The Human Factor. Ishmael Jones

and I and our wives next attended a “crash and burn” course in rapid escape and how to deal with attackers and terrorists while driving. We used a fleet of battered cars and raced around, ramming them into each other. Everyone enjoyed this course immensely. We did a lot of “nerfing” by hitting a car in one of its rear wheels, causing it to spin off the road. The instructors had just finished teaching a group of highway patrolmen how to do it. Nerfing is an excellent way to get another car off the road, far more effective than ramming it in the side.

      One of the points of the course was to learn how to cause damage to cars when necessary. Chauffeurs in particular can freeze up during a terrorist attack, as they’ve spent years making sure their car doesn’t get scratched and aren’t prepared for the moment when it’s time to let all hell break loose.

      AT THE END OF the driving course, HQs invited me to join the Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Combating terrorism sounded like the perfect use of my time, so I went ahead with it. At the CTC I found rows of TV sets tuned to various news stations, with people watching them attentively.

      A friend of mine worked in the CTC. He told me privately that just the previous week, a cable had come in saying that a terrorist group in Lebanon was planning to kidnap a US citizen upon his arrival at Khartoum airport that day. “I walked the cable around here, trying to get permission to warn him,” he said, “but the managers didn’t want to do anything. They said they didn’t like the source, and anyway, it was almost 5 o’clock and time to go home. The next day, the US citizen was indeed captured and held hostage by the terrorists. Luckily, he was able to convince the terrorists that he meant them no harm and was on their side, and they let him go, all by himself. But no one in the Center was reprimanded. In fact, no one ever said anything more about it.”

      CTC was, in fact, an early and innovative attempt to break through the Agency’s geographical turf barriers, with the authority to track terrorists through different countries.¹⁶ But CTC couldn’t grant overseas assignments because the geographical divisions controlled those.

      Max and I graduated from our final training course on the evening the first Gulf War began. Several Agency mandarins attended our graduation cocktail party, including the chief of the Middle East division. They’d been taken aback to hear that the US military had begun the war. Nobody had bothered to let them know.

      Max and I were euphoric at having at last finished our training and domestic service. We were sad to have lost so many of our classmates, though. Most had quit. Max, Jonah, a fourth classmate, and I were all that remained of the original group. The people who quit were all well-qualified, and I remember them fondly.

      As it happened, I was the first of my class to land approval for an overseas assignment, and my family and I packed up happily to head for the Middle East.

      ★ 5 ★

       Sent to Spy Out the Land

      And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan

       Numbers 13:17

      Our plane descended in the night and we could see the gas flares burning in the distant oil fields. We arrived in the Middle East on a midnight flight and checked in to a hotel by 0200. A wedding celebration in the ballroom turned bellicose and broke out into the street and parking lot below. Men swirled about, yelling and fighting. They hiked their robes up around their thighs and slapped at their opponents with their sandals. At one point, a car swerved out of the darkness and rammed into a dense hedge in front of the hotel.

      Jetlag woke us up a few hours later. We watched the sunrise, the sky red with dust and humidity. We took our children for a walk to a crude playground across the street, with an ancient rotating platform and a big rusty climbing gym—the kind long since judged a liability hazard in the US. The kids darkened as the playground dirt stuck to them in the humidity. Competing “Allahu Akbar” prayer calls bellowed from all directions. We were overjoyed to be on our first adventure overseas. At last, I was a real case officer on assignment. But goals are a moving target. I’d won my overseas assignment, sure, but now I had to make it a success.

      If I received a one-way ticket home because I couldn’t get properly established, it would be the end of my Agency career. I couldn’t bear languishing in the Oakwood or at a US post, praying that HQs would approve another overseas assignment. I promised myself never to wander the halls of HQs with the other beaten-down non-State Department officers. I had to make this assignment work.

      We quickly set up by renting a house and buying furniture and a car. Our oldest child was ready for school, but there were no slots available in the nearby British school. On a hunch—a hunch informed by the overtly defined racial and class distinctions in the Middle East—my wife took my son for a visit and the school made a space available. They’d just wanted to get a look at the boy first.

      I bought a modest, mid-sized car. I only needed one because my wife could not legally drive. I’d already guessed how important my choice of car would be, and as my career progressed I saw the issue arise again and again. Sly colleagues wheedled lots of money out of HQs by convincing them that an expensive car was necessary for the officer’s high-powered position. A modest car might draw suspicion. Why, they’d ask, does such an important businessman have such a mediocre car?

      Of course the threat came less from what a hostile foreign intelligence service thought than from how our colleagues behaved. When a State Department officer—himself issued a modest car—saw another Agency officer driving around in a shiny black Mercedes Benz, his mounting envy could end the officer’s tour. During the course of my career I counted at least a dozen situations in which an officer’s extravagant car led to a one-way ticket home. Then again, the car may have been merely a symptom of the officer’s lack of judgment.

      Exploring the region, an American business associate and I headed out over the desert to find an ancient oasis we’d read about. We got some rough directions and eventually saw a spot of green in the distance. The oasis is lush, but it is surrounded by sand and there is not another living thing, not even a blade of grass, as far as the eye can see. About the oasis there were many theories and legends. As we got closer, the car got stuck in the sand. The 120-degree heat bore down on us while I tried various methods to get the car out. “I see death, death,” said my friend. Fortunately, another traveler appeared and gave us a ride into town. I left my friend next to a refrigerator full of cold drinks in a “cold store,” the Middle Eastern version of a 7-11, and I hired a tow truck.