“With this asset, yes,” Irene said. “With the compound, no. I think we need to change our approach. Send in someone who isn’t afraid to knock on the front door.”
“You’re talking about a CIA officer,” Alexander said with a frown. “We’ve been over this.”
They had been over this.
Numerous times.
At this very moment, a troop of SEAL Team 6 assaulters were training on an exact replica of the Abbottabad compound in a remote area of North Carolina. This was to say nothing of the team of CIA officers conducting round-the-clock surveillance of the Abbottabad compound from a nearby safehouse.
To his credit, Alexander had agreed with each of Irene’s requests to escalate toward a raid on the compound, save one. Until he had absolute proof that bin Laden was the lanky man captured by drone footage pacing back and forth across the compound’s courtyard while wearing a hat with a large brim that obscured his face, the president did not want an American anywhere near the Waziristan Haveli.
On this point, Alexander refused to budge.
Irene intended to change his mind.
“Yes,” Irene said, “I am. This is what my people train for. Let them do their jobs, sir.”
Alexander reached for the coffee cup on the corner of his desk, realized that it was empty, and frowned. As delaying tactics went, it wasn’t the most subtle, but Irene resisted the urge to fill the silence. She’d made her case for using a CIA officer to conduct a reconnaissance of the compound numerous times. Doing so again would only weaken her position.
Besides, the president hadn’t yet said no.
That was progress.
“You said your update was a mixed bag,” Alexander said, clasping his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his plush leather chair. “That implies that you’ve got some good news.”
“I do, sir,” Irene said.
Irene opened the satchel she was holding and withdrew a folder.
The cover sheet was orange and stamped with a series of acronyms, each meant to spark fear in the heart of the beholder. Irene didn’t like taking material at this classification level out of Langley, but in politics, as in the intelligence business, words were cheap. If she was going to convince her boss that years of hard work had finally borne dividends, Irene would need more than just vague assurances.
The collection of papers she handed across the Resolute Desk had that in spades.
“What’s this?” Alexander said, reflexively taking the documents.
“Remember the two men who live with their families in the compound?” Irene said.
“The ones you’re convinced are couriers for Al Qaeda?
“Not just Al Qaeda,” Irene said. “Bin Laden. And I can prove it.”
Alexander raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t dispute her statement.
This was also progress.
Satisfying the president’s exceptionally high standard for what he considered proof of who called the compound home had been a game of back-and-forth for the last two weeks. To his credit, Alexander had authorized the CIA safehouse and given the go-ahead for the SEALs to begin preparations for an eventual assault, but that was as far as he’d been willing to go.
Hopefully, that was about to change.
With a long sigh, the president began to read. Within a few pages, Alexander’s eyebrows shot from where they’d been resting above skeptically narrowed eyes to the top of his forehead. The stack of read papers to his left allowed Irene to chart the president’s progress through the intelligence report.
He’d arrived at the good stuff.
“It is bin Laden,” Alexander said, his chair snapping upright.
The president’s words carried a reverence that was at odds with the revulsion etched across his face. It was as if Alexander were afraid that merely speaking the terrorist mastermind’s name would cause him to vanish.
Irene nodded. “Our linguists have combed through the text. The speech pattern and sentence construction match other bin Laden fatwas. The level of detail and familiarity with ongoing operations expressed in the communiqué also indicate that the sender is a senior Al Qaeda commander. That message came from bin Laden.”
“How did you get it?” Alexander said.
“We’ve had one of the compound’s courier/bodyguards under electronic surveillance for the last several weeks,” Irene said. “He practices excellent tradecraft with his cellular devices.”
“Explain,” Alexander said.
“The courier switches phones randomly and discards them after a single use,” Irene said. “He buys his burners from a rotating selection of stores, making interdiction of his hardware extremely difficult.”
Extremely difficult was perhaps too charitable a description.
After identifying the potential courier, Irene had dispatched paramilitary officers to Abbottabad with instructions to hack into the man’s cell phone. The Al Qaeda operative had proven to be too wily. He never kept his phone active for more than a day and he never bought a replacement at the same store.
“Then how did you get to him?” Alexander said.
“The internet cafés,” Irene said. “We were able to crack his phone twice since we’ve been monitoring the courier, but we found zilch. No hidden files, no texts or calls to numbers of interest, and no emails. Both times we gained access to his cell we got nothing.”
The president leaned forward, intrigued. “Maybe he’s clean.”
Irene shook her head. “His obsession with operational security suggested otherwise. Yes, his phones were absent incriminating data, but his actions said we were on the right track.”
