It was going to be a supersonic game of cat and mouse, with one little twist.
The mice might be nuclear.
He’d lost the element of surprise.
But he still had cards to play.
General Azziz, sitting alone in his private command center—staring at a bank of computer screens providing him the latest updates on the mobilization of his elite Republican Guard forces and his agents overseas—knew he could still deliver a knockout punch. The only question was when.
He quickly tapped out three cryptic email messages. The first was to the “four horsemen,” now racing out of Russia to get into position as quickly as possible. Their mission: assassinate Dmitri Galishnikov (the “dirty Jew,” barked Saddam) and Ibrahim Sa’id (“that filthy traitor to his people,” the Iraqi leader had added); then launch a bloody suicide bombing campaign in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat. The second email was to his “assets” outside of Moscow—Gogolov and Jibril—activating another phase of the terror campaign. The third was to his failsafe, “Mr. C.,” deep inside the U.S.
Next, Azziz picked up a phone and barked commands in Arabic to his senior deputy in the larger command and control center down the hall.
“Send out the general alarm. We should be expecting American planes within the hour. All forces prepare for battle. And seal up the bunker. The battle is about to begin.”
Air Force One finally landed at Andrews at four-thirty Friday morning.
Only three days had elapsed since the initial kamikaze attack on the president and his motorcade in Denver. Yet everything had changed.
The president, Corsetti, Football, and a team of Secret Service agents—led by Jackie Sanchez—flew Marine One and a backup helicopter back to the White House to get an update on the first air strikes. Iverson directed his security detail to take him home. He needed to shower, shave, change his clothes, and take care of some urgent business before he headed back to Treasury to work the phones and help manage the crisis.
Bennett, Black, and McCoy, meanwhile, grabbed their luggage and crashed in an officers’ lounge until their G4—trailing Air Force One all night—was refueled, restocked, and ready to whisk them back to Israel.
A long day’s journey into night was about to get much longer.
By five A.M., Iverson was back at his newly purchased sprawling Georgetown mansion.
His Secret Service detail took up their standard positions around the house and inside the front and back doors. Iverson immediately headed upstairs to his bedroom, flipped on CNN’s breaking news coverage of the mushrooming military crisis in the Middle East, and booted up his personal laptop on the desk beside his antique canopy bed. By the time he finished taking a quick hot shower and donning a freshly dry-cleaned Brooks Brothers suit, his computer was already logged onto AOL and downloading his emails. It had been awhile since he’d even had time to check this account.
“You’ve got mail,” said the pleasant voice, heard more than forty million times a day, more than twenty-seven thousand times a minute, by AOL subscribers worldwide.
Most of his emails were junk. Except one. The last one. It had arrived just a few minutes before, as though the sender knew he’d be coming home, though he couldn’t possibly have. Iverson was afraid to open it. It was marked inconspicuously, “Special offer/rush order.” But he knew immediately what it was, who it was from, who it had been forwarded from, and what it would say.
“Mr. I—you must RESPOND NOW to our SPECIAL OFFER. Send us your entry and CLAIM YOUR PRIZE. Reminder: if we don’t hear from you within twenty-four hours, the offer will be null and void. And Mr. C—next on the list—will win. Don’t let that happen. ACT TODAY.”
Iverson knew what it was, all right. He’d even fully expected it. Nevertheless, now that it had arrived, he just stared in disbelief. Evidence of the horror yet to come. Unless he sent back his own brilliantly conceived plan by Saturday morning—someone (he didn’t know who) was going to set into motion their plan to assassinate the President of the United States. And soon. Especially if the U.S. started bombing Baghdad back into the Stone Ages.
He had no idea who this sleeper agent—this “Mr. C.”—was. Nor had he any way to contact him. Especially not as the new Secretary of the Treasury. Not now that he oversaw the U.S. Secret Service, responsible for the protection of the president. No one had expected that to happen. Least of all him. But here he was. If he wanted to go through with the plan, it should be even easier, given the new role fate had given him to play.
