The Ghost Read online

  The establishment of democracy in Syria and Iran … Paul Emmett in his opening address stated his belief …

  www.arcadiainstitution.org/site/roundtable/A56fL%2004.htm – 35k – Cached – Similar pages

  Arcadia Institution – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  The Arcadia Institution is an Anglo-American nonprofit organisation founded in 1991 under the presidency of Professor Paul Emmett …

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArcadiaInstitution – 35k – Cached – Similar pages

  Arcadia Institution/Arcadia Strategy Group – SourceWatch

  The Arcadia Institution describes itself as dedicated to fostering …

  Professor Paul Emmett, an expert in Anglo-American …

  www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=ArcadiaInstitution – 39k –

  USATODAY.com – 5 Questions for Paul Emmett

  Paul Emmett, former professor of foreign relations at Harvard, now heads the influential Arcadia Institution …

  www.usatoday.com/world/2002-08-07/questions_x.htm?tab1.htm – 35k –

  When I got bored with the same old stuff about seminars and summer conferences, I changed my search request to ‘“Arcadia Institution” “Adam Lang”’ and got a news story from the Guardian website about Arcadia’s anniversary reception and the prime minister’s attendance. I switched to Google Images and was offered a mosaic of bizarre illustrations: a cat, a couple of acrobats in leotards, a cartoon of Lang blowing into a bag with the caption ‘Soon to be humiliated’. This is the trouble with internet research, in my experience. The proportion of what’s useful to what’s dross dwindles very quickly and suddenly it’s like searching for something dropped down the back of a sofa and coming up with handfuls of old coins, buttons, fluff and sucked sweets. What’s important is to ask the right question, and somehow I sensed I was getting it wrong.

  I broke off to rub my aching eyes. I ordered another coffee and another bagel and checked out my fellow diners. It was a light crowd, considering it was lunchtime: an old fellow with his paper, a man and woman in their twenties holding hands, two mothers – or, more likely, nannies – gossiping while their three toddlers played unheeded under the table, and a couple of young guys with short-cropped hair, who could have been in the armed forces, or one of the emergency services, perhaps (I’d seen a fire station nearby): they were sitting on stools at the counter and had their backs to me, engaged in earnest conversation.

  I returned to the Arcadia Institution website and clicked on the board of trustees. Up they all came, like spirits summoned from the vast transatlantic deep: Steven D. Engler, former US Defense Secretary; Lord Leghorn, former British Foreign Secretary; Sir David Moberly, GCMG, KCVO, the thousand-year-old former British ambassador to Washington; Raymond T. Streicher, former US ambassador to London; Arthur Prussia, President and CEO of the Hallington Group; Professor Mel Crawford of the John F. Kennedy School of Government; Dame Unity Chambers of the Strategic Studies Foundation; Max Hardaker of Godolphin Securities; Stephanie Cox Morland, senior director of Manhattan Equity Holdings; Sir Milius Rapp of the London School of Economics; Cornelius Iremonger of Cordesman Industrials, and Franklin R. Dollerman, senior partner of McCosh & Partners.

  Laboriously, I began entering their names, together with Adam Lang’s, into the search engine. Engler had praised Lang’s steadfast courage on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Leghorn had made a hand-wringing speech in the House of Lords, regretting the situation in the Middle East but calling the prime minister ‘a man of sincerity’. Moberly had suffered a stroke and was saying nothing. Streicher had been vocal in his support at the time Lang flew to Washington to pick up his Presidential Medal of Freedom. I was starting to weary of the whole procedure until I typed in Arthur Prussia. Then I got a one-year-old press release:

  LONDON – The Hallington Group is pleased to announce that Adam Lang, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, will be joining the company as a strategic consultant.

  Mr Lang’s position, which will not be full-time, will involve providing counsel and advice to senior Hallington investment professionals worldwide.

  Arthur Prussia, Hallington’s president and chief executive officer, said: ‘Adam Lang is one of the world’s most respected and experienced statesmen, and we are honoured to be able to draw on his well of experience.’

