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CHAPTER THREE
The Fort Meade report on the deliberations of the Koran Committee was ready by dawn of that Saturday and destroyed several planned weekends. One of those roused during the Saturday night at his home in Old Alexandria was Marek Gumienny, Deputy Director (Operations) at the CIA. He was bidden to report straight to his office without being told why.
The ‘why’ was on his desk when he got there. It was not even dawn over Washington but the first indications of the coming sun pinked the distant hills of Prince George’s County where the Patuxent River flows down to join the Chesapeake.
Marek Gumienny’s office was one of the few on the sixth and top floor of the big, oblong building among the cluster that forms the headquarters of the CIA
and is known simply as Langley. It had recently been redubbed the Old Building to distinguish it from the mirror-image New Building that housed the expanding agency since 9/11.
In the hierarchy of the CIA, the Director of Central Intelligence has traditionally been a political appointment but the real muscle are habitually the two Deputy Directors. Ops handles the actual intelligence-gathering while the DD (Intelligence) covers the collation and analysis of the incoming harvest to turn raw information into a meaningful picture.
Just below these two are the Directors of Counter-Intelligence (to keep the agency free from penetration and in-house traitors) and Counter-Terrorism (increasingly becoming the boiler room as the agency’s war swerved from the old USSR to the new threats out of the Middle East).
DDOs, since the start of the Cold War in about 1945, had always been Soviet experts with the Sov. Division and SE (Satellites and Eastern Europe), making the running for an ambitious career officer. Marek Gumienny was the first Arabist to be appointed DDO. As a young agent he had spent years in the Middle East, mastered two of its languages (Arabic and Farsi, the language of Iran) and knew its culture.
Even in this twenty-four-hours-a-day building, pre-dawn on a Sunday is not an easy time to rustle up piping hot and aromatic black coffee, the way he liked it, so he brewed his own. While it perked Gumienny started on the package on his desk, which contained the slim, wax-sealed file.
He knew what to expect. Fort Meade may have handled the file-recovery, translation and analysis, but it was the CIA, in collaboration with the British and Pakistan’s CTC over in Peshawar, who had made the capture. The CIA’s stations in Peshawar and Islamabad had filed copious reports to keep their boss in the picture.
The file contained all the documents downloaded from the AQ financier’s computer, but the two letters, taking up three pages, were the stars. The DDO spoke fast and fluent street Arabic, but reading script is always harder so he repeatedly referred to the translations.
He read the report of the Koran Committee, prepared jointly by the two intelligence officers at the meeting, but it offered him no surprises. To him it was clear the references to Al-Isra, the magical journey of the Prophet through the night, could only be the code for some kind of important project.
That project now had to have a name in-house for the American intelligence community. It could not be Al-Isra; that alone would betray to others what they had found out. He checked with file-cryptography for a name to describe in future how he and all his colleagues would call the Al-Qaeda project, whatever it was.
Code names come out of a computer by a process known as random selection, the aim being to give nothing away. The CIA naming process that month was using fish; the computer chose Stingray, so Project Stingray it became.
The last sheet in the file had been added during Saturday night. It was brief and short. It came from the hand of a man who disliked wasting words, one of the six principals, the Director of National Intelligence. Clearly the file out of Fort Meade had gone straight to the National Security Committee (Steve Hadley), to the DNI and to the White House. Marek Gumienny imagined there would have been lights burning late in the Oval Office.
The final sheet was on the DNI’s personal headed paper. It said in capital letters:
WHAT IS AL-ISRA?
IS IT NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL, CONVENTIONAL?
FIND OUT WHAT, WHEN AND WHERE.
TIMESCALE: NOW
RESTRAINTS: NONE
POWERS: ABSOLUTE
JOHN NEGROPONTE
There was a scrawled signature. There are nineteen primary intelligence-gathering and archive-storing agencies in the USA. The letter in Marek Gumienny’s hand gave him authority over them all. He ran his eye back to the top of the sheet. It was addressed to him personally. There was a tap on the door.
A young GS4 stood there with yet another delivery. General Schedule is simply a salary scale, a 4 means a very junior staffer. Gumienny gave the young man an encouraging smile; he had clearly never been this high up the building before. Gumienny held out his hand, signed the clipboard to confirm receipt and waited until he was alone again.
The new file was a courtesy from the colleagues at Fort Meade. It was a transcript of a conversation held by two of the Koran eggheads in the car on the way back to Washington. One of them was British. It was his last line that someone at Fort Meade had underlined with a brace of question marks in red ink.
During his time in the Middle East Marek Gumienny had had much to do with the British and, unlike some of his fellow countrymen who had been trying to cope with the hellhole of Iraq for three years, he was not too proud to admit the CIA’s closest allies in what Kipling once called the Great Game were a repository of much arcane knowledge of the badlands between the Jordan River and the Hindu Kush.
For a century and a half, either as soldiers or administrators of the old empire, or as eccentric explorers, the British had been trudging over desert, mountain range and goat-pen in the zone that had now become the intelligence time bomb of the world. The British code-named the CIA ‘the Cousins’ or ‘the Company’; the Americans called the London-based Secret Intelligence Service ‘the Friends’ or ‘the Firm’. For Marek Gumienny one of those friends was a man he had shared good times, not-so-good times and downright dangerous times with when they were both field agents. Now he was pinned to a desk in Langley and Steve Hill had been pulled out of the field and elevated to Controller Middle East at the Firm’s Vauxhall Cross headquarters.
Gumienny decided a conference would do no harm and might yield some good. There was no security problem. The Brits, he knew, would have just about everything he had. They too had transmitted the guts of the laptop from Peshawar to their own listening and cryptography HQ at Cheltenham. They too would have printed out its contents. They too would have analysed the strange references to the Koran contained in the coded letters.
What Marek Gumienny had that was probably not with London was the bizarre remark by a British academic in the back of a car in the middle of Maryland. He punched up a number on the console on his desk. Central switchboards are fine up to a point, but modern technology has meant any senior executive can be connected faster by speed-dial on his personal satphone.
