Matt Fulton's Blog

Get the first look at Active Measures: Part II

Writing the next volume of Active Measures has felt like carrying King Kong on my back. I've finished about 700 manuscript pages to date, but this absolutely massive novel is still a little under halfway to completion. In the meantime, I'd like to share some of it with you.

Click the button below to check out an exclusive preview of Part II. Don't worry, there are no big spoilers. You can enjoy this excerpt even if you haven't yet read Part I. Once you've finished it, I'd love to hear from you!

I recently got together with Chris Carr, an awesome indie filmmaker, and host of The Dry CleanerCast, to chat about the books, discussing how they began and what's yet to come. I also let it slip that Active Measures will now be a five-book series instead of a trilogy! There's just too much ground left to cover and I know this move will give me the space needed to tell this sprawling story in a way that does justice to these characters. 

You can listen to our conversation by subscribing to The Dry CleanerCast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play or Spotify, or by visiting Chris' website. 

Thanks for your support,

- Matt

Hi all! — Wanted to give an update on the Active Measures Trilogy. I'll try to keep this short, but then again nothing with this trilogy ever winds up "short."

So… There's good news and bad news.

Bad news first: I am definitely still working on Part II of the trilogy — I know I haven’t talked about it much recently, but I've never not been working on it. Frankly there hasn't been much to say. Progress is slow, slower than I'd like it to be, but no matter how hard I try to press on, the demands of this story tend to bog me down (or often it's just petty, boring life that stops me dead in my tracks). I'm not going to boast of a word count or try to rattle off how many pages I've completed as of today; the fact is, I don't really keep track, and the exact numbers are rather fluid: some chapters are what I'd consider rock solid and complete, almost all of them will require revisions in later drafts, a few are just disjointed fragments of scenes, and a handful will be either rewritten from scratch or thrown out entirely.

Either way, let me make it clear — Active Measures: Part II, when complete, will be a very, VERY large book. Like… a massive book. Seriously, you'll be able to bludgeon small rodents with it, although I wouldn't recommend that. There's a reason I've taken to calling it "the Monstrosity," or "the Goliath," or "the Dragon," or "King Kong," or "That fucking nightmare." From the first page, we pick up mere seconds from where Part I ended and keep marching forward, watching as helpless bystanders while the world moves inexorably toward war. There are huge character moments coming around the bend, some that were perhaps anticipated and still more that may come as a complete shock—and not to mention a healthy dose of political intrigue, espionage, and action on a scale I feel the spy genre hasn't seen in a long time. The original lure of this trilogy, what first drove me to write it all those years ago, was to tell a story on as large a canvass as possible, one with hundreds of characters and dozens of plotlines stretched across the globe—to truly be constrained only by the limits of my imagination. Nothing has changed in my approach to writing the next volume of this saga. Part I promised a lot, and it is my sincere hope that Part II will deliver on those promises by orders of magnitude greater than what readers expect. 

Some days as I'm writing I feel completely exhausted, like I've bitten off far more than I can chew. Other days I'll sit back at my desk, look at what's on my screen and feel giddy, barely able to contain my excitement as I imagine readers experiencing this story for the first time.

There is still clearly a lot of work ahead. I won't begin to guess when the book will be finished—I feel that to lazily pick some arbitrary deadline would be unfair to you all, and not to mention seriously test my sanity! I'm just one guy—a kid with a laptop and a Starbucks card—but I need you to know that I'm working, that I'm striving every day to give you the best damn novel I can produce.

Now for the good news…

I'm almost ready to share a sneak peek with you guys!

Early this fall I will release the first "official" preview chapter of Active Measures: Part II on my website. I've been rewriting this chapter on and off for the past year, and, I dare say, it's a doozy. For real—buckle your seat belts when this one drops. There is no firm date on when the preview will be released (I'm still nailing that down) but if you would like to be among the first to know when it happens, I'd strongly encourage you to sign up for my mailing list if you haven't done so already.

I cannot thank you all enough for supporting my dream and I hope you'll stick with me in this journey. It would not be possible for me to continue without the enthusiasm you've shown for these characters and this story. As Ryan Freeman forebodingly said in the closing line of Part I, “This was only the beginning.”

All my best,

- Matt

On January 25th, 2018, Matt was interviewed at Lois Lane Investigates Authors. Head over to their blog at to read their conversation about the Part I and the spy genre.

JD DeHart posted an excellent review of Active Measures: Part I.

"From the beginning of this book, we know we are in a worldwide story of global conflict that has roots in the past, and we know we are in the hands of a writer whose voice and know-how can guide us through such a story capably."

Click the link below and head over to his blog to read the rest.

On October 31st, 2016, Matt was interviewed by Danielle Urban. Head over to her blog at Urban Reviews to read their conversation.

On September 30th, 2016, Matt was interviewed by Lisa Haselton. Head over to her blog to read their conversation.

Freeman was already in his office and on his third cup of coffee, the second since arriving at Langley. The morning sun cast a bright, natural light into the room, which held a remarkable view over the Potomac Valley and Northern Virginia. A ridge carrying the George Washington Memorial Parkway blocked a direct view of the river, but through the empty branches he could just make out the rocky shores of Maryland. In almost an hour, he made his way through the call sheet on his desk that required his immediate attention and was close to appeasing everyone in the second list of people from the agency and around the intelligence community that needed “just a minute” of his time. Freeman’s secretary had made close to three or four rounds of changes to his schedule. He had no particular sense that any of these alterations were being made, nor did he much fuss over them; Freeman just went where he was told and made frequent consultations to his daybook, a masterful collection of research papers, background sketches and biographies that his staff prepped each day.

He just ended a conversation with the director of the National Security Agency and looked down to his mug, noticing it was almost time for a refill, when his phone rang for seemingly the twentieth time that morning.

“Yeah?”

“Satellite’s coming up,” Grace Shaw reported from her office down the hall.

“Get everybody in the conference room.”

“Already waiting for you.”

The D/CIA smiled. His suite of offices occupied the entire southeast corner of the Old Headquarters Building’s seventh floor, where all of the agency’s top executives were based. With the daybook tucked under his arm, he walked out into the private hallway that connected his office to his conference room.

Grace Shaw met him outside with Peter Stavros, chief of the Iran Operations Division (C/IOD), known internally as Persia House. “Again, these are live and we’re not entirely sure what we’re going to see,” Stavros cautioned, “but once we have it, we’ll get the proper analysis.”

“I hope they’re smiling.” Freeman turned into the room.

Freeman took his seat at the head of the conference table and looked forward to a set of twin LCD monitors with various readouts that meant something to someone with a greater technical understanding than him. Shaw and Stavros took the seats closest to him as a group of division chiefs and senior analysts lined the table. Next to the monitors, a technician from the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) prepared the live video feed.

“We got lucky on this pass, sir — near-perfect viewing conditions, given the location. Ground temperature is about eighty-three and humidity isn’t much higher,” the technician, an Air Force captain, informed. “The bird was repositioned specifically for this and at about 0845 — that’s 1615 local — it’ll sit five degrees from being directly overhead. Shadows will be at a good angle, too.”

“This was so much harder in the eighties,” Shaw added.

