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International terrorism may increasingly be a problem. Better intelligence to counter terrorist activities cannot be based on technological intelligence (e.g. photography, radio, and traffic intelligence) but must be based on clandestine agents’ activities, or what is called HUMINT. —Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

During training for my present job, I had been particularly struck by a foundation document of tradecraft, “The Role of Self-Deception in Prediction Failures.” It argues that Americans are especially prone to self-deception and that our ability to fool ourselves is greater than the ability of others to fool us. History shows plenty of examples, but it’s my own that’s made me understand the author’s point. Am I myself more gullible than other Americans? Perhaps these are the very qualities I was recruited for: gullibility, and the rigidity of my belief in pragmatism—for I am determined not to let ideology, whether of love or patriotism, get the better of me again.

And when did the gullibility principle begin to work on me? Maybe not until I was on the plane to Marrakech, or even when I got the assignment to go there. Am I once again its victim? I still don’t know, even now, how much of what happened had been orchestrated, how much was the collusion of unforeseen events.

But I should explain how I came to be involved in all this. I’m Lulu Sawyer—not my christened name, but it is now Lulu even in company records.

In our organization, we have foreign intelligence (FI), counterintelligence (CI), human intelligence (HUMINT), and communications intelligence (COMMI); there’s covert, overt, clandestine, and paramilitary, and passive and aggressive in each category. I am FI/HUMINT/NOC. NOC means not officially connected to an embassy or government agency.

“Human intelligence,” said my handler, Sefton Taft, in a regretful tone—I report to an insensitive and sometimes seemingly not-too-friendly case officer named Taft, who is stationed in Spain. “HUMINT. It must still be gathered. These Arabs are so backward; things like electronic surveillance, technical collection—these are useless. Knowledge is in someone’s head, it’s recorded in the knots of a camel’s bridle, in certain pas-sages of the Koran. The Russians, God bless them, at least had radio communications, listening stations of their own, cell phones we could intercept—those were the days.”

“Human intelligence; an oxymoron,” I remember saying.

HUMINT/FI had a basic mission in Morocco: to gather information intended to upgrade generally our database on the country, including information about the flow of money through certain Marrakech Islamic charities or, more startling, the European clubs and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It was the analysis at headquarters that it was the Moroccan NGOs, directed and mostly funded by foreigners, that formed the nexus of, or at least an important stage on, the money trail from Europe and America to various terrorist organizations, via Moroccan banking. It was important, because we had intelligence that the Islamists left over from recent crack-downs in Algeria had regrouped in the Sahara desert and were recruiting and attempting to radicalize everywhere in North Africa—Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and in the no-man’s-land of the Western Sahara—and unless they could be impeded would have a powerful Al-Qaida-like base within easy striking distance of Europe, as the bombings in Spain had shown.

“HUMINT—it makes you long for the old days,” Taft had added. “Satellite photos, listening devices, hard targets. You’re well-placed, Lulu. No matter what happens with the boyfriend, you’ll easily find a way of staying on in Morocco—a healthy, articulate, sociable girl like you.”

Taft was briefing me: “Huge sums of money change hands in the souk, intended for jihad, never going near a bank. Who are the bankers? We think there’s a network involving domestics, car repair guys, people who interact with Europeans every day. Waiters. We need a lot more information on them.” It was from Morocco that huge sums of money were being distributed to radical Middle Eastern organizations and suicide bombers, and as reparations to their families. Terrorists were being formed there too—Moroccans had been among the bombers in Casablanca and Madrid, and were even connected to London. There is evidence that all of North Africa is home to rising numbers of fanatics.

“Remember,” Taft said, “these people depend on a network of little shopkeepers, forgers, fishermen—sympathizers who can get a false pass-port, a train ticket, put them up for a night or a week, help them cross the water. These are people who won’t themselves be planting bombs, but who indulge their convictions or ease their consciences by supporting the bombers. That’s where we need information. Where are those passports coming from?”

I understood. I would not be Lawrence of Arabia. Mine was a frankly low-level and not very specific mission; but I was a low-level person who had happened into a potentially valuable cover, acquiring an English lover who lived in Morocco. Luckily our corporate ethic does not include celibacy, and though it was utterly unspoken, I sensed company backing for recruits who were also passable-looking and had a fair chance of going to bed with possibly useful men, and the willingness.

Beside this mission, other personal things drew me to the idea of Morocco—the warm weather, the fascination of a new culture, but especially my little love affair with Ian Drumm. I’d told my family and friends I was going to visit a lover in Marrakech, as, of course, I was, and it was a more-than-perfect cover for my real mission, which I couldn’t reveal to them or to him. In my first post, I’d been attached to an international aid agency in Pristina, in Kosovo, where I had met Ian, and was now being reassigned conveniently near him. To spend a few months with him at his villa in Marrakech would hardly be work.

I’d never been to North Africa but had always liked travel posters of the mosques and domes, the salmon walls, the palms and donkeys and goats, all so evocative of warm sunshine and the melodic calls to prayer, and a dionysian miasma of goat and incense layered in the air. Islam drew me and repelled me. My misgivings weren’t sectarian; part of my apprehensiveness had to do with the paradox that we are apt to fear most what we most want, in case when we get it, it turns to ashes. I wanted to succeed professionally—as predicted for the paradigmatic young person sought by the Agency (though I’m in my thirties)—and personally, with Ian, for I was kind of stuck on him.

Excerpt from LULU IN MARRAKECH by Diane Johnson © 2008.

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