The director’s office was on the top floor of the Old Headquarters Building, with a clear view of the Potomac and its tree-lined banks. Tyrus Oakes waited impatiently in a leather chair in the anteroom, ignoring the magazines neatly displayed in a fan on the credenza in front of him.
‘Come in,’ said a man’s voice from the doorway, and Oakes stood up and followed the slightly stooping white-haired man into a large corner room, which had a view on two sides. They walked to the far end, where the director pointed to the chair on the near side of his large, antique roll-top desk. Oakes sat down reluctantly, since the director, a towering figure, stayed standing, moving to the window, his hands clasped behind his back.
‘Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, General,’ Oakes said.
The director nodded, but his gaze remained locked on the grass plaza below. It was as if he smelled trouble brewing, and wanted to take his time before following the scent.
General Gerry Harding was a West Point graduate who had risen to be one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, having served with distinction at the tail end of the Vietnam War, and been a senior commander in the first Iraq War. Showing an aptitude for Washington infighting, he had then served administrations of different political stripes, first as number two to the UN Ambassador, now as director of the CIA.
His appointment had been a sudden, unplanned affair, since the President’s first choice – an obvious political appointment, a man with neither military nor intelligence experience – had fallen at the first hurdle of Senate approval. Harding had sailed through, since his war record had made him an all-American hero, and the only partisan ideology he had ever evinced was ruthlessness.
Now he turned around and eased his long frame into his high-backed leather chair. He pushed it back easily from the desk, then stretched his legs out in front of him.
‘What’s on your mind, Ty?’ he asked, with an edge that poked out through the folksy veneer.
‘I’ve had a visit from our British friends. Their director of counter espionage – Charles Wetherby. He’s an old hand, and a good one. They think there’s a leak of information about the threat to the Gleneagles conference. You’ll have seen the report on that, General. One of their officers working on the lead has been attacked. It seems they’ve been following a Mossad agent operating in London.’ He said significantly, ‘Danny Kollek.’
‘Kollek?’ Harding’s equanimity was fast receding. ‘How the hell did they get onto him?’
‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. Kollek’s undeclared, which has the Brits’ dander up. They don’t trust the Israelis. And unfortunately, their surveillance found Kollek meeting with one of our own.’
‘Andy Bokus runs him, doesn’t he? You mean they saw them together?’
‘That’s what makes it so difficult. The photographs the Brits took show Kollek meeting Andy. It was hard for me to explain that away to Wetherby. I didn’t know what to tell him.’
Harding thought hard for a moment. ‘How about the truth?’
‘I can do that. But I figured I needed your approval first.’
‘You’ve got it.’
Oakes hesitated before saying, ‘It will involve a fair amount of risk.’
‘How’s that? You don’t trust the Brits?’
Oakes shrugged. ‘It’s not that. They’re hyper-anxious about this conference. It’s top of their priorities. They’d tell the Israelis anything, even that we’re running one of their people, if they thought it would help them protect the conference. That could do us a lot of damage. Mossad gives us some very valuable intelligence. They’ll close up like clams if they find out we’ve been running Kollek.’
He could see the General calculating this. Harding was relentlessly, clinically logical, something not always true of the directors Oakes had known. Harding said, ‘What if we throw them a bone?’
‘Who, the British?’
‘No. Mossad. If there isn’t much more we can get out of Kollek, maybe we should just turn him over to his own service. We can say he approached us, and we turned him down. That might earn us some brownie points in Tel Aviv.’
Oakes was appalled. He struggled to hide his outrage at the suggestion they throw an agent to the wolves. The logistics of what Harding was proposing were impossible – Mossad would see through the subterfuge at once – but that was not what bothered Oakes the most. He prided himself on his realism, but he also held firm to certain principles. Foremost among them was a loyalty to his agents, especially penetration agents, who risked their lives to help.
He knew any argument with Harding would all too easily be lost. So he said slowly, ‘Not sure that would work, General. And anyway, I don’t think we’ve got the best out of Kollek yet. It would be a pity to let him go prematurely.’ He thought ruefully of what ‘let him go’ would mean for the Israeli, once put under Mossad’s notorious methods of questioning.
Harding seemed to think about this, then glanced at his diary, open on the desk top before him. He looked intently at his watch, and Oakes realised his time was up.
‘Okay, Ty, let’s keep him in place then. You can come clean with the Brits, but make it clear we expect them to keep it to themselves. If they tell the Israelis, then we might as well have got some credit by telling them ourselves.’