Adam found this ominous, even more so when he turned around and looked at the airplane they’d be flying to Chongju.
It was a Boeing 737 wearing the red, white, and blue markings of Air Koryo.
Adam had read somewhere that Skytrax, the world airline rating service, had reviewed and rated nearly seven hundred airlines over the globe, and they had given out but a single one-star rating.
Air Koryo, North Korea’s national airline, was the recipient.
Adam didn’t remember where he had read this fact, but as he climbed aboard the plane he wished he had forgotten it.
—
The Air Koryo flight was bad, but Adam had been on worse flights in the USA. It landed without incident at Kwaksan Airport in an evening rain shower, and the men and women were led onto another bus, and then were driven on surprisingly good roads to the city of Chongju.
On this bus ride, as on the other, several armed guards sat at the front, and an olive-drab truck full of troops followed close behind. Adam wondered if the North Koreans were fearful a Chinese technician would leap from the moving vehicle and run out into the hills around the road. It occurred to him that if these people really believed North Korea was the paradise the woman at the welcome meeting this morning had claimed it was, then it stood to reason they’d need to watch out for foreigners trying to break in to reap the nation’s bounty.
The city of Chongju was all but blacked out, obviously because there was no electricity running this evening. Beyond the lights of the bus he could see only the illumination of a few other vehicles on side streets, plus cooking fires, the odd flashlight, and the glow of cigarettes from people on the sidewalks in the darkness.
There was one major exception to the darkness. The bus entered a large driving circle, and in the middle was a forty-foot-high statue of Choi Ji-hoon in his military uniform, holding a pair of binoculars in one hand and pointing northward toward China with the other. The entire statue was bathed in bright yellow light, and a tiny street market had been set up around it to take advantage of the glow of the Dae Wonsu.
The bus made a turn and Adam leaned into the window glass and felt a sudden lump in his throat as he saw the entrance to the temporary housing facility. He’d spent a great deal of time in the past weeks studying this very place in satellite images. To be rolling through the front gates of the complex—it looked like some sort of prison camp from a World War II film—made him feel so much farther from home.
Orders were given in Korean and then translated into Chinese by a minder, and soon Adam was lined up in front of the bus with the rest of his group. During a short wait in the darkness, Adam had a moment to recognize that the last time he’d looked at this parking lot in the center of all the metal trailers, he’d been sitting in a tidy and efficient conference room in the ODNI building in McLean, Virginia, with a Starbucks latte in one hand and a cinnamon roll in the other. Now he was here, queuing up single-file to be counted and checked in and given a cot.
Even for a NOC who’d played a lot of roles in his career, this felt surreal and otherworldly.
49
Three days before the arrival of the President of the United States in Mexico City, Iranian bomb maker Adel Zarif was driven back to the parking garage construction site on the corner of Vidal Alcocer and José J. Herrera.
It was seven p.m. and the evening rains had ended, dusk was falling quickly on the area, and the street market had closed. But the area was not quiet. The sounds and lights of construction were obvious as soon as he climbed out of Emilio’s truck. Zarif had been told a group of six Maldonado men with experience in construction had been working at the site all afternoon; they had a cement mixer and some portable lights and would be kept away from him while he was here, but they would be all his when he needed them.
He’d already spent the entire day building his weapon at an auto repair yard a quarter-mile away in northern Tepito. He’d taken his three 105-millimeter high-explosive artillery shells, removed the fuses in the nose cones, replaced each with a homemade delayed-action base fuse, wired them to detonate, and attached a blasting cap to each device. The blasting caps were, in turn, attached to a signaling device.
At the beginning of the Iraq War, Zarif and men like him used simple electronic detonating signalers, such as garage-door openers, to command-detonate IEDs. Soon enough, however, coalition forces began taking measures to jam these signals, so Zarif and the others graduated to cell phones.
These worked for a while. In fact, Zarif still used these almost exclusively against insurgents in Syria, but cell phones were not a perfect solution, either. Their signals could be jammed or otherwise interrupted, and large parts of the world were without coverage.
But there was another way. Long-range cordless phones aren’t popular in the United States, but in locations with spotty cell coverage the devices are ubiquitous. The Taiwanese firm StreamTel sold a popular model of phone that consisted of a base station that plugged into a wired phone network, and a handset with a range of up to dozens of kilometers. Two or more handsets could be paired to the same line, and this created a nearly unjammable long-range signaling device.
StreamTel sets were components of thousands of IEDs in the Middle East. The company boasted that forty percent of its world market share came from sales to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and the U.S. military understood the reason behind the demand.
Zarif had a Maldonado lieutenant purchase a base station and two handsets from a telephone store in Guadalajara and ferry them into the capital city, and the Iranian built his device much as he would have done had he been in Mosul, Iraq, or Helmand Province in Afghanistan. It wasn’t state-of-the-art, but the veteran bomb maker always believed the tried-and-true methods were the most reliable.
