The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [118]
“Why you?” I asked. “Why didn’t the Germans work through the FBI, or follow up themselves?”
“Our German friends aren’t ready to involve your government yet—or their own, for that matter. There are complicated political considerations. The expedient course was to foist the matter onto us. We’re discreet, we have assets on the ground, and we have unusual latitude in our methods.”
I’d seen their methods, and I could imagine the political considerations. Germany needed Russia for energy—that was the whole point of the Nord Stream pipeline. The politicians who’d stuck their necks out would be reluctant to circulate proof that the Russians had acted wrongly against the Ukrainians, and doubly reluctant to admit that the actual culprits had been their own compatriots. I kneaded the back of my neck, trying to stay focused.
“So, there are two possibilities. Either this was a genuine terrorist attack, carried out for reasons still unknown, or—”
“It was a provocation,” Shimon interrupted, “intended to give the French and Russians an excuse to hit the Ukrainians. We lean toward a provocation.”
“Why?”
“A handful of small things. It’s particularly striking to us that the French and the Russians seized so many documents implicating the Ukrainians. Given what we know from the Germans, and the fact that none of the seized documents can be independently verified, it seems likely that the documents are forged. And as compelling forgeries take time to prepare …”
“The entire operation had to be planned well in advance.”
“Hans and his people reached the same conclusion. It’s another reason that they’re proceeding cautiously.”
It made sense on some levels. But I had one big objection.
“If the attack was a provocation, then Russia damaged one of its premier pipeline facilities and murdered a lot of its own senior people just to have an excuse to go after the Ukrainians. That doesn’t feel right to me. The Ukrainians aren’t that big an annoyance.”
“Unless the Russians didn’t know it was a provocation,” Ari suggested.
His implication took a moment to penetrate.
“You think the French would do something like this on their own?” I asked incredulously.
Shimon shrugged.
“Possible. They tend to get carried away from time to time. You remember the Rainbow Warrior?”
I did. The Rainbow Warrior had been a Greenpeace ship protesting French nuclear tests in the Pacific back in the mid-eighties. Mitterrand himself had approved a covert operation to blow it to smithereens in Auckland, New Zealand, because he was unhappy about the criticism. The Kiwis—and almost everyone else—had been less than amused.
“Remind me: Who did the actual dirty work on that operation?”
“The action branch of the DGSE, the French intelligence service. Two of their people were caught by the New Zealand police. The experience might have taught them to work through intermediaries.”
The DGSE. The same people who’d tried to suppress the Euronews footage of the attack. French foreign intelligence creeps, Gavin had called them when we talked on the phone. Jackbooters. I started to ask why the French would want to hit the Ukrainians and suddenly recalled my last conversation with Rashid.
“Rashid told me that the French foreign minister had visited Riyadh and pushed the notion of a coalition to take over America’s security role.”
“It’s an elegant scheme if you think about it from their perspective,” Shimon said, half admiringly. “They killed two birds with one stone. The Russians are indebted to France for their assistance with the raid, which translates into preferential terms for French industry on Russian oil projects. And they get to showcase their military competence, which buttresses a bid to supplant the United States in the Middle East.”
“France is one of the countries you shared your analysis of the Saudi oil fields with?”
“Correct. It seems they believed more than they let on and are making a bid to position themselves for the inevitable shortages.”
My brain was spinning. I closed