The technician lifted a phone and relayed orders to the pilot in his “cyber cockpit” at the National Reconnaissance Operations Center, twenty-five miles away in Chantilly. At once, the monitor sprang to life with a streaming video feed directly from NRO’s Aerospace Data Facility-East, the primary downlink station for the eastern seaboard at Fort Belvoir. It displayed a clear, crisp image of the Islamic Republic of Iran from one hundred and two miles above the surface of the Earth.

“There’s Tehran…and its smog,” Freeman observed, looking intently at the view from one of the KH-13 reconnaissance satellite’s eleven wide-angle lenses. This was #63B, to be precise. The white peaks of the Alborz Mountains came next as the satellite orbited overhead at twenty-six thousand miles per hour. In several seconds, the picture on the ground morphed into an empty beige wasteland as the satellite moved east over the Dasht-e Kavir desert at the center of the Iranian plateau. The view on the screen slowed over an expansive, hazy white smear called the Haj Ali Gholi dry lake. Finally, the image shifted one last time and settled on a group of dusty mountains at the southern edge of the lakebed. A high-resolution camera took over and peered into a narrow valley locked between two high mountain ranges, miles from any from any semblance of civilization.

The senior intelligence analyst from the Iran Branch of the Underground Facility Analysis Center (UFAC) — the Defense Intelligence Agency’s clearinghouse for information and analysis on hard and deeply buried targets worldwide — rose from the conference table and stood next to the monitors. “Director Freeman, I must preface this briefing by saying that the analysis to follow includes our preliminary findings, rather than a definitive judgment of the site. As you are aware, NGA noticed the new construction only seventy-two hours ago and, to be perfectly frank, that’s the only reason we are aware of its existence.” The analyst took a sip of water before referring to his handwritten notes.

“First, allow me to provide some background as to the setting of what we’re seeing here. To quickly clarify a question we faced earlier, we can now say with certainty that the site is not visible from any publicly accessible land. Directly to the north of the valley is Haj Ali Gholi, an expanse of salt flats, which remains dry year-round. Tehran is a hundred and eighty miles to the west and the nearest town is Damghan — population, fifty-seven thousand — about forty miles north. The climate is almost rainless and extremely arid, with temperatures ranging from a hundred and twenty degrees in the summer to seventy degrees in January. Humidity is generally always high, which has provided poor viewing conditions over the last few days. As for nearby military installations, the Iranian Space Agency’s launch site at Simorgh is sixty miles to the southwest and we’re aware that the IRGC Aerospace Force operates a missile test facility of some size fifteen miles northwest of that. It’s our determination right now that neither is in any way connected to the site.

“Allow me to direct your attention to the foot of the mountain range at the western edge of the valley where we’ve seen the highest level of activity.” The analyst switched on a laser pointer and circled a tunnel entrance sunk into the mountainside. “As for ‘Monet,’ the northern-most of the two portals, we’ve noticed slightly more activity overnight in the form of vehicle traffic on the access road leading into the mountain. This leads us to believe that Monet is complete and fully operational — ”

“Any idea how long?” a CIA imagery expert interrupted.

“Not yet, but we’re checking older imagery to try and get an answer. As you can see,” the analyst continued to the rest of the group, “the tunnel entrance is clearly fabricated with poured concrete and reinforced with steel rebar. There is a guard post constructed here and you can see a paved road, branching off from the main access road that leads into the mountain. And as I said, we can now confirm vehicle traffic into Monet in the evening hours, only.”

“Excuse me, could you focus on that guard post?” asked Stavros.

“Certainly.” The technician picked up the phone again and passed the orders to the pilot. The picture quickly changed as the camera zoomed in, demonstrating just what NRO’s new bird was capable of. A pair of stationary dots became the discernible picture of two bearded men standing together at Monet’s entrance with Heckler & Koch G3A6 assault rifles slung over their shoulders, completely ignorant of their spectators over six thousand miles away.

“The ground security force, which we estimate to be battalion-sized,” the analyst informed, “wears desert camouflage fatigues with H-and-K G3 assault rifles, which is the standard-issue weapon of the Revolutionary Guards, but we cannot use that as an indicator of the site’s operator. We haven’t seen any signs of unit insignias on the uniforms. If we could pan back out, I’d like to add that Monet has been a complete enigma to us. We still haven’t a clue of its purpose, nor have we been able to judge its internal layout and until we do that, any final analysis will be incomplete.” The analyst turned to the NRO technician and asked, “Can we move the image to Picasso?”

The view through the satellite’s camera quickly shifted a kilometer south, following the main access road on the valley floor.

“Jesus, would you look at that,” Shaw marveled at the screen before her.

The KH-13’s lens refocused over a second tunnel entrance blasted into the mountainside. Sitting directly adjacent were two large teardrop-shaped mounds of excavated earth, or spoil. “Since discovery, we’ve viewed sustained activity at Picasso,” said the analyst. “The spoil piles — here and here — grow daily and from what we can tell, they contain approximately a thousand cubic meters of crushed rock in total, covering some five hundred square meters. Based on that information, we estimate that construction began sometime between October and December of last year.”

“And still only at night?” asked Stavros.

“Yes, sir. As is true with the entire site, it seems to hibernate during the day, with the majority of activity taking place overnight, including all of the construction at Picasso. I’d guess this to be nothing more than a countermeasure, and not due to any operational knowledge of the constellation’s orbital path.” The analyst referred to regularity with which a KH-13 satellite passed overhead. “Any pieces of construction equipment not in use are stored under this camouflage netting here during the day, and the heavier pieces are moved inside the tunnel. And, as you can see now, there’s a rail line for mining carts, which leads from the pile and into the tunnel portal. Strikingly absent from the site is any amount of concrete, steel rebar, or the equipment to put it in place. The Iranians seem solely focused, for the time being, with digging, and haven’t made any attempt to harden the portal beyond the natural rock. This suggests to us that Picasso is more temporary in its construction than Monet. Given that the spoil piles grow daily, we can judge that construction of Picasso is still well underway. If the tunnel is dug straight into the mountain from its portal, it’s on an axis to meet Monet with a difference of maybe twenty degrees. This could mean that Picasso is an expansion of its sister facility, but that can’t be confirmed right now.”

At the opposite end of the conference table, Freeman sat patiently without saying a word. The analysis was desperately frustrating. He felt as if he were being led by the hand through a labyrinth, coming upon an unmarked door only to see after it was opened that another endless passage awaited him, lined at either side with more anonymous doorways. There were no answers at the end of these questions, only more uncertainties, more deception and more time wasted. “So is this a third enrichment hall I’m seeing?” the D/CIA spoke for the first time. “Is this Iran betraying our agreement?”

“Unlikely, Director Freeman. The nature of the construction wouldn’t suggest it. A fuel enrichment plant requires a massive amount of floor space to accommodate thousands of gas centrifuges spinning in tandem. The Natanz facility has two halls, each with about twenty-five thousand square meters of space. Fordow has around five thousand. To create such a huge space, you’d have to dig down, clear out that wide area, build a containment facility, and then cover it back over. I’ll pull up a rendering.” The analyst brought on the second screen a 3D computer model of the valley floor showing the steep rise of the mountain with an animated graphic denoting the portals for both Monet and Picasso. “The elevation of the mountain is fifteen-hundred meters above sea level,” the analyst read from his notes. “That would cover these sites under more than six hundred feet of solid rock. The topography we’re dealing with here doesn’t support that sort of construction. It’d be much too labor intensive.”

