Plato Karsarkis stood quietly in front of the windows, his hands in his pockets. It seemed to me that he stood that way for a very long time. Finally he turned around and examined metly small hospital room as if he were seeing it for the first time.
I said nothing. I just waited.
“Let’s start at the beginning, Jack,” Karsarkis said after a few moments passed like that. “Eventually maybe we’ll even come to the end.”
“It’s your story,” I shrugged, at least I shrugged as well as a guy lying in a hospital bed wrapped in bandages can shrug. “I’m hardly in any position to throw you out.”
Karsarkis walked over to the couch and sat down, slouching back as if he was settling in comfortably for a long chat. Outside the windows, the dawn looked as if it was further away than I had thought it was a few minutes before, but probably that was only my imagination.
“About eight years ago, a man I knew very well…” Karsarkis paused and cleared his throat. “His name doesn’t really matter. Anyway, I had just bought control of a Hong Kong company that had shipping interests in the South Pacific and he asked me to allow some American intelligence officers to operate a small freighter under the cover of this company. He told me its purpose was to supply some people in the region with whom the Americans had a covert relationship, and he readily admitted the supply process would include weapons. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I gathered it was a CIA operation and they probably wouldn’t tell me the truth even if I asked. So I kept things simple. I agreed. I didn’t ask for the truth.”
“What were you getting out of it?”
“Ah, well…” Karsarkis laced his fingers behind his head and studied the ceiling with what seemed to me to be unnecessary care. “There was a matter of an SEC investigation and some claims of securities fraud-pure horseshit, you understand-and my friend promised they would be dealt with. But I would have been delighted to help my adopted country regardless, Jack. Absolutely delighted.”
“Of course you would have.”
Karsarkis looked at me, but he said nothing else.
“So the CIA used your shipping company as a commercial cover in return for killing off an SEC investigation of you,” I said. “Am I supposed to be shocked? Maybe even morally outraged? I’ve heard worse.”
“That was just the beginning, my friend. The thin end of the wedge. There was another favor after that, and then another and another.”
“And more favors for you in return?”
“Naturally,” Karsarkis nodded without any apparent embarrassment. “When I set up Icon and shifted our group operations to Luxembourg, they suggested I form an entirely separate division to work with them. Technically, it was only another Hong Kong trading company called Global Resources that was controlled by Icon, but it was a lot more than that in reality. You have no idea, Jack, how much of American intelligence operates through perfectly ordinary looking companies like Global Resources. They use commodity brokers, air freight forwarders, oil drillers, all sorts of companies.”
“All part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, huh?”
“I doubt you have any understanding at all of the real scope of it, my friend. Any understanding at all.”
Karsarkis drew a deep breath and stood up. He stretched slightly and walked over to my bed, resting his hands on the rail at its foot.
“I never knew the whole ststrory. Only pieces here and there. Companies operating through Global Resources were used for secret construction projects, selling and shipping arms, money laundering, bribery, extortion, blackmail, disinformation, and plain old espionage. They acquired high-resistance steel and sold it to Pakistan for nuclear weapons research; they traded weapons for information with Abu Nidal; they built the Al Shifa chemical plant in the Sudan; they founded an executive jet service in Switzerland that made planes available to anyone anywhere with no questions asked. You get the idea, Jack. It was nothing less than the administrative apparatus of covert action on a grand scale. And it was all being done in my name.”
“So you’re saying …what? That you’re really a spy?”
“No, nothing so grand. Or nearly so clear. I was…” Karsarkis stopped and thought, searching for the right word, “a facilitator. I used my commercial resources to facilitate various operations by American intelligence about which I knew very little.”
“In return for what? A get-out-of-jail-free card from the SEC? An agreement by the IRS to look the other way? You played ‘Let’s Make a Deal’ and ended up in over your head. That’s about the size of it, isn’t it?”
Karsarkis smiled, once again without the slightest appearance of any embarrassment.
“Let me tell you how the Iraqi oil sales worked,” he said. “It’s a good example of the way these things were usually done.”
I said nothing.
