The Company We Keep (10 page)

Spend enough time on the road, and you learn to improvise. If you need a clean phone line, you grab a pair of alligator clips and a spare phone, go down in the apartment’s basement, and borrow a neighbor’s line. Or if you need a clean license plate for a car, you borrow it, returning it before the owner knows it’s gone.

You also learn how to do things yourself. Even the hard ones. If a kitchen pipe breaks and you don’t want a plumber to see the inside of your place, you fix it yourself. It’s not much of a problem for me. As a girl I used to stand behind my dad at his workbench, watching him fix things, and he could repair pretty much anything. I’m a whiz at using Bondo, wood glue, and clamps to repair doors after we change a lock and need to cover up our handiwork. I can make it look as if it has never been touched.

The thing is, our lives are completely unplanned. One week we’re in a fabulous five-star hotel, the next in a flophouse with a communal bathroom. I’ve had bosses hand me $75,000 in a plastic sack so I could go on a shopping spree and turn a complete dump into a reasonable facsimile of a four-star short-term business rental, and I’ve had other bosses whose motto was the sleazier, the better. There’s no way to predict. Every job is different.

We don’t keep office hours, or obey any sort of workweek. We go for days waiting for an assignment, just killing time. But no one feels guilty. Sooner or later we’ll catch a job pulling eighteen-hour-a-day shifts. And anyhow, downtime is rarely just sitting around a hotel swimming pool. There’s always something to do. For me it’s learning to disappear—blend in with the locals.

My mentor in all this is Jacob. The first time I worked with him and he saw me in a pair of white Keds, he shook his head as if to say, “Absolutely not.” He pointed at my feet. “Only Americans wear white tennis shoes,” he said. “It’s black, brown, or nothing.”

He took me shopping that very day, picking out a cheap
European-cut black leather coat that would fit in anywhere in the world. In Vienna he helped me find a black wool woman’s bowler with a bow, and a long brown wool bouclé coat. I laughed at it at first. Back home, it would look like I’d shopped at a costume store. But in Vienna I can stand at a tram stop on the fashionable Ringstrasse for hours on end and no one notices me. It took me a couple of months under Jacob’s tutelage to go from posing in Paris as a chic
parisienne
shopping in Galeries Lafayette to mastering the art of dressing German Gothic, making it look as if I had nothing better to do than hang out in front of Frankfurt’s Bahnhof, the train station.

Another discipline we learn is living for a long time in a hotel and going unnoticed by management. You can count on the staff of any hotel in Europe reporting to the police. It’s all pretty much common sense. No parties, one person to a room, no equipment left around for the maids to find. And of course nothing with your true name on it. That comes down to no calls home, no letters, postcards, or e-mail, nothing that could in any way link your alias with your true name. There’s no diagonal parking in parallel lives.

At one point Langley considers telling the Greeks about the 17N house, but just as quickly changes its mind. There’s a real risk 17N has sympathizers inside the police. That leaves us to do everything ourselves, from identifying who lives there to finding out what’s going on inside.

One thing I learned early on about intelligence is that it’s not so much connecting the dots as it is deciding what’s a dot and what isn’t one. The case in point is that we’re still not sure the house really does belong to November 17. It could just as easily be a bad lead. Until we nail that down, the fertilizer could mean anything. For all we know, someone in the house owns a farm and is just storing it here.

That’s the first hurdle. The second is that there’s no place to park a van without attracting someone’s attention. There isn’t an apartment for rent anywhere on the street, or even a café for one of us to hang out in. We’re reduced to walking by the house, noting new details, but this gets us only so far.

It turns out the house is actually a building containing several apartments around an interior courtyard, but there is no panel outside to tell us who lives where. And what did happen to the fertilizer? It doesn’t look like there’s a storage area anywhere.

One morning I find Jacob working on a small cargo box, the kind that sits over the back wheel of a bike or a motorcycle. He’s making a pin-sized hole in it. When I ask him what it’s for, he says for a video camera to put on a motorbike. When I ask him what happens if someone steals the box, he says we’ll chain it to the motorbike. And if they steal the motorbike? We’ll chain that to a pole.

That afternoon I go out with Jacob to rent a 65-cc Suzuki, common as dirt in Athens. It’s beat up, the gas tank caved in on one side and handlebars rusted. The glass on the headlight is cracked. This is the last motorbike anyone would ever steal.

We stand in our backyard and admire the dirty, dented bike now fitted with a camera.

“So who rides it in?” I ask.

“You ride, right?”

Sort of. When I was fifteen my dad and my brother both had dirt bikes, and I often tagged along on their trips to a dry lake bed near our house. When they got tired they’d let me ride around. It’s not going to give me a mastery of Athens traffic, but it’s a start.

The next day Jacob coaches me, riding the bike in the alley behind our apartment. When I’m more comfortable, I venture out into the street and drive around the block three or four times.

The next morning I push the bike to the street, put on my helmet, and tuck my hair up inside. I look like any other Athenian on
her way to work. And when I hit traffic three blocks away, I start to drive like one too, weaving through traffic to be the first at the signal.

When I turn onto the 17N house’s street, I deliberately take the sidewalk to get around traffic. Anyone following close on me would have to do the same thing—and I would see them. I park in front of the house, chain the bike to a lamp pole, and walk away. I stop two blocks away at a café for a cappuccino and then make three other stops to make sure I’m clean. Finally I go look for Jacob, who’s waiting on a corner in a car.

I do the same thing for a week, every evening picking the bike up and riding it to an underground parking garage where we keep it at night. Jacob pulls out the film, and late that night I hand it off to Tom, who then takes it to the embassy.

