THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 11:10 A.M.
BIG LAKE, WASHINGTON
The drive from Sea-Tac Airport takes ninety minutes. It rains most of the trip. Mount Rainier, shrouded in clouds of gray linen, appears and disappears like some kind of Indian spirit in the sky. Brooks, driving, asks more about the man they are going to see.
“Anthony Rousseau,” Senator Burke had told Rena on the phone four days earlier. “He’s your rabbi.”
It took Burke three more days to persuade Rousseau to see them, including two calls yesterday, on Christmas.
“He’ll be wary,” Burke had counseled Rena. “But if you can persuade him to help, he knows everyone. And if you push the right button, Tony can’t keep a secret.” After a pause Senator Burke added: “I know, ironic for a spy.”
Rousseau had retired to a little town in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle called Big Lake.
With the possible exception of Bill Donovan, who created the CIA, and Allen Dulles, who directed it under two presidents, arguably no one had left more of an imprint on the Agency than Anthony Rousseau, though he never became director.
When the planes hit the twin towers, Rousseau had been the leading voice arguing that Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism were the next great threat. In the aftermath, he helped shift the Agency’s focus away from cloak-and-dagger spying to paramilitary operations, thus reviving the Agency’s budget at a time when some in Congress wanted to slash it. Ellen Wiley’s background file on Rousseau said “he helped transform the CIA from secret agents to a secret army.”
Brooks had asked what “secret army” meant. Rena explained that in the hot war zones of the Middle East, the CIA’s supersoldiers, specially trained military personnel, armed with the best weapons and high-tech intelligence, ran military operations that were entirely covert.
“I was Special Forces,” Rena had explained to Brooks. “The CIA recruited its secret army from the best of that group. They were more special. We called them Captain Americas.
“In six weeks, Rousseau’s secret soldiers, working with northern rebels, swept most of the Taliban out of Afghanistan before the bulk of U.S. troops arrived. It didn’t last, but they did it.”
As the ground war cooled and troops were withdrawn, Wiley’s brief explained, Rousseau innovated again. He became an early champion of arming drones. That was when the Agency budget really started to grow. “Seventy percent of the intelligence budget is now outsourced to contractors and other services,” the brief said.
“Jesus,” Brooks says.
Then Jim Nash chose Owen Webster to be his CIA chief over Rousseau.
“Why?” Brooks asks.
Rena ponders the question. “I have two guesses,” he says finally, “but that’s all they are. Rousseau was an innovator. Inevitably making change means making enemies.”
“And?”
“As prescient as he was for so many years, Rousseau in the end missed the rise of ISIS, the whole second wave of radical terrorism we’re facing now. For all he got right, maybe some people thought he had lost his mojo.”
Rousseau worked for a while under Webster as number three in the Agency, director of Operations, the division in charge of collecting intelligence. A different division, Analysis, decides what it means. But soon Webster wanted him gone. When Rousseau left, three years ago, he moved back home to Washington State and this small, isolated lake.
“You’ve met him?”
“Only briefly, Iraq in early 2004. I was pretty green still. Then a couple times through Senator Burke.”
“What’s he like?”
“Burke warned he’s sort of haunted. He used the term Shakespearean.”
“Haunted by what?”
“He didn’t stop 9/11, couldn’t stabilize Afghanistan, was part of a war in Iraq that obviously was a mistake, and didn’t anticipate the next wave of jihadists.”
“That isn’t exactly all his fault.”
They see a lake appear below them not long after they leave the interstate. The lake is smaller than they expect, given the name of the place, and it is surrounded by a mix of late 1950s fishing cabins, 1970s ranch-style suburban houses, and a few modern multimillion-dollar mansions.
They stop in front of what was once a small cabin that had grown over the years into an impressive modern vacation home. At the door, Rousseau greets them in blue jeans and Patagonia flannel.
“Look at you,” he says, taking Rena’s hand. “Out of uniform and in politics. What has happened to us?”
Now just past sixty, Rousseau has the looks of a James Bond kind of spy—broad shouldered, thick black hair, and deep wary eyes—but the impression is deceptive. Rousseau was a Senate staffer and National Security Council aide before joining the CIA. A suit, not a spook. A minder. A purse keeper. A man who knew appropriations and how to please overseers—necessary skills in the quaint days after the Cold War when the Agency was contracting.
Few expected him to become a visionary spy.
He leads them to a back deck overlooking a lake the color of dried basil. He brings coffee, warm cider, and cookies, and they sit, three figures around a teak table, bundled in jackets against the chill of a clearing storm.
He has owned the house since college, Rousseau tells them, when it was a one-room cabin. He knew the lake as a boy, bought the place “for nothing, with money I’d saved from a paper route, literally. Now there are houses here worth five million dollars.”
It is Rousseau, when the small talk slows, who says, “Tell me why you’re really here.”
“You know why,” says Rena.
Rousseau warms his hands on his coffee. “Tell me anyway. I’ll learn from what you leave out.” He aims an impish glance at Brooks, then stares stonily at Rena.
They explain it all again, the charge from the White House to stay ahead of Congress and the media, the shock of the Tribune exposé. They leave out their suspicions about O’Dowd and Franks and the awkward meeting at the White House this week.
“What the hell you gotten yourself into?” But it is only half a joke.