  Adam Lang said: ‘I welcome the challenge of working with a company of such global reach, commitment to democracy and renowned integrity as the Hallington Group.’

  I had never heard of the Hallington Group, so I looked it up. Six hundred employees; twenty-four worldwide offices; a mere four hundred investors, mainly Saudi – and thirty-five billion dollars of funds at its disposal. The portfolio of companies it controlled looked as if it had been drawn up by Darth Vader. Hallington’s subsidiaries manufactured cluster bombs, mobile howitzers, interceptor missiles, tank-busting helicopters, swing-wing bombers, tanks, nuclear centrifuges, aircraft carriers. It owned a company that provided security for contractors in the Middle East, another that carried out surveillance operations and data checks within the United States and worldwide, and a construction company that specialised in building military bunkers and airstrips. Two members of its main board had been senior directors of the CIA.

  I know the internet is the stuff a paranoiac’s dreams are made of. I know it parcels up everything – Lee Harvey Oswald, Princess Diana, Opus Dei, al-Qaeda, Israel, MI6, crop circles – and with pretty blue ribbons of hyperlinks it ties them all into a single grand conspiracy. But I also know the wisdom of the old saying that a paranoiac is simply a person in full possession of the facts, and as I typed in ‘“Arcadia Institution” “Hallington Group” CIA’, I sensed that something was starting to emerge, like the lineaments of a ghost ship, out of the fog of data on the screen.

  washingtonpost.com: Hallington jet linked to CIA ‘torture flights’

  The company denied all knowledge of the CIA programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’ … member of the board of the prestigious

  Arcadia Institution has …

  www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27824-2007Dec26language=-Cached – Similar pages

  I clicked on the story and scrolled down to the relevant part:

  The Hallington Gulfstream Four was clandestinely photographed – minus its corporate logo – at the Stare Kiejkuty military base in Poland, where the CIA is believed to have maintained a secret detention center, on February 18.

  This was two days after four British citizens – Nasir Ashraf, Shakeel Qazi, Salim Khan and Faruk Ahmed – were allegedly kidnapped by CIA operatives from Peshawar, Pakistan. Mr Ashraf is reported to have died of heart failure after the interrogation procedure known as “water boarding”.

  Between February and July of that same year, the jet made 51 visits to Guantanamo and 82 visits to Washington Dulles International Air Force Base as well as landings at Andrews Air Force Base outside the capital and the US air bases at Ramstein and Rhein-Main in Germany.

  The plane’s flight log also shows visits to Afghanistan, Morocco, Dubai, Jordan, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Azerbaijan and the Czech Republic.

  The Hallington logo was visible in photographs taken at an air show in Schenectady, NY, on August 23, eight days after the Gulfstream returned to Washington from an around-the-world flight that included Anchorage; Osaka, Japan; Dubai, and Shannon.

  The logo was not visible when the Gulfstream was photographed during a fuel stop at Shannon on September 27. But when the plane turned up at Denver’s Centennial Airport in February of this year, a photo showed it was sporting not only the Hallington logo but a new registration number.

  A spokesman for Hallington confirmed that the Gulfstream had been frequently leased to other operators, but insisted the company had no knowledge of the uses to which it might have been put.

  Water boarding? I had never heard of it. It sounded harmless enough, a kind of healthy outdoor sport, a cross between windsurfing and white-water rafting. I looked it up on a website
.

  Water boarding consists of tightly binding a prisoner to an inclined board in such a manner that the victim’s feet are higher than the head and all movement is impossible. Cloth or cellophane is then used to cover the prisoner’s face, on to which the interrogator pours a continuous stream of water. Although some of the liquid may enter the victim’s lungs, it is the psychological sensation of being underwater which makes water boarding so effective. A gag reflex is triggered, the prisoner literally feels himself to be drowning, and almost instantly begs to be released. CIA officers who have been subjected to water boarding as part of their training have lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. Al-Qaeda’s toughest prisoner, and alleged mastermind of the 9/11 bombings, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of his CIA interrogators when he was able to last two and a half minutes before begging to confess.