To this day I have no idea whether anything Jacob and I did, any of our film, any of our surveillance, helped bring down 17N a decade later, in 2002. The people in the Koukaki house might well have been innocent. Not knowing is pretty much par for the course. A guy I worked with tracked Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist, in Khartoum for weeks. One day they called him in and simply told him it was time to leave the Sudan. No one said why. Not until weeks later did he read about Carlos’s arrest and realize he had helped pave the way, providing information about his car and his house.

In my job you soon get used to living with little pieces of the truth. Spying is like keeping a giant accounting ledger. You collect a fact at a time, a name at a time, tiny pieces of insight. Collect enough of them, collate them, and you might end up with a big payoff, or with nothing. Meanwhile, you live on the faith that Washington knows what it’s doing.

Dushanbe, Tajikistan:
BOB

A
few months after I get back from Moscow I run into a Russian walking out of the American embassy. He introduces himself as Yuri. With thick folds under his eyes and a slight, gun-dog physique, he looks more Chinese than Russian. His English is cultivated, peppered with distinct Americanisms. We talk for a while about the civil war in Afghanistan. As we say good-bye, he invites me to drop by his place.

As soon as he’s away, I stick my head into the political officer’s office. “Who’s that?”

“Yuri. He’s KGB. He’s my contact, so let it go.”

Three days later in the evening I knock at Yuri’s apartment door. Yuri is in the back, changing out of his suit, but his wife insists I stay. I sit on the sofa waiting for Yuri, watching her set a place for me at the table.

Yuri comes out in loose-fitting pants, a T-shirt, and a traditional
chopan
—a stiff, tube-shaped embroidered robe. As he pours me a cup of unsweetened green tea, I ask him about some reports of
recent fighting in the Garm Valley, less than fifty miles from Dushanbe. He laughs, shaking his head. “Where do these stupid rumors start?”

Over dinner we talk family, schools, weather. His two teenage daughters both speak fluent English, and Yuri has to hold them back from overwhelming me with questions about the United States. Both of them want to go to college there.

I sense Yuri’s reluctance to talk about local politics, and I don’t press him. That can come later. But as I’m ready to leave, I can’t resist asking if it’s wise to drive up to the Garm.

“Definitely not.”

“So there is fighting.”

“I worry about the criminal gangs there.”

This is a typical Soviet non-answer answer, and we both know it. As the Soviet Union collapsed, the official explanation for every problem was that “criminal elements” were behind it rather than people with genuine political grievances.

“Where’s it safe?” I ask, still hoping to elicit at least something from Yuri.

“I’ll tell you what. You and I’ll take a trip outside the city sometime.”

Two days later Yuri and his driver pull up in front of the Oktyabrskaya to collect me. As I climb in the backseat, I see a Kalashnikov assault rifle on the floor beneath Yuri’s feet. He follows my gaze. “Don’t worry. We’re going someplace safe.”

Instead of the main road out of town through the Hissar Valley, the driver takes the backstreets north of town, through a neighborhood of stale yellow houses and poplar trees. People are starting to close up their metal shutters against the night and the criminals. There’s a murder almost every night in Dushanbe.

Yuri half turns in his seat. “We’ll have a pleasant dinner. Just friends.” He reaches across the seat with an open pack of cigarettes. I decline, and he lights a cigarette for himself and the driver.

By the time we find our way back to the main road, it’s dark. There’s almost no traffic. Just outside town we come to the first roadblock. The driver slows, pulls a pistol out of his belt, points it at the side of the door, covering it with his jacket. He shows his KGB ID to the soldier, and we’re allowed to continue.

Forty miles west of Dushanbe we come to a small village without lights. Shadows move between the houses. Yuri and I get out. He points into the sky, and only then do I see it—a monstrous smokestack attached to a giant factory encased in steel scaffolding.

“It’s our aluminum factory,” Yuri says.

I realize where we are: Tursunzade, the fourth largest aluminum plant in the world. I’ve never seen it in the dark. Closed for the last two years, it’s now just a carcass.

I follow Yuri around the factory until we come to a run of stairs down to a sublevel. Scaffolding above drips water. Yuri opens a door that lets us into the guts of the factory. I can barely see Yuri in front of me as he feels his way down a pitch-black corridor until he comes to a padded door, which opens into a room lighted by smoky kerosene lanterns.

There’s old rattan furniture and a pool table, and what looks like a raised dance floor. The walls are covered in varnished papier-mâché fishes, mermaids, and seaweed. At the far end is a black pool. I walk over to look at it. Scum and a patch of some sort of oil cover the surface. It’s too dark to see how deep the pool extends.

Yuri pours us vodka in shot glasses, and we down them. “I told you,” he says. “No one will bother us here.” We sit down at a table that has been set for dinner. The driver comes in with an armful
of more vodka bottles, fills a large tumbler for himself, and throws his head back, finishing it.

“You want to know about Tajikistan?” Yuri says. “Here there are no issues. Only ambitions. You people see sides, secularists against Islamic fundamentalists, Communists against capitalists. But you are people who live somewhere else and don’t know.”

This almost sounds rehearsed. I don’t say anything, and Yuri pours us another vodka. A man I haven’t seen before comes in with a platter of pilaf, rice cooked in cottonseed oil, and pieces of grizzled lamb. Yuri pours us more vodka. I decide I need to start asking him questions before this stuff hits me.

“What do the Kulyabis want?” I ask. The fortunes of Tajikistan’s charismatic clan are critical because if they fail, the country collapses, throwing it wide open to Islamic fundamentalism.