Lulu in Marrakech Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  LULU IN MARRAKECH

  Diane Johnson, a two‐time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and three‐time National Book Award finalist (most recently in 1997 for Le Divorce), is the author of thirteen previous books. Le Mariage (2001) and L’Affaire (2006) are available from Penguin. Diane divides her time between San Francisco and Paris.

  LULU IN

  MARRAKECH

  Diane Johnson

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2009

  Copyright © Diane Johnson, 2008

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re‐sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-91900-3

  To the memory of Barbara Epstein,

  Marie‐Claude de Brunhoff, and Pauline Abbe;

  and, as always,

  to John Murray

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Koranic quotations are based on a classic 1934 translation by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, widely available in many editions. The intelligence-related epigraphs and some of Lulu’s references to CIA practices come from papers published from a colloquium on Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s, in several volumes, edited by Professor Roy Godson, of which I found “Analysis and Estimates,” “Counterintelligence,” and “Clandestine Collection” the most helpful. Many friends helped with special expertise, observations, and criticisms, especially John Beebe, Diana Ketchum, Robert Gottlieb, Craig Phillips, Sally Shelton-Colby, Marlise Simons, and Drusilla Walsh. Grateful thanks to my editor, Trena Keating; my agent, Lynn Nesbit; and as always to my husband, John Murray.

  How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones. The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little that she does understand… she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there.

  —E. M. Forster, A Passage to India

  1

  International terrorism may increasingly be a problem.… Better intelligence to counter terrorist activities cannot be based on technological intelligence (e.g. photography, radio, and traffic intelligence) but must be based on clandestine agents’ activities, or what is called HUMINT.

  —Michael Handel, “Avoiding Surprise in the 1980s”

  During training for my present job, I had been particularly struck by a foundation document of tradecraft, “The Role of Self‐Deception in Prediction Failures.” It argues that Americans are especially prone to self‐deception and that our ability to fool ourselves is greater than the ability of others to fool us. History shows plenty of examples, but it’s my own that’s made me understand the author’s point. Am I myself more gullible than other Americans? Perhaps these are the very qualities I was recruited for: gullibility, and the rigidity of my belief in pragmatism—for I am determined not to let ideology, whether of love or patriotism, get the better of me again.

  And when did the gullibility principle begin to work on me? Maybe not until I was on the plane to Marrakech, or even when I got the assignment to go there. Am I once again its victim? I still don’t know, even now, how much of what happened had been orchestrated, how much was the collusion of unforeseen events.

  But I should explain how I came to be involved in all this. I’m Lulu Sawyer—not my christened name, but it is now Lulu even in company records.

  In our organization, we have foreign intelligence (FI), counterintelligence (CI), human intelligence (HUMINT), and communications intelligence (COMMI); there’s covert, overt, clandestine, and paramilitary, and passive and aggressive in each category. I am FI/HUMINT/NOC. NOC means not officially connected to an embassy or government agency.

  “Human intelligence,” said my handler, Sefton Taft, in a regretful tone—I report to an insensitive and sometimes seemingly not‐too‐friendly case officer named Taft, who is stationed in Spain. “HU‐MINT. It must still be gathered. These Arabs are so backward; things like electronic surveillance, technical collection—these are useless. Knowledge is in someone’s head, it’s recorded in the knots of a camel’s bridle, in certain passages of the Koran. The Russians, God bless them, at least had radio communications, listening stations of their own, cell phones we could intercept—those were the days.”

  “Human intelligence; an oxymoron,” I remember saying.

  HUMINT/FI had a basic mission in Morocco: to gather information intended to upgrade generally our database on the country, including information about the flow of money through certain Marrakech Islamic charities or, more startling, the European clubs and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). It was the analysis at headquarters that it was the Moroccan NGOs, directed and mostly funded by foreigners, that formed the nexus of, or at least an important stage on, the money trail from Europe and America to various terrorist organizations, via Moroccan banking. It was important, because we had intelligence that the Islamists left over from recent crackdowns in Algeria had regrouped in the Sahara desert and were recruiting and attempting to radicalize everywhere in North Africa—Mali, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and in the no‐ man’s‐land of the Western Sahara—and unless they could be impeded would have a powerful Al‐Qaida‐like base within easy striking distance of Europe, as the bombings in Spain had shown.

  “HUMINT—it makes you long for the old days,” Taft had added. “Satellite photos, listening devices, hard targets. You’re well-placed, Lulu. No matter what happens with the boyfriend, you’ll easily find a way of staying on in Morocco—a healthy, articulate, sociable girl like you.”

