Echo Platoon (19 page)

What was I doing? Two things. First, I was running scenarios for our hit in Iran. I’d received enough intel
from Tony Merc and Pepperman to start the mission planning process.

Yes, the mission planning process. SpecWar missions are not seat-of-the-pants, “Hey, let’s go off and kill some Japs . . .” affairs. We may be
unconventional
warriors, but we spend a shitload of time working on our ops plans. I call it the Satchmo approach to killing.

Louis Armstrong, known as Satchmo, was the greatest jazz trumpet player this country (or any other) ever produced. His solos were ineffable, inventive flights of creation that soared and sang and pushed the edge of the musical envelope way beyond where it had ever been taken, just as my own thousands of real-world operations have pushed the SpecWar envelope further than anyone else has taken the Warrior’s craft of breaking things and killing people.

But Armstrong’s solos weren’t off-the-top-of-the-head jam sessions any more than my ops are improvised hop & pops. He worked out each solo—every nuance of it—during long hours of practice. He improvised, revised, adapted, reworked, and refitted his performance so that, in the end, it fit perfectly and completely into the Armstrong artistic and technical musical universe. And then, thus shaped, buffed, and polished, he played the hell out of that solo in public. The result was that the audience believed what they were hearing was total improvisation when, in fact, they were listening to an artistic and technical genius whose compositional capabilities were on the level of a J. S. Bach.

And so, I scratched notes on legal pads, and played with my rational databases on the computer, dealing with EEIs (Essential Elements of Information), working
out the limitations and special conditions under which we’d be operating, diagramming the six mission phases,
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then identifying within each of those six phases the most likely times that Mister Murphy and his family would make an appearance, and work out the solutions to either prevent him from showing up, or putting the sumbitch out of action right after he made his appearance.

Under normal circumstances, my senior enlisted men would do much of this planning. I’m a firm believer in what might be called “bottoming up.” That’s when you let your senior noncoms, who know the men in their platoons best, design the nuts-and-bolts of an op-plan.

But today, my senior enlisted men were training Araz Kurbanov’s troops, and it was up to me to do all the work. And so I slaved over the keyboard and the legal pad until I got it done. No—I didn’t necessarily like it. But I did it. That’s what being IN COMMAND is all about.

And when I finished, I did not go straight to the minibar and pour myself a Dr. Bombay Sapphire on the rocks. I did not pop a six-pack of Heinekens. I closed down the mission planning files, logged onto the Internet, found a good search engine, and typed Steve Sarkesian’s name into it. After I downloaded a humongous number of files, I typed “Sirzhik Foundation” into the search engine, and tapped the left mouse button. It didn’t take long to get lots of hits on that subject, either.

And here,
mit einem Wort, kurz gesagt,
as my old
shipmate, KSK commander Brigadier General Fred Kohler
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would say “in a nutshell” in his native Kraut, is what I found out after some three-plus hours of staring at the screen and downloading.

As you already know, the Sirzhik Foundation was what they call an NGO, which stands for NonGovernmental Organization. NGO is a twenty-first century way of saying that it was a hybrid organization, somewhere between a pressure group and a nonprofit charitable association. Whatever it was, Sirzhik certainly had a lot of money to dole out. And I already knew it was headquartered in the old Whitney mansion on upper Fifth Avenue in New York City. But I learned that in that particular neighborhood, real estate goes for about half a mil per square
yard
. I also knew Sirzhik had a network of offices in the high-rent districts of Washington, London, Paris, Moscow, Prague, Tbilisi, Baku, and even Yerevan. On paper, Sirzhik was devoted to economic and social development all across the former Soviet Union. A glowing article in the
Wall Street Journal
less than three months ago described the Foundation’s programs in Armenia, the Republic of Georgia, Turkmenistan, Kazakstan, and Azerbaijan. There was nothing in the article about Sirzhik taking bribe money, so I guess the reporter didn’t spend much time talking to the late and unlamented Roscoe Grogan. Nor was there any material about Sirzhik’s possible ties to transnational crime syndicates. But then, as Avi had said, it was only a suspicion on his part.

