“And yet here we are,” Watkins replied gruffly. “That give you any kind of a tip-off to how much shit is coming your way this morning?”
After another protracted silence, Hanley quipped, “If you guys are bundling me off to a black site, I might have overdressed.”
Lacy looked uncomfortable. Watkins just looked pissed.
Watkins said, “We are debriefing Caprice right now at the embassy in San Jose. She’s surprisingly uninjured, considering the carnage that took place just a few hours ago. When does Violator get back?”
“He’s in the air, in U.S. airspace but a few hours from touchdown. I haven’t seen him, but I texted with him briefly on Signal, just after he dropped Caprice at the embassy. I’ll talk with him on Signal this afternoon, meet with him tomorrow.”
The DDO rubbed his face now. “That whole fucking thing went to hell down there, didn’t it? Just like multiple other intelligence community ops in the past two months.”
Hanley just said, “My guy didnotfuck up in Nicaragua.”
“Caprice said he killed two MSS officers who were not posing an immediate threat. That’s one hell of an international incident, in my book.”
“He didn’t know they were MSS.”
“And if he didn’t fucking shoot them dead while hiding in the jungle, he neverwouldhave known. The Chinese could have denied involvement, we could have denied knowing this was a Chinese operation, and life could have continued on without a shooting war between the CIA and the Ministry of State Security.”
“C’mon, Trey, this isn’t going to start a shoot—”
“You don’t know what this is going to do!” Watkins shouted back.
Hanley sighed. “I spent ten years in Special Forces, I ran the Agency’s Special Activities Division. Then I was DDO, same as you. But I wasn’t there, in Nicaragua, so I’m not going to second-guess my agent.”
He continued. “You, Trey, on the other hand, spent zero seconds doinganythingoperational—for the military, for the Agency, for the local police of wherever the hell you grew up—and you weren’t there in Nicaragua last night, either. Nevertheless, here you are, trying to second-guess Violator and his actions.
“I don’t get to make the call on whether or not he fucked up, and neither do you.”
Watkins took a few slow breaths, obviously to calm himself down. “I’m not here to dress you or your man down for Nicaragua. I’m not going to think about Nicaragua again.”
“Well,someoneclearly leaked that extraction plan, so youbetterbe thinking about Nicaragua.”
“I know someone leaked it. Someone up here. Managua station isn’t the problem. Langley is.Thatis my focus.”
Hanley said, “You know, for sure, that the compromise came from inside the house?”
Lacy answered this. “It’s been happening for the last nearly three months. Ops have been blown that couldn’t have been blown at the sharp edge; they were blown in Washington. We don’t know where or how.”
Watkins added, “The problem is, the FBI is making the same claim. State is making the same claim. JSOC had a cell blown a couple weeks ago in Nigeria. Delta Force had to slip out of their safe house just minutes before it was raided by a company of government troops. Nobody outside of JSOC knew where that safe house was.”
Hanley thought a moment. “If everyone in the IC is getting hit, then that sounds like an executive branch compromise of some sort. Somebody that’s privy to that diverse a set of intelligence.”
Watkins said, “Thought of that, of course, but the granularity doesn’t lend itself to an executive branch leak. Code words, frequencies, logistics. Our enemies seem to have just what they need, just when they need it.”
“And by ‘enemies,’ you mean the Chinese?”
Watkins shook his head. “No. Last night, two Chinese got smoked by your boy. But we don’t know the leak went through China. Could have gone through Nicaragua. In Tunis, there was no hint of Chinese involvement; ditto Addis Ababa. I mean, yeah, China is active in Africa, Central America, pretty much everywhere, but other than the two shootersViolator killed last night, we can’t say the Chinese are directly involved in the intelligence leak.”
Hanley thought about it a moment. “The ODNI would have knowledge of all operations and might have a more detailed understanding of how they would be carried out.”
To this, Lacy said, “One of our working theories is this might be someone at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. So far, the DNI herself has started an investigation, but she hasn’t found any interrelation to the compromises.”
“If there is no interrelation to the compromises, then maybe you are looking at multiple compromises.”
“And if I’m looking at multiple compromises popping up around the same time,” Watkins said, “I am not inclined to see this as a coincidence. It’s some player with the ability to cause leaks all across the intelligence community.”
Hanley sat up straighter. “You’re talking about someone high up the food chain in the American IC passing this intelligence.”
