Body of Lies
by David Ignatius
Summary
Roger Ferris is one of the CIA’s soldiers in the war on terrorism. He has come out of Iraq with a shattered leg and an intense mission – to penetrate the network of a master terrorist known only as “Suleiman.” Ferris’s plan for getting inside Suleiman’s tent is inspired by a masterpiece of British intelligence during World War II: He prepares a body of lies, literally the corpse of an imaginary CIA officer who appears to have accomplished the impossible by recruiting an agent within the enemy’s ranks.
This scheme binds friend and foe in a web of extraordinary subtlety and complexity, and when it begins to unravel, Ferris finds himself flying blind into a hurricane. His only hope is the urbane head of Jordan’s intelligence service – a man who might be an Arab version of John le Carre’s celebrated spy, George Smiley. But can Ferris trust him?
*** Film rights acquired by Warner Bros. for director Ridley Scott***
Excerpt
It took nearly a month to find the right body. Roger Ferris had very particular requirements: He wanted a man in his thirties, physically fit, preferably blond but certainly and recognizably Caucasian. He should have no obvious signs of disease or physical trauma. And no bullet wounds, either. That would make it too complicated later.
Ferris was on assignment in the Middle East most of the time, so it fell to his boss, Ed Hoffman, to manage the details. Hoffman didn’t trust his colleagues to locate a body without thinking they had to notify a congressional committee or otherwise botching the job. But you could find someone in the military who was willing to do almost anything these days, so Hoffman contacted an ambitious colonel on the J-2 staff at Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida who had been helpful on other matters. He explained that he needed a favor, and an odd one at that. He required a white male, approximately six feet tall, early middle age, muscular enough to be believable as a case officer, but not so muscle-bound that he looked like a trigger-puller. The ideal candidate would be uncircumcised. And he had to be dead.
The colonel found a body three weeks later in a morgue in south Florida. He had tapped a network of retired officers who were working private security and claimed they could get anything done. The dead man had drowned the previous day while windsurfing off the Gulf Coast near Naples. He was a lawyer on vacation from Chicago. He was physically fit, brown-haired, disease-free and in possession of a foreskin. His name was James Borden, and he was, or had been, thirty-six. The body was altogether suitable, except for one detail: it was due to be cremated at a funeral home in Highland Park, Illinois, in two days. That presented a challenge. Hoffman asked the colonel if he had ever staged a black-bag job, and the colonel said no, but he was game for anything. That was a sentiment Hoffman rarely heard at CIA.
They worked up the body snatcher’s version of a two-card monte. One corpse went into the cargo hold of the airplane in Fort Myers,and another one came off at O’Hare. The coffin was the same, but the man inside was now a seventy-eight-year-old retired insurance executive who had died of a heart attack. The colonel sent an NCO to the funeral home in Highland Park to make sure nobody decided at the last minute on a public viewing. They had prepared a cover story in case something went wrong--about how the airline had made a terrible mistake and confused two coffins in transit, but now it was too late because the other body had been cremated in Milwaukee. But they never needed to use it.
James Borden’s corpse wasn’t perfect, but it was close enough. The upper body was muscular, although the tummy had begun to sag, and he had a bald spot at the crown of his head. It turned out that he had an undescended testicle. The more Hoffman thought about these imperfections, the more he liked them. They were the real, human details that would make the larger deception believable. Perfect artifice includes mistakes.
To this corpse, Hoffman now attached a legend. He became Harry Meeker, not James Borden. They rented Harry Meeker an apartment in Alexandria and got him a home phone and a cell phone. Using the picture from Borden’s Illinois driver’s license, they obtained a Commonwealth of Virginia license, and then a passport....
Copyright © 2007 by David Ignatius
Reprinted by permission of W.W. Norton and Company, Inc.
Reviews
“Displaying his trademark expertise and writing skill, Washington Post columnist Ignatius has crafted one of the best post-9/11 spy thrillers yet….Few readers will anticipate the jaw-dropping conclusion, and the pairing of first-rate espionage suspense with fully developed characters should propel this onto the bestseller lists and possibly attract Hollywood interest"--Publishers Weekly
“No outsider knows the world of CIA operations in the Middle East as well as David Ignatius, and Body of Lies, from its opening pages, pitches us into the murk, mystery and, ultimately, disappointment of our operations there. It’s simply a great read”--Seymour Hersh
“David Ignatius has done it again. Like his seminal spy novel Agents of Innocence, Body of Lies is fiction but reads like fact. CIA officers admire Ignatius because more than any other writer he understands the nuances of their trade. Fascinating"--George Tenet, former director, CIA
Author's Biography
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius has covered the CIA and the Middle East for twenty-five years, serving at various times as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor, and columnist. He has published articles in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The Washington Monthly. He is the author of five previous novels, including Agents of Innocence, SIRO, and A Firing Offense.