Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius Read Free Book Online Page A

did.
    Khartoum was the first child. Oman was the second. In those first few months in Beirut, Rogers and his wife still didn’t like to talk about what had happened to their daughter in Oman. It was too painful, too much a symbol of what frightened Jane about the Middle East.
    Jane coped. She learned to live with the privations of the Arab world. She studied Arabic, read and reread her beloved English novels, immersed herself in the world of her children. Surrounded by the deceit of the intelligence business, she somehow remained tender and vulnerable, as idealistic as she believed her husband to be.
    As the years passed, Rogers’s fascination with the Middle East became more intense. He was an Arabist in his heart, as well as his head. He spoke the language fluently, understood the strange rituals and nuances of the culture, grieved at the stupidity and suffering of the Arabs. He felt the Middle East like a physical sensation on his skin: from the moist, dank air of Jiddah on the Red Sea, where clothes hung from the body like wet rags in midsummer, to the dry deserts outside Cairo and the crunchy taste of sand in the mouth and throat during the winter dust storms.
    Unlike many of his colleagues, who served their time overseas chiefly to advance their promotion prospects back at headquarters, Rogers wanted to stay abroad forever. He was happiest trekking through the wilds of Dhofar in Oman to call on a tribal leader, or sitting in a parlor in Aden, chewing qat, as he talked Arab politics late into the night with a Marxist revolutionary.
    Rogers tried, not always successfully, to keep from romanticizing his work. He reminded himself that, at bottom, it was a struggle for control, over his emotions and those of others. But there was also a restlessness deep down in him—that burr under the saddle—which was part of why he had been drawn to intelligence work in the first place. There were so many layers of self-control in Rogers that people usually didn’t see the yearning and the impulsiveness. But it was there.
    Jane Rogers saw it and left it alone. If she worried about her husband, it was only that he worked too hard. She was the sort of woman who could not imagine character defects in someone she loved.

6
     
    Beirut; November–December 1969
     
    The CIA, which had a system for everything, had a lengthy procedure for assessing potential agents.
    The first step, every young case officer was told, was “spotting” a potential agent who had access to useful information. Then came a sometimes lengthy period of “development,” when the prospective recruit was watched and encouraged and bonds of trust were forged on both sides. Eventually there was “assessment,” when the case officer had to decide whether to initiate a formal proposal to recruit the candidate as a controlled agent.
    If the answer was yes, then a new bureaucratic procedure—known as the Headquarters’ Operational Approval system, or HOA—took over. The case officer filed detailed biographical information on the recruit, including a two-part Personal Record Questionnaire, or PRQ. Rogers suspected that this cumbersome routine was modelled on the Yale admissions process.
    The Jamal operation was barely past the “spotting” phase. But before going any further, Rogers took some simple precautions to protect Fuad, himself, and the agency if things went sour.
    He outlined for Fuad a new set of work rules. Fuad should stay away from the American Embassy or any known American official other than Rogers, his case officer. He should immediately adopt countersurveillance procedures at his hotel, in the street, and on the telephone. The station would monitor the Soviet Embassy for any sign that they had been tipped by Jamal to Fuad’s identity. The station’s liaison officer would also make a discreet check of the wire-tapping logs compiled by the intelligence branch of the Lebanese Army, known as the Deuxième Bureau.
    Jamal’s silence about Fuad’s