Freeman harshly rubbed the bridge of his nose, a nervous tic he had since childhood. “Okay, it’s probably not an enrichment hall. So what else would you build in the middle of nowhere? A bomb?” Every head around the table turned to face him. He suddenly wished he could take the word back the second it spilled from his mouth.

“Ryan.” Shaw laughed, “let’s not get away from ourselves.”

“Maybe,” the analyst responded as the temperature in the room seemed to skyrocket. He, too, immediately felt the gravity of what he had said. “Of course, that’s, not really, likely. Nor is it my place to suggest such a thing, sir,” he walked back his words.

“But it is. And it’s my job to decide whether or not I believe you. What does your experience say?”

“Well, with the exception that there aren’t any outbuildings, the site is eerily similar to preparations at Punggye-ri before the North Koreans tested their first device. And the geography is similar to the Ras Koh hills, where Pakistan conducted a few tests in ’98. The overburden of the rock would allow detonation of a yield of twenty to forty kilotons. That’s the maximum detonation size that the mountain could support without venting.”

“Sir!” Stavros insisted.

“I want to hear what he has to say,” Freeman cut him off. He looked to Shaw and made eye contact with her. It was obvious to him what thoughts were running through her head, but they couldn’t be spoken in the room.

“But the division chief is right,” the analyst agreed. “It’s far too early to make that sort of call. If it’s a test site of any sort — if — these spoil piles will start to disappear and that will give ample warning that a shot is imminent. They’ll take the spoil and fill the tunnel back up. And none of this accounts for Monet, none of it.”

“We’d get the seismic readings and air samples in real-time anyway,” an agency expert down the table dismissed.

“It’s not that simple,” the analyst countered. “The area sits on the convergence of the Arabian and Eurasian plates, and the Astaneh and Shahrud fault systems pass each other not forty miles north of the lakebed. A test here could be passed off to a seismic monitor as a geological anomaly. It would be very high burden of proof at the United Nations.”

“Air sampling?” asked another agency expert.

“That desert is volcanic in origin. The underlying bedrock and soil are mostly full of basalt — relatively high background-radiation count. Any emissions the test would give off — save for a large vent of radioactive dust — would get lost in nature. Radionuclide stations wouldn’t notice a thing.”

Freeman saw that Shaw had her head in her hands. “But as long as that spoil pile grows, we have time…if it is what you’re saying it is.”

“Director Freeman, it is not the judgment of my colleagues and I that what we’re seeing is in any way related to a nuclear weapon, much less an imminent test. You asked me what my intuition tells me and I am simply giving you relevant facts.”

“You are, and you’ve done a superb job in doing so.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Okay,” Freeman sighed, “let’s send this out to ODNI, DTRA, STRATCOM J2, NCPC, ASD(NCB), NSA, NGA, Los Alamos and AFTAC, immediately. This is TS/SCI — if you don’t need to know, you don’t. I want us back here in forty-eight hours.” The meeting adjourned hastily and in less than a minute, Freeman had whisked his brain trust down the short corridor to his office.

“But, and I say this again, if the ayatollah gave the order to restart, we would know. This isn’t up for debate, Grace,” Stavros argued a few tense moments later, sitting on the arm of Freeman’s sofa.

“The man could drop dead of another stroke any second, Peter, and CITADEL is still human no matter how special he is,” Shaw shot back.

“No, Pete is right,” Freeman drifted back from the windows. “Khansari hasn’t made a single decision on his own in months. We would know if they restarted the nuclear program. That’s why CITADEL is there.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose again. “Grace, we aren’t gonna figure this out with a satellite. Pete, any alternatives?”

Stavros shook his head. “I have a couple NOCs traveling in and out, but they can’t get close. Jack’s the only one inside. I can have him ask.”

“Grace?”

Shaw bit her lip. “If you boys think it’s worth the risk, then I agree.”

“Okay,” Freeman nodded. “And let’s rope in the distribution list; it’s too big as it is. Leave it at WINPAC, CP, you guys, very few at ODNI. NE doesn’t need to know yet. I’m not reading about this in the Post.”

“Got it, sir,” Stavros confirmed.

“Good.”

“Right,” Shaw agreed. “Pete, let’s send word to Tehran and see what we can shake loose.” They both went to leave Freeman’s office when Shaw stopped at the door and turned her head. “Ryan, once this is out we can’t get it back.”

“I know.”

•     •     •

A quick glance at his passport by a wary police officer would have shown the name of a Swiss national, Simon Marleau, born 25 February 1985. A closer inspection of the pages to follow by a vigilant immigration official would have revealed numerous foreign visas, all of which would have appeared authentic, detailing a pattern of travel from his home in Tehran to Zurich, Brussels, Paris, Istanbul or Dubai, and would have spanned the four years since its date of issue. Upon further questioning, “Simon” would have gladly offered up minute details in German, French, Arabic, Persian or English of his childhood in Emmen, a working-class suburb of Lucerne, or his time abroad studying economics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He could have also spoke at great length of his employment as a contracted account manager in the Tehran representative office of the Arab Banking Corporation. A run on the cheque cards at his disposal would have also shown a lengthy credit history to match. And each time the questions were posed, even under a polygraph test, Simon would have recounted these stories with the exact same attention to detail. But, as is with all works of fiction, they were lies, expertly crafted by the wizards of Langley for the non-official cover (NOC) operative whose job it was to guard the most valuable asset the Central Intelligence Agency had known since the Cold War.

But his cover hardly concerned him at the moment. A clear glaze of cold sweat formed across Jack Galloway’s brow and the quickening thud of his heart ensured that it would stay there for the immediate future. Using every muscle in his legs, he hastened the pace of his jog and rounded another bend on the dirt path as a healthy sense of paranoia kept an attentive pair of eyes over his shoulder. The path was one of a handful Jack would use to maneuver through the park and it was especially useful for spotting a tail. At this level of the mountain, the path’s switchbacks became sharp enough that any surveillance team attempting to maintain continuous visual contact with him would be hard-pressed to remain hidden. Jack planned it that way. He had been jogging aimlessly through one of Tehran’s affluent residential neighborhoods at street level for over an hour, only deciding to enter the park and ascend the mountain when he was convinced he hadn’t seen anyone twice. If he had spotted so much as a suspicious glance from a passerby, he would simply finish his run and return home to wait patiently for the next opportunity. It was an exhausting routine, but Jack welcomed it. It was what kept him alive.

After clearing another tight bend, Jack turned his head and saw only nature at his back. Nothing. He was “black” — free of surveillance.

He took a second to catch his breath and take in the view before him. Jamshidieh Park sat on the lower slopes of the Alborz Mountains, which formed Tehran’s northern-most extremity. The entire Iranian capital, home to over eight million, spread out before him in a seemingly endless field of concrete residential blocks and snaking highways, all cloaked in drifting clouds of orange smog.

Panting and wiping the sweat from his forehead, Jack bent down and slid off the heel of his right tennis shoe, revealing a small, hidden cavity. He eased two fingers inside the confined space and removed a folded piece of paper wrapped in tin foil. A few steps off the path, Jack found a rock the size of his fist, smooth and much darker than the ones surrounding it. He pushed the rock aside and brushed clear an inch of dirt, unearthing a black, metal surface twice the size of a quarter with a string attached. Jack pulled on the string and eased out a waterproof, eight-inch spike. He unscrewed the threaded cap from the top of the spike and opened a hollow space that was large enough to hold a few film canisters, a thumb drive, or a small message. Jack placed the folded paper inside and buried the spike before replacing the rock exactly as he found it.

