Sleeping With The Devil Read Online Free PDF Page B

a high premium on such assets. Sniffing down the trail of Semtex,
    SA-7 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, and Kalashnikovs was part of the job, just as
    following the money had been for the Watergate investigators. No longer.
        That attitude changed completely in the 1990s, when the CIA’s Office of
    General Counsel started to put in overtime worrying about arms dealers “graymailing” the
    agency. A mild form of blackmail, graymail works like this: An arms dealer will volunteer his
    services to the CIA, claiming he’s a patriot who wants to run out the bad guys in the business.
    He provides a couple of tantalizing tidbits about some deal or another, but they end up being
    dead ends because the arms dealer is really after an insurance policy. He’s counting on using
    the CIA as an umbrella that will cover him for anything he does, legal or illegal. If one day
    he’s unfortunate enough to get caught selling arms to an embargoed country like Syria or Iran,
    he can falsely claim that his CIA handler (someone like me) had given him a go-ahead. Since CIA
    officers undercover cannot testify in court, the arms dealer walks.
        Was it a legitimate worry? Sure. Arms dealers don’t go into the
    business because they’re patriots. But intelligence gathering is like investing in the market:
    You can stick your neck out and take your losses with your gains. Or you can clip T-bill
    coupons with the AARP bluehairs, clearly Langley’s preference.
        To give you an idea of how crazy it got, not too long before I resigned
    from the CIA in December 1997, I had the opportunity to recruit an arms dealer who, like Yuri,
    sold Russian weaponry in the Middle East. It was at a time when the CIA was beginning to
    understand what a disaster the old Soviet strategic-weapons labs and testing facilities were.
    Stocks were missing everywhere. During a routine visit to a former Soviet weapons site called
    Vozrozhdeniye, on an island in the Aral Sea, we found weaponized anthrax lying on the ground.
    Anthrax! The site was unguarded, and anyone could have picked it up. That’s the kind of thing I
    wanted to turn this arms dealer loose on.
        Times were hard in the arms trade. Supply and demand had gotten out of
    whack. My guy was happy simply to have the CIA pay his travel and expenses. He would do his
    business on the side - legitimate, he assured me - while giving me a heads-up when things like
    anthrax were being put on the market. I thought this operation would be fairly clear-cut, and
    inexpensive, too, but as soon as my bosses heard what I intended to do, the hand wringing
    started. At first they flatly refused to let me meet the guy. They relented only when I agreed
    to drag along a lawyer from the general counsel’s office.
        You can imagine the chill that put on the operation. Informants, by
    nature, work in the dark. Turn a government lawyer’s spotlight on them, and they scurry back to
    their rat holes. The seventh floor at Langley had its priorities, though. If the guy tried to
    play us, the CIA brass wanted to be able to produce the lawyer in court. No one seemed to care
    that, in the end, we wouldn’t learn a damn thing about the anthrax at Vozrozhdeniye or any of
    the other stuff missing from the ex-Soviet strategic-weapons sites. After I resigned, I heard
    that the informant was dropped - terminated, as it’s called in the business - and the CIA went
    back to treating arms dealers like the clap, closing the best window we had into the
    international arms market and the deadly scourge of proliferation.
        In Caesarea, face-to-face with a true titan of the arms trade, I wasn’t
    about to let another opportunity slip by. More than anything else, I wanted to hear what Yuri
    could tell me about Saudi Arabia and arms.
        By 2001 anyone who understood anything about Saudi Arabia knew it was
    circling the drain. Per capita income over the last twenty years had fallen by more than