OPINION:
FALSE FLAG
By F.W. Rustmann Jr.
Regnery, $27.99, 302 pages
Fans of intelligence fiction can take heart at a jacket blurb for Fred Rustmann’s splendid new novel, “False Flag.” Gene Poteat, a career CIA officer and president emeritus of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, writes that the book will have readers doing “late-night page-turning to see how it all turns out and wondering, ’Did this really pass CIA censors?’”
No one doubts the necessity of the CIA’s Publications Review Board (PRB), which justifiably keeps secrets from being publicly disclosed.
Nonetheless, the PRB has frustrated an uncountable number of agency retirees who set out to write either memoirs or fiction drawing upon their real world experience. Several have complained to me they saw neither rhyme nor reason in the board’s refusal to clear sources and methods that have long been in the public domain.
In this instance, however, the board gave Mr. Rustmann a relatively free hand in discussing the nuts and bolts of CIA operations.
The author spent 34 years in CIA’s Clandestine Service, serving in nine countries, twice as chief of station. And virtually every page of “False Flag,” his fourth book, displays an authenticity of how an officer actually works in the field.
Mr. Rustmann’s central character is Harry MacMurphy, a cashiered CIA officer who remains in the good graces of the chief of the agency’s operations directorate. He sets up a Florida firm, Global Strategic Reporting.
The innocuous name conceals what is effectively a private CIA which handles “off the books” international matters outside of the agency’s, ranging from due-diligence research to internal corporate frauds.
As his former boss states, “We’re going to do the things that need to be done: Covert actions and a whole range of things that this great outfit used to do but won’t do anymore. No more timidity. We’ll be bold. Just like in the old days.”
In an opening riff, Mr. Rustmann relates how GSR handles a “child recovery” operation in Belize, involving a cocaine-addicted Belizean mother who has taken a child away from an American father who has legal custody. A jailhouse scene in which MacMurphy’s associate beats the tar out of four would-be bullies perhaps illustrates what is taught in unarmed combat courses at CIA’s training center in Tidewater, Virginia.
The child saved, Mr. Rustmann moves to his main story: The kidnapping in Beirut of a young female officer, Yasmin Ghorbani, who is in Lebanon under non-official cover (NOC).
Her assignment is described with textbook precision: She is to make a brush pass with another woman at 11:43 a.m. on the third floor, central aisle, of a department store — preceded by a three-hour surveillance detection route to ensure she is not being followed.
She is to exchange envelopes with another woman, a CIA officer who works under official cover in the American embassy. The pass succeeds. The envelope she receives contains a Jordanian passport, a driver’s license, two credit cards and various club membership cards. The packet would create a Jordanian identity for Ghorbani, who is of Middle Eastern descent.
She plans to use the identity package to travel into Iran, Syria and other countries to gather important information on the Iranian nuclear program.
But when Ghorbani goes onto the street, she is grabbed and pushed into a van. Her kidnappers are from the terrorist group Hezbollah, which is close to ruling authorities in Iran. The fear is that Ghorbani can be tortured into revealing her highly-secret sources.
So how can CIA free the woman without revealing for whom she works? Mr. Rustmann’s solution is the core of his story. And in doing so he offers some generic advice on how a case officer works in the field.
A striking example is MacMurphy’s use of an Iranian businessman, Hadi Kashmiri, now living in exile on Cyprus, the location of which makes it the “focus” of all the agency’s worldwide counterterrorism operations.
Eager to work against the dictatorial regime now ruling Iran, Kashmiri happily gives what help he can to the CIA. Over the years, officers have developed him from a “contact” into an “asset,” by persuading him to take money for his help.
The change in status makes Kashmiri “feel like part of the operation,” and convinces him that the agency has confidence in him.
Just what Kashmiri does to free Ghorbani is suggested in the title of the book. “False Flag,” which in intelligence lingo means that an officer (or an asset) pretends to be working for another country.
Without giving away too much of Mr. Rustmann’s intricate plot, suffice to say that his characters fly several different “false flags” — and here are enough snags along the way to make you fear for the fate of the captive woman.
A splendid read, written by an expert who is adept at telling an exciting sorry as he was as a field operative. Five cloaks, five daggers.
• Joseph Goulden, the author of 19 books, specializes in intelligence and military affairs.
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