Without a swarm of Iranian counterintelligence officers behind him, Jack succeeded in servicing his dead-drop one more time. He stood and stretched his legs before returning to the path. In an hour, a cut-out — an anonymous Iranian Jack regularly paid to pass messages to his asset — would drift by the same rock and retrieve the spike’s contents. And before dawn the next morning, an underpaid worker of the Tehran Sanitation Department — whose meager salary Jack also supplemented — would take a piece of chalk and mark a lamppost on Ammar Street opposite a comfortable, walled villa owned by the state. And to the dozens who would drift past that morning, the chalk mark would be meaningless — save for one.

•     •     •

Andrei Ilyich Minin rose from the warmth of a Mercedes-Benz S600 into a frigid gust of eddying snowflakes that bit his round boyish cheeks and tore at his neat sandy hair. He buttoned his overcoat and looked east to a taxiing AirBaltic 737. The winter sun clung shyly to the horizon, swathed in smog and clouds, its weary glare broken by the tailfins of business jets. Minin counted nearly two-dozen pristine Gulfstreams, Bombardiers and Dassaults on the apron at Vnukovo-3, sitting with only inches to spare between their wingtips. That morning an international power menagerie had descended upon Moscow like seals on a rock for the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club. Over the coming week, an assortment of oligarchs, journalists, diplomats, academics and various intellectual hangers-on would gather under the theme, “The World Order: New Rules or a Game without Rules?” After five years of civil war in Syria ripped the old notion of order to shreds, the meeting’s roundtables and plenary sessions were geared to find an answer to that perplexing question.

For the keynote that evening, President Mikhail Borisovich Karetnikov was due to deliver a landmark address that would dramatically reassert the Russian Federation’s role on the world stage. It was being hinted by the Kremlin that the speech would launch a rhetorical assault on the upheaval of the past nine months with a soaring indictment of Turkey’s invasion of Syria that hastened the collapse of the regime and ended the war. Rumors also abounded that Karetnikov would denounce President Andrew Paulson — by name — and condemn the current unipolar world order of the United States that consistently bred such catastrophes in the Middle East. The consequences of this “Karetnikov Doctrine” — as the press deemed it — were up for speculation, but if whispers in the Arctic wind were to be believed, a much darker future lurked on the horizon.

As Minin watched the 737 hurl itself down the runway, his eyes caught a silver Opel Antara parked beneath a fluttering windsock. The SUV’s windows were tinted and its license plate was stamped with the prefix code of the Kremlin’s Special Purpose Garage. They weren’t even trying to hide, he thought. Sitting inside were officers of the Federalnaya Sluzbha Okhrany — the Federal Protective Service, or FSO — armed with high-powered binoculars and parabolic microphones. Minin immediately knew their target, and who sent them.

Looming over the other planes on the tarmac, like a whale in a school of goldfish, was an Airbus ACJ330. Its fuselage stretched sixty-nine meters from nose to empennage and was painted pearl white with a tapering black band running along the windows. Mounted discreetly on the tail cone and tucked behind the Rolls-Royce engines under the wings were tiny infrared panels meant to stave off heat-seeking missiles. Airstairs were pressed to the cabin door and a bulky man in a wool coat stood guard at the bottom step. Minin made a wary glance at the Opel, and began walking to the plane.

He approached the guard — likely a former operator of the British Special Air Service, as Minin understood most were — and offered his name. After he was wanded with a magnetometer, the guard muttered something in his lapel and nodded for Minin to climbs the stairs.

A young stewardess appeared in the cabin door, dressed impeccably in heels and a tan form-fitting skirt despite the cold. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Minin,” she greeted him in English with a slight French accent. “May I take your coat?”

“Thank you,” he replied, pulling his arms from the sleeves.

“His Lordship will be with you presently. Please make yourself comfortable in the lounge just down the corridor,” she said with an effortless smile. “May I bring you a beverage while you wait?”

Minin thought for a moment. “Espresso would be wonderful.”

“Of course, sir,” she held her smile. “My name is Nicolette. Please don’t hesitate to ask me or my staff if you require anything. It’s our pleasure to serve.”

“Thank you.”

The corridor ran a few steps aft and opened on the lounge, spanning the width of the cabin. The aircraft’s interior was designed by the London firm Candy & Candy and was appointed with silk-and-wool carpeting, hand-stitched leather seating and lacquer tables and consoles in understated, earthy tones.

Minin chose a sofa along the starboard fuselage. Bloomberg played on a television recessed in the bulkhead. Amid the scrolling stock ticker and graphs overlaid on the screen, the anchors squawked about the two breaking stories that teased markets from New York to Hong Kong into a frenzy.

At four o’clock that morning, Oleg Dubik — CEO of Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas producer — emerged from a conference room at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Shanghai and announced that he and his counterpart with the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) had reached an agreement after months of negotiations. Their joint memorandum, which was being parsed by the Bloomberg anchors, revealed a thirty-year deal, worth four hundred billion dollars, that would ship thirty-eight billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas to China annually. A network of pipelines dubbed the “East-Route” would connect the Kovyktin and Chayandin gas fields in eastern Siberia to the metropolitan sprawl surrounding Beijing and the Yangtze River delta. Once constructed and operating at full capacity, the deal would provide one-fifth of China’s yearly consumption of natural gas.

Another stewardess entered the lounge and laid a silver tray on the table. She set his espresso cup and saucer with a bowl of sugar cubes in front of him. Across the table, she placed a bottle of Fernet-Branca and a crystal stemmed cordial glass, smiled, and excused herself.

Barely was the ink dry on the memorandum in Shanghai when, at midnight in Moscow, a press release was quietly issued from the Kremlin. The one-page statement sat unnoticed in newsrooms overnight until, with dawn, it exploded.

“I’ve had hemorrhoids more pleasant, my dear!”

Minin’s head spun.

Two gray and white Italian Greyhounds — Artemis and Eos — pranced into the lounge and happily came for Minin with their wet noses. He knew they were gifts to their master from the grand duke of Luxembourg, and twins of the same litter.

Lord Roman Leonidovich Ivanov trailed in a moment later. He was a tall, sharp man of eighty-six with the booming voice of an auctioneer, the confident poise of a Shakespearean actor and the suffocating presence of a master politician. A wavy silver mane covered the sides of his head; wrinkles ran across his forehead like rivulets and connected his wide nose with the corners of his mouth; and pale, fleshy circles ringed his eyes where tanning goggles frequently rested.

“Down, girls,” he spat at the dogs while knotting the sash of a bespoke silk kimono around his waist. “Go!” He pointed his bony index finger and whistled and the dogs scampered out of sight. Next his finger turned on Minin.

“I’ll ask you straight, boy!” Ivanov’s voice swelled through the cabin. “Did you play me for a bloody fool?”

“I — I didn’t do anything.”

“You’re damn right you didn’t!”

The second breaking story that morning was an unceremonious announcement that the Kremlin was withdrawing support for South Stream, a pipeline designed to transport Russian gas under the Black Sea to Bulgaria where it would have run in two branches: one south across Greece and under the Adriatic to Italy, and one north across Serbia and Hungary to Austria. The project had been in development for much of the last decade. Customers were arranged in Europe, permits were approved with the transit countries and some sections, such as in Bulgaria, were already under construction. One press release in the middle of the night ended all of that; the consortium could keep building, but the pipes would stay dry.

