Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius

Author:David Ignatius
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Espionage, fiction, United States, Suspense Fiction, Middle East, Terrorism - Middle East, Thrillers, General, Spy Stories, Suspense & Thriller
ISBN: 9780393317381
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Published: 1987-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

27

Beirut; April 1971

As the Deuxième Bureau crumbled, the CIA station tried to pick up useful pieces of the debris. There were so many angry and frustrated officers that the hardest problem for Hoffman and his colleagues was deciding which of them was worth trying to recruit.

Hoffman ignored most of them. He had a rule about buying members of another intelligence service: Don’t recruit the ten people in the field who are gathering information. Recruit the one man at the top who runs the network. With the surge of walk-ins, Hoffman added another rule: No more Lebanese agents at all, unless they had vital information or access to it.

For Rogers, the top priority was getting access to the Christian militias. He focused his attention on a bright young army officer named Samir Fares. Though only in his mid-thirties, Fares had gained a reputation as one of the Deuxième Bureau’s ablest intelligence officers. He had the look of an intellectual: balding, smoking a pipe rather than the ubiquitous Lebanese cigarettes. But he was a tough operator. His current assignment, Rogers had learned, was to recruit agents from among the militias and secret political organizations of Christian East Beirut.

Rogers decided to set up a meeting with Fares. He asked Elias Arslani, a retired history professor who had been Fares’s mentor at AUB, to arrange a meeting at his country home in the mountains near Jezzine, in southern Lebanon. Dr. Arslani was the sort of person the American Embassy called on to make discreet introductions: a distinguished academic, a pillar of the Greek Orthodox community, a man who believed in the establishment of a modern and liberal Arab world. He was not an agent, not even an “asset.” He was simply and forthrightly a friend of the United States.

Rogers drove south on a spring day, navigating the hairpin turns that looped up and down the steep hills like thin strands of yarn, till he reached the village of Watani and the professor’s large, red-roofed villa. The professor, known to the villagers as “Sheik Elias,” greeted Rogers at the door. He was a gaunt, erect old man, dressed in the uniform of a Levantine gentleman: a crisp white shirt, a well-tailored gray suit, and a red fez. Standing next to him was Samir Fares, dressed in a baggy seersucker suit and looking more than a little uncomfortable.

Dr. Arslani apologized to his guests for making them travel to the mountains. He rarely went to Beirut anymore, he said. He found it too depressing. His goal as a professor had been to help train a modern civil service in Lebanon, the old man explained. But when he went to Beirut now and saw what had become of the Lebanese bureaucracy, he felt that his life’s work had been a failure.

“They are pickpockets,” Dr. Arslani said scornfully.

In his lapel, the old man still wore the fading emblem of the Order of Lebanon, awarded years earlier for his services to the republic. Looking at him, Rogers felt he was seeing a remnant of a vanishing era.

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