A week after graduating from Boston College Paul Devereaux was sworn into the ranks of the Central Intelligence Agency. For him it was the poet’s bright, confident morning. The great scandals were yet to come.
With his patrician’s background and contacts he rose in the hierarchy, blunting the shafts of jealousy with a combination of easy charm and sheer cleverness. He also proved that he had a bucketful of the most prized currency of them all in the agency in those years: he was loyal. For that a man can be forgiven an awful lot, maybe sometimes a bit too much.
He spent time in the three major divisions: Operations (Ops), Intelligence (Analysis) and Counter-Intelligence (Internal Security). His career hit the buffers with the arrival as director of John Deutsch.
The two men simply did not like each other. It happens. Deutsch, with no background in intelligence gathering, was the latest in a long and, with hindsight, pretty disastrous line of political appointees. He believed Devereaux, with seven fluent languages, was quietly looking down on him, and he could have been right.
Devereaux regarded the new DCI as a politically correct nincompoop appointed by the Arkansan President whom, although a fellow Democrat, he despised, and that was before Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky.
This was not a marriage made in heaven and it almost became a divorce when Devereaux came to the defence of a division chief in South America accused of employing unsavoury contacts.
The entire agency had swallowed Presidential Executive Order 12333 with good grace, except for a few dinosaurs who went back to World War II. This was the EO brought in by President Ronald Reagan that forbade any more ‘terminations’.
Devereaux had considerable reservations but was too junior to be sought out for his counsel. It seemed to him that in the thoroughly imperfect world occupied by covert intelligence gathering there would arise occasions where an enemy in the form of a betrayer might have to be ‘terminated’ as a pre-emption. Put another way, one life may have to be terminated to preserve a likely ten.
As to the final judgement in such a case, Devereaux believed that if the director himself was not a man of wholly sufficient moral integrity to be entrusted with such a decision, he should not be director at all.
But under Clinton, in the by now veteran agent’s view, political correctness went quite lunatic with the instruction that disreputable sources were not to be used as informants. He felt it was like being asked to confine one’s sources to monks and choirboys.
So when a man in South America was threatened with the wreckage of his career for using ex-terrorists to inform on functioning terrorists, Devereaux wrote a paper so sarcastic that it circulated throughout the grinning staffers of Ops Division like illegal samizdat in the old Soviet Union.
Deutsch wanted to require the departure of Devereaux at that point but his deputy director, George Tenet, advised caution and eventually it was Deutsch who went, to be replaced by Tenet himself.
Something happened in Africa that summer of 1998 that caused the new director to need the mordant but effective intellectual, despite his views on their joint commander-in-chief. Two US embassies were blown up.
It was no secret to the lowliest cleaner that since the end of the Cold War in 1991 the new cold war had been against the steadily growing rise of terrorism, and the ‘happening’ unit within Ops Division was the Counter-Terrorism Center.
Paul Devereaux was not working in the CT Center. Because one of his languages was Arabic, and his career included three stints in Arabic countries, he was Number Two in Mid-East at the time.
The destruction of the embassies brought him out of there and into the headship of a small task force dedicated to one task and answering only to the director himself. The job in hand was called Operation Peregrine, after that falcon who hovers high and silent above his prey until he is certain of a lethal hit, and then descends with awesome speed and accuracy.
In the new office Devereaux had no-limits access to any information from any other source that he might want and a small but expert team. For his Number Two he chose Kevin McBride, not an intellectual patch on himself, but experienced, willing and loyal. It was McBride who took the call and held his hand across the mouthpiece.
‘Assistant Director Fleming at the bureau,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t sound happy. Shall I leave?’
Devereaux signalled for him to stay.
‘Colin . . . Paul Devereaux. What can I do for you?’
His brow furrowed as he listened.
‘Why surely, I think a meeting would be a good idea.’
It was a safe house; always convenient for a row. Daily ‘swept’ for bugging security, every word recorded with the full knowledge of the conference participants, refreshments on immediate call.
Fleming thrust the report from Bill Brunton under Devereaux’s nose and let him read it. The Arabist’s face remained impassive.
‘So?’ he queried.
‘Please don’t tell me the Dubai inspector got it wrong,’ said Fleming. ‘Zilic was the biggest arms trafficker in Yugoslavia. He quit, disappeared. Now he is seen conferring with the biggest arms trafficker in the Gulf and Africa. Totally logical.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of trying to fault the logic,’ said Devereaux.
‘And in conference with your man covering the Arabian Gulf.’
‘The Agency’s man covering the Gulf,’ said Devereaux mildly. ‘Why me?’
‘Because you virtually ran Mid-East, although you were supposed to be second string. Because back then all company staff in the Gulf would have reported to you. Because even though you are now in some kind of Special Project, that situation has not changed. Because I very much doubt that two weeks ago was Zilic’s first visit to that neck of the woods. My guess is you knew exactly where Zilic was when the request came through, or at least that he would be in the Gulf and available for a snatch on a certain day. And you said nothing.’