Portrait of a Spy

Euro-idiots such as the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Brigades—intelligence officers mainly used physical surveillance, hard wiretaps, and good old-fashioned detective work to identify the members of a cell. Now, with the advent of the Internet and global satellite communications, the contours of the battlefield had been altered. The Internet had given the terrorists a powerful tool to organize, inspire, and communicate, but it had also provided intelligence services with a means of tracking their every move. Cyberspace was like a forest in winter. The terrorists could hide there for a time, hatching their plots and organizing their forces, but they could not come or go without leaving footprints in the snow. The challenge for the counterterrorism officer was to follow the right set of tracks, for the virtual forest was a dark and confusing place where one could wander aimlessly while innocents died.
    Gabriel and his team cautiously set foot there the next morning when British intelligence, under standing agreement, shared with their American cousins the preliminary results of the inquiry into the Covent Garden bombing. Included in the material were the contents of Farid Khan’s computers at home and work, a printout of every number he had dialed from his mobile phone, and a list of known Islamic extremists he had encountered while he was a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir and al-Muhajiroun. There was also a copy of the suicide tape, along with several hundred still images captured by CCTV during the final months of his life. The last photo showed him standing in Covent Garden, his arms raised above his head, a bloom of fire erupting from the explosives belt around his waist. Lying on the ground a few feet away, shielded by two men, was Gabriel. When the picture was magnified, it was possible to see the shadow of a gun in his left hand.
    Carter had distributed the material to the CTC at Langley and the NSA at Fort Meade, Maryland. Then, without the knowledge of either, he delivered a third copy to the house on N Street. The next day, he dropped off a remarkably similar package from the Danish, but an entire week would elapse before he appeared with the material from Paris. “The French still haven’t quite figured out that we’re all in this together,” Carter said. “They view the attack as a failure of their intelligence system, which means you can be sure we’re getting only part of the story.”
    Gabriel and his team worked through the material as quickly as possible, but with the patience and attention to detail required in such an endeavor. Instinctively, Gabriel told them to approach the case as if it were an enormous canvas that had suffered extensive losses. “Don’t stand off at a distance and try to see everything at once,” he warned. “It will only drive you mad. Work your way in slowly from the edges. Focus on small details—a hand, an eye, the hem of a garment, a single thread running through each of the three attacks. You won’t be able to see it at first, but it’s there, I promise you.”
    With the help of the NSA and the government data miners who worked in faceless office blocks ringing the Capital Beltway, the team burrowed deep into the memory of mainframe computers and servers scattered around the world. Phone numbers begot phone numbers, e-mail accounts begot e-mail accounts, names begot names. They read a thousand instant messages in a dozen different languages. Browsing histories were scoured for intent, photographs for evidence of target casing, search histories for secret desires and forbidden passions.
    Gradually, the faint outline of a terror network began to take shape. It was scattered and diffuse—here the name of a potential operative in Lyon; here the address of a possible safe flat in Malmö; here a phone number in Karachi; here a Web site of uncertain origin that offered downloadable videos of bombings and beheadings, the pornography of the jihadist world. Friendly Western intelligence services, believing they were dealing with the CIA, happily supplied material they would have normally withheld. So, too, did the secret policemen of the Islamic world. Before long, the walls of the drawing room were covered with a mind-numbing matrix of intelligence. Eli Lavon likened it to gazing upon the heavens without the aid of a star chart. It was pleasant, he said, but hardly productive when lives were at stake. Somewhere out there was an organizing principle, a guiding hand of