  Water boarding can cause severe pain and damage to the lungs, brain damage due to oxygen deprivation, limb breakage and dislocation due to struggling against restraints, and long-term psychological trauma. In 1947, a Japanese officer was convicted of using water boarding on a US citizen and sentenced to 15 years hard labour for a war crime. According to an investigation by ABC News, the CIA was authorized to begin using water boarding in mid-March 2002, and recruited a cadre of fourteen interrogators trained in the technique.

  There was an illustration from Pol Pot’s Cambodia, of a man bound by his wrists and ankles to a sloping table, lying on his back, upside down. His head was in a sack. His face was being saturated by a man holding a watering can. In another photograph, a Vietcong suspect, pinioned to the ground, was being given similar treatment by three GIs using water from a drinking bottle. The soldier pouring the water was grinning. The man sitting on the prisoner’s chest had a cigarette held casually between the second and third fingers of his right hand.

  I sat back in my chair and thought of various things. I thought, especially, of Emmett’s comment about McAra’s death – that drowning wasn’t painless, but agonising. It had struck me at the time as an odd thing for a professor to say. Flexing my fingers, like a concert pianist preparing to play a challenging final movement, I typed a fresh request into the search engine: ‘“Paul Emmett” CIA’.

  Immediately, the screen filled with results, all of them, at first sight, dross: articles and book reviews by Emmett that happened to mention the CIA; articles by others about the CIA that also contained references to Emmett; articles about the Arcadia Institution in which the words ‘CIA’ and ‘Emmett’ featured. I must have gone through thirty or forty in all, until I came to one which sounded promising.

  The CIA in Academia

  ‘The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred American academics … Paul Emmett …

  www.spooks-on-campus.org/Church/listKl897a/html – 11k

  The web page was headed ‘Who did Frank have in mind???’ and started with a quote from Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee report on the CIA, published in 1976:

  The Central Intelligence Agency is now using several hundred American academics (“academics” includes administrators, faculty members and graduate students engaged in teaching), who in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, occasionally write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. Beyond these, an additional few score are used in an unwitting manner for minor activities.

  Beneath it, in alphabetical order, was a hyperlinked list of about twenty names, among them Emmett’s, and when I clicked on it, I felt as though I had fallen through a trapdoor.

  Yale graduate Paul Emmett was reported by CIA whistleblower Frank Molinari to have joined the Agency as an officer in either 1969 or 1970, where he was assigned to the Foreign Resources Division of the Directorate of Operations. (Source: Inside the Agency, Amsterdam, 1977)

  ‘Oh no,’ I said quietly. ‘No, no. That can’t be right.’

  I must have stared at the screen for a full minute, until a sudden crash of breaking crockery snapped me out of my reverie and I looked round to see that one of the kids playing under the nearby table had tipped the whole thing over. As a waitress hurried across with a dustpan and brush, and as the nannies (or mothers) scolded the children, I noticed that the two short-haired men at the counter weren’t taking any notice of this little drama: they were staring hard at me. One had a cell phone to his ear.

  Fairly calmly – more calmly, I hoped, than I felt – I turned off the computer, and pretended to take a final sip of coffee. The liquid had gone cold while I’d been working and was freezing and bitter on my lips. Then I picked up my suitcase and put a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Already I was thinking that if something happened to me, the harassed waitress would surely remember the solitary Englishman who took the table furthest from the window and absurdly over-tipped. What good this would have done me, I have no idea, but it seemed clever at the time. I made sure I didn’t look at the short-haired pair as I passed them.

  Out on the street, in the grey cold light, with the green-canopied Starbucks a few doors down and the slowly passing traffic (‘Baby on Board: Please Drive Carefully’) and the elderly pedestrians in their fur hats and gloves, it was briefly possible to imagine that I’d spent the past hour playing some homemade virtual reality game. But then the door of the café opened behind me and the two men came out. I walked briskly up the street towards the Ford and once I was behind the wheel I locked myself in. When I checked the mirrors I couldn’t see either of my fellow diners.

