The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (17 page)

After a decade’s worth of failed policy in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh is only the third senior American government official to have resigned for reasons of conscience.

Three weeks after Hoh’s resignation, Peter Galbraith will be back home in Vermont. He’ll get a call from a journalist, asking him if he has a response to the fact that he’s been fired. Fired? It’s news to him. He’d agreed to leave the mission temporarily over the differences in view on the election fraud. But Kai Eide couldn’t stand being embarrassed, so he made sure he got the boot, Galbraith believes. Eide, on the other hand, says that he could no longer “trust” Galbraith. (“Kai and Peter had different
philosophies,” says a senior UN official who worked with both men. “Imposing on Kai a man with a bad history with Kai had to end in disaster. They were irreconcilable.”) Galbraith gets another call from Afghan expert Michael Semple.

“Peter,” says Semple, a former UN official and an Irishman who’s considered the leading Taliban expert. “It gave me joy to hear that you got fired when I read it in the papers.”

“Fuck you,” Galbraith says.

“No, you don’t understand,” Semple continues. “Had you embezzled money, it would have taken the UN eighteen months to fire you. Had you sexually harassed an employee, it would have taken them a year. But take a stand on principle? The UN fires you overnight.”

Over the next few months, Galbraith will be the victim of a vicious smear campaign, accusing him of unethically profiting from his work with the Kurds in Iraq. The story is broken by
The New York Times
, carrying a dateline of Oslo, Norway, Eide’s home country. “I was shocked when I read about it,” Eide tells me. “I hand no knowledge of it.” A month after that, Eide will publicly accuse Galbraith of trying to persuade the Americans to overthrow Karzai and replace him with Ashraf Ghani—a charge Galbraith vehemently denies. Galbraith will continue to return fire in the media, warning that the troop surge “makes no sense,” and filing a suit against the United Nations for his improper termination. Eide steps down from his post early in the next year.

  APRIL 20, 2010, BERLIN, AROUND MIDNIGHT

The blonde with the very pronounced upper body took a seat at the bar.

I sat in one of the comfortable lounge chairs, about thirty feet away from her. Duncan was to my left. Charlie Flynn leaned back in his seat across the table.

Flynn and I eyed the blonde.

Duncan twisted in his seat to look where we were staring.

“What do you make of her?” I asked Duncan and Charlie.

Charlie tilted his head to one side.

Duncan turned back around. “She’s either a high-class prostitute or a spy,” he said.

“Are you kidding?”

“No, she was working Dave earlier pretty hard.”

“Now that you mention it, the first time I saw her was when you guys all arrived. She was hanging out around the bar during the welcoming party.”

“She’s either an operative or a lobby worker,” Duncan repeated.

Charlie nodded. I sipped my Perrier.

The woman got up. She said something to the bartender that we couldn’t hear.

To leave the bar, she had to pass our table.

Twenty feet away. Fifteen feet. Ten feet. Five feet. Three feet.

“Hey, how are you?” Charlie said to her.

She stopped.

“I’m very good, thank you,” she said.

Botoxed, maybe collagen implants, breasts certainly augmented. I thought: prostitute.

“Want to join us for a drink?” Charlie asked her.

I was surprised. The woman whom Duncan and Charlie had identified as either (a) a prostitute or (b) a spy now sat down at the table with us after receiving an invitation from General McChrystal’s executive officer.

She said her name was Kerina. She gave her last name as well. She explained why she was in the lobby bar of the Berlin Ritz: She’d been in Stockholm visiting a boyfriend, who happened to be married to someone else. The boyfriend was in the oil and mineral business. She and the boyfriend had some kind of falling-out. Then the volcano hit, and she didn’t want to stay in Stockholm. She couldn’t leave yet to go to Morocco, where she’d planned a ten-day trip. She lost her credit card, somehow, her AmEx. She also may or may not have misplaced her passport.

She slipped off the gray jacket she was wearing.

“So what do you do?” Charlie asked.

“I’m a travel writer.”

She claimed she was a columnist and had a blog. She said she’d written for travel magazines and a sex column for a men’s fashion magazine. She said she lived in Canada but had German citizenship. She kept talking, explaining, maybe a little drunk. She said she’d taken helicopter lessons and jumped out of airplanes at high altitude.

It all sounded like an elaborate ruse. None of it sounded credible.

Her phone rang.

“Excuse me, I have to take this call.”

She got up and stepped outside the edge of the bar, which merged with the lobby.

When she got out of earshot, Duncan nodded to the jacket she left behind.

“Might not be secure to talk,” he said, indicating that her jacket could be bugged. He leaned forward.

“I have been Googling what she said,” Duncan whispered, BlackBerry in hand. “None of the things she said is true. Her story doesn’t check out.”

“I did see her earlier,” I said. “I’ve worked for that magazine she claims to write for, and she didn’t know any of the editors’ names. So that’s strange.”

“Holy shit, this is great,” Charlie said. “Like having my own ops center right here, just feeding me information.”

Duncan continued. “I’m not buying her rich story. A girl like that would have a five-hundred-dollar haircut,” he said. “That’s not a five-hundred-dollar haircut.”

“What do you make of the helicopter lessons?” I asked.

“She’s had cockpit time,” Charlie said, gesturing to his groin. “Thousands of hours on the stick.”

We stopped talking. She walked back into view, hanging up. She said good-bye in what sounded like a foreign language.

Suspicious. She’d done most of the talking up to this point. Now she asked the questions and Duncan and Charlie tried not to answer them. They didn’t want to tell her who they were with or what they were doing in Berlin.

“Business,” Charlie said. He wasn’t wearing his uniform, which was typical for the downtime when he traveled.

Duncan concurred. “Business,” he said.

She turned to me. “What are you doing?”