But by reading between the lines, I also understood that the organization used its financial clout to achieve political goals. For example, it had lobbied strenuously to prevent the Azeris from receiving any security assistance from the United States—and it had won that fight by making sure that several of its projects were directed toward the states and districts where key senators and congressmen were from. And where did Sirzhik get all its money?

Let me quote from the
Journal:
“Thanks to the huge stock market run-up of 1995–1998, the Sirzhik Foundation’s endowment is currently in the hundred-billion-dollar range, which is more than twice the United Nations’ budget. That huge fiscal clout makes Sirzhik CEO Steve Sarkesian a world-class socioeconomic and political power broker.”

The same Steve Sarkesian who is head of the Armenian National Foundation. The multibillionaire who ranks number five on the
Forbes
magazine Four Hundred Richest People in the World list, but still takes kickbacks from oil companies in Baku. The one who’s throwing a party so he can meet me.
That
Steve Sarkesian.

You, the one waving your hand out there, interrupting
moi
. What the fuck do you want? You say you don’t know anything about Steve Sarkesian, and I should fill you in.

What’s the matter with you, do I look like some fucking intel squirrel with a plastic fucking penholder in my fucking shirt pocket and dweebish black-framed glasses with fucking Coke-bottle lenses?

You what? You say you paid good fucking money for this fucking book and I should do my fucking job and fucking tell you who the fucking characters are.

Well, fuck you very much, too. But since you asked the way I like to be asked, here’s what I know courtesy of my research. Sarkesian came to the United States as a twelve-year-old Armenian orphan named Sirzhik Sarkis—ergo the name of the foundation he currently heads. He made his fortune in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in New York’s volatile real estate market, along with forays into venture capitalism (he bankrolled three of Silicon Valley’s most profitable software companies and currently holds four hundred thousand shares of Amazon.com and six hundred thousand shares of AOL in his personal portfolio), and hard-nosed international currency speculation in deutsche marks, British pounds, and yen. In fact, according to a clip that I found in the
New York Times
archive, Steve-o single-handedly collapsed the British pound on the world currency markets back in 1992. That was just after the Tory prime minister dissed him in a House of Commons speech as “nothing more than the tartedup, bespoke-suited, nineties vision of the itinerant rug peddler.”

The self-styled Armenian nationalist also allocated his own money to political causes and to politicians who do things his way all over the world. According to materials I discovered at the Jane’s Information Group Web site, he allegedly contributed more than a million dollars to the current Russian president’s campaign, bypassing Russkie election laws by providing political advisers and media consultants instead of cash. According to a top OSINT
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service I subscribe to, he has been active in the Caucasus, too, financing
projects that made him popular with the region’s leaders, most of them former Communist officials, or what was obliquely referred to as “new-style capitalists.” When you read about “new-style capitalists” in this part of the world, friends, you’re reading about gangsters. Full stop. No wonder Grogan had been so impressed. I wondered if Roscoe’d been taking kick-backs skimmed from the money he’d been paying out to Sirzhik. He’d struck me as the type who would.

Another article, this one at BusinessWeek.com mentioned that Sarkesian had spent more than six million dollars in the past year, donating half of it in “soft” money to both Democrat and Republican national committees, and the rest to Armenian causes. The guy was a regular fountain of cash.

“And so,” gushed some slavish split-tail in the Style section of the
Washington Post,
“when he’s in Washington, Steve Sarkesian meets regularly with the president and vice president, with the speaker and the minority leaders of the House, as well as with leading senators and the national political chairmen of both parties. And according to one Capitol Hill observer, they pay attention to what he says, too. Like those old E. F. Hutton TV commercials went, when Steve Sarkesian talks . . . people listen.”

Sounds too good to be true, don’t it? Yeah—I think so, too. I’m not a cynic by nature, but I have to say that I instinctively mistrust folks like Steve Sarkesian, even without meeting ’em, when I read such a huge quantity of breathless, uncritical drivel.

Because, let’s be RP—Roguishly Plain—about what we are talking about here. We are talking about fixers. Influence peddlers. Folks who pay bribes but call ’em “expediting.” Bribes? Yeah, bribes. They bribe congressmen
and senators with political contributions, and in return
they
get to write the laws that affect us all. You say that’s undemocratic. Fuckin’ A. But to this unelected group of grease-the-wheels motherfuckers that doesn’t matter. They believe they know what is best for the USA—that’s the unruly, unwashed, unsophisticated assholes out there—in other words, you and me.

