Chapter Six
February 23—1:12 P.M. The West Wing, Washington, D.C.
Landenberger was trying to understand how the CIA had dropped the ball.
How could they not know this was going to happen? Where are they getting their information? This is one mess we are in. My popularity rating dropped five points because of this. I must figure a way to get it back up.
“Exactly how many operatives do we have in Iran?” he asked.
Larry Deshano answered, “Exactly? Well technically we don’t have anyone physically inside the country.”
“None then—we do not have one person inside Iran.” Landenberger tapped a pencil on the desk. The Cabinet members sat silent. Anyone could see the president was visibly upset and doing his best to hold it back.
“We use satellites of course. We have reports sent to us from Iranians willing to sell us information.”
“I see. You can monitor the activity around the buildings and then guess at what is going on. Answer this: How do you know your snitches are reliable and not feeding you false information?”
“We evaluate it as best we can. It is not that simple—”
Landenberger pounded his fist. “YOU TOLD ME THEY WERE YEARS AWAY FROM CONDUCTING A TEST! You sent me reports every week for the last year that we could worry about this sometime in the future. ‘Don’t worry’ you said. Now I look so gullible. We all look like fools. In fact we are fools. Now I know how Bush felt when he found out that there were no WMD’s in Iraq. He coined the term WMD and then found he knew nothing.
He will go down in the history books as an idiot who let some petty dictator outsmart him. I viewed the videos taken by the UNMOVIC when Saddam made the team wait for hours at the gate while he moved trucks out the backside supposedly full of nuclear weapons projects. He always made sure the inspectors could see the trucks. The first time I saw this ploy I fell for it. After I saw a number of repeat performances, I was convinced he was pulling a fast one.”
Melissa Farnsworth added a thought. “You are right, Mr. President. I remember seeing that broadcast on National Geographic with my eight-year-old daughter and asked her what she thought. She said, ‘MOM, THERE AINT NUTT’N IN DA TRUCKS!’.”
Everyone burst in laughter. She had a way of telling a story.
“Perhaps we should put a bunch of eight-year olds in charge.”
“Children cannot be fooled like adults. They spot things that go right by an adult.”
“That is it, Larry. Perhaps we must think like children. Thank you, Melissa for relieving the tension here, however our problems are serious and the future of the world may very well hang in the balance on the decisions I make in the coming weeks and months ahead. You are my team and I need more than information. I need a perspective that includes the possibility that we are being duped.”
“Perhaps the footage shown to us was faked?” suggested Willy Bumgardner.
“The bomb may not exist.”
“Then they would have faked the seismic recordings that were felt around the world.”
“They could have set off a cache of dynamite and found some way to amplify the effect.”
“The North Koreans set off the dud WMD’s and then used it to sell their inferior wares to gullible terror groups. This could be the same thing.” Robinson chirped, “Exaggeration could be at work here. Part of it is true and other parts are exaggerated.”
YOU ARE READING
Armageddon: 2013
Mystery / Thriller. . .The Day Iran set off the WMD. . . . . . . . . . . . . A half-billion would die before it was over. . . . . . Some said that Admiral Mustafa Mahdi was the most ruthless man in history, others said a savior. He was a man who unde...
