The back-slapping at Langley was still under way when a junior technician, who’d begun coordinating with Moroccan first responders, stumbled upon reports of a second calamity: the RosAvia complex in Tazagurt was falling victim to a raging fire. By the time Ouarzazate’s distant fire brigade reached the facility, there was little left to salvage. More disturbing news soon followed: a number of bodies had been found amid the charred wreckage.
The improbable timing of the tragedy escaped no one at Langley, and their bleak outlook was confirmed when evidence of accelerants was found. Another body was discovered near the runway, on the roof of a curiously equipped van—a victim whose demise had nothing to do with fire and everything to do with two 9mm hollow-point bullets.
All too late, Director Coltrane ordered yet another retuning of the agency’s priorities. In the frenzy to prevent the destruction of the House of Saud, all regional surveillance assets had been directed toward the Atlantic coast. The NRO quickly retrained its nearest bird eastward, and analysts scoured RosAvia’s tarmac for the small business jet that had arrived twelve hours ago carrying a single Russian.
The jet was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
In the following days, Moroccan authorities issued a stream of disturbing press releases.
In his grave initial account, the minister of foreign affairs announced that an attempt had been made on the life of the king of Saudi Arabia. By grace of God, the plot targeting the monarch’s jet along the southern Moroccan coast had been foiled. Great credit was given, and rightly so, to the king’s pilots, who had skillfully brought the damaged plane to safety. The specific nature of the attack was characterized vaguely as a “drone incident,” and requests from the press for amplification on the point were shot down for reasons of national security, no mention made as to whose secrets were in jeopardy.
The minister also linked the tragedy at Tazagurt to the attack. He noted that the facility, run under license by the Russian corporation RosAvia, had been integral to the plot. Yet the extent of that involvement would be difficult to measure: all thirteen employees had been killed execution style, and the hangar and outbuildings had burned to the ground. Little remained of the few aircraft inside. The minister also mentioned, perhaps through clenched teeth and with a degree of pith, that RosAvia representatives were responding dutifully to investigators’ questions from their distant Moscow headquarters. At the end, he left no doubt that the inquiry would be a long and arduous one. Subsequent updates did nothing to dispel that notion.
Curiously, the most headline-worthy release of information came not from the Moroccans, but rather the Russian ambassador in Rabat. In a freewheeling news conference on the second day after the event, he spilled word of what had been discovered in the wreckage of RosAvia’s hangar. Surviving the inferno were countless ISIS pamphlets, prayer rugs, and two laptop computers containing a virtual library of radical Islamic literature. Perhaps coincidentally—or perhaps not—within minutes of the Russian ambassador leaving his podium, a number of crude videos began circulating on the internet in which ISIS claimed credit for the attack.
With the bit between their teeth, reporters besieged Morocco’s Sûreté Nationale, who reluctantly confirmed the ambassador’s assertions. The police had hoped to deflect mention of ISIS involvement, not wanting to fan fundamentalist flames in their strongly Muslim nation. The dashing of the Sûreté’s hopes was made complete the next day when headlines across the world labeled the attack as the latest radical jihadist assault.
An ocean away, the CIA followed every dispatch. The consensus opinion there was nearly universal, and distilled to two points: As attempts at false flag attribution went, it was perhaps the clumsiest job anyone had ever seen. And by all appearances, it seemed to be working.