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Unit 999
by Douglas DeBono, 2005

3

Stories

Louis Edwards was one of the oldest Iraq watchers. Even when Saddam was a nominal ally before an Iraqi Mirage fired two Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missiles at the USS Stark, Louis pegged Saddam as a bad guy. The attack killed 37 sailors, left a ten-by-fifteen foot hole in the port side, shattered superstructure, and forced Captain Brindel to retire.

In 1987, the Reagan Administration counted Saddam an ally and seemed content to let him bleed the Iranians for eight years. Louis did not endear himself to anyone when he argued that Saddam was akin to a Pit Bull incapable of loyalty.

Louis watched the rise and fall of the Company. He spent time in Vietnam and Chile. He weathered the cold days when Admiral Stansfield Turner publicly chastised the CIA during his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence. He survived Frank Church and his pack of do-gooders, who thought the Soviet Empire was just another legitimate form of government. He rode high during the Reagan years and implemented a policy designed to win, not coexist.

Those heady days were followed by what he called, “the great decline.” The Company morphed into a risk adverse organization dazzled by the technological wonders and a second-class status. The Clinton years tackled every adversary as a law enforcement issue, granting the Bureau the lead in virtually every investigation. They tackled foreign leaders by openly funding and sending their hatchet men to run campaigns. Others they simply litigated to death. It was an odd, gray time and it gave America’s enemies a chance to gather strength.

Louis directed more than half of the covert operations that took place during the nineties—a paltry, pathetic number. Successive DCIs challenged and threatened him, but Louis had learned the Beltway’s tangled ways. There were things politicians feared more than the National Rifle Association and big labor—they feared their private peccadilloes emblazoned on their hometown newspapers. They feared embarrassing details leaching out to the fourth estate about Cayman bank accounts and high priced mistresses. They feared a man who knew where the bodies were buried, and who was unafraid to dig up nasty skeletons.

He lived in the deep black world, directing and manipulating people to his will and his perception of what needed to be done. He funded operations from illicit bank accounts scattered across Caribbean and Asian banks. He chose his moments carefully, then acted to subdue and destroy the country’s enemies. He failed as many times as he succeeded. Yet no one else could match his record.

September 11th brought about a new reality. Suddenly, people who had shunned Louis for decades realized they needed malicious SOBs capable of taking the fight to Osama’s cavernous hideouts. When pressed in close door testimony, DCI George Tenet admitted that the Company’s covert assets had atrophied to almost nothing. Too many years had been dedicated to accountants, wiz bang gizmos and woefully inadequate policy models. The idea that spy agency should have spies got lost along the way, and the CIA became another Washington institution shackled in bureaucratic red tape.

The country suddenly needed men like Louis—men who knew how to fight a covert war. He did not accept a titular position or move to a bigger office. He maintained the meager staff permitted him under the Clinton years. Instead, he asked for money, volunteers and a free hand. His needs were modest and his results spectacular. Louis had a war to fight and an enemy to find.

Louis had one assistant, Jonas Benjamin, and two bodyguards: Mister Smith and Mister Jones. The bodyguards had changed over time, but the names stuck.

Originally, Jonas ended up assigned to Louis as part of a cruel joke. The Company wanted him to retire. They banished him to office on the third floor next to the janitor’s room in an obscure building at Langley’s campus. When Jonas showed up for work, he was nothing more than a bright-eyed kid fresh out of college.

Stripped of assets and prestige, Louis assessed the situation and realized his enemies had provided him a golden opportunity. Jonas did not know how the modern spy game worked, or failed to work in Louis’s opinion. So he took the fledgling spy under his wing and tutored him in deception, misdirection and coercion. Along the way, Jonas met the remnants of covert teams Louis ran during the eighties.

He trained Jonas to question the obvious and look behind the facts. Too many questions remained unasked by the mind-numbing bean counters. Lawyers and espionage remained a poisonous concoction that the Company’s top floor management imbibed through out the nineties. It took four airplanes to rouse them from their stupor and by then it was almost too late.

Countless stories were written about the Company’s surprise at Osama bin Laden’s brazen attack. Everyone ran for the tall weeds, except for Louis. He knew what had to be done; furthermore he had done what needed to be done. Covert, active operations—and he had an assistant that clearly met the requirements for the new war. Jonas embraced technology, but he did not worship it.

Jonas became an extension of Louis, dredging up facts, angles and details the older man needed to see.