  Taft was briefing me: “Huge sums of money change hands in the souk, intended for jihad, never going near a bank. Who are the bankers? We think there’s a network involving domestics, car repair guys, people who interact with Europeans every day. Waiters. We need a lot more information on them.” It was from Morocco that huge sums of money were being distributed to radical Middle Eastern organizations and suicide bomb
ers, and as reparations to their families. Terrorists were being formed there too—Moroccans had been among the bombers in Casablanca and Madrid, and were even connected to London. There is evidence that all of North Africa is home to rising numbers of fanatics.

  “Remember,” Taft said, “these people depend on a network of little shop keepers, forgers, fishermen—sympathizers who can get a false passport, a train ticket, put them up for a night or a week, help them cross the water. These are people who won’t themselves be planting bombs, but who indulge their convictions or ease their consciences by supporting the bombers. That’s where we need information. Where are those passports coming from?”

  I understood. I would not be Lawrence of Arabia. Mine was a frankly low-level and not very specific mission; but I was a low-level person who had happened into a potentially valuable cover, acquiring an English lover who lived in Morocco. Luckily our corporate ethic does not include celibacy, and though it was utterly unspoken, I sensed company backing for recruits who were also passable-looking and had a fair chance of going to bed with possibly useful men, and the willingness.

  Beside this mission, other personal things drew me to the idea of Morocco—the warm weather, the fascination of a new culture, but especially my little love affair with Ian Drumm. I’d told my family and friends I was going to visit a lover in Marrakech, as, of course, I was, and it was a more‐than‐perfect cover for my real mission, which I couldn’t reveal to them or to him. In my first post, I’d been attached to an international aid agency in Pristina, in Kosovo, where I had met Ian, and was now being reassigned conveniently near him. To spend a few months with him at his villa in Marrakech would hardly be work.

  I’d never been to North Africa but had always liked travel posters of the mosques and domes, the salmon walls, the palms and donkeys and goats, all so evocative of warm sunshine and the melodic calls to prayer, and a dionysian miasma of goat and incense layered in the air. Islam drew me and repelled me. My misgivings weren’t sectarian; part of my apprehensiveness had to do with the paradox that we are apt to fear most what we most want, in case when we get it, it turn to ashes. I wanted to succeed professionally—as predicted for the paradigmatic young person sought by the Agency (though I’m in my thirties)—and personally, with Ian, for I was kind of stuck on him.

  2

  Analysis may be the most important and is surely one of the most vulnerable components of the intelligence process. Analysts are required to answer difficult questions on the basis of usually limited data. Thus they are frequently tempted to accept data more or less at face value.

  —Roy Godson, ed., Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s

  Though I don’t usually talk to people on planes, I had fallen into conversation with the woman in the seat next to me, a slender, tan, and well-dressed Frenchwoman in her forties. I’d stopped in Paris for a visit between posts and was flying out of Charles de Gaulle on Royal Air Maroc. The plane was crowded with merry Parisians making for their weekend places—their riads and condos in the warm, exotic desert.

  “There’s no problem in Morocco,” she said. “It’s the last place where Europe and Islam still get along.”

  “No one shot there, as in Egypt, or bombed, or kidnapped like in Afghanistan. Not yet,” I said, for I had boned up on all this.

  “Luckily, such things are impossible in Morocco. They are culturally very French,” she said, apparently remembering nothing about Algeria and the French experience there.

  We were flying high enough that the whole contour of the northern coast of Africa was visible, a whole new continent, the dark continent, as it used to be called, though it lay beneath us as green and cheerful as one could wish—the strip along the coast at least—so lovely that I hadn’t been able to keep myself from calling her attention to it.

  This led to our introducing ourselves. She was Yvette Frank, and she dealt in real estate in Marrakech, but more interesting than that to me, she told me she worked as a bénévole, a volunteer, with a group in Paris that helped young Muslim French girls escape from the murderous intentions of their fathers and brothers: On the plane with us was a girl, Suma Bourad, whose father and brother had planned to slit her throat in one of the honor killings you read about, and which actually happen.

  “We help these girls menaced by their families. Some of the histoires are quite harrowing,” Madame Frank had said, and told me what she knew of Suma’s story, in a low voice so Suma couldn’t hear. The girl was sitting two rows behind us in the first row of coach. They hadn’t been able to get seats together, and I sensed that this was something of a relief to Madame Frank, who, well-meaning as she was, probably didn’t have a lot in common with a teenage Muslim victim. Or maybe the French charity wouldn’t spring for a business-class seat. Anyway, luckily for the girl, she had eluded her family; at least, no mark was visible under the sedate fastening of her foulard, though one wondered what kind of mark it must have left on her soul.

