Chapter 8
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
I’M telling you, Irene, it doesn’t feel right.”
As a CIA case officer, Irene Kennedy wasn’t much on feelings, at least in so much as they pertained to intelligence products.
A finding either was or it wasn’t. Too often an analyst allowed personal biases to intrude into what should be an analytical summary of raw intelligence.
As with a journalist desperately chasing a story they want to be true, the temptation to twist facts and asset reporting to fit a predetermined narrative was real.
Normally, the moment an analyst started talking about feelings, hunches, or their gut, Irene made a beeline for the door.
Normally.
But this was Hannah Edwards.
“What has you concerned?” Irene said.
Technically, this wasn’t even Irene’s billet.
While she was notionally assigned to the Counterterrorism Center in the basement of the CIA’s Original Headquarters Building as the expert on all things Arab and Islamic, this role was a stand-in for her true job.
A way to satisfy snoopers, busybodies, and the occasional congressional staffer.
According to the organizational chart, Dr. Irene Kennedy spent her days sifting through data related to Islamic terrorism and relaying her findings to Thomas Stansfield, the CIA’s director.
At not yet thirty, Irene was young for such an important role, but her rapid progression wasn’t unheard of.
Stansfield was known for prizing talent over seniority, so while her close proximity to the director did raise eyebrows, her basement office tended to assuage her critics.
The truth of what Irene did for Stansfield was much more controversial.
“This column of trucks,” Hannah said, tapping a finger on one of the many photographs spread across her desk. “They’re heading the wrong way.”
Irene frowned as she studied the imagery, intrigued despite herself.
The picture had come courtesy of a KH-11 Key Hole satellite circling the earth at an altitude of nearly two hundred miles.
The imagery had been an opportunistic grab, meaning that the satellite was not in a geostationary orbit above this section of Iraq.
Instead, it had been expending precious maneuvering fuel to obtain a better view of Iraqi air defense emplacements when some enterprising controller at NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office, decided to take footage of the Iraqi-Syrian border crossing.
It might seem odd that she was poring over imagery obtained via a chance decision, but Irene had learned long ago that in the world of espionage luck often played an oversized role.
“Not sure I follow,” Irene said.
Actually, Irene was very sure that she was not following Hannah’s logic, but she knew to temper her instinct toward bluntness.
Though they both worked for the CIA, analysts and case officers were very different.
Irene and her fellow spies were modern-day swashbucklers.
Men and women charged with boarding an enemy nation and stealing its treasure in the form of secrets.
Analysts on the other hand were trained to be conservative in their approach and analytical in their observations.
Someone had once described the difference in personalities attracted to each profession as the equivalent of the football team and the chess club sharing a locker room.
Both groups represented the same high school, but their rosters were very different.
“See how high they’re resting on their struts?” Hannah said. “The trucks are empty. Normally, military transports drive into Syria empty and return full. This is the opposite.”
Irene bit her lip as she thought. “Full of what?”
Hannah shrugged. “Different things. The Iraqi military is outfitted almost exclusively with Soviet equipment. Old Soviet equipment.”
“And old equipment breaks,” Irene said.
Hannah nodded. “Exactly. Thanks to postwar sanctions, smuggling has become quite the growth industry in Iraq. Oil is trucked out through Syria and spare parts are driven in the same way. These trucks should be loaded with equipment, but they’re empty.”
Frowning, Irene peered more closely at the photographs. “What do you think it means?”
“Not sure,” Hannah said, “but this is unusual. An anomaly.”
“And you get paid to notice anomalies.”
Hannah smiled. “Exactly.”
Irene tapped a finger against her lips, considering.
While her fellow basement cubicle dwellers regarded her as one of the gang, there was no getting around the fact that she enjoyed a level of access to agency decision-makers that they did not.
Specifically, access to the chief agency decision-maker.
As such, she was treated differently. Her coworkers made a point of talking with her.
Sometimes this took the form of flattery or ass-kissing.
This, while annoying, was easily dealt with.
It was the overt attempts to get work products noticed by the director that she found harder to address.
Reports left on her desk, observations scribbled on sticky notes, casual conversations that were anything but.
She supposed she had only herself to blame for this nonsense.
While the CIA was the world’s premier intelligence organization, it was also a bureaucracy staffed with bureaucrats.
Among the careerists who inhabited Langley’s halls, fiefdoms were religiously guarded and access equaled importance.
On more than one occasion, Irene had rescued a particularly promising bit of intelligence work from the scrap heap and put the document under Stansfield’s nose.
She’d done this for the same no-nonsense reason she did everything—to provide the best possible work product to her boss.
She’d also highlighted the analyst who’d written the report, which had resulted in accolades for the author and anger from the person’s supervisor.
That anger proved to be short-lived, since the employee could honestly say they had nothing to do with Irene circumventing the chain of command.
Besides, the testy supervisor knew better than to take out their frustration on Stansfield’s prized employee.
Now her desk was inundated with folders containing interesting bits of intelligence. When Hannah had approached her for a consult, Irene had steeled herself for another such interaction, but in this case, she thought the analyst might actually have something.
The question was what to do with the information.
“Let’s say you’re right,” Irene said. “Where would you take this?”
The look of surprise on Hannah’s face confirmed Irene’s intuition.
Unlike her coworkers, Hannah had brought the intelligence to Irene’s attention for the reasons she’d stated, not as an attempt to curry favor.
Irene made a mental note to flag the young analyst for possible inclusion into something she planned to pitch to Stansfield.
The Orion program worked because it was staffed with the right people, who were given the freedom to operate outside the stuffy confines of the agency’s entrenched organizational charts.
Maybe the analytical side of the house could benefit from a similar initiative.
“Uh… I guess I would flag this for further development. Perhaps an operational tasking. At the very least Damascus and Baghdad Stations should canvass their assets for reporting on irregularities relating to smuggled cargo. Better still, it would be great if we had some case officers capable of poking around the Syrian and Iraqi black markets.”
“Agreed,” Irene said. “Why don’t you put together a list of intelligence requirements that we can circulate.”
“What about involving NSA? We could cross-reference any HUMINT reporting with an uptick in SIGINT. Even if they don’t have captured conversations that are of interest, we could still see if there are changes to known smugglers’ call patterns.
Serves to reason if they’ve altered their modus operandi, someone has told them to do it.
I could also send a request for more imagery to NRO.
Maybe we’d get lucky and see where the convoy originated, or at the very least, determine if this wrong-way traffic is an anomaly or a change in the way the smugglers are doing business. ”
“Great thinking,” Irene said. “If you come up with anything else, please pursue it. Let’s touch base in a couple of hours. I’ve got a meeting with the director.”
Hannah nodded, but if the thought of Stansfield reviewing her product impressed her, she didn’t show it.
Instead, the woman pursed her lips as her fingers flew across her keyboard.
Irene had been forgotten. The same couldn’t be said of her cubicle mates.
More than one envious glance was directed Irene’s way as she gathered up the photographs and slipped them into a folder festooned with classified markings.
Hannah Edwards was about to become much more popular.