Welcome to DouglasDeBono.Com, the Cyberspace Home of author Douglas De Bono. Mr. DeBono seamlessly blends history and fiction with the deft precision of a literary surgeon. His knowledge of special forces, intelligence agencies, political corruption and the tradecraft of espionage are unrivaled in the literary world. --Jim Clonts, Author Of MIG Drivers I was glued to my cozy chair during the entire story! I enjoyed the characters and found both the dialogue and the plot of this fantastic story a real edge of your seat kind of read from cover-to-cover! (A Highly Recommended Novel!) --Victoria Taylor Murray, Author Of Friendly Enemies/Le Fin

Unit 999
by Douglas DeBono, 2005

2

The Working Group

The hunt for weapons of mass destruction lost its appeal when the post war inspection teams failed to find anything more threatening than a couple of buried gas centrifuges and unlabeled binary chemical shells. The CIA made repeated attempts to justify the pre-war intelligence, but time after time, George Tenet made excuses for deficiencies leading up to the war.

The political season fogged many memories, and no one seemed to recall that WMDs was one of the reasons for invading Iraq—not the only one. The hunt for Saddam’s secret weapons soon took on the notoriety of a snipe hunt, and the Company’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) quickly found a way to disassociate itself.

While the politicos ran for cover and the bureaucrats shuffled paper, there were those who knew the weapons had existed. There had been too many stories, and too many markers to ignore. Saddam had imported yellow cake uranium. He had produced thousands of liters of Anthrax. There were indications that the West Nile Virus plaguing America and Israel came from the same genome.

Saddam, the great liar and corrupter, had been up to something. Based on the post war evidence, the French had been supplying missiles as late as January 2003—two months before American and British led forces jumped off. Dual use technologies, specifically banned by the United Nations were funneled through Jordan, Syria and Turkey. The provisional Iraqi government and American intelligence officers had found the receipts in French, German and Russian.

The Butcher of Baghdad might have been a madman, but he was a meticulous bookkeeper.

Charlie Brock had returned to the Defense Intelligence Agency on September 12, 2001. Working as an accountant in an Omaha insurance firm lost its appeal when the towers came crashing down.

Frustrated by the myopic approach towards terrorism, where everything was treated as a law enforcement issue and the FBI sent G-men out to arrest bad guys, Charlie turned in his papers and retired to a civilian job a few months before the 2000 Presidential election. He thought the private sector would offer him what he found lacking in government, but bureaucracies everywhere suffer the same maladies.

Like everyone else on September 11th, he returned home in the morning and remained glued to the cable news channels. The sickening crunch of the towers collapsing seared his memory. He quietly drank his way through a twelve pack. Charlie had a fair idea of who was behind the attack and he wondered if the Bush Administration would listen to the Bureau’s siren call about criminals, or did they have a clearer perspective? Did they understand that this was an act of war?

Sometime after the sun went down, his phone rang. His former boss, General Paul Moore, was on the other end of the line. “Would you like to come back and work for me?”

Charlie thought about the insurance company. He knew he could not go back. He knew he could be helpful in striking back. “Do we get to kill the bad guys this time?” he heard himself saying.

“Why don’t you listen to the president tonight,” he suggested.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Charlie.

“I’ve been told the gloves come off now. No more restraints and no more arrest warrants. We’re going to get a hunting license. It’s what you have been arguing for,” replied Moore.

Charlie caught a military transport at Offutt Air Force Base the next morning. He landed at Andrews Air Force Base outside of Washington D.C. and found a desk, security badge and assignment waiting for him.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) went to work in tracking Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden, but everyone knew that sooner or later the day of reckoning between American and Iraq was fast approaching. The Anthrax scare caused the Beltway crowd to demand an accounting. Everyone wanted in on the hunt for Saddam’s weapons.

Post war Iraq turned into an intelligence bonanza, but the absence of any weapons tainted the effort. The CIA palmed the WMD hunt off on the DIA, and none of the careerists wanted to touch the problem. Eventually, the mess landed in Charlie’s lap.

The WMD Working Group occupied three offices in sub-basement of the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC). Intelligence insiders dubbed the blocky, silvery-white building the Death Star. Most of the time Charlie did not feel like a Jedi Knight; usually he confronted a puzzle distorted by rumors, half truths, red herrings and U.N. weapon inspection teams.

Charlie reviewed the CTC’s approach to the weapons search and discovered they had relied on David Kay’s inspection teams. As far as Charlie could determine, everyone followed the same worn leads. No one attempted to get inside Saddam’s head and think like a lunatic. Charlie wrote on the white board in the main conference room: What would Saddam do?

He challenged his team to think outside of the box, review the evidence and develop answers. No one disputed the fact that Saddam was crazy, but he was a sly fox. Charlie could not reconcile Saddam’s declaration that he had no WMDs with his admissions to substantial stocks of chemical and biological weapons. When Hans Blix failed to find anything, no one working for the CIA or MI6 seemed very surprise.

The problem boiled down to three possibilities. First, the weapons never really existed beyond the research stage—so there was nothing to find. Second, the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) had found and destroyed everything Saddam had stashed away—so there was nothing more to discover. Third, the long lead up to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM provided Saddam sufficient time to move and secure the weapons—so there were WMDs to be found.

Charlie believed the third possibility. He badgered his team to hunt for more answers. His team worked up a comprehensive theory that did little to soothe the Maalox addicted leadership.