Ivanov sat across the table from Minin and unscrewed the bottle of Fernet-Branca. “Who knew about this?”

Minin shook his head. “It came from Volodnin’s office.”

Ivanov scoffed. He poured the bitter into the cordial glass and threw it back in a single gulp.

“If anyone else knew in advance, they kept it from me.”

Valery Volodnin was head of the Presidential Administration, Karetnikov’s chief of staff and closest confidant. He was also the first deputy prime minister and chairman of both Gazprom and Rosneft, the state oil monopoly. Volodnin had served with the KGB and was suspected to be the leader of the siloviki, a faction of former Soviet intelligence officers that now held a number of key positions in Moscow. He was a ruthless manager, enforcer and protector of Karetnikov. It was whispered that when an outspoken journalist or politician ran afoul of the president for the last time, it was Volodnin who personally saw that they troubled his boss no more. Minin was his deputy.

“I was in the air not twenty minutes,” Ivanov’s eyes tightened. “From that shithole in Ashgabat. The phone rings. I expected great things. But it’s my general counsel. Guess how he found out.”

Minin didn’t answer.

“The fucking BBC!”

Minin blinked and tried to look away.

“I have had an understanding with Gazprom for ten years,” Ivanov smoldered. “I fought your battles with Brussels, I assured friends of mine that opening their wallets to Karetnikov was wise, I got those imbeciles in Sofia elected,” his tongue hung on the word. “Now I’m cheated out of fifty billion…and I want someone’s head, Andruishka.”

Ivanov was long called “the Oracle of St James’s” for the neighborhood of London where Bridgewater House, his head office, fronted Green Park. His investment firm, the Ivanov Group, amassed a trove of nearly seven trillion dollars in assets under management — and a personal net worth of a hundred and twenty billion, making him easily the wealthiest man on Earth. Over a career spanning sixty years, Ivanov became widely seen as one of, if not the most, influential financial voices alive, on par with or even surpassing some central bank governors, finance ministers and heads of state. He held shares in the world’s largest banks, energy companies and shipping lines. One such investment was a fifty-fifty stake held with Gazprom in South Stream AG, a joint venture registered in Zug, Switzerland to design, finance and construct the pipeline. For Karetnikov, it was a tool of geopolitical might to keep Europe addicted to Russian gas and further cement Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet satellite states as part of a larger ploy to weaken European unity. For Ivanov, the pipeline was simply good business. And so for years Ivanov toiled behind the scenes to court potential investors and allay concerns, providing a friendly face where his Russian partners could not. While he and Karetnikov personally detested each other, Ivanov always understood that the West wanted Russia alongside it vastly more than it wanted to resist it. Since the end of the Cold War, he endeavored to make that a reality, with great headway, until Mikhail Karetnikov evoked the worst vestiges of his country’s past.

It began two years earlier when Karetnikov seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in broad daylight and dared the West to make him pay. As sanctions were levied against Karetnikov’s associates, the European Commission passed regulation after regulation to prevent South Stream from being built and leaned on the Bulgarian government, where the pipeline would come ashore, to end their involvement. Gazprom executives and Kremlin emissaries began clandestine pilgrimages to Bojan Siderov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, and showered the country with politically strategic investments. Ivanov warily helped the GRU, Russian military intelligence, funnel millions to Ataka, a far-right party opposed to European integration and the exploration of Bulgarian shale gas. After parliamentary elections, Ataka gained enough seats to bolster Siderov’s coalition and pass a bill clearing the way for the pipeline. Everything was in order, and even as of that morning, pipe-laying ships were at work in the Black Sea.

“I can’t give you an answer,” Minin sighed.

“What do I say to Eni and OMV?” Ivanov leaned in. “What do I say to the crews in Burgas?” He shrugged. “’Mikhail’s mistress bit down a little too hard last night and, shame, it’s worth fuck-all now?’”

Minin looked down at his toes.

“I helped that bastard when no one else would.”

During the last week of negotiations in Shanghai, the Chinese delegation suddenly informed Gazprom that in any arrangement they would only agree to pay half of the going European market rate for Russia’s gas. To strengthen their position they revealed that a consortium of Central Asian energy monopolies, led by President Dhzuma Ovezov of Turkmenistan, was offering the same rate. The Chinese demanded that Gazprom match the offer or talks would end. Through Karetnikov’s furious outbursts when the news reached the Kremlin, Minin quickly thought to make a call.

One of the Ivanov Group’s most important holdings was a sixty-percent stake in Vidar, a Geneva-based global commodities trading firm co-run by managing-directors Torbjön Thåström and Arseni Sokoloff, another former Soviet intelligence officer and occasional judo sparring partner with Karetnikov. Vidar held tender contracts with Rosneft, Gazpromneft and Surgutneftgaz and traded a vast swathe of Russian seaborne crude on the open market. At Minin’s request, Ivanov flew immediately to Turkmenistan and spent several days holed up in the garish Oguzkhan Palace in Ashgabat, sweet-talking the notoriously corrupt Ovezov. He countered the Chinese with a proposal that Vidar would purchase the lot of Central Asia’s gas exports at the standing market rate for the next thirty years, and promised that he would personally secure a grant from his friends at the Asian Development Bank to help construct a new power plant on the Caspian Sea. To seal the deal, Ivanov brought twenty suitcases bursting with British pounds sterling for whatever use Ovezov saw fit. With that, Ovezov was hooked.

“Do you know what kind of delusional nonsense that crater-faced cretin goes around spouting? He thinks we’re mates now,” said Ivanov. “He wants to come up to Scotland for a stalking trip at Glengorm.”

Minin pointed to the television with his chin. “They’re talking about him.”

Ivanov craned his neck.

The anchors cut to footage filmed three days earlier. One clip panned over the charred husk of the baroque Château Bartholoni. Another featured a row of police cars and fire engines, and emergency lights pulsing in the dead of night as lips of flame crept above treetops in the distance. The last showed the tranquil surface of Lake Geneva, shimmering red and orange like a sheet of molten copper.

“That’s done now,” Ivanov dismissed.

“I heard there was smoke in his lungs.” Minin looked at the TV. “He was still alive.”

Ivanov pursed his lips. “I want to read something to you, Andruishka. Don’t move.” The Oracle of St James’s floated down the corridor.

Arseni Sokoloff was outraged to hear of the scheming in Ashgabat; Vidar was nominally under his control, a firm that Sokoloff alone had built into a behemoth of the global energy markets that enticed Ivanov’s investments. He refused to tether Vidar to Dhzuma Ovezov’s incompetence for the next thirty years. Yet without him, Gazprom’s hope for a lucrative contract with the Chinese would implode. Sokoloff had to be removed from the equation. Minin quietly reached out to Colonel-General Vyasheslav Trubnikov, director-general of the GRU, and asked for his assistance. In turn, Trubnikov contacted a man whom he only ever referred to as, “the American.”

Ivanov returned with a small leather-bound book bearing the title, Michael Robartes and the Dancer by the poet William Butler Yeats. He flipped to a yellowed, dog-eared page and mouthed, “The Second Coming,” then read aloud:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Ivanov’s cold indifference was unshakable. He snapped the book shut. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life in that man’s shadow? Or would you like to cast a pall of you own?”

“Where you’re asking to go — I can’t follow.”

