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delighted. He had spent much of his undergraduate career sitting in Faisal’s, smoking cigarettes and talking politics with his classmates. Faisal’s was famous in Beirut as the meeting place of the intellectuals who had spawned the Arab cultural renaissance of the 1930s. Leftists still venerated the spot as the birthplace of Arab nationalism.
    Across the street were the AUB gates, bearing the inscription carved by the Protestant missionaries who founded the university a century earlier: “That they shall have life and have it more abundantly.” A noble sentiment. Faisal’s was a good spot, Fuad thought, to renew his acquaintance with Jamal and talk, as brothers, about the woes of the Arab nation.
     
     
    “I think you work for the Americans,” said Jamal quietly, when they were seated in the restaurant. Fuad felt his heart pounding in his chest but his face remained expressionless.
    “Why do you say that?” responded Fuad evenly.
    “Because it is the truth,” said Jamal.
    There was a long silence.
    “When we first met in Cairo,” said Jamal, “you told me you were a member of the Congress for Arab Cultural Freedom. I had never heard of this organization, so I asked a friend in the Egyptian Moukhabarat about it. He asked the Russians, who said it was an American front group. I found that interesting, but I said nothing to you. Why should I? Perhaps, I thought, this young Lebanese doesn’t know who really runs his group.
    “Then yesterday I heard that an old Palestinian man, who everyone knows is an American agent, was asking around Fakhani for the location of my office. So I was expecting a visitor. I was very pleased that it was someone like you—a friend—and not a dirty dog like the Russians send after us.”
    Jamal pulled back a strand of his long black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He withdrew a pack of Marlboros from the pocket of his black leather jacket, offered Fuad a cigarette, and lit one for himself.
    “I won’t speak about it again,” said Jamal with a twinkle in his eye. “Everyone in Beirut works for somebody. Why not the Americans? Don’t worry. I haven’t told my people. As the Egyptian proverb says: ‘To us belongs the house and the talk therein.’ ”
    Fuad changed the subject. He talked about the weather. He talked about Egypt. Anything he could think of. It was only many hours later that he concluded, with relief, that he wasn’t going to be killed.
     
     
    When Fuad reported the conversation to Rogers, the American was furious about the security breach. He made a note to have Hoffman fire the low-grade agent who had obtained Jamal’s address. He also lectured Fuad about cover.
    The more Rogers thought about the meeting, the more perplexed he was by Jamal’s behavior. Why would an important Palestinian official, aware that he was talking to a CIA agent, join him for lunch and then promise to keep quiet about it? Why would he refrain from the usual Palestinian denunciations of American Mid-east policy?
    There seemed only two possibilities: either Jamal was a provocateur, trying to lure Fuad into an embarrassing situation, or he was inviting further contact. Rogers decided that it was worth the risk to find out which. He gave Fuad $5,000 in cash from the station’s contingency fund and told him to rent an apartment near the Palestinian quarter of the city.
    “Let’s find out whether Jamal would like to make some new friends,” said Rogers.

4
     
    Beirut; October 1969
     
    At the end of Tom and Jane Rogers’s first month in Beirut, Sally Wigg, the ambassador’s wife, called.
    “Jane!” said the ambassador’s wife. She spoke very loudly, with an enthusiasm that made clear how much pleasure she took in organizing the lives of other embassy wives.
    “Yes, Mrs. Wigg.”
    “Jane! We’re having a dinner next Saturday night! We’ll expect you at eight. See you then!”
    She rang off without waiting for an answer. A social secretary from the embassy called an hour