Protect And Defend

One man had carried her over his shoulder, and she got the sense they had walked down several narrow flights of stairs. Every time the man hit a landing, he would turn and the hood on Ke

The pain of what she thought was most likely a broken rib was a bit of a blessing. It gave her something else to worry about. It had been nearly twenty-five years since she’d gone through her training at The Farm near Williamsburg, Virginia, but she remembered it very well. In fact one lecture stood out all too vividly in her mind. It was about the kidnapping of CIA Beirut station chief Bill Buckley in March of 1984. Buckley had been a Special Forces officer in the army before joining the CIA and was no wilting flower. One week after his kidnapping the first of dozens of CIA spies went missing. Buckley’s Hezbollah interrogators broke him and began selling the information to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and other countries in the region. They brutally tortured him for more than a year and then hanged him. The CIA had managed to get their hands on some of the tapes Hezbollah had made of the torture sessions. The instructors at The Farm made Ke

It was obviously too late for that, but Ke

By far it was more difficult to rank her own clandestine operatives-employees of the CIA who worked abroad without diplomatic cover. Some were more effective than others, but they were all her fellow countrymen. Ke

For a second she even pitied the men who had taken her. What if they were simply a band of local militia looking to collect some ransom? If that was the case, they were in way over their heads. For the first time since being attacked, Ke

47

Imad Mukhtar had changed into a suit and dress shirt. He had chosen not to wear a tie, however. He descended the ancient steps one at a time. The fact that they had not made it out of the city was not what was worrying him. He had felt from the begi

Mukhtar had another backup location within the city. A place where the Americans were not welcome. He continued down the steps of the mosque to the dank basement, where the director of the CIA was waiting. Mukhtar had been very pleased with the attack up until just a few minutes ago. Ke

He had just been given the bad news that they had lost thirty-four men. At first Mukhtar thought the information was surely inaccurate. How could they possibly have lost so many men? It started to sink in when he asked for Ali Abbas, Hezbollah’s liaison in Mosul. Abbas was the man who had brokered the deal with the local police chief. When he was told that Abbas was one of the men killed, his first response was to make sure. If Abbas was alive everything was in jeopardy. He knew Hezbollah’s entire infrastructure. Not just in Mosul, but back in Lebanon as well. He also knew they were working directly for the Iranian president which could complicate things. Abbas knew where each and every safe house was located and what local officials were on their payroll.

Someone needed to be dispatched immediately to the scene to find out if anyone had been taken alive. Next he asked for Rashid Dadarshi, the Quds Force commander. Dadarshi was extremely capable. He surely had a man who could go back and begin poking around. But the news only got worse. Dadarshi’s second in command informed Mukhtar that his commander had not made it back.

Mukhtar could scarcely believe it. He had seen both men just seconds before he had left with Ke

When the imam informed Mukhtar of the ancient tu