John Weisman: Car Trouble in the CIA
This article first appeared on Military.com on May 28, 2003
I have a friend, let's call him Michael, who worked as a CIA case officer in the Syrian capital of Damascus a few years ago. Michael worked under embassy cover. His day job was as a junior consular officer, and he spent hour after hour interviewing Syrians and others who wanted U.S. visas. It was tedious, often boring work, but it had one positive aspect in that it helped Michael perfect his Arabic.
After the Consulate closed for the evening, Michael would often slip out of his apartment, run an SDR-a Surveillance Detection Route-and then, secure in the knowledge he wasn't being tracked by Syrian counterintelligence, he would meet with one of his agents.
The most productive of these was a military officer I'll call Mahmoud. Mahmoud was a colonel in an elite unit. He had close connections to Syria's intelligence apparatus, as well as entrée into the Alawite ruling class, including the Asad family.
Mahmoud looked like your movie-star version of a Middle Eastern officer. He was tall, dark, and mustachioed. Unlike most of his colleagues, he exercised regularly, running and working out with weights. And he was a shooter. He owned a vintage Belgian-made Browning Hi-Power, which he would shoot at a nearby military range
Mahmoud drove to his meetings with Michael in a sporty little Renault sedan, which he handled much like a Beirut cab driver-racing through the dark streets at 100 miles an hour and signaling lane changes with his horn or headlights.
Now, Mahmoud had become a spy for the United States at the risk of his life not for money. He spied on his own government simply because he loved America.
He was smitten with our culture, our open society, and our democracy. He reveled in American culture and always asked Michael for samples of American food. "Some day," he often told Michael, "you will arrange for me and my family to emigrate to the United States."
Now, Mahmoud had proved himself to Michael by stealing the technical manuals for Syria's Soviet-supplied SS-21 "Scarab" surface to surface missiles, so Michael could copy the manuals and send them back to Langley. Syria had almost two dozen SS-21s at the time.
The Scarab has a range of 72 miles. Unlike many surface to surface missiles it can be launched against a moving target. In fact, after the Pentagon saw copies of the manuals Mahmoud had stolen for Michael, it called for certain changes in the design of the Patriot missile system to compensate for the Scarab's unique capabilities.
The bottom line, then, is that Mahmoud was a valuable CIA asset, whose information had proved valuable in protecting the national security of the United States.
A few months after Mahmoud gave Michael the manuals, the transmission in his Renault burned up. He asked Michael, at their next meeting, whether CIA could advance him $600 to repair the auto.
Michael didn't see any problem. He cabled Langley with the request accompanied by a strong letter of recommendation.
Three days Michael got his answer. Which was a resounding "No." The bean-counters had decided that agents' auto transmissions were not allowable expenses.
Soon after that, Michael left Damascus for another assignment elsewhere in the region. I asked him once how he'd felt when Langley refused to pay Mahmoud's transmission bill.
"It was a real warning shot," he said. "I'd been trained to protect my agents. That's the bond between agent and case officer. The agent knows that no matter how bad things get, the case officer will do everything in his power to protect him. So here's a guy who's risked his life for us not once but a lot of times, and the people at Langley thank him by saying 'Piss off.'"
When I asked Michael whether he thought Mahmoud was still working for us, he shrugged. "Would you, if you'd been treated like that?"
There is a point to this story. Given Mahmoud's political connections and his rank, he'd be a top Syrian general today. And privy, one suspects, to a lot of the answers U.S. intelligence is looking for right now. Like, how many Iraqi Ba'ath officials are in Syria, or whether they transited through Damascus to other locations. Or, did Iraq place any of its WMD assets across the Syrian border-and if so, where might they be hidden?
Maybe CIA already knows the answers to all those questions. But somehow, finding the answer might have been made a little easier for the price of a $600 transmission job.
©2003 John Weisman