever you really needed to see me, anytime, day or night, you could see me. So what’s up?”
“Well, sir, you told us at the off-site that intelligence analysis was ‘literally looking for needles in haystacks. The trick is looking in the right haystack, the one where they don’t expect you to look.’ Right?” Connor seemed to be reciting the lines from memory.
“That does sounds like something I might have said.” MacIntyre smiled, amused to hear his own words bounced back at him and pleased at the impact they had clearly made on at least one listener. “So, have you found an interesting haystack, Susan?” What the hell was Connor’s assignment anyway, Saudi — he corrected himself— Islamyah military?