His team theorized that Saddam had moved his weapons into three areas: Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, Syria and Iraq’s western desert. Satellite imagery recorded exceptionally high levels of traffic during January and February 2003. The destinations for most of this traffic appeared to be a series of bunkers inside the heavily defended Bekaa Valley, and Syria’s Mediterranean ports.

This theory relied on the belief that Saddam entrusted his most lethal arsenal to the likes of Bashar Assad and his Baathist regime. These weapons were diverted south into Lebanon, where the Syrians controlled Bekaa. Of course, if the weapons were actually stored in the Bekaa, it seemed reasonable someone would have used them by now against the coalition forces. Instead, the attacks had boiled down to car bombs and mortar attacks. Whenever the insurgents came eyeball-to-eyeball with the Marines or the Army, they blinked and ran for cover under the nearest Mosque.

Critics claimed the Bekaa bunkers were a convenient myth put forth by neo-conservatives and other knuckle dragging warmongers. Nonetheless, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA) that used to be called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) maintained reconnaissance satellite coverage above the bunkers, and ordered routine signals intelligence flights along Lebanon’s Mediterranean Coast. No one knew what the Bekaa bunkers contained and that was enough to bother the worried spooks up the road at the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The second part of the theory relied on the al Qaeda fleet. No one took the idea seriously that Osama controlled fifteen different freighters and moved them around the globe. The snickers behind Charlie’s back derisively referred to the entire idea as the Flying Dutchmen. Few people prior to September 11th seriously believed the United States could be humbled by a pack of fanatics using box cutters. He did not press the point. He simply urged his team to continue to hunt for evidence and clues. If the al Qaeda fleet existed, then there had to be paper trail.

Charlie’s team pointed to the MiG-25 and Su-25 jets that were buried at Al-Taqqadum Air Force Base in western Iraq. American forces dug up the planes after major combat operations ended. The theory suggested that Saddam buried other things in the vast, unpopulated deserts between Baghdad and Damascus.

What kept the WMD Working Group in business was the nervous undercurrent that Saddam had managed to squirrel away his weapons. No one wanted to be right or wrong on this issue.

Satellite reconnaissance told Charlie certain things, but to know for sure he needed boots on the ground in the Bekaa. He needed men inside the bunkers. He had lobbied for a covert or overt mission to penetrate the area.

The Bekaa was one of the most heavily defended areas in the entire region. The air defense network rivaled the ones deployed in Cuba, North Korea and Baghdad. Thirty thousand Syria army troops patrolled the length of the Bekaa. Even Israel was reticent to attempt missions into or over the Bekaa, and the MOSSAD did not share the WMD Working Group’s opinion when it came to the bunker system. They claimed it was used for conventional arms.

Charlie logged into his workstation. The flat panel display snapped to life, reminding him that his password was due to expire in the next ten days. Charlie groaned and wondered what he would come up with this time. He had already run through the list of childhood pets, old girl friends and comic-book characters. The algorithm forced a change every forty-five days and kept a history of his selections. It made sure he never changed to one similar to an old one.

Too many issues crowd his Monday. Charlie clicked LATER and logged into his machine. He brought up his email program and went to the morning intelligence brief distributed to all supervisors. He scanned through the document, reaching for his coffee and struggling to keep his focus. Most of the daily briefs were safe statements designed to convey a general sense of knowledge without drawing too much fire. Intelligence and caution did not go together.

He closed the document and paged down to the overnight intelligence specific to the WMD Working Group. The document opened up to a series of hyper links. The first link exploded into an image of the Bekaa Valley. The terrain was familiar. It covered the area along the Orontes River.

The Israelis provided the first imagery of the bunkers from their Ofek-5 reconnaissance satellite. He clicked open the next three and rubbed his eyes. The third and forth images were infrared and they displayed multiple heat plumes outside the bunkers.

“Oh, no,” he whispered.

He checked the time stamp and cursed again. The images were a week old. It took that long for the proper classification and dissemination to reach his email box. How was he supposed to run a credible intelligence operation when the security pinheads forced him to play captain-may-I.

He picked up his phone, dialing his boss’s line.

“Moore,” barked the two-star general.

“Paul, we’ve got activity in the Bekaa,” he said too quickly.

“Uh-huh,” came a less than enthusiastic reply.

“These images are over a week old. We haven’t seen activity near the bunkers before,” continued Charlie.

“What’s it mean?” asked Moore.

“It means I need to insert a team and find out what’s going on down there,” snapped Charlie.

Paul Moore sighed. “Charlie, we’ve been over this before. No one is keen to authorize an intrusion into Lebanon. No one wants to start another fight with the Syrians.”

“The Syrians already picked that fight,” argued Charlie.

“I don’t make policy and neither do you. We don’t start wars here—you know that,” chided Moore.

“I know what my charter is. I’m not asking to start a war. I just need boots on the ground to check this out. I think they’ve got something.”

“That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? We don’t have a handle on the them and no one believes there’s a something to go after.”

“Then why did you give me this job?” demanded Charlie.

“I needed somebody who believed in Saddam’s WMDs. I need more than your gut feeling to authorize a covert look-see into the Bekaa,” answered Moore. “I’m not the bad guy here. Give me a justification.”

“Paul these satellite images are seven days old,” complained Charlie.

“What do you want?” asked Moore.

“Real time imagery—my team can handle the raw data. I don’t need some school marm deciding what I can and cannot see.”

Moore rolled the idea around for a few moments. “Okay, you’ll have what you want by this afternoon.”

“Thanks,” said Charlie. After he rang off, he wondered if he had just passed some sort of test.

Douglas De Bono / DouglasDeBono.Com Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota E-Mail readermail@DouglasDeBono.Com