But what if he wanted to call it off? That would be tougher. How could he actually inform Secret Service Director Bud Norris about a sleeper agent he knew nothing about? And how would he explain exactly how he knew a hit on the president was imminent without implicating himself?
Everything was happening too fast. When he’d met Gogolov years before, he’d had no idea what he was getting into, or where that relationship would lead. How could he have? Iverson stopped and thought about that for a moment. Was that really true? Was this really such a surprise? Maybe not.
Born January 23, 1940 in a tiny hamlet in the Swiss Alps, Iverson was the only child of a powerful banking family. Iverson’s mother, also an only child, forced a bitter, painful divorce in the spring of 1948, after finding her husband in a vault with his secretary. The ensuing custody battle was a particularly nasty affair, a shrill, demeaning bid by both parents to force their son to take sides.
Eventually securing sole custody, she rapidly set about using her contacts and her own considerable personal fortune—nearly $69 million, left to her after the death of her parents—to emigrate to the U.S. and set up a new life in New York. Refusing him the chance to ever see his father again, she immediately sent Stuart off to a series of boarding schools in Delaware and Massachusetts, preparing him to eventually attend and graduate from Harvard with both a BS and an MBA, and hopefully go back into banking, where her parents and their parents and their parents had made their fortunes.
The problem was that Stuart had no interest in banking. Not as a career, at least. Fluent in French, German, and Russian, he joined the State Department’s foreign service division and headed overseas after leaving Harvard, variously posted in Hong Kong, Prague, Paris, and Bonn before arriving in Moscow as an economic attaché in the summer of 1973. It was then that he was introduced to Yuri Gogolov, a former Spetsnaz commander who’d become the director of security at Russia’s central bank, and his career began to take a radical, unexpected turn.
Perhaps U.S. counterintelligence officials should have seen it coming. Rich, restless, and devoid of deep personal, professional, or financial ties in the U.S., Iverson was, perhaps, a classic Soviet espionage recruit. Except that he was never recruited by the KGB to spy against the U.S. He was recruited by Gogolov to spy against the Soviet Union.
As the two slowly became friends between 1973 and 1979, Iverson (who did two tours of duty in Moscow as an economic attaché, then was transferred back to the State Department to monitor Soviet economic affairs, until he later became the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow in 1989) slowly came to learn that Gogolov was actually a mole inside the Bank of Russia. But he wasn’t working for a foreign intelligence service. He was working for himself. A fierce Russian nationalist, Gogolov was intensely opposed to the presence of the Soviet communist regime in his homeland, and deeply angered by the rampant corruption of the Politburo, which he saw up close and personal every day in his position at the Bank of Russia.
Gogolov’s dream—indeed, his mission in life—was to undermine the Kremlin from inside, to recruit and raise up an enormous, underground cadre of nationalist insurgents, dedicated to reclaiming “Russia for the Russians,” and to burying the Communists as Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev had once threatened to bury the West.
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Gogolov—then responsible for the security of all Russian central banking officials in Moscow—believed he could see the beginning of the end. Afghanistan would become the Sovi
et’s Vietnam. Kabul would become Moscow’s Hanoi. The more eighteen-and nineteen-year-old Russian-born soldiers that died at the hands of the mujahedin, the more support Gogolov found for his cause.
That’s where Iverson came in. In the summer of 1981, at a Black Sea resort where the two both vacationed, Gogolov made his move. He asked Iverson to begin investing a small portion of his personal funds—safe and out of the sight of the FBI in an anonymous account in a bank in Basel, Switzerland—in a complicated but fascinating scheme.
First, together, they would start “buying” the loyalties of junior up-and-coming Soviet military and political officers posted throughout the various Soviet republics. Then, they would begin funding a new paramilitary unit Gogolov was developing, run by a shadowy operative from Tehran by the name of Mohammed Jibril. Gogolov’s Spetsnaz connections were already identifying men who could be trusted to sign up. But they needed at least small amounts of cash to seal the deals, and provide incentives for each new recruit to recruit still more members.
