Permanent Record(49)
I took my plate and sat down at a table next to a well-dressed Middle Eastern man in a cuff-linked, demonstratively Swiss pink shirt. He seemed lonely, and totally exasperated that no one seemed interested in him, so I asked him about himself. That’s the usual technique: just be curious and let them talk. In this case, the man did so much talking that it was like I wasn’t even there. He was Saudi, and told me about how much he loved Geneva, the relative beauties of the French and Arabic languages, and the absolute beauty of this one Swiss girl with whom he—yes—had a regular date playing laser tag. With a touch of a conspiratorial tone, he said that he worked in private wealth management. Within moments I was getting a full-on polished presentation about what, exactly, makes a private bank private, and the challenge of investing without moving markets when your clients are the size of sovereign wealth funds.
“Your clients?” I asked.
That’s when he said, “Most of my work is on Saudi accounts.”
After a few minutes, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and on the way there I leaned over to tell the CO who worked finance targets what I’d learned. After a necessarily too-long interval “fixing my hair,” or texting Lindsay in front of the bathroom mirror, I returned to find the CO sitting in my chair. I waved to my new Saudi friend before sitting down beside the CO’s discarded, smoky-eyed date. Rather than feeling bad, I felt like I’d really earned the Pavés de Genève that were passed around for dessert. My job was done.
The next day, the CO, whom I’ll call Cal, heaped me with praise and thanked me effusively. COs are promoted or passed over based primarily on how effective they are at recruiting assets with access to information on matters substantial enough to be formally reported back to headquarters, and given Saudi Arabia’s suspected involvement in financing terror, Cal felt under tremendous pressure to cultivate a qualifying source. I was sure that in no time at all our fellow party guest would be getting a second paycheck from the agency.
That was not quite how it worked out, however. Despite Cal’s regular forays with the banker to strip clubs and bars, the banker wasn’t warming up to him—at least not to the point where a pitch could be made—and Cal was getting impatient.
After a month of failures, Cal was so frustrated that he took the banker out drinking and got him absolutely plastered. Then he pressured the guy to drive home drunk instead of taking a cab. Before the guy had even left the last bar of the night, Cal was calling the make and plate number of his car to the Geneva police, who not fifteen minutes later arrested him for driving under the influence. The banker faced an enormous fine, since in Switzerland fines aren’t flat sums but based on a percentage of income, and his driver’s license was suspended for three months—a stretch of time that Cal would spend, as a truly wonderful friend with a fake-guilty conscience, driving the guy back and forth between his home and work, daily, so that the guy could “keep his office from finding out.” When the fine was levied, causing his friend cash-flow problems, Cal was ready with a loan. The banker had become dependent, the dream of every CO.
There was only one hitch: when Cal finally made the pitch, the banker turned him down. He was furious, having figured out the planned crime and the engineered arrest, and felt betrayed that Cal’s generosity hadn’t been genuine. He cut off all contact. Cal made a halfhearted attempt to follow up and do damage control, but it was too late. The banker who’d loved Switzerland had lost his job and was returning—or being returned—to Saudi Arabia. Cal himself was rotated back to the States.
Too much had been hazarded, too little had been gained. It was a waste, which I myself had put in motion and then was powerless to stop. After that experience, the prioritizing of SIGINT over HUMINT made all the more sense to me.
In the summer of 2008, the city celebrated its annual Fêtes de Genève, a giant carnival that culminates in fireworks. I remember sitting on the left bank of Lake Geneva with the local personnel of the SCS, or Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. These guys worked down the hall from my vault at the embassy, but they were older than I was, and their work was not just way above my pay grade but way beyond my abilities—they had access to NSA tools that I didn’t even know existed. Still, we were friendly: I looked up to them, and they looked out for me.
As the fireworks exploded overhead, I was talking about the banker’s case, lamenting the disaster it had been, when one of the guys turned to me and said, “Next time you meet someone, Ed, don’t bother with the COs—just give us his email address and we’ll take care of it.” I remember nodding somberly to this, though at the time I barely had a clue of the full implications of what that comment meant.
I steered clear of parties for the rest of the year and mostly just hung around the cafés and parks of Saint-Jean Falaises with Lindsay, taking occasional vacations with her to Italy, France, and Spain. Still, something had soured my mood, and it wasn’t just the banker debacle. Come to think of it, maybe it was banking in general. Geneva is an expensive city and unabashedly posh, but as 2008 drew to a close its elegance seemed to tip over into extravagance, with a massive influx of the superrich—most of them from the Gulf states, many of them Saudi—enjoying the profits of peak oil prices on the cusp of the global financial crisis. These royal types were booking whole floors of five-star grand hotels and buying out the entire inventories of the luxury stores just across the bridge. They were putting on lavish banquets at the Michelin-starred restaurants and speeding their chrome-plated Lamborghinis down the cobbled streets. It would be hard at any time to miss Geneva’s display of conspicuous consumption, but the profligacy now on display was particularly galling—coming as it did during the worst economic disaster, as the American media kept telling us, since the Great Depression, and as the European media kept telling us, since the interwar period and Versailles.