AS INSTRUCTED, I reported to Fred Turco’s office right at nine. I had worked for Fred in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in the mid-1980s. Now he was in charge of some new office set up to tighten up security in the CIA. Why he’d summoned me, I had no idea.
Fred took a good look at me standing in his door and didn’t necessarily like what he saw. I’d gotten back from northern Iraq the night before and hadn’t had time to get a haircut. Sunburned and wearing a sport coat that had been sitting in the bottom of a duffel bag for the past three months, I must have looked like I’d been in the field for years.
“Sit down,” Fred said, pointing at a chair pulled up in front of his desk. When he silently ran his fingers through his shock of prematurely gray hair, I knew it wasn’t a morning for pleasantries.
“There are two FBI agents upstairs in the general counsel’s office waiting to interview you,” he finally said. I didn’t have to be told what that meant: The FBI doesn’t interview CIA officers returning from an overseas assignment unless a criminal investigation is afoot.
“Why the FBI, Fred?”
Fred moved his in box so he could see me better. As he shifted uneasily in his chair, I knew we hadn’t hit bottom yet. He fixed me with a stare he was known for all over the CIA and let me have it: “Tony Lake ordered the FBI to investigate you for trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein.”
Assassination? I knew what had happened in Iraq was sure to rattle windows at the White House. I knew Lake, the president’s national security adviser, was furious at the CIA. But this was insane—turning the FBI loose on the CIA. Not to mention that the accusation wasn’t true.
“He can’t be serious,” I managed to get out.
Fred shrugged. “You have no idea how this town works. Stay cool, and we’ll get you through this.”
Rob Davis, a lawyer from the general counsel’s office, had been sitting so quietly at the conference table in the back of the room that I’d forgotten about him. Now he joined the party.
“Look, Bob, you’ve been overseas for almost twenty years. Washington really has changed a lot,” Davis said. “These kinds of investigations go on all the time now. Fred’s right—you’ll get through it. And, by the way, it’ll make you a better officer.”
He was right about Washington having changed, but the part about the investigation being good for my career was bullshit. I’d worked for the CIA long enough to know that it had long ago stopped backing up its officers in the field. An FBI investigation, no matter how baseless, meant my career was over. In the CIA, as elsewhere in the federal government, you’re innocent until you’re investigated.
I ignored Davis and turned back to Fred, a former case officer who had survived his own run-in with Washington’s new political correctness. Rumor had it that while he was working in counterterrorism, he had a close call with the Department of Justice. Fred was running a source, so the story went—a former terrorist who was helping track Carlos the Jackal. The source let us know when Carlos moved from Damascus to Amman and then to Khartoum, where the French, acting on our information, eventually arrested him. The problem was that the source, many years before, had been involved peripherally in an attack in which an American died. A couple of straight-leg Department of Justice attorneys heard about the source’s past and tried to nail Fred’s hide to the wall for putting a bad guy on the payroll. They didn’t care that our bad guy had helped capture a far worse one: an internationally sought assassin. Fred had lasted, though. He knew how the game was played in Washington, and I was counting on him to give me a few quick lessons.
“I’m going up first,” Fred said as he stood to leave. “I’ll sit through the interview. So will Davis. But don’t forget, he’ll be there to represent the CIA—not you. The FBI agents are going to tell you you’re entitled to a lawyer. It’s your call. But if you ask for one, frankly it’s not going to look good inside this building. See you in five minutes.”
Maybe I should have paid a little more attention to the irony of it all: I was the one being investigated, but it was the CIA who had a lawyer.
THE TWO FBI AGENTS were sitting at the general counsel’s oval conference table. They stood up, shook my hand, and showed me their credentials.
I recognized one of them. Mike 
and I had worked together in 1986 in Wiesbaden, Germany, debriefing Father Lawrence Jenco, a Catholic priest serving in Lebanon, a hostage who had just been released by Hizballah. Although Mike had known me by a different name then, he remembered me now. The expression on his face seemed to say, Yeah—I, too, recall better times when we were all on the same side and knew who the enemy was; but his words were all business.
“Mr. Baer, we are conducting a criminal investigation,” he said as soon as we sat down. “You have the right to an attorney. Do you wish to consult an attorney at this time?”