“You’re not innocent anymore,” Ivanov said.

“No.” Minin shook his head. “No.”

“Could Trubnikov’s man?”

Minin stared at the TV. “He’s done that much.”

“Andruishka, we’ve talked about this for years.”

“It’s not right.”

“Go see him. See for yourself.”

“He was still alive…”

“He’s not now.”

Minin’s eyes welled for a moment.

“Andruishka?”

“Fine,” he breathed. “I will.”

“Timely, gripping, and unbelievably authentic…” Active Measures: Part I is available for purchase on Amazon.

Published by H-Hour Productions, LLC. Copyright © 2016 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.

5:45 always came too early. A swift smack of his hand silenced the monotone chirping echoing through the bedroom. He double-checked the time and eyed the green-tinted darkness around him through two weary slits; Mary, his wife, still slept soundly beside him. With a subtle hint of jealousy, Ryan Freeman rose and went about his routine. Later, after knotting a crisp blue tie and throwing a suit jacket over his shoulders, he returned to his wife and leaned over the bedspread to plant a kiss on her forehead. Mary rewarded him with a loving groan and rolled back into the tangle of sheets.

Freeman descended the staircase and met his security detail in the kitchen. His personal space had shrunk in the past month. Upon being confirmed by the Senate as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA), a section of the basement in his three-bedroom home on Highland Drive in Silver Spring had been walled-off to create a security command post and classified document vault. It was now half-past six and Freeman trailed two of the agents into the world of manicured lawns and joggers that was suburban Maryland. The sky was pink and the air was characteristically still for a bitterly cold winter morning. It was the first of February.

An armored Chevy Tahoe idled in his driveway with pulsating red and blue LED lights behind the windshield. An identical chase car sat alongside the curb. Freeman climbed into the rear right seat and welcomed the heated cabin. His work day had actually begun at ten o’clock the previous evening when a printer in the basement command post automatically started, as it did every night, and spat out a draft of the president’s morning intelligence briefing. The President’s Daily Brief (PDB) was the most important document the intelligence community produced and was referred to by many as simply “the book.” Essentially, it was a classified version of any major newspaper with the key exception that its stories were on topics most reporters would sacrifice their first-born child to break. Freeman would review the draft for an hour each night. On occasion he would call the PDB night editor and give his opinion on the content and provide direction on which pieces may require more, or less, explanation.

But while official Washington slept CIA’s overseas operations were in full swing, and that meant with each sunrise a mountain of cable traffic crowded offices from Fort Meade to Fairfax, all of which had to be sifted, analyzed and prioritized for the policy makers. Freeman was an expert in determining that priority, but to aid him, a sizable anthology of state secrets in three-ring binders and fat manila folders sat at his side. He began cutting through the pile by reaching for a stack of reports his staff had plucked from the Operations Center’s overnight influx of secrets. The reports, fronted by laminated bright-red Top Secret cover sheets, addressed a large swath of issues that the various directorates, desks, stations and centers at his command deemed worthy of his attention that morning. In a matter of minutes he had poured over the pages and filled the margins with cursive shorthand that only his secretary was able to decipher into legible English. Next came something always guaranteed to sour Freeman’s mood: a collection of clippings from The New York Times, The Washington Post and a changing variety of foreign newspapers — the daily leaks, as he called them. Thirty years of experience in the US intelligence community had taught him that staying abreast of the media was just as much if not more crucial than the intelligence. What was reported in the morning broadcast usually fueled policy makers’ agenda and it was consistently the first item they wanted to discuss.

Finally, the D/CIA turned his attention to a leather portfolio containing a collection of one- or two-page articles printed on heavy paper. Freeman walked through the finalized PDB, reading each article in detail, making notes on what to consider, as well as what last minute advice should be phoned in to the briefing team under the aegis of the director of national intelligence that would join the president in the Oval Office promptly at nine that morning. His eyes fell upon an article with intelligence contributed by a targeting officer out of Station Beirut entitled, “Hezbollah Scours Source of Lost IRGC Aid Funds.” The report concerned information gleaned from a Lebanese source identified by the “crypt” or code name AM/TOPSAIL. TOPSAIL claimed that Sheikh Wissam Hamawi, Hezbollah’s secretary-general, was leading an internal investigation aimed at finding two million dollars in missing aid money that had been funneled to the group through private charities controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the IRGC or the Pasdaran. Slapped on the first page of the article was a yellow Post-it note with “Call me!” scribbled over it. Freeman recognized the handwriting and immediately reached for the encrypted BlackBerry in his jacket pocket. It clicked twice and rang on the seventh floor of Langley’s Old Headquarters Building.

“Morning, boss,” answered Grace Shaw, a legendary field officer, and CIA’s deputy director for operations (DDO).

“Why are you in so early?”

“Pipes in the condo upstairs froze. Had a quick panic attack until I realized I’m lucky if I sleep there two nights a week anyway. You see my note?”

“Yeah, what gives?”

“Let me tell you what I know and you can be the judge.”

“Okay…”

“The Tel Aviv COS got a request overnight from Jerusalem — from Avi Arad’s security advisor, not Mossad — to be read-in on all TOPSAIL intake as it concerns a source of funding to Hezbollah from the Rev Guards.”

“What?”

“Yeah, right on Ilan Halevi’s letterhead — clear as day — my eyes, trained. Who do you suppose talked?”

“Tanner.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” Shaw referred to Dr. Eli Tanner, the president’s national security advisor. Tanner was most recently the president of the Council on Foreign Relations — a lifelong academic who had never set foot in the field and didn’t grasp the concept that loose lips do, in fact, sink ships. He was a personal friend of Prime Minister Arad and it wasn’t the first time that their relationship had irked Freeman. However, as Tanner’s office sat mere steps from the president of the United States, he remained untouchable.

“What do they want?” Shaw sensed the annoyance in her boss’s voice.

“A trade.”

“Tell Halevi to go fuck himself.”

“Really?”

“No. Just tell him no.”

“Damn, I got excited there. But just between you and me and anybody who’ll listen, Tanner needs to shut his mouth or one day he’ll let something slip that’ll get somebody killed.”

“Roger that.”

“Your schedule says you’re coming straight in, is that still true?”

“Yep.”

“Okay,” Shaw shifted in her chair, “because I just heard from Ops at NRO and they say the weather should be good when they pass Haj Ali Gholi. They’ll get maybe a twenty-minute window for VTC. You’ve been wanting to see it live?”

“I do. See you soon.”

“Bye, boss.”

The encrypted line went dead just as the Tahoes reached the Beltway and crossed an icy Potomac River.

•     •     •

Ouzai was one of the poorest sections of Beirut’s desolate southern suburbs. For displaced Shia from the south and Palestinian refugees, too impoverished to take up residence in their own scattered camps, the grimy warren of cinder block houses and illegally built apartment buildings was often the only escape from an Israeli prison. Many of the structures in that chaotic, destitute slum were built close enough together that residents could reach out and touch hands. Electrical wires ran exposed along crumbling walls and stairwells. Burning garbage and the thick, oily smoke it produced would choke the cool breeze following off the Mediterranean as middle-aged men and women faded away from diseases the developed world had long since forgotten. Power failures and short circuits were a common occurrence. Those better off could purchase generators and place them on their balconies; when the power was cut, it was a contest to get one’s voice heard over the whine of diesel engines. And in the hot summer of 1982, a young Shiite boy called it home.