“I’m a journalist,” I said. “I’m writing for
Rolling Stone
. I’m going to Afghanistan in a couple of days.”

Duncan’s eyes flashed. I had fucked up, apparently. Operational security.

“Are you all going to Afghanistan?”

They shook their heads.

I stopped talking about Afghanistan.

Duncan and Charlie’s paranoia had rubbed off. Already paranoid by nature, the idea that this woman might be a spy—sent by a foreign intelligence agency to snoop on General McChrystal—seemed both dangerous and hilarious.

I threw out a story to test the spy thesis. I had a cursory John le Carré–based knowledge of covert operations and spycraft during the Cold War. Two words came to mind: honey trap.

“A friend of mine has this great story about the Cold War,” I said. “This French diplomat was in Moscow in the early eighties. The KGB chief summons him to his office. The chief throws down a folder of black-and-white photos. It’s the French diplomat banging these two Russian chicks he’s had a threesome with. Blackmail. The KGB chief stares across the desk: ‘We are going to send copies of these photos to your wife.’ The French diplomat nods. ‘Then you don’t mind if I keep these for myself?’ ”

I laughed the loudest at my own joke. Kerina laughed, too. Charlie nodded.

“I’m going for a cigarette,” I said.

Duncan joined me, leaving Kerina and Charlie alone.

“You broke operational security,” Duncan scolded. “You shouldn’t have said we were going to Afghanistan.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Sorry.”

I was actually thinking: You guys can come up with your own cover stories if you’re so worried. I’m not going to lie. What the fuck—Charlie was the one who asked her to sit with us in the first place. That didn’t seem like such an operationally secure move, either.

“We have to get Charlie out of there,” he said. Duncan was worried Charlie might get seduced. “We shouldn’t leave the two of them alone.”

“This is crazy, though,” I said. “That she’s a spy.”

“That’s the lobby scene, you know? Spies, high-class prostitutes, that’s what it is.”

We walked back to the table. I said good night. Duncan said good night. Charlie said good night.

I went outside for one more cigarette.

Through the glass doors, I watched Kerina walk through the lobby. She turned—and came outside.

“You know there is a smoking lounge in the back,” she said.

“Oh, really?”

We went back to the smoking lounge. My mouth was dry. I was nervous. I waited for her to pop the question: How much? Or was she going to try to pump me for information?

She took a different tack. She asked me life questions.

“Are you happy?” she said. “What do you want to accomplish?”

I was thrown off guard. Are we having a moment? Is the moment serious? These were odd questions for a prostitute to ask. Not so odd if she’s a spy—to get my guard down. And she didn’t have that dead-eyed coldness in her eyes, either.

“I should go to bed,” I said.

She walked to the elevator with me.

“What floor?” I asked.

“Ninth,” she says. “Are you on the ninth floor, too?”

The ninth floor. That was the floor the operations center was on. That was the floor McChrystal was staying on.

Holy shit, maybe she was a spy.

“I’m on the fifth,” I said.

The door to the fifth floor opened. I stepped out.

I texted Duncan immediately.

Gathered more info—she is staying on 9th floor! I think she’s a spy.

Duncan responded:

Poor tradecraft. But at least they are learning and that is healthy.

Duncan texted me again and asked if I wanted to get a final drink in his room.

I waited a few minutes, then went to his room on the ninth floor.

He opened the door in a white hotel robe. I took a seat on the chair next to the bed. We started to talk. I was excited at the possibility that she was a spy. It was an unusual chance to witness a foreign agent trying to infiltrate one of the military’s most sensitive commands.

Duncan sipped a beer. I took a bitter lemon seltzer from the minibar.

It was late enough to discuss those big ideas that couldn’t be mentioned during the day.

Duncan started talking about the team. Their love for McChrystal. The brotherhood. Why did they make the sacrifice? The war for them was more about the man than the conflict. They were there for him. Each on a search for meaning, naturally—and McChrystal was meaning. McChrystal was historic. McChrystal was MacArthur and Grant and Patton, and yet he lived and breathed and walked among them. They gave McChrystal their loyalty, and McChrystal gave shape to their identities. The wars gave McChrystal his own. He was the ultimate operator, his decisions felt in Kabul and Washington and Islamabad and Baghdad and Sana’a and elsewhere, in still-classified hideouts, playing at changing the world. The other operators out there, the politicians, the pundits, the soldiers, the diplomats, the spies, the insurgents, the hacks, and the flacks, swarming him, loving him, hating him, working against him, all playing the game.

I could live like this forever, I said. The Ritz, the Hotel Rivoli, the bullet trains, the first-class lounges, the wars. Drinking bitter lemon and asking fucked-up questions until dawn. Who is the spy? Who is Duncan? What the fuck are we doing here at two
A.M.
?

Duncan talked about himself—rootless, wandering, the kind of person war zones tend to attract. Why do we do what we do? A tremendous loneliness? Trying to fit in? It was a version of life that kept life at bay. It was a fantasy. Who wants the real world? Who can operate there after this, here?

Duncan: a collection of stories and vague origins. A naturalized American citizen who was born in England. Once a Shakespearean stage actor. Once a producer for a television network. Once a hotel manager off an interstate. Duncan found the war, first in Baghdad in 2006, where he worked as a communications consultant. Duncan spent time as a spokesperson at Fort Leavenworth. The timeline was always fuzzy. Not married, no kids. When exactly he was there, when exactly he was here.

Duncan had worked as a manager at a large chain hotel in Connecticut—the lost and found at that hotel was filled with dildos, he said. It was amazing how many people left dildos behind at hotels, like cell phone chargers and laptop cords. There was a whole box in the lost and found filled with dildos, multicolored, different sizes. The dildos were held for thirty days, per lost-and-found policy, before being thrown out. But no one ever came back to collect a forgotten dildo.