  Suma was a student, eighteen or nineteen, very pretty, with almond skin and large dark eyes shadowed by a sort of plum bloom around them, not quite bruised-seeming, but you looked twice to see what it was; it brought to mind the reason for her fleeing. Madame Frank didn’t know if this was the first time she had been on a plane. She was born in France to Algerian parents, perhaps had never seen North Africa. Su‐maya Bourad, Suma. She appeared such a model of Islamic decorum, I had to remind myself that what ever her religion, she was also a French girl, educated in dialectics and Descartes, hoping to be a doctor.

  “It’s not so common among Algerians, honor killing,” said Madame Frank. “It’s usually the Turks.”

  Suma’s story, Madame Frank said, is not unusual among the daughters of immigrant families in Europe, when the old ways cherished by the parents conflict with what Parisian girls come to feel for themselves. For every one who accedes to the wishes of her parents concerning marriage or education, another rebels or—I don’t really know the proportion of the rebels to the dutiful— but Suma was the former. She had embarrassed her family in some way, had believed her brother was going to kill her, and had gone to the shelter.

  Apart from chatting with Madame Frank, I read and looked out of the window, but I was conscious of the young woman, who didn’t seem to be doing anything. I would have expected a vibrant, rebellious girl, but she sat quietly the whole way, not reading, her hair covered in a dark blue scarf, eyes lowered, gazing at the seat in front of her. Several times I walked back through the coach section toward the toilets, which took me by her seat. She didn’t give any sign of desperation, though I supposed she must be desperate.

  I was glad she had the gumption to escape. The metaphor of flying contains the idea of flight from something, from danger or constraint, and it contains the idea of freedom. I supposed these were the things this trip meant to Suma, the opposite of what it meant to me.

  “The brother is a fanatic, he’s watched, the police have had him down for some time,” said Madame Frank.

  “It is almost too late to buy in Marrakech now,” she went on, reverting to her favorite subject. “The beautiful old riads are mostly gone, though some remain, for a price. Currently I have a line on an especially good one, in a good location, completely à rénover, naturellement… if that should interest you.”

  “What will she do in Marrakech? Suma.”

  “She will work as an au pair for a very nice English family. They’ll be meeting us, of course. I will present you. The Cotters. ‘Sir and lady’!” She smiled the patronizing smile the French adopt when dealing with English titles and other vestiges of what they consider a backward political system they themselves had had the wisdom to ditch. “Maybe you know them?”

  The French also always assume that all Anglo-Saxons know each other. “No,” I said, “I don’t know anyone in Marrakech except my host, Ian Drumm.”

  “But I know him!” she cried. “He is very known in the community. You must surely come to us during your visit.”

  I thank
ed her. I could see that Madame Frank, in Moroccan real estate, and Suma, positioned in a nice English family, could become useful sources for me; I hoped Suma and I would eventually become friends, and it seemed that Madame Frank and I were friends already.

  3

  Who stays at home during that month / Should spend it in fasting; But if anyone is ill, / or on a journey, the prescribed period should be made up by days later… and you may be grateful.

  —Koran 2:185

  “What may I serve you, Miss… Sawyer?” said the flight attendant, glancing at her manifest. But when I asked for a glass of wine, she said they couldn’t serve alcohol during Ramadan. “It is our sacred period, the Muslim month of fasting,” she continued, though I knew what Ramadan was, of course. We were now at the end of September, and Ramadan had just begun. No food or alcohol all day. Could they drink water? I suddenly wasn’t sure, and this made me doubt my general preparation, though I had read works of sociology, slogged through the Koran, and learned the rudiments of the beautiful script.

  The flight attendant was serving water, tea, and coffee, what ever the rule. Though most of the people on the plane were Western, drinking coffee and eating pretzels, some were sitting abstemiously. One or two hungry-looking people were standing in line before me waiting for the toilets in business class. Next before me was a beautiful, dark Middle Eastern–looking woman, her huge eyes kohl-lined, her clothes Armani. She took an inordinate amount of time in the cabine, and when she came out she was wrapped in a black chador, or abaya, as these garments are called in Morocco, an Islamic shawl over her hair, her body, the lower part of her face. I had heard that the abaya was not worn much in Marrakech, and in fact she was the only woman on the plane dressed in such a way, her black costume contrasting with the pastels and beiges of the Europeans and returning Moroccans, so that she stood out like the wicked godmother at the christening and was a powerful reminder of the strange fate of women in the place I was going.