Barely over the age of twenty, he was still a child — razor-thin with eyes the color of jade. The boy had, to this point, led a simple existence helping his father push a small vegetable cart through the dusty paths and squalor of the city’s southern suburbs. He was known in the neighborhood for his sense of humor — frequently cracking jokes at family weddings — and for his pious adherence to Islam. A distant cousin was a prominent scholar of Twelver Shiism, had studied in the Iranian seminaries of Qom and even wrote books that could be found in some Muslim enclaves of Europe. The boy admired his cousin yet knew a similar path was impossible for him. But his mind was sharp and on a scholarship he enrolled in the American University of Beirut to study engineering, only to drop out after a single year. As a Shia, a job in Saudi Arabia or anywhere in the Gulf was incredibly unlikely and that was where all the work could be found. For a young man in his situation, he picked up the only tool he could wield: a Kalashnikov rifle.

His name was Ibrahim al-Din and it would soon become synonymous with the spate of bombings, hijackings and kidnappings that would scourge Lebanon and its foreign occupiers for the next thirty years. Al-Din and his friends rested in the glow of the Mediterranean sun with their legs pulled up beneath them, contemplating their bleak futures. In that single-story house next to the Airport Road there was no running water or electricity — the Israeli Air Force ensured as much when they began their siege of Beirut. A few short miles to the north, a string of luxury flats along the sea were being pounded by relentless artillery fire and the rumble of cannons was clearly audible over his family’s struggling generator. War was a fact of life for these young men and they accepted it and the death it brought like many accepted a rainy day. Al-Din knew in his heart that the end was near, that it was simply a matter of time before the PLO — then the vanguard of the Islamic resistance — would capitulate its Lebanese base and flee. The Arabs had consistently failed to protect their own people and once more humiliation and defeat would be their fate. It was a precedent for which the eager young man grew tired.

All three spent their teenage years fighting in the Lebanese civil war on the side of Fatah as snipers targeting Christian neighborhoods in the cratered wasteland of East Beirut. The combat that was native to these men crafted them into masters of urban warfare. Al-Din, especially, was a prodigy in the art of death and there was not a weapon he couldn’t unjam, nor an AK-47 he couldn’t fieldstrip blindfolded; he could crimp a blasting cap with the skill of a demolitions expert and put a rocket-propelled grenade on target at over a hundred meters. By the time he was sixteen he had organized a hundred men into a student brigade for Force 17, the personal bodyguard service of Yasser Arafat, who spoke openly of al-Din’s skill and intelligence. Now, as the Israelis inched closer to Verdun Street, where the PLO was headquartered, it was obvious to al-Din, and the others that their former commander had failed. It was time to fly a new flag.

Al-Din, the two others in the room, and countless more spread throughout Lebanon and the Arab world were exiles in their own homeland. Ouzai’s position on the northwest perimeter of Beirut International Airport served as a constant reminder of how they had been subjugated by forces outside their borders. Day and night, jets full of rich Lebanese flew in from New York, Paris, Rome and London. Chauffeured Mercedes and hand-built Bentleys would queue in front of the terminal and ferry the decadent back to their mansions in the Baabda hills above the city. Their heavy bags of Swiss chocolate, French cognac and Italian couture kept a reality present to the angry men that, in Lebanon, the Lebanese were second-class citizens.

The Ottomans, the French and now the Israelis with their American protectors, were their occupiers. The sound of commercial airliners was replaced with screeching F-16s manufactured in the United States, and the airport was closed — now a pockmarked sheet of asphalt — but nothing would change once the Israelis completed their mission.

However the young men had a different plan and they were determined to change Lebanon for good.

Yet they were not naïve and knew they could not take back Lebanon or Palestine from its occupiers alone. The Palestinian elite failed them just as much, if not more, than their rich Arab brethren in the Gulf. The Saudi royal family and the Emiratis only gave their oil-soaked cash to the Palestinian cause out of guilt. Twice, the massed armies of the Arab world had stood up together to run the Zionists back into the Mediterranean and twice they had failed. But Al-Din was aware of a new movement stirring on the eastern shores of the Persian Gulf led by a charismatic ayatollah named Ruhollah Khomeini. Three years earlier Ayatollah Khomeini led a revolution — a Shiite revolution — that overthrew the shah and expelled Western influences from Iran. The ayatollah was now promising to do the same across the Middle East and eventually the whole world. The “Imam,” as he was affectionately known within his new Islamic Republic, succeeded where countless revolutionaries before had failed.

The boy stood and wished his family and friends farewell, but he would return. With a small amount of money he saved from helping his father, he took a shared taxi east to Baalbek in Lebanon’s lawless Beqaa Valley. A man al-Din knew as Sheikh Mostafa agreed to meet with him there, out of reach of the Israeli Air Force and Mossad’s hit squads. Together, they would plot the future of the Lebanese people. Al-Din knew little of this Sheikh Mostafa other than that he was an ethnic Arab, a Shiite like himself, and an officer in Ayatollah Khomeini’s new Revolutionary Guard Corps, a separate military force committed to preserving and expanding the wave of fundamentalist Islam that washed over Iran. Al-Din went to see if the Iranians were serious about conquering the Jews and forcing out the French and American soldiers that would soon arrive in Lebanon. Al-Din wanted to know if the sheikh and the ayatollah behind him would flinch at the sight of blood.

He sat across from Sheikh Mostafa and listened intently without blinking an eye. That was a distinguishing feature of Ibrahim al-Din — his eyes would gaze on unnervingly and pass through a person without reverence for the soul within. It was a stare that proclaimed he would murder you as easily as he would shake your hand. The future that Sheikh Mostafa presented was clear: a war with Israel, a war with the United States, a war with the West and any other enemy of Shia Islam. That part of the plan was not particularly important to al-Din. He was a believer and a follower of God, but he was not tutored in Islam like his cousin, nor did he necessarily fall down at Ayatollah Khomeini’s new interpretation. Al-Din saw the Shia faith as a means of recruitment and as a way to market a wholly political struggle to a people wholly uneducated in politics. The fact that he would carry the banner of Shiite revolution to the shores of the Levant was a contractual obligation to which he did not object. Iran’s goal in Lebanon was clear and all that was needed were martyrs to turn it into a reality. The sheikh asked if al-Din and his followers were ready, but he already knew the answer.

From that summer day in 1982, Ibrahim al-Din became a captain and a founder in what would become the most effective guerrilla army in the world: Hezbollah — the “Party of God.” The thin, honey-eyed man returned to Beirut with his instructions. He would only recruit relatives and trusted fighters from Fatah. With Iran as a rear base, this war would be fought entirely from Lebanon. The IRGC would provide the weapons and funding, but there would be no payroll and transactions would be handled only in cash. Al-Din was never to contact the sheikh electronically and a trusted courier would relay their messages. All of his activities, his movements and the names of his fighters would be kept under the utmost secrecy; only Sheikh Mostafa and a handful of officers in Tehran would know that al-Din even answered to the Iranians.