“That’s what we came to ask you,” Brooks says.
“A mess,” Rousseau answers.
“Then we need an annotator.”
It’s a term Rousseau liked to employ, Burke had said. “Tony liked to say most people look at the world and see only the outlines. Never the context. Never the meaning. They need an annotator. Especially presidents. ‘The CIA,’ he would tell them, ‘is the annotator.’”
Rousseau smiles at Rena’s use of the term.
But they hope Rousseau will be more than that. Nash had passed over Rousseau and chosen Webster to run the CIA. Now, through Rena and Brooks, the president in effect is reaching back and offering Rousseau a chance to be in the game again. That is their real offer. That is what he can annotate.
“You would have made a good goddamn spy, Peter,” says Rousseau.
“No,” Rena says. “I’m too direct.”
“Who knows you’re here?”
“No one.”
The answer seems to irritate Rousseau.
“Bullshit. You think you’re just regular citizens anymore?”
“What happened in Oosay?” Rena asks, trying to stay on track.
All at once the former spy is out of his chair and walking to the dock. He stops at a boatlift, pushes a button, and a large motorboat hanging fifteen feet in the air begins to lower into the water.
He returns to the table. “Let’s go on the lake,” he says. “I’ll get us warmer coats.”
Without another word he heads into the house and comes back with two heavier coats, which he hands to his visitors. In a few minutes they are in the middle of the lake.
ROUSSEAU DROPS ANCHOR and flips a switch and music begins to play, a Bach cello concerto, coming through scratchy boat speakers. He scans the horizon, then makes his way back to where Rena and Brooks are seated in the back of the boat.
“You are into the shit,” he says.
“Why?” Brooks asks.
“The intelligence community hates Nash,” Rousseau says.
“And why is that?”
Brooks knows her role here is to play the innocent, the uninformed, which would pull Rousseau to reveal more.
“Because Jim Nash only trusts certain kinds of information and certain kinds of people.”
“You need to explain that to me,” Brooks says.
Rousseau glances at Rena in recognition he is being handled.
“In intelligence, Ms. Brooks, there are three kinds of information. There’s the kind that comes from people on the ground. Spying. The acronym is HUMINT. Short for ‘human intelligence.’ There’s intelligence from imagery—cameras and satellites. IMINT. And there is machine and signal intelligence—from picking up specific signals from fixed objects, listening, hacking, and electronic monitoring. MASINT, or machine and signal.”
Rousseau scans the lake and the shoreline.
“I always hated the acronyms.”
His head swivels to the other shoreline. An old habit—always monitor your surroundings? Or does Rousseau think they are being watched?
“Over the last decade, the United States, and especially the Agency, has leaned more heavily on image and machine intelligence—cameras and eavesdropping. And then, in fighting the war on terror, on drones.”
“It’s a shift you started,” Rena says.
Rousseau smiles ruefully. “Those who make changes are always more mindful of their risks than those who inherit them.”
He examines their faces for understanding.
“It was inevitable really. When you’re losing a war, you want new tools. Technology seems safer. Better. More accurate.”
“Why does that make Nash’s national security team distrust him?” Brooks asks.
“Because over time the president and Diane Howell have come to trust only the intelligence they can see for themselves and to doubt the advice they get from their team of generals and spies. Nash has struggled to find a defense secretary he trusts. He’s squabbled with the Joint Chiefs. He isn’t close to Webster at CIA. He just fired his director of national intelligence, the person who is supposed to coordinate everything. He also fired his first national security advisor and brought Howell down from the United Nations.”
“Is he wrong?”
“Imagery and machines aren’t enough,” Rousseau answers. “You can’t win this war with drones and imagery. It’s a war of ideas. We can’t kill our way to victory here. Nash knows that, but he doesn’t know what else to do.”
Rousseau stares at Brooks.
“And it has made the feuds in the family worse.”
“What feuds? What family?”
“Look, Ms. Brooks. Spies want to spy. Soldiers want to fight. If drones can do your killing, and CIA contractors your fighting, your soldiers become obsolete. So do you. So does your knowledge. You’re being outsourced and replaced by machines.”
Rena, who has been listening and watching Rousseau, finally speaks.
“What does this have to do with Oosay?”
“Morat, and all of Africa, they’re another place to watch the same movie again,” Rousseau says. “Another country in chaos. Another place where DOD vies with CIA to see which service leads, which has the president’s ear, which has control. The army wants to play a bigger role in Africa because it thinks the CIA’s role is too big in the Middle East. My guess is that’s why Brian Roderick was in Oosay. Trying to put the army in charge. Not the CIA or other agencies. If Africa is the next great battlefield, try it the military way.”
They have gotten part of the way. Now Rena and Brooks know they have to go further.
“Something happened out there and Shane, Webster, Hollenbeck at the Joints Chiefs, they’re hiding something,” Rena says. “Maybe hiding it from Nash. We’ve talked to the survivors. They’re hiding something, too.”
Rousseau stares at Rena.
“We need to ask you about Roderick. Shane. Webster. Howell. We need to know what Roderick was doing out there. That is the key to what happened, and what is being covered up.”
Rousseau smiles. Then he stands, moves to the center of the boat, hoists the anchor, and pushes a button to restart the engines.