  I didn’t move for a while. It felt safer simply sitting there. I fantasised that perhaps if I stayed put long enough, I could somehow be absorbed by osmosis into the peaceful, prosperous life of Belmont. I could go and do what all these retired folk were bent on doing – playing a hand of bridge, maybe, or watching an afternoon movie, or wandering along to the local library to read the papers and shake their heads at the way the world was all going to hell, now that my callow and cosseted generation was in charge of it. I watched the newly coiffed ladies emerge from the salon and lightly pat their hair. The young couple who had been holding hands in the café were inspecting rings in the window of the jeweller’s.

  And I? I experienced a twinge of self-pity. I was as separate from all this normality as if I were in a bubble of glass.

  I took out the photographs again and flicked through them until I came to the one of Lang and Emmett on stage together. A future prime minister and an alleged CIA officer, prancing around wearing gloves and hats in a comic revue? It seemed not so much improbable as grotesque, but here was the evidence in my hand. I turned the picture over and considered the number scrawled on the back, and the more I considered it, the more obvious it seemed that there was only one course of action open to me. The fact that I would, once again, be trailing along in the footsteps of McAra could not be helped.

  I waited until the young lovers had gone into the jeweller’s and then took out my mobile phone. I scrolled down to where the number was stored, and called Richard Rycart.

  Fourteen

  * * *

  Half the job of ghosting is about finding out about other people.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  THIS TIME, HE answered within a few seconds.

  ‘So you rang back,’ he said quietly, in that nasal singsong voice of his. ‘Somehow I had a feeling you would, whoever you are. Not many people have this number.’ He waited for me to reply. I could hear a man talking in the background – delivering a speech, it sounded like. ‘Well, my friend, are you going to stay on the line this time?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He waited again, but I didn’t know how to begin. I kept thinking of Lang – of what he would think if he could see me talking to his would-be nemesis. I was breaking every rule in the ghosting guidebook. I was in breach of the confidentiality agreement I’d signed with Rhinehart. It was professional suicide.

  ‘I tried to call you back a couple of times,’ he continued.
I detected a hint of reproach.

  Across the street, the young lovers had come out of the jeweller’s and were strolling towards me.

  ‘I know,’ I said, finding my voice at last. ‘I’m sorry. I found your number written down somewhere. I didn’t know whose it was. I called it on the off-chance. It didn’t seem right to be talking to you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The couple passed by. I followed their progress in the mirror. They had their hands in one another’s back pockets, like pickpockets on a blind date.

  I took the plunge.

  ‘I’m working for Adam Lang. I—’

  ‘Don’t tell me your name,’ he said quickly. ‘Don’t use any names. Keep everything non-specific. Where exactly did you find my number?’

  His urgency unnerved me.

  ‘On the back of a photograph.’

  ‘What sort of photograph?’

  ‘Of my client’s days at university. My predecessor had it.’

  ‘Did he, by God?’ Now it was Rycart’s turn to pause. I could hear people clapping at the other end of the line.

  ‘You sound shocked,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, well, it ties in with something he said to me.’

  ‘I’ve been to see one of the people in the photograph. I thought you might be able to help me.’

  ‘Why don’t you talk to your employer?’

  ‘He’s away.’

  ‘Of course he is.’ He had a satisfied smile in his voice. ‘And where are you? Without being too specific?’

  ‘In New England.’

  ‘Can you get to the city where I am, right away? You know where I am, I take it? Where I work?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I have a car. I could drive.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘don’t drive. Flying’s safer than the roads.’

  ‘That’s what the airlines say.’

  ‘Listen, my friend,’ whispered Rycart fiercely, ‘if I was in your position, I wouldn’t joke. Go to the nearest airport. Catch the first available plane. Text me the flight number – nothing else. I’ll arrange for someone to collect you when you land.’