The goal, Gogolov made clear, was not to harm U.S. interests, but to further them—to use a little venture capitalism to destabilize the Soviet Empire from within and leave the U.S. the only true superpower on the planet. Of this outcome—and Gogolov’s motives—Iverson wasn’t wholly convinced. But it didn’t really matter. The game sounded fun; a whole lot more exciting than the life of a bureaucrat, much less a banker.
On August 2, 1981 Iverson signed on, asking only one thing of his new “business partner” in return. Iverson wanted to be supplied the latest and most accurate economic and political intelligence on the real state of the Soviet Union developed by this new clandestine network Gogolov was wiring.
The more Iverson knew about the inner workings of the Soviet empire—particularly its economic strengths and weaknesses, and particularly in the area of natural resources such as gas and oil—the more valuable he would be to his superiors in the State Department, and to his friends in the White House.
Iverson could see the handwriting on the wall as well. He knew the Soviet Union’s days were numbered. And he saw a strategic opportunity to call it first and set himself apart from the hacks all around him who believed Reagan was a lunatic for predicting the Soviet Union would soon wind up on the ash heap of history. He could scratch Gogolov’s back and Gogolov could scratch his. It was the oldest business deal in the book and, though the stakes were high, Iverson concluded the price was right.
What he should have predicted, however, but didn’t, was that a chess player of Yuri Gogolov’s caliber would not be satisfied by making friends only of an American like him. He would harbor other ambitions. Bigger ambitions. Deadly ambitions.
Gogolov and Jibril, for example, believed they could eventually build a new Russian-Persian strategic alliance, combining Moscow’s nuclear might with Tehran’s gas and oil reserves and strategically critical warm-water ports on the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. A Russia-Iranian alliance would create the wealthiest and most powerful North-South alliance on the planet, and Gogolov was offering Iverson an opportunity to buy in early.
There was just one obstacle in the way: Iraq.
If Iraq could be neutralized—wiped off the face of the planet forever would be preferable—Gogolov and Jibril’s dream of their Russian-Persian alliance could actually be within striking distance of reality.
The question was: How do you neutralize Iraq? An eight-year war between Baghdad and Tehran had left millions dead, but no winner. So war between the two countries would not be an option. Iraq was a Russian client state. So there was no possibility of inciting a war by Moscow against Baghdad. That left only two nations capable of reducing Iraq to rubble: the U.S. and Israel. How, then, could such nations be prodded into going nuclear against Iraq?
And then came America’s “war on terrorism.”
In January of 2002, then-President George W. Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “axis of evil.” And Gogolov and Jibril had an idea. It would take time. Careful planning. A lot of money. And some luck. But if they played their chess pieces shrewdly, they could actually buy their way into the good graces of Saddam Hussein, become his putative allies, and offer to help him destroy the U.S.—the “Great Satan”—and Israel, the “Little Satan.”
They would offer Saddam nuclear scientists, and nuclear weapons-grade materials. They would offer Saddam the latest intelligence from Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, London, and Washington. And eventually, to seal the deal, they would actually offer Saddam the assistance of Stuart Iverson, the American president’s best friend and closest confidante.
Then, when Saddam least expected it, they would tip off the Israelis and the Americans and set into motion Iraq’s ultimate demise. When Iraq was gone, a new Russian-Iranian alliance would be the most powerful player remaining on the geopolitical chessboard. And then the real fun would begin.
That, at least, was the theory. Anything could go wrong. But at the moment—so far as Gogolov and Jibril were concerned—all systems were “go.” And for the moment, they didn’t know half of what Iverson knew. The American president was, in fact, poised to go nuclear against Saddam Hussein, and Iverson was gently egging him on.
