Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius Page B

that you can do what?”
    “So that I can make personal contact with Jamal. As soon as possible. That’s the only answer. Otherwise we’re whistling in the dark.”
    “Hmmm,” said Hoffman. For once, he actually looked pensive.
    “Hasn’t Jamal already told you he won’t meet you?” asked the station chief.
    “Yes,” said Rogers.
    “Well, he isn’t going to change his mind just because you ask him politely. This is what I have been trying to explain to you: You need a handle on him!”
    “Let me try it my way,” said Rogers. “I’ve got some ideas.”
    “Okay,” said the station chief after a moment’s deliberation. “As we say in the personnel-management business, it’s your ass.”

12
     
    Amman, Jordan; February 1970
     
    Rogers’s first plan was simple: trickery. He decided that he would wait for the next scheduled meeting between Fuad and Jamal, a few days hence, and crash it. He would be there in the safehouse when Jamal arrived, sit him down on the couch, and insist that he had to deal directly with an American. The worst that could happen was that the relationship would break off right then and there. Which would be better than waiting months before finding out that Jamal wasn’t willing to play ball.
    The appointed day arrived. The meeting was set in an apartment in Ramlet el-Baida, near the seacoast. Rogers went early to the safehouse, waited for Fuad, and told him that there had been a slight change in plans. They would both be meeting with Jamal that day. He didn’t explain why, and Fuad didn’t ask.
    Rogers and Fuad sat in the cheerless apartment for five hours, smoking cigarettes and waiting for the Palestinian. He never showed up.
    Rogers suspected a double-cross. His fears were relieved by a bit of intelligence that arrived the next day. The Beirut station had learned from a source in the Deuxième Bureau that a number of senior Fatah officials, including Jamal, had gone urgently to Amman, where some sort of crisis was brewing between the PLO and the Jordanians.
    Details of the crisis emerged in the cable traffic from the CIA station in Amman. On February 9, the king had issued a decree banning the Palestinian commandos from carrying weapons in public in Amman. The decree also required the commandos to carry identity cards and put license plates on their cars. The king’s demands sounded modest enough. But in the supercharged atmosphere of Jordan, where the PLO commandos had become a virtual state-within-a-state, they amounted to a declaration of war.
    It’s a bluff, thought Rogers as he read the cables. It has to be a bluff. The king doesn’t want a showdown yet.
    The Fatah leadership seemed eager enough for a confrontation. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the CIA’s radio-monitoring unit, picked up a communiqué the night of February 9 from Fatah Radio in Cairo. In the tormented syntax of the Revolution, it declared: “The time has come for the masses to act and act quickly, not only to stop the new conspiracy, but to inflict final defeat on the conspirators.”
    That meant that if the king wanted war, he would have war.
     
     
    When Rogers put the pieces together in his mind, he saw that the crisis in Jordan might provide a useful opportunity. It represented movement, and movement of almost any kind was beneficial. Movement altered the field of play and created space in which to operate. A political crisis of this sort was better still, since it provided openings that, in normal times, wouldn’t exist.
    The trick was to contrive the right moment, Rogers told himself. The moment when your target had no choice but to walk through the door you were opening for him.
    Rogers decided to follow Jamal to Amman. He sent Fuad separately by car and booked an MEA flight for himself in the name of Edwin Roberts. The same name was on the Canadian passport that Rogers carried in his briefcase.
     
     
    In a saner world, the MEA flight from Beirut to Amman would take about thirty