I had decided to do without one. For a start, I didn’t have a lawyer. And even if I did, there was no way I could afford a protracted investigation on my government salary. What was the alternative? Call up the ACLU and explain that I was an accused CIA assassin who needed pro bono counsel? Besides, I didn’t need a lawyer to know that in an investigation like this, the one thing you never do is give up anything freely. I’d conducted enough of my own. Just answer the questions, yes or no.
“We are investigating a conspiracy to commit premeditated murder—the murder of Saddam Hussein,” Mike began.
I didn’t reply.
“Are you aware Executive Order 12333 prohibits the CIA from conducting assassinations.”
President Reagan had issued 12333 in 1981. Since then every incoming CIA officer was obligated to read and initial it.
“I’ve read it.”
“Did you attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein.”
“No.”
“Did you ever order anyone to assassinate Saddam Hussein?”
“Did anyone on your team, as far as you know, attempt to assassinate Saddam?”
“No.”
“Did you ever use the name Robert Pope?”
I didn’t answer.
Mike then turned around a thick manila file so I could read a three-page report he’d marked with his finger. It was about a meeting held in late February 1995 in northern Iraq, between Ahmad Chalabi, the head of an Iraqi dissident group, and two Iranian intelligence officers. According to the report, Chalabi told the Iranians the U.S. finally had decided to get rid of Saddam—to assassinate him. To carry it out, he said, the National Security Council had dispatched an “NSC team” headed by Robert Pope to northern Iraq. The NSC, Chalabi explained, had asked him to contact the Iranian government on its behalf to ask for help. The report went on to say that in the middle of the meeting Chalabi had received a telephone call and left the room, giving the Iranians an opportunity to read a letter left conspicuously in the middle of his desk. Supposedly written on NSC stationery, it asked Chalabi to give Mr. Pope “all assistance requested for his mission.”
That’s when I stopped reading. I knew Ahmad Chalabi well. I had been in northern Iraq when the meeting took place, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Chalabi had invented this story from scratch. He must have thought that if he could swindle the Iranians into believing that the NSC and the White House were finally serious about getting rid of Saddam, they would have no choice but to throw their support behind Chalabi and his faction. There were, however, problems. There was no Robert Pope, for one. Nor was there any NSC assassination plan. No one, NSC or otherwise, had asked Chalabi to pass a message to Iran. As for the letter, it was clearly forged. Chalabi left it on his desk knowing the Iranians couldn’t resist reading it when he was called out of the room.
So far, so good. But like a lot of traps, Chalabi’s had caught the wrong hare—not the Iranians he wanted to buy into it, but the national security adviser to the president of the United States. Tony Lake apparently didn’t understand how the Middle East works—how conspiracies, lies, and double-crosses like Chalabi’s Pope scam make the place go around. But Lake did know Washington and politics. He had been had, and someone was going to pay. In the endless Beltway turf wars, that meant the CIA, and since I was the CIA’s man in northern Iraq, that meant me.
Never mind that Lake knew Ahmad Chalabi had been tried and convicted for defrauding his own bank. Never mind that we were in the middle of the most important action against Saddam Hussein since the end of the Gulf War. I had been summoned back to Washington, and now my career, reputation, and future were in the hands of a very angry, very powerful man. Worse, the agency I had served for nearly twenty years had let it happen without a fight. Worst of all, maybe, I wasn’t really surprised. There was a reason America’s human intelligence resources had dried up like the Sahara, and it began with a lack of guts right where I was sitting now—in Langley, Virginia.
After I finished with the memo, I looked back up. I knew that if the president’s national security adviser didn’t understand the Middle East, neither would the two FBI agents. Then again, that wasn’t their job.
“None of this is true,” I said.
It was obvious to both FBI agents that they weren’t getting anywhere. They looked at each other and nodded. Mike turned back to me and asked, “Would you be willing to take a polygraph?”
“No problem,” I said. I’d gone too far to turn back now.
Mike accompanied me to the door.
“Frankly, Justice had a hard time with this one,” he said when we were in the hall, out of earshot of the others. “They weren’t comfortable with 12333 and instead used Title 18, sections 1952 and 1958.”
I looked at Mike for a translation.
“Federal murder-for-hire statutes,” he said, then turned and walked back to rejoin the others.
As I later found out, the maximum penalty for a conviction under 1952 and 1958 is life imprisonment or death.