“After the Vietnam War ended,” Karsarkis continued, “America lost interest in Asia. Americans largely turned their back on half the world for nearly two decades. In the period just before the first Gulf War broke out, at least some Americans started to realize they might be in trouble because of that.”
I listened, but still I said nothing.
“In the early nineties, I was told a significant quantity of crude oil was being smuggled out of Iraq in spite of the economic embargo. I was also told I could obtain access to this oil through a certain Jordanian intermediary and no objection would be raised by the Americans if I brokered this oil to a very specific list of companies. As it turned out, all of these companies were controlled by politicians in Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.”
“Why would anyone in the US want to help the Iraqis sell embargoed oil?”
“Just think about it, Jack. It was really a very clever play. The Americans knew the Iraqis were going to sell the oil anyway, so if they secretly helped do it, they would at least have some measure of control over how much got sold and where it went. They would even know how the Iraqis were being paid and could keep track of what they did with the money. Best of all, they could use the sale of the oil itself to funnel money to people in Asia who they wanted to influence, a part of the world where they needed some new friends. It was a sweet deal all around.”
“For you, too, I imagine.”
“Well…yes, it was. I wasn’t doing all this for intellectual stimulation. I made money at it. That’s the way business works.”
“Did you make a lot of money?”
“Yes,” Karsarkis said, “I made a lot of money.”
His tone had an edge of challenge to it, but I didn’t argue the point. If Karsarkis was telling the truth and if his oil sales had been officjusially sanctioned, then there wasn’t very much of an argument to be made. Companies were in business to make money, weren’t they? I could hardly object to Karsarkis doing it, particularly if his deal carried the stamp of approval of the United States of America.
“That was when things started to go bad.” Karsarkis looked at me and hesitated. “I was asked to take on Cynthia Kim,” he said, “to give her cover as my assistant.”
He paused again, but I made an impatient gesture and he went on.
“I was told she was involved in tracking the money the Iraqis received from the oil sales and I assumed Cynthia was CIA. But she wasn’t CIA after all it turned out, and she had a rather more ambitious agenda than accounting for a little oil money. Eventually I found out Cynthia was sent to me straight from the White House.”
“Are you saying you were in direct contact with the president?” I asked carefully.
“That was always implied, of course, but…well, if not directly with him, then with the boys in the basement. That’s more or less the same thing.”
“The boys in the basement?”
“The National Security Council. Their operations center is in the basement of the Executive Office Building next door to the White House. The President’s staff calls them the boys in the basement. Very colorful, huh? Full of implications.”
“But the NSC is just-”
“Yeah, that’s what everybody else thinks, too. Nothing but a bunch of paper pushers and professors on leave.” Karsarkis shot me a quick look. “No offense, Jack.”
I ignored both Karsarkis’ insult and his apology. “Maybe I’m really not with you here. The NSC doesn’t handle covert operations.”
“Really?”
Karsarkis seemed amused.
“You mean covert operations like the guns for hostages deal with Iran Ollie North ran out of the Reagan White House? Or maybe you mean covert operations like the hit squads the NSC funded in Nicaragua to murder the left-wing priests and other threats to their friends there. Or maybe, if you want an example a little closer to home, you mean covert operations like using the Asian Bank of Commerce for large-scale money laundering and then murdering people to cover it up when Jack Shepherd discovered what was going on and-”
“Okay,” I interrupted, “you’ve made your point.”
“Good.”
I sighed and waved to Karsarkis to continue.
“Cynthia’s mission was focused on Indonesia,” he said. “Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world and it has the largest Muslim population on earth. Historically, Southeast Asian Muslims have been far more moderate than Arab Muslims, but that was changing, partly because of a determined effort by Arab Muslims to create instability there and partly because of the homegrown efforts of some Indonesians. The country seemed ripe to blow. If it did, Afghanistan would look like the good old days.”
“I don’t see anything odd about the NSC being interested in Indonesia. That’s what they do. They track hot spots and advise the president on how to respond before a full-blown crisis develops.”
Karsarkis leaned back and crossed his legs at the knee. He seemed to think for a moment about what I is said, but I doubted that. My guess was that he was thinking about something else altogether, something I probably could never even begin to imagine.