But the old bottom line is that these rent-by-the-hour power brokers are no more and no less than whores. In fact, hookers are more honest about what they do. Oh, they may call themselves lawyers, or public affairs counsels, and they may consider themselves to be Washington’s own God-given Brahmin class, because they spend their days and nights kissing up to the nation’s alleged leaders, throwing them fund-raisers, and taking ’em for all-expenses-paid weekends. What I detest most about ’em, however, is their cynicism. It is absolutely unbounded. By that, I mean this moneyed, limo-riding, bespoke-suit wearing bunch of vermin believe that their money can buy them anything, or anyone. I have seen it in the past. Assholes like the late and unlamented Clark Clifford of the BCCI scandal, who got too big for his Guccis and skimmed a few mil here and a few mil there just because he felt like it. Or former SECDEF Grant Griffith, whom I had to wax when he thought he could get away with selling nuclear missiles because it would be too politically embarrassing to bring him to justice. Lemme tell, ya, the list is as long as my
szeb.

And so, with my instincts at odds with all the profusely fawning prose in the public press, I turned up the radio and the TV sound, and got on the secure cellular to that intel safety net of mine, back in the States.
It only took me a few minutes, because Jim Wink was able to pull up a shitload of info almost as if he’d had the stuff sitting on his desk waiting for me to call. And half an hour after I’d reached for the phone I had the REAL and unvarnished skinny on Steve Sarkesian and the Sirzhik Foundation. And believe me, what I learned from Wink and a couple of others like him was a lot more helpful than the fluff I’d been reading.

RUMINT had it, said Wink, that the foundation had been trying to form relationships with the big multinational oil companies who were planning exploration in the Caucasus, but without any positive results. The corporate lawyers were chary because bribery is illegal, no matter what you call it. So Steve Sarkesian had been reduced to making deals with the smaller consortiums in Azerbaijan, Kazakstan, and Tajikistan.

He added that Steve Sarkesian might be overextended financially, even though there were billions and billions of dollars in the foundation’s coffers. Several Paris banks had lately put “holds” on Sarkesian’s personal checks. And the Swiss had, only last year, refused to open any new accounts from Steve Sarkesian, and had asked him to remove all his funds from Zurich and Geneva. Why was that? Because last year was when the Swiss banking laws had been changed, making it much, much easier to track money laundering.

Finally, Wink told me that even the White House, which as we all know, will do almost anything including sell the nation’s secrets for campaign funds, had been holding Steve Sarkesian at arm’s length recently. Did all of the above prove that Steve Sarkesian was dirty? No, it didn’t. But the signs sure led me to believe that this sumbitch was no patriot.

I was putting other pieces of the puzzle together as well. Pepperman had been able to lay his hands on what’s known in the trade as a Whiskey-Number intercept
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log. There was no way he could ever see the message itself. But sometimes, just seeing the log can help. And in this case, that’s what happened. According to one of the log entries, the Russkie I’d waxed on the awl rig had been on the phone to Paris when we hit the place. Paris was where Steve Sarkesian was flying to Baku from. It occurred to me to wonder why NSA had been targeting that specific cell phone, but Pepperman has limits about what he can tell me and what he can’t, so I didn’t even bother to ask.

Second, the Amex card I’d taken off the POG belonged to a dummy corporation in the Seychelles, which belonged to a dummy corporation in the Bahamas, which belonged to a shell corporation based in Liechtenstein and run out of the British West Indies, which belonged to an Iranian corporation headquartered in Paris, which in turn was half-controlled by . . . Steve Sarkesian’s wife.

This guy was dirtier than Grant Griffith, Bentley Brendel, and Werner Lantos all put together. That was when I realized what I had to do. Which was exactly what the POG had done earlier, and
carpe
the old
diem,
take advantage of the situation, and use the trip to the Sirzhik Foundation not only to gather as much intel on Steve Sarkesian as I could, but also to simultaneously rattle the sumbitch’s cage long and loud enough so that he’d do something careless.