When it appeared that Headquarters’ ignorance and acedia would prevail, and that the WOLVERINEs would be put out to pasture, a crisis arose in 2001 involving CIA employees in Syria. Three visiting analysts—two women and one man—from the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) had ignored Damascus Station guidance to stay within the embassy compound in central Damascus on Abu Ja’far al Mansur Avenue. They were in Syria to gather “ground truth” on the Syrian civil war, and thought they knew what they were doing. Two of them spoke rudimentary Arabic. They set out on a Tuesday morning, intending to visit the offices of the International Red Cross on Arwada Square, the Italian Hospital on Omar Al-Mukhtar Avenue, and the Souq Al Khoja on Al Thawra Street, a total round-trip of three hours and ten miles.
When they did not return to the embassy at the close of business, the security officer called the metropolitan police who several hours later found the body of one of the women in the eastern suburb of Jobar, on the ground floor of the burned-out Teacher’s Tower Building, a blackened ten-story shell amid rubble and rusted tanks with hatches flung open and tracks thrown off the drive wheels. The forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two had been wired in her Maidenform underwear to a rusted bedspring propped upright against a shrapnel-pocked wall, and a plastic cable tie had been cinched around her neck. With a shrug, police said it might have been rogue soldiers from the National Defense Forces, or Sunni-led insurgents, or a Hezbollah unit, who could tell, but they expected the torture tape would be delivered to the embassy in several days.
That night, the security officer received a frantic call from the other two analysts. They had narrowly escaped being taken by running down an alley when their taxi had been blocked by two cars. They had flagged down an elderly man in a dented truck and offered to pay him to drive them to the embassy, but Hezbollah roadblocks and a thunderous explosion a block away had panicked the driver who instead drove the protesting analysts to his house in the village of As Saboura, eight miles west of the city along Route One. The old man and his wife were terrified that local Islamist insurgents would discover the Americans and murder them all—the streets at night were full of roving armed bands of men in
Complicating matters further was that someone in the police had whispered to the local Iranian Qods Force commander that two CIA officers were stranded and hiding somewhere in Damascus. The call went out from Tehran to compliant Syrian security organs, militia, and army units to find and apprehend the perfidious Americans who, significantly, were not accredited to the Syrian government, and therefore had no diplomatic immunity. Despite repeated protests from the acting ambassador, Hezbollah roadblocks were set up around the US Embassy. Station officers tried several times to get clear and drive to the village, but had to abort when they picked up heavy harassing surveillance. They stood down.
At Headquarters, the dire situation in Damascus was the first topic of discussion during the nightly Director’s executive-review meeting in the seventh-floor conference room. The caliphs in Langley who normally sat in the high-backed chairs waiting for orders from downtown were gloomy: they had a dead analyst on their hands, and the possibility of losing two more would be no end of trouble. No one had any ideas, nor was anyone going to suggest a solution, and conversation withered. The dyspeptic silence was broken when now Chief EUR Forsyth submitted to the collected leadership that his team of Polish agents could infiltrate Damascus without attracting attention, make contact with the two surviving analysts, and exfiltrate them out of Syria, probably west to Lebanon. There would be no contact with the beleaguered Station. Faces around the table brightened. This was a solution on two levels: either the analysts would be rescued, or the train wreck of a blown op could be blamed on Forsyth and his polka-dancing retinue.