Becoming Treasury Secretary, however, had never been part of Iverson’s personal plan. Gogolov and Jibril were ecstatic when they’d heard the news. But Iverson hated the idea. He knew full well it would bring new and nearly untenable risks—exhaustive background checks, Senate confirmation hearings, constant Secret Service protection, never-ending media coverage. It would also deny him what he wanted most, a piece of the financial action from the megadeals he was helping engineer in the shadows.
But there was no turning back now, thought Iverson. He’d sealed his fate long ago.
In 1981, when he first began secretly diverting funds to Gogolov and his inner circle.
In 1995, when he helped Gogolov narrowly escape a frantic Yeltsin mole hunt.
In 1999, when he reconnected with Gogolov at a hotel in Prague and began discussing how much better the Clinton-Gore administration was for Gogolov’s purposes than a new, tough, no-nonsense Republican administration.
And certainly by last month, when he’d agreed, however reluctantly, to commit treason and help assassinate the President of the United States. All to become a player in a world of pawns. If he got away with it.
Iverson quickly deleted the email, without responding. He deleted all the emails from his AOL account, and from his MSN account, using Microsoft Outlook. He then went to “Tools,” scrolled down to “Empty Deleted Items Folder,” and got rid of his trash. Then he logged off, shut down his laptop, and headed back outside to the waiting Lincoln Town Car. He wasn’t ready to reply to Gogolov, who would then reply to Azziz. He wasn’t ready to give them an answer. Not yet, anyway.
Time was running out. But he needed to be sure. He was tired, hungry, and his head was splitting. And he could hardly afford to make a mistake now.
Maxwell and Downing didn’t spend much time here.
Especially not in the wee hours of the morning. But destiny has a strange way of bringing men and women skilled in their work before those who hold power and the wisdom to use it. The two young agents stood on the thick blue carpeting in the seventh-floor executive suite, looking over portraits of Teddy Roosevelt and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., before a bleary-eyed and none-too-happy Scott Harris.
Unshowered and unshaven, the director wore jeans and a gray sweatshirt sporting the FBI logo, and a navy blue baseball cap with “FBI” in white letters stitched across the front.
They watched silently as he read two intercepted emails from Gogolov to Treasury Secretary Iverson; the first one Iverson had received and deleted aboard Air Force One, and the second he’d received and deleted at his home less than twenty minutes ago. Harris flipped through the sheaf of additional papers in the newly created and highly confidential file on his desk.
Reaching for his Bureau mug, topped off with freshly brewed black Gevalia coffee, Ha
rris took several sips before looking up and addressing the two directly.
“You’re absolutely sure both of these emails are from Gogolov?”
“Yes, sir,” Downing said quickly, fully cognizant of the chilling implications.
“Agent Maxwell, you concur?”
“Yes, sir. I tripled-checked her work. It’s solid.”
“Have you guys told anyone else about this?”
“No, sir,” Downing replied.
“What about these other emails?” Harris asked Downing.
“Sir, once I intercepted the first, I considered the possibility that previous emails had been sent or received from the secretary’s personal home computer before we launched Magic Lantern. Based on the search warrant you gave us after the president’s directive, I immediately went into the secretary’s hard drive and began reconstructing all of his incoming and outgoing emails for the past several years.”
“And you found these nine, plus the one that just came in?”
“Yes, sir. Seven from Mr. Gogolov. Three sent to him. You can see the dates on each one, sir. The one on the top of the file was transmitted by Mr. Iverson to Gogolov precisely one month to the day before the airborne attack on the president. He received a reply from Gogolov three days later. The next one Mr. Iverson received arrived the day after the attack. And so forth.”
“So Iverson initiated the contact.”
“Well, sir, I’m not sure we can conclude that. They obviously knew each other before the emails began. And they knew each other’s personal email addresses. But yes, the text of Mr. Iverson’s recent emails does suggest he is not a passive player in this whole thing.”
“And you don’t think he replied to these last two emails from Gogolov?”
“Not from his personal computer, at least. Mr. Iverson trashed them both immediately, then tried to get rid of any trace they had ever arrived.”