Working group MARJORIE DAW
Dearborn’s a bitch,” said the special agent in charge of the Detroit Field Office, Ronald Houston. “Everybody knows everybody. Everybody talks to everybody. Everybody listens to everybody. The radicals are buried in the general population but operate with the general population’s tacit support—and, in emergencies, active support. And Arabs—not to stereotype—being volatile, bristly, highly verbal, crafted by a millennium in the marketplace, haggling about everything, haggling for the sheer love of haggling, get lawyered up, are smart about politics, understand leverage and patronage and election support, so the local judiciary has been penetrated and subverted. It’s really hard to get a subpoena for a wiretap, and if you do get it, the folks who are the subject will hear of it before you. To get a warrant is even harder, and to serve it by force—that is, to raid—is almost a legal impossibility. No midnight door-busting in Dearborn. So you can’t tap, you can’t raid. I suppose you could surveil, but the community is wired so tight that any vans or teams in apartments or street-level retail are blown before they’re even inserted. On top of that, if you do make some kind of initiative, it better be executed perfectly, because, if not, you will be sued, your litigants will be all over the tube, claiming harassment and bias and anti-Islamic prejudice, the academics at Ann Arbor will join the hallelujah chorus, the protestors, with their genocide signs, will be out in the hundreds, and suddenly you’re teaching at a junior college in Tennessee for the rest of your life. That leaves snitches. Please note, I do not say ‘our’ snitches, because although we have a lot of them, we’re never quite sure who they’re working for. They are expert at playing both ends against the middle, can switch allegiances in midsentence and switch back again before the punctuation at the end. Can they be trusted? Yes, no, and maybe. Penetration? Forget it. You’ll never get a double into the cells. They know each other too well, and have for a thousand years. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian, Egyptian, or whatever, them-against-us will always trump them-against-them. Shiite or Sunni—whatever—makes no difference. That’s the realpolitik of the situation, gentlemen. You’re up against a system that is thirteen hundred years old and has stood against opponents for twelve hundred of those years. They know the ropes. They invented the ropes.”
“Thanks, Ron,” said Nick Memphis. “At least we know where we are. Mr. Gold, with your experience in that part of the world—I can’t help thinking the situation sounds a lot like Tel Aviv’s problems in Gaza City—I wonder if you have any suggestions or observations.”
The briefing was not being held in the FBI Detroit Field Office. It probably hadn’t been penetrated, but both Gold and the SAIC, the special agent in charge, agreed that you couldn’t be too sure. So it took place in an Ann Arbor library conference room, forty miles northwest of Dearborn. The SAIC came in one car—his own—after hours, his assistant in another. The entire MARJORIE DAW working group, a co-FBI/Mossad task force consisting of Nick Memphis, Gershon Gold, and consultant Bob Lee Swagger, who shared the room with the federals, assembled itself.
It had been a crazy couple of days, way too full of meetings for anyone’s pleasure, but you couldn’t put stuff together like this without suits sitting around tables in fluorescent-lit rooms, making decisions. The most important had already been made, however, and that was to grade MARJORIE DAW priority one, and Nick, dragged out of retirement because he knew and was trusted by Swagger, reported directly to Ward Taylor, the Assistant Director of the Counterterrorism Division, with copies to the Director himself. What was the budget? Priority one essentially meant there was no budget. At the same time, it was to be separated and shielded from Taylor’s same Counterterrorism Division, at least for the immediate time being, on the idea that the fewer people that knew about it, the more likely it was to stay secure. It’s not that Counterterrorism had been penetrated; it’s that it was big, too big to control and monitor, and things always squiggled out of it, and if anyone was watching, those squiggles could be assembled into information.
“It sounds a lot like Gaza City,” said Gold in response to Nick’s question. “I agree on penetration agents. No luck with that in Gaza City either, and too many have died trying. I could suggest observation by drone, with a small team examining the photographic evidence, but, again, drones are cumbersome to administer in any number without ample notice being given, and surely word would quickly reach the ears of exactly those whom we wish it not to. Thus, I’m afraid we’re left with our eyeballs, and again I concur with Special Agent Houston. The more eyeballs, the better. But also, the more eyeballs, the worse. More eyeballs means more chances of a leak. So I would restrict our observer corps to those in this room. I would obtain a variety of utility vehicles—mail trucks, UPS vans, television repair vans, telephone company units—and I would invest the hours it takes to move about the city in irregular intervals, from target to target, looking for anomalies.”
“How would you prioritize the targets?” asked Nick.
“Surely Special Agent Houston has an idea of which mosques are home to radicalized imams and which are not. I would take that list and invert it. I think it far more likely, given the expense and effort they—whoever ‘they’ are—have taken with this operation, that they would prevail on a mosque known for its docility to harbor Juba.”
“Are we so sure he’s going to be in a mosque?” asked Swagger. “Thinking like a sniper, I’d go for the best hide, but certainly not one that’s already on a list.”
“Very good point, which gets at a congenital operational weakness among the brotherhood. As leaders of a theocracy, the mullahs and imams will always want control. We have found that although operational assembly points might not actually be within the mosque itself, they will always be near it. The leaders want close-by fellows as their assault troops, men they know from families they know. We have found, furthermore, that they tend to administer all ops from within the mosque—meaning that if food or other kinds of support are necessary, it will come from the mosque. Though, I might add, there aren’t so many pizza delivery shops in Gaza City as in Dearborn.”
“If we had time, we could open a pizza shop,” said Nick. “That’d get us into places we might not otherwise get into. But we don’t have time.”
“Counterterror can get you three or four clean agents,” said Ron Houston, “to help with the outside surveillance. When I say ‘clean,’ I mean they are new to my office and haven’t yet interfaced with any Dearborn customers. They can take up the slack. I’m seeing a patrol pattern, driving by each of five mosques once an hour, changing vehicles frequently. I see walkers-by too, again nonchalant, no observational tells, just ambling, spelling the vehicular orbiting. Standard anti-mob procedure. Never stopping, but eyeballing on the move. We’re pretty good at it by now, all the energy and time we’ve put into working the dope trade. I can arrange to borrow at least a U.S. Mail van and a UPS truck. Detroit Metro has a surveillance van dressed up as a plumber’s truck. I know people there, and I could get it discreetly and unofficially.”
“It has always helped,” said Gold, “if we have very specific behaviors for the observers to focus on. I would like to see each of us, and each of the new recruits, given a list. If they know what they’re looking for, they may see it. If they’re, generally, just staring, the chance is less likely.”
“Such as?” asked Houston.
“Groups of unknown men entering and exiting. Certain entrances blocked off. Hyperactivity among security personnel. Upgrades in countersurveillance. Men in groups leaving with packages or groceries.”
“Another thing,” said Swagger. “Remember, Juba ain’t no cosmopolitan world traveler. So one of the things he’ll do here is go out with a group of guys to get acclimated to America. They’ll take him places, brief him on public transportation, taxis, Uber, anything practical that’ll prepare him for movement in America as he manipulates his way closer to his target.”
“That’s good,” said Nick.
“Swagger has gifts for this game,” said Gold.
“Hey!” Swagger said, looking at Houston. “You said getting an agent in was impossible? I know an agent who could get in.”
All eyes came to him.
“This person knows the routines. This person has passed among them before. This person has the clothes. This person knows the prayers, the ranks in the mosque, the literature, the culture. This person has done undercover. This person is brave, speaks the language, and is highly motivated. This person has a very low profile.”
“Sergeant Swagger,” said Gold, “I don’t think we could ask—”
“No, she’d do it in a second. They took her son.”