Countdown to Crisis

Chapter One

Chapter 1: THE DEFECTOR

On July 26, 2001, an Iranian intelligence officer named Hamid Reza Zakeri walked into the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, and asked to speak to the CIA. As a trusted security official, Zakeri had a diplomatic passport with permanent visas, allowing him to leave his country at will. He told the local receptionist that he had important information concerning the security of the United States and wanted to convey it to the station chief in person.

The Azeri shrugged. We have no CIA officers here, he said. But the Marine guard behind him had been trained for this type of occasion and discreetly phoned up to the CIA station. The forty-one-year-old Zakeri was known as a "walk-in" in the intelligence trade. Like an itinerant peddler, he had goods for sale. It was the CIA's job to evaluate those goods.

On the one hand, it was easy to get taken in by the Willy Lomans of the intelligence trade. But on the other, if the peddler's wares were good, it was the station chief's job to pay him a fair price and pass the information on to Langley for further evaluation and exploitation. Walk-ins ... read full excerpt from Countdown to Crisis ebook