Beirut File

Larnaca, Cyprus

Larnaca, CyprusC

han Dwyer Davis looked up from the intercept she was reading and let her gaze sweep the Mediterranean beaches below her little cubbyhole on the second floor of the recently-purchased and now tightly-secured building that neighbors thought was the new Larnaca office of an international import-export firm. If the information contained in the document that landed on her desk was reliable, it was going to be another long day at the top-secret Multi-National Intelligence Evaluation Team. Even if it was deemed relatively iffy on the arbitrary scale they’d worked so hard to establish over the past three weeks of intercepting, translating, evaluating, and reporting to various masters, Chan was fairly certain her planned beachfront stroll at lunchtime was now out of the question.

The document—really a compilation of messages intercepted and then decoded by one of her Israeli counterparts who was monitoring traffic out of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Gaza—indicated that Hezbollah fighters were now up to their checkered keffiyehs in the Syrian mess. “Obviously,” the Israeli spook said when he delivered his assessment to Chan, “these Hezbollah assholes will be coming in on the side of the al-Assad government. It’s another game-changer.”

That, Chan thought as she stood and walked into the common room on the other side of her office wall, tossed yet another unsavory turd into the Syrian punchbowl. It was the kind of wrinkle that would require a tedious meeting in which the information would be analyzed, evaluated and discussed until the Chief of Mission from the NSA decided where, when, and how to pass the revelation along to various national security honchos. It was those honchos—from the U.S., Israel, Turkey, and Jordan for the most part—who sent their best and brightest with the MNIE Team to help decide what ought to be done about an Arab Spring uprising that was rapidly turning into a very bloody winter of discontent.

In a normal world, Chan would simply pick up the phone, call the staff coordinator and let him know they needed a meeting, but there were no phones allowed in the building and emails were restricted to a single internal server that was slow as molasses. When the team needed to communicate with the outside world, it was done by one individual via one ultra-secure server. Only the Chief of Mission or his designated representatives could make satellite-phone calls. The operational security protocol was maddening, but compliance with it was the only way the Israelis would agree to play along, and everyone agreed the situation required their insight and area expertise. She’d complained to Alan Gelb, her counterpart from the IDF Directorate of Military Intelligence, and the next day he’d casually plopped a six-inch thick folder on her desk that documented just one year of American press leaks concerning sensitive or classified material. Painful and frustrating as it was—especially for Chan who accepted the assignment with no idea she’d be cut off from even private and personal communication for an undetermined period—the OpSec protocol was a fact of life, and she would have to live with it just like all the others on the team.

She approached the white-board on one wall of the common room where formal analysis sessions were requested and scheduled and wrote in her personal code (3US2), checked the block for a formal analysis meeting, and wrote an A in the box asking for priority. The date and time would be filled in for all to see by the Staff Coordinator once he’d cleared the conference and the Chief of Mission had decided who should attend. On the way back to her office, Chan noted that someone with an abiding sense of humor had formalized the shorthand for the Multi-National Intelligence Evaluation Team. With so many languages spoken among the intercept operators and analysts, most had taken to referring to their group as “Minnie” which prompted an artist among them to render a full-color drawing of Minnie Mouse complete with frilly pink dress and a bow between her big ears.

More like Mickey Mouse, Chan thought, as she called up her blocked personal email and saw there were 27 increasingly desperate notes from Shake, none of which she could respond to or even acknowledge according to the OpSec protocols. With agents and analysts assembled from so many nations, the NSA was paranoid about moles or leaks of any kind. This was a gathering of some of the most capable Intel people in the world using ultra-secret technology and the information developed was being handled with a very tight fist.

Cheating was not an option. The CI people swept the office constantly and every email account was both monitored and controlled. Even the hotel phones were tapped, and they made no bones about letting everyone know it was a complete lock-down and black-out for as long as the mission lasted. If there was a genuine, verified family emergency, the staffer involved would be sent home to handle it. It was a one-way ticket and Chan didn’t think she was ready to quit on this assignment just yet. She saved the Hezbollah information and found the file containing her chemical warfare studies. Sometime today she’d find a moment to talk to the Chief of Mission about her domestic problems. There had to be some safe way to let Shake know she was OK without getting herself canned from a very important assignment.