The entire IED was carried into the construction site just after dark inside a large rolling tool chest the size of a steamer trunk, and then Zarif was left alone behind the orange tarp while the half-dozen other men poured concrete on the sidewalk on José J. Herrera and in the already built stairwell in the center of the site.
The open rebar wall frame that Zarif had found three days earlier had changed. The men today had built a lumber casing around the lower six feet of the wall and they had already filled it with concrete. Above this they had built another wooden frame to raise the wall up to its intended height of twelve feet, but a portion of the frame high on the wall was missing, following Zarif’s instructions.
One by one Zarif took the pieces of his IED up a ladder and onto a scaffolding five feet off the ground next to the wall and he gently reassembled the device in the metal rebar grid exposed by the missing boards. The shells faced out toward the six-lane street on the other side of the tarp. They were positioned ten feet off the ground, and each one was slightly angled with wooden shunts so that they would project downward onto the street.
The artillery shells did not have full charges behind them, nor were they being propelled through long barrels that would spin them through rifling, so they would not launch like they would if fired from a howitzer. Still, Zarif had a design plan for his weapon to ensure that the explosives launched out to the street before detonating. He had two Maldonado men help him place three ninety-pound sheets of iron at the back of the device, behind the shells in the grid, using more wooden slats to hold them in position while he soldered them to the rebar. When he finished this, he had created a plate to deflect the back blast of the initial detonator charge, and thereby propel the artillery shells outward.
Zarif had created identical devices many times in the past, and he’d destroyed enemy armor with them at a range of up to fifty feet.
It took him nearly three hours to ready the IED high on the open wall, and then he covered the entire device with plastic bags, threading them through the rebar, wrapping them from the blast plate in back to the nose cones in front, protecting everything and hiding the bomb from the other Maldonad
o men. He and his helpers then cleared back the scaffolding and the ladder, and finally they called for the men to bring in the cement blower.
Three hours after this, the concrete was poured all around the device, and the next morning, when the quick-drying concrete had formed, workers began placing a thin sheet of stone veneer over the front of the wall.
By noon the next day the entire façade was complete. From Vidal Alcocer, the six-lane street down which the President would travel, it looked like a massive concrete parking-lot wall with a decorative façade, but in truth it hid the explosive force of three howitzer rounds, and on command, the rounds would launch out into the road in front of it and detonate.
But Zarif wasn’t finished. In the afternoon Zarif had Emilio take him to a grocery store, and here he grabbed a basket and walked directly to the spice section. He picked up several containers of cumin and turmeric.
Emilio asked, “Are you making dinner?”
“You’ll see.”
They returned to the construction site. It was empty again, but now the tarp in front of the wall had been cleared away, and they walked around the wall and under the tarp on the José J. Herrera side. Zarif went to his wall, pulled out his containers of spices, opened them, and got down on his hands and knees. Slowly and meticulously he began pouring them along where the floor met the new wall. He used a lot right below the device, and then he crawled in each direction, sprinkling less and less until he had covered the entire floor.
He stood up, dusted off his hands, and walked over to a drain in the concrete floor of the parking garage. He knelt down and peered through the metal grating, then looked up to Emilio. “One more thing. I need you to find me a dead animal.”
“What?”
“Really dead.”
An hour later a Maldonado runner arrived on the back of a motorcycle. In his hand he carried a white garbage bag. He handed it to Zarif, who opened the bag and recoiled from the stench. A putrefying cat lay inside.
Zarif walked over to the open drain, removed the grating, and dumped the dead cat out of the bag. It fell in just two feet before landing where the drainpipe turned.
He looked to Emilio. “This will also affect the dogs’ noses.”
Emilio nodded. “What dogs?”
“The Americans will search this area before the President drives by. I’ve seen it on YouTube. They will bring dogs that can smell explosives. But here the dogs will smell spices and dead cats.” He pointed up high on the wall. “Even if they check the wall, they won’t check up so high. No one will look for a bomb that points down.”
Zarif grinned at his own cleverness.
50
Adam spent his first day at the Chongju refinery installing his new computer terminal. Even though the machine was a new but run-of-the-mill PC, it had been shipped from France and had been loaded with a few off-the-shelf mining software programs he would use to operate the massive cone crusher. None of the software was terribly complicated, but the tools were very specific in nature, and even though Adam had learned the job in a couple weeks, no one in North Korea had the training or the experience to run the machine.
This meant Adam was the only person authorized to use the terminal, and this was extremely good news for Adam because the cone crusher operating program wasn’t the most distinctive thing about this PC. Adam had been briefed and trained by the CIA’s Science and Technology staff on how to use the terminal to send clandestine messages back to the Acrid Herald operations center at the Liberty Crossing Intelligence Campus.
Even though the device wasn’t attached to the Internet, there was a text feature that was connected not to the computer’s hard drive and motherboard but to another device that had been built into all the hardware. It was, essentially, a satellite phone without a speaker, just the components of the device that could make a connection via satellite and send a text message. The miniaturized pieces of the device were so well hidden within the rest of the computer hardware inside the tower that even if the North Koreans disassembled the machine, they would need a computer hardware expert to come to the conclusion that tiny pieces that didn’t belong were attached to different parts of the motherboard and power supply. Even then it would be nigh on impossible to discern just what the equipment was, only that it wasn’t needed.