Soon, Louis intended to teach Jonas the toughest lesson of all, sending men into harm’s way and knowing they probably would not come back. Sometimes the truth needed embellishment to convince men to do the hard things. Louis’s soul had hard calluses. His dreams were haunted by men he had sent on black operations. Men he never saw again, but the country benefited from their sacrifice.

Virtually every operation Louis planned over the last two decades remained under seal in a fifty-year vault buried beneath the Pentagon. He doubted fifty years was enough time for the bloody history he helped write.

Jonas arrived after nine on Mondays. Louis never kept track of when he worked or played—the job required a man’s soul. Waging wars never fit the narrow parameters of eight-to-five.

Today, Jonas bustled through their common door at six-thirty. He juggled a smoothie, a bagel and a brief case, before sliding into his workstation.

“Morning,” murmured Louis.

Jonas glanced across the room and grunted. He spun the combination locks on his briefcase. It took two tries before he got it right. Three mistakes would have required a security technician to open his briefcase. He opened the case and dug through the file folders until he found the one he wanted.

“You need to read this,” he said.

Louis accepted the file. “What’s this?”

“An interrogation transcript,” replied Jonas.

Louis flipped open the file.

“Translated, but I also have the original language as well,” he sighed. “Not that it does me much good. My Arabic is marginal at best, and this guy has a one of those regional dialects.”

Louis nodded slowly. “Is this guy still at Gitmo?”

Jonas nodded. “I checked on that last night.”

Louis tossed the file on his blotter. The prospect of another rambling diatribe did not whet his appetite. “What’s so special about this guy?”

“He’s not your run-of-the-mill rabid bomb thrower. He’s got an offbeat story I think you need to hear,” explained Jonas.

“Uh-huh,” said Louis unconvinced.

Jonas sipped his smoothie and flipped open his notebook. “He’s mentioned Aralsk midway through the interrogation, but no one understood what he was saying.”

Louis glanced back at the file resting on his blotter. “What are you saying?”

“When they transcribed the tapes and then did the translation, there is a comment that makes no sense. I mean the translation is just mumbo-jumbo. I think the interrogators missed the opportunity. So I dug up the tapes and listened to the actual words,” explained Jonas.

“There had to be a reason—something about this guy that made you look closer. What was it?” probed Louis.

“He was picked up in northern Iraq close to the Ansar al Islam enclave,” began Jonas.

Louis closed his eyes again. Ansar al Islam attempted to run a private enclave in the Kurdish areas near the Iranian border. They set up camp behind a natural fortress of rocky cliffs and trackless canyons. As the Americans worked their way down the target list, they came to Ansar’s impenetrable lair. Forty Tomahawk cruise missiles made the lair a bit more penetrable.

The pinpoint bombing raid reduced the extremist camp to craters and body parts. The CIA team went in behind the Army Rangers and began sifting through the debris. Army medical teams followed them and recovered DNA samples in an effort to identify the bad guys.

Everyone had heard the rumors that Saddam had crossed the line, supplying biological and chemical precursors to fanatics. The CIA’s wise men largely discounted such notions, because the opportunity for miscalculation suggested that only a madman handed a loaded gun to an infant.

The CIA teams followed standard operating procedures and set up detectors. The chemical sensors detected Ricin—a protein toxin that acts like a cellular poison. It was more evidence that WMD technology had been disseminated to al Qaeda and other like minded groups.

Congressional critics pooh-poohed the idea and pointed to the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) classification. Ricin was a Category B biological agent that represented a minor threat to large population centers.

Louis opened his eyes and stared at the file. “He was part of Ansar?”

“That’s unclear, but they pulled him out from under a building. Because they found him in the vicinity of the Ansar camps, they labeled him an enemy combatant. It was the Ansar connection that drew my attention,” explained Jonas.

“What did he say about Aralsk?” asked Louis.

“It’s garbled on the tapes. Like I said the interrogators missed it, but its there. I heard it. I slowed it down, filtered out the noise and he says Aralsk.”

Louis shook his head at nothing. “That’s an entirely different league from Ricin,” whispered the aging spymaster.

Jonas nodded slowly.

“How quickly can you arrange for me to see this guy?”

“You’re booked on military transport out of Andrews at ten,” answered Jonas.

Louis chuckled. “You were pretty confident.”

“I know your hot buttons,” smiled Jonas.

Indeed he did.

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