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Barber left to send his copy of the transmission in heavily encrypted code to Bill Stewart, with an urgency rating of “flash,” the highest known. That would mean that wherever he was, the cipher people would find him and tell him to go to a secure line.

Paxman did the same for Steve Laing, who would be awakened in the middle of the night and told to leave his warm bed to step into a freezing night and head back to London.

There was one last thing Paxman could do, which he did. Martin had a transmission window for listening only, and it was at fourA.M. Paxman waited up and sent his man in Baghdad a very short but very explicit message. It said Martin should make no attempt until further notice to approach any of his six dead-letter boxes. Just in case.

Karim, the Jordanian student, was making slow but steady progress in his courtship of Fräulein Edith Hardenberg. She allowed him to hold her hand when they walked through the streets of Old Vienna, the sidewalks crackling with frost beneath their feet. She even admitted to herself that she found the hand-holding pleasant.

In the second week of January she obtained tickets at the Burgtheater—Karim paid. The performance was of a play by Grillparzer, Gygus und sein Ring .

She explained excitedly before they went in that it was about an old king with several sons, and the one to whom he bequeathed his ring would be the successor. Karim sat through the performance entranced and asked for several explanations in the text, to which he referred constantly during the play.

During the intermission Edith was happy to answer them. Later, Avi Herzog would tell Barzilai it was all as exciting as watching paint dry.

“You’re a philistine,” said the Mossad man. “You have no culture.”

“I’m not here for my culture,” said Avi.

“Then get on with it, boy.”

On Sunday Edith, a devout Catholic, went to morning mass at the Votivkirche. Karim explained that as a Moslem he could not accompany her but would wait at a café across the square.

Afterward, over coffee that he deliberately laced with a slug of schnapps that brought a pink flush to her cheeks, he explained the differences and similarities between Christianity and Islam—the common worship of the one true God, the line of patriarchs and prophets, the teachings of the holy books and the moral codes. Edith was fearful but fascinated. She wondered if listening to all this might imperil her immortal soul, but she was amazed to learn that she had been wrong in thinking Moslems bowed down to idols.

“I would like dinner,” said Karim three days later.

“Well, yes, but you spend too much on me,” said Edith. She found she could gaze into his young face and his soft brown eyes with pleasure, while constantly warning herself that the ten-year age gap between them made anything more than a platonic friendship quite ridiculous.

“Not in a restaurant.”

“Where then?”

“Will you cook a meal for me, Edith? You can cook? Real Viennese food?”

She went bright red at the thought. Each evening, unless she was going alone to a concert, she prepared herself a modest snack that she ate in the small alcove of her flat that served as a dining area. But yes, she thought, she could cook. It had been so long.

Besides, she argued with herself, he had taken her to several expensive meals in restaurants ... and he was an extremely well-brought-up and courteous young man. Surely there could be no harm in it.

To say that the Jericho report of the night of January 12-13 caused consternation in certain covert circles in London and Washington would be an understatement. Controlled panic would be nearer the mark.

One of the problems was the tiny circle of people who knew of Jericho’s existence, let alone the details.

The need-to-know principle may sound persnickety or even obsessive, but it works for a reason. All agencies feel an obligation to an asset working for them in a very high-risk situation, no matter how ignoble that asset may be as a human being. The fact that Jericho was clearly a mercenary and no high-minded ideologue was not the point. The fact that he was cynically betraying his country and its government was irrelevant. The government of Iraq was perceived to be repulsive anyway, so one rogue was playing traitor to another bunch.

The point was, apart from his obvious value and the fact that his information might well save Allied lives on the battlefield, Jericho was a high-value asset, and both the agencies running him had kept his very existence known only to a tiny circle of initiates. No government ministers, no politicians, no civil servants, and no soldiers had been formally told that any Jericho existed. His product therefore had been disguised in a variety of ways. A whole range of cover stories had been devised to explain where this torrent of information was coming from.

Military dispositions were supposed to stem from a series of defections by Iraqi soldiers from the Kuwait theater, including a nonexistent major being extensively debriefed at a secret intelligence facility in the Middle East but outside Saudi Arabia.

Scientific and technical information regarding weapons of mass destruction was said to have been gleaned from an Iraqi science graduate who had defected to the British after studying at Imperial College, London, and falling in love with an English girl, and an intensive second run-through of European technicians who had worked inside Iraq between 1985 and 1990.

Political intelligence was attributed to a mix of refugees pouring out of Iraq, covert radio messages from occupied Kuwait, and brilliant signals intelligence and electronic intelligence—sigint and elint—listening-in, and aerial surveillance.

But how to explain a direct report of Saddam’s own words, however bizarre their claim, conducted within a closed meeting inside his own palace, without admitting to an agent in the highest circles of Baghdad?

The dangers of making such an admission were appalling. For one thing, there are leaks. There are leaks all the time. Cabinet documents leak, civil service memoranda leak, and interdepartmental messages leak.

Politicians, so far as the covert community is concerned, are the worst. To believe the nightmares of the master spooks, they talk to their wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, hairdressers, drivers, and bartenders.