But that wasn’t covert enough for Science and Technology. The tiny components they did use were all Chinese in manufacture, made by the company Huawei, which, surely everyone in North Korean intelligence knew, had ties to Chinese intelligence.
Taking this extra step ensured that, even if the computer was revealed as an intelligence collection device, China would be the country blamed for spying on the Chongju operation.
That wouldn’t do Adam one damn bit of good. North Korean counterintel would shoot him for being a Chinese spy just as quickly as they would shoot him for being an American spy, but at least America would be in the clear.
On his first day getting his machine up and running, Adam realized he couldn’t have asked for a better desk. He had the lone workstation at a cubicle alongside a two-story-tall cone crushing machine. As far as secure locations went to broadcast his messages back to ODNI, he felt like he was in a comfortable place.
Several men worked on the machine in his proximity, most of them on a catwalk above him, but Adam was the only man with any business in the back of the machine where his workstation stood. Further, the other workers were mechanical engineers and simple ore loaders, and Adam doubted they would notice anything amiss even if they did see him opening the texting program to contact ODNI.
This cone crusher had been here in North Korea for a year and a half, long before construction started on the refinery. The state-owned Chinese company Chinalco put the machine at the Chongju mine itself, a kilometer to the east, because the Chinese had planned on crushing the ore down to processing size so it could be transported in sacks on trucks, as opposed to larger rocks, which were harder to ferry. But the North Koreans had no problem trucking the ore the kilometer to the processing facility, so they brought the massive machine here, where the electricity ran more regularly than at the mine.
Right after a fifteen-minute break for tea and plant-wide government-mandated singing, stretching, and knee bends, Adam returned to his desk with plans to send his first message home. He checked his area to make sure there was no one around who could see what he was doing. This involved him simply looking back over his shoulder and then scanning overhead through the grating of the catwalk. When he was comfortable that he was clear, he restarted his PC, then went into the BIOS screen of the computer. Here he changed a series of settings, and then pressed enter.
He had two choices now. He could type a 1, which would take him to the texting program, or he could type a 2, which would send him to a satellite map of North Korea that had been hidden on the drive. In the case of an emergency exfiltration, Adam’s minders had had the foresight to realize, he would need a good idea of the area and the ability to type in specific coordinates, so the function had been secreted on the drive.
Adam wasn’t on the run now, and he hoped like hell he never would be, so he typed 1 and hit enter again.
The screen went blank except for a small blinking cursor in the lower right.
Adam had to admit, S&T had set this up so no one was going to accidentally find the clandestine software.
He took another glance around, then quickly typed out a message, all in Mandarin, so if it was somehow intercepted, the U.S. would not be blamed for the operation.
SECRET
TO: FLASH FOR TIDALWAVE
FROM: AVALANCHE
SUBJECT: ARRIVAL ESTABLISHMENT
SOURCE: AVALANCHE
1. ALL NOMINAL. FULL REPORT SOONEST
2. FLASH—DIR. HWANG MIN-HO MET WITH AVALANCHE AND OTHER CHINA TECHS 2 DAYS PRIOR IN PYONGYANG—HE CLAIMS ONE (1) FURTHER SHIMENT OF LARGE EQUIPMENT TO ARR
IVE BEFORE FACILITY ON LINE. NO INDICATION OF TYPE OF EQUIPMENT. WITH NO FURTHER CORROBORATION, AVALANCHE CANNOT INDEPENDENTLY CONFIRM.
3. HWANG CLAIMS HE WILL BE PRESENT AT PROCESSING FACILITY IN COMING WEEKS.
AVALANCHE
The final reference to his code name was the tip that he was not writing under duress. Had he signed off with anything else—or nothing at all—the control officers of Acrid Herald would have known the words on their screen could not be taken at face value.
Adam hit the enter key twice; this directed the satellite phone to send the digital message.
Science and Technology had warned him about this part. Back in McLean they let him know the sending could take a couple minutes, and some messages might have to be resent. As good as the technology was—and the eggheads from Langley promised it was the best—there were always atmospheric conditions that could come into play, as well as issues with other equipment at the Chongju facility.
They’d also given him one more interesting tidbit of information. Most sat phones blast their signals to one of many commercial satellites, but this phone beamed to an NSA satellite in geostationary orbit over North Korea, parts of China, and Japan. He was assured the signal would broadcast, eventually, but was reminded to wait for a confirmation from the computer in the form of a long row of dashes that ran from left to right.
After a minute and a half he received this confirmation.
Adam was pleasantly surprised the boys and girls at S&T, who didn’t have to be out in the field with the devices, didn’t just put a big flashing “MESSAGE SENT” graphic on the monitor.
51
As director of national intelligence, Mary Pat Foley was the chief intelligence officer of the United States of America, and with this role quite naturally came a tremendous amount of responsibility and a large number of draws on her time.