When the Soviet Union imploded in 1989 and Poland came back into the light, Forsyth proposed that his five WOLVERINEs be kept together and on the active-duty roster. He envisioned the team traveling as commercial reps for various Polish companies selling machine tools, pumps, and software in denied areas—North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Russia—countries murderously difficult for traditionally covered CIA officers. The statuesque Agnes Krawcyk, moreover, had joined the Faculty of Conservation and Restoration of Works of Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow where she finally earned her degree as a licensed conservator of antique terra-cotta, plaster, and ceramic artworks. Forsyth envisioned operational foreign travel for Agnes with cover as a restorer of art.
With relative freedom of movement in these countries, said Forsyth, the team could discreetly conduct required operational acts. The WOLVERINEs had been trained over the years and were proficient in street surveillance, surreptitious entry, site casing, recruitment, and intelligence reporting. All of them spoke fluent Polish and Russian, as well as the requisite French, German, and Satellite Proto English. They were self-sufficient, aggressive, natural risk takers, and fiercely loyal to Forsyth, who was like a god to them. Then Headquarters intervened.
There was protracted bureaucratic wrangling over Forsyth’s proposal for the WOLVERINEs. The new breed of CIA leadership—mostly politically ambitious former analysts and administrators who for decades had resented the verve and hegemony of the Directorate of Operations and now perversely sought to reform the DO into oblivion—viewed these five fanatic Slavs (or whatever they were) as retro Cold War dinosaurs. Besides, collection in the modern age was shifting to drones, and satellites, and massive electronic listening posts. Classic HUMINT (human intelligence) such as an officer talking to a clandestine source, the one sure way to obtain the plans and intentions of the opposition, was atrophying as an overly dangerous and time-consuming method of collection. Most CIA bureaucrats frantic to avoid operational flaps wanted nothing to do with case officers, collectors, operators, cowboys, scalp takers, mustangs, old whores, headhunters, or five fucking Eastern European WOLVERINEs for that matter, who could create only blue ruin and wind them up in front of a congressional oversight committee.
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When it appeared that Headquarters’ ignorance and acedia would prevail, and that the WOLVERINEs would be put out to pasture, a crisis arose in 2001 involving CIA employees in Syria. Three visiting analysts—two women and one man—from the Office of Near Eastern and South Asian Analysis (NESA) had ignored Damascus Station guidance to stay within the embassy compound in central Damascus on Abu Ja’far al Mansur Avenue. They were in Syria to gather “ground truth” on the Syrian civil war, and thought they knew what they were doing. Two of them spoke rudimentary Arabic. They set out on a Tuesday morning, intending to visit the offices of the International Red Cross on Arwada Square, the Italian Hospital on Omar Al-Mukhtar Avenue, and the Souq Al Khoja on Al Thawra Street, a total round-trip of three hours and ten miles.
When they did not return to the embassy at the close of business, the security officer called the metropolitan police who several hours later found the body of one of the women in the eastern suburb of Jobar, on the ground floor of the burned-out Teacher’s Tower Building, a blackened ten-story shell amid rubble and rusted tanks with hatches flung open and tracks thrown off the drive wheels. The forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two had been wired in her Maidenform underwear to a rusted bedspring propped upright against a shrapnel-pocked wall, and a plastic cable tie had been cinched around her neck. With a shrug, police said it might have been rogue soldiers from the National Defense Forces, or Sunni-led insurgents, or a Hezbollah unit, who could tell, but they expected the torture tape would be delivered to the embassy in several days.
That night, the security officer received a frantic call from the other two analysts. They had narrowly escaped being taken by running down an alley when their taxi had been blocked by two cars. They had flagged down an elderly man in a dented truck and offered to pay him to drive them to the embassy, but Hezbollah roadblocks and a thunderous explosion a block away had panicked the driver who instead drove the protesting analysts to his house in the village of As Saboura, eight miles west of the city along Route One. The old man and his wife were terrified that local Islamist insurgents would discover the Americans and murder them all—the streets at night were full of roving armed bands of men in keffiyeh head scarves. The analysts were trapped, unable to move. They had water and had been fed—the old lady made a batch of kurrat-barasya, a fragrant Syrian leek-and-lamb stew, to last the week. They spent the night on the couch, listening to voices in the courtyard. They didn’t have much time: some neighbor eventually would notice and talk, or militants might search the houses.
Complicating matters further was that someone in the police had whispered to the local Iranian Qods Force commander that two CIA officers were stranded and hiding somewhere in Damascus. The call went out from Tehran to compliant Syrian security organs, militia, and army units to find and apprehend the perfidious Americans who, significantly, were not accredited to the Syrian government, and therefore had no diplomatic immunity. Despite repeated protests from the acting ambassador, Hezbollah roadblocks were set up around the US Embassy. Station officers tried several times to get clear and drive to the village, but had to abort when they picked up heavy harassing surveillance. They stood down.
At Headquarters, the dire situation in Damascus was the first topic of discussion during the nightly Director’s executive-review meeting in the seventh-floor conference room. The caliphs in Langley who normally sat in the high-backed chairs waiting for orders from downtown were gloomy: they had a dead analyst on their hands, and the possibility of losing two more would be no end of trouble. No one had any ideas, nor was anyone going to suggest a solution, and conversation withered. The dyspeptic silence was broken when now Chief EUR Forsyth submitted to the collected leadership that his team of Polish agents could infiltrate Damascus without attracting attention, make contact with the two surviving analysts, and exfiltrate them out of Syria, probably west to Lebanon. There would be no contact with the beleaguered Station. Faces around the table brightened. This was a solution on two levels: either the analysts would be rescued, or the train wreck of a blown op could be blamed on Forsyth and his polka-dancing retinue.