Part 11 (1/2)

The last member of our team was Jack Kerry, our resident PhD chemist. Jack was new to the CIA and to OTS. His a.s.signment would be to support us in any research, development, and engineering (RD&E) requirement we might have-for instance, supplying us with a piece of technical equipment, or building one if it was needed. He was a gentle soul, extremely intelligent, intellectually curious, and very much an outdoorsman. His thinning hair, spa.r.s.e beard, and prematurely gray hair belied the fact that he was only thirty-five years old.

I closed the door after Jack entered. Elaine didn't even look up, just flicked her cigarette ash into the wastepaper basket next to her desk.

”Everyone remember that memo from State we received a little while ago?” I asked. They all nodded. ”Well, it appears things just became a whole lot more urgent.” I explained the situation with Pelletier, which got everyone's attention.

”Okay,” I said. ”Let's start with the basics.”

Since the epiphany in my studio, I had been informally tasking team members with preliminary planning for the exfiltration, and now it was time to examine the results. Our first priority would be to establish the route by which we could get the houseguests out of the country. We always knew our best option was on a commerical flight out of Mehrabad Airport.

This meant our major area of concern would be how to get the houseguests through the airport's draconian immigration controls. Every country's airport procedures were different, and the best way to understand them was to send a probe in and out to collect data. Iran's controls had been put in place under the shah, but thanks to the revolution, there was no telling what to expect. Protocol could s.h.i.+ft from one day to the next. We were fortunate in one sense, however, since we already had a large collection of data on the customs and immigration controls at the airport thanks to the RAPTOR operation seven months before. In addition, we could augment our data collection by continuing to support the insertion of the advance team or running our own probes. Eventually a team of intelligence officers would need to make the final probe into Iran and meet up with the houseguests to a.s.sess their state of mind and ability to carry off the operation. Near East Division, meanwhile, would look into a potential black route for getting them out overland as a fallback, much like the one that Ross Perot had used to exfiltrate two of his employees a year earlier. At this stage, it was important not to rule anything out, and to have a fallback plan if necessary.

With that out of the way, we then turned to the problem of the cover, which posed a unique challenge. We had six American diplomats, male and female, varying in age from fifty-four to twenty-five. As far as we knew, none of them could speak a foreign language and none of them had any clandestine training. To make matters worse, because they worked in the consulate, which was heavily trafficked by Iranians, we suspected that their faces were probably pretty well known and that they might be on a watch list.

”We don't yet know what we are going to use for doc.u.ments or what their cover is going to be, but we are going to have to come up with some of those answers quickly,” I said. ”I'm going to have to interface with NE/Iran on this and get them on board with anything we're going to do.”

I turned to Dan and Joe. ”So what do you think, guys? What have you got?” It would be the job of the doc.u.ments branch to fabricate a realistic cover story for the houseguests to accompany their alias doc.u.ments. For this reason they often kept backstopped alias doc.u.ments on the shelf ready to use in a moment's notice. But depending on the subject, there are really only a few nationalities that would work at any given time, and until they started inventing new countries, we had to be incredibly careful about wasting them.

This problem had been highlighted when the militants at the emba.s.sy had ferreted out two altered doc.u.ments issued to two CIA officers captured at the emba.s.sy. Both of the doc.u.ments corresponded with friendly Western powers, and had almost created a diplomatic scandal. The defense minister for one of the countries in question just happened to be touring Langley when the news broke, and he asked pointedly how many more of these items the CIA had fabricated. ”Just the one,” he was told. ”Like h.e.l.l,” the minister had muttered. As a result we had to be incredibly selective about what kinds of doc.u.ments we used.

”How about one of the Nordic countries?” Dan responded.

”Okay,” I said. ”What are six people from northern Europe doing in Tehran?”

Joe piped in. ”Do they all have to be from the same place? We could issue each of them a travel doc.u.ment from a different country and then have them line up at the airport as if they just happened to arrive all together.”

”The real problem,” I said, ”is that no one in headquarters believes that these people are going to be able to carry any foreign cover. They're not even sure they could carry false U.S. pa.s.sports.”

In an earlier call with Hal, who after the RAPTOR operation had been promoted to the Near East Division's chief for Iran, the two of us had discussed the possibility of the houseguests' using foreign doc.u.ments for their cover story. Since none of the houseguests had even basic training in the tradecraft needed to carry off a foreign cover, he doubted it would work. ”Besides,” he had said, ”almost everyone in Iran speaks a foreign language, and we can't risk that they might stumble upon somebody who could question them in their 'native' tongue.”

”What is State saying?” asked Tim.

”Their idea is to have them be unemployed U.S. schoolteachers who had come to Iran looking for work,” I said. ”They could give us any of the doc.u.mentation we would need, but that would still make them U.S. citizens, which doesn't seem like the best idea to me.”

”What about Canadian pa.s.sports?” Doris asked.

”That would make the most sense, but I don't know if they'll go for it. I'd like to pose the question while I am in Ottawa and see if they jump.”

”When are you going?” Joe asked.

”I am scheduling it now,” I said. ”I want to get up there as soon as possible, and if we are going to ask them for Canadian doc.u.ments, we need to have done it yesterday.” I had already decided that it would be Joe's job to come up with a cover legend for the six. Working in doc.u.ments did not mean that Joe was a forger. The forgers were the artist-validators who worked in the bullpen, a position I had held myself in the earliest days of my career. Doc.u.ments people were in charge of maintaining travel doc.u.ments and understanding the controls related to those doc.u.ments. They often traveled on probes to update their portfolios and knew what kinds of doc.u.ments would be needed by a person in order to carry off a certain cover.

”Joe, I want you with me. This may not be legal, and they may say no, but if they say yes, I want to be ready to move on it.”

”What do we need to take with us?” Joe asked. Joe had already gone across the street to the State Department and requested current pa.s.sport photographs of the six houseguests. He had also collected current samples of their handwriting and had a.s.signed them alias names in advance. He had done all of this background work without knowing in which direction we were going to go with their doc.u.mentation. Be prepared. It was not just a Baden-Powell Boy Scout motto. It was the motto of the intelligence officer as well.

”Bring everything you've got,” I replied. ”We might be able to use it all.”

There was a knock at the door. I looked up to see Elaine poking her head around the corner. ”They're here,” she said. When she saw the puzzled look on my face, she took a drag off her cigarette and blew the smoke out into the vestibule. ”The Christmas Door Decorating Committee from the art shop,” she explained. I looked at her without speaking. ”I'll just close the door and they can do this without any fuss,” she said, closing the door with a small clatter. I shook my head.