His ascendance to the world stage as a master terrorist was swift and brutal. At 1:03 in the afternoon on April 18, 1983, a delivery truck laden with two thousand pounds of plastic explosives rammed through an outlying guard post and lodged itself in the lobby of the US embassy in Beirut. Before anyone could respond, its cargo detonated, taking the lives of sixty-three people, including most of CIA’s top echelon in the Middle East. The force of the expertly crafted bomb collapsed the central façade of the chancery building and shattered windows as far as a mile away. In October of that same year, another bombing ordered by al-Din ripped through a barracks housing American marines at Beirut airport. Two minutes later, another blast struck a company of French paratroopers. In the costliest day for the US Marine Corps since Iwo Jima, 241 American servicemen perished.

After the attack, the United States withdrew its force from Lebanon and, for the first time in history, Ibrahim al-Din — and by proxy, Iran — had accomplished what every other Arab state had failed to do: they prevailed against the technological and conventional might of a Western military power. His campaign to cleanse Lebanon continued through the decade with a rash of kidnappings that targeted journalists, members of the clergy and even CIA’s Beirut Station chief. A wave of commercial airline hijackings in the eastern Mediterranean that al-Din also masterminded, and even participated in, expanded the fight. However, in the skies between Cyprus and Lebanon, al-Din was about to witness a philosophical shift in the strategy of his Iranian backers and it would signal a greater shift in the value of the trade he perfected.

On April 5, 1988, eight hijackers stormed the cockpit of Kuwait Airways Flight 422 under orders from al-Din. Armed with grenades, three of the terrorists informed the captain that they were now in control. The hijacking was an effort to free members of the savage Dawa 17 organization who awaited execution in a Kuwaiti prison cell for their efforts to attack the American and French embassies in the country. Al-Din’s cousin was among them.

His men aboard the plane were professionals, and they kept their hostages under complete control — quiet, submissive and terrified. To hide their Lebanese accents, they only spoke classical Arabic, swapped clothes and wore masks so their captives could not tell them apart. They kept the window shades drawn to degrade the hostages’ sense of time, and they turned the lights and air conditioning on and off to maximize discomfort. They prowled the aisles like vultures, shouting and picking out individuals to shine lights in their eyes, making them believe they were seconds from execution.

From his base in Ouzai, al-Din ordered the plane down at Mashad in eastern Iran where it sat beside the runway for several days. In past operations, the IRGC would allow the hijackers off the plane to refresh in shifts, but this time they did not. The peculiar change in protocol was the first sign to al-Din that something was different. After an inordinate amount of time, the airliner took off again, this time bound for Beirut and the airport that Hezbollah now controlled. Once in Lebanese airspace, the political bosses of Hezbollah and al-Din’s handlers in Tehran made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the hijacking. The plane circled for hours until al-Din realized that his masters would not let the plane land. Frustrated, he directed the hijackers to Larnaca, Cyprus.

The Cypriots did not have a particularly well-equipped hostage rescue team and the small airport there had good fields of view from all directions around the runway. It was a prudent tactical move that would keep the hijackers in control. Al-Din also had a competent surveillance team at his disposal in Cyprus that would alert him of any troop movements toward the airport. On the fifth day of the ordeal, the Kuwaitis still refused to negotiate. In anger, al-Din radioed his men aboard the plane and ordered them to execute two of the hostages. They did so in earnest, but it had no effect. The Kuwaitis were not intimidated and the Iranians refused to associate themselves with al-Din. The plane’s next stop was Algeria, where after PLO negotiations, the hijackers were granted safe passage back to Lebanon in exchange for abandoning the airliner. For the first time, an operation al-Din meticulously planned and executed had failed to achieve its purpose, but why?

Central to Iran’s developing goal of regional hegemony in the Middle East was a desire to transform itself from a terrorist state to a conventional military power. One could not accomplish such a thing by executing airline passengers. Iran’s interest was now rooted in air and naval tactics, armor and advanced weaponry, and the political posture to be noticed. For Iran to be taken serious it had to act serious, and that was not done by basing its policy in the Arab world on a terrorist, noble as his cause may have been. With his specialty service no longer required by his employers, al-Din’s role, too, shifted from hijacker and kidnapper to liaison, military commander and strategist.

He was given the chance to spill Israeli blood numerous times throughout the nineties as the Israel Defense Force (IDF) continued its costly occupation of Lebanon’s southern Shiite heartland. Hezbollah militants would continuously ambush Israeli patrols or bombard a fortified outpost with anti-tank missiles and swarming raids. In the summer of 2006, it was al-Din who made the Zionists’ advance to the Litani River a tactical hell. Still, his job was that of a glorified logistics officer, overseeing the transfer of Iranian weapons by sea and land through Syria. The rest of Hezbollah’s commanding Shura Council was concerned with being seen as the modern reincarnation of Saladin, and the Iranians were more concerned with conquering the atom than Jerusalem.

For his efforts, al-Din was placed on the kill and capture lists of every major Western intelligence agency. An Interpol red notice hung over his head since the mid-nineties, making travel beyond the safe harbor of Hezbollah’s strongholds a risky endeavor. To survive, he vanished back into the cinder block jungle from where he once emerged. In time — and with new, more pressing threats coming to the fore — the memory of his many enemies began to fade. There were several theories in circulation on what became of him. The Saudis, the French and the Germans held to a flimsy rumor that he died of a brain tumor some years ago under an assumed name in Damascus. The Americans and the British quickly became too obsessed with al-Qaeda to even pretend to care; so long as al-Din kept off the radar, he was as good as dead. Only the Israelis, led by Mossad’s merciless and vindictive director-general — who tried no fewer than four times to assassinate him — dared to keep the chase alive. But as with any ghost, finding it meant first being haunted.

From the moment the initial Israeli shell fell on Lebanon, Ibrahim al-Din was a man committed to finishing his mission, and so long as there was an Israeli state, his was a struggle without end. He would never lose sight of the vision he set out to realize over thirty years earlier. But he needed the means, he needed inspiration, he needed an opportunity — and in due time he would get them all.

“Timely, gripping, and unbelievably authentic…” Active Measures: Part I is available for purchase on Amazon.

Published by H-Hour Productions, LLC. Copyright © 2016 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.

There is great power in letting go.

But no one had taught him that. No one had plunged down their hands to dig up the shards and piece him back together. No one had ever tried.

Not yet.

Jack Galloway weighed his surroundings with a wary intent: a few muted women, their bodies engulfed by the deep, black, obscuring fabric of a chador; the cliques of men, young, old and plenty lost somewhere in the gap between; and their voices — the usual voices, the normative patterns — at times exuberant toward the cricket match on the television suspended from the far wall, at times silenced by an assuaging drag on a water pipe, at times hushed in acquiescence of the CCTV camera suspended to the other; at no time content. Their faces were unfamiliar to him yet their patterns, their movements, their fleeting glances, their questioning eyes were not — all caught by his own, all measured, processed and stored lest his eyes ever fall upon them again. Then he would know. Then he would vanish. Familiar faces in unfamiliar places were deadly in the denied corners of the world.

Jack took his cuff and wiped down a ceramic cup. He hadn’t seen his potential minder since he ducked into the café, although that was likely by design. In Moscow it was called “dolphin surveillance” — now you see me, now you don’t. The KGB would tail the subject with a sloppy team, making the surveillance obvious and then promptly pull the team off, replacing them with a much more skilled unit, of which the subject wouldn’t be granted the slightest hint. It was meant to deceive the subject into a false sense of security — the illusion of reality: an unreality — like the shadows dancing over the cave wall before the captivated prisoners, chained and ignorant of the raging fire at their backs. All mere projections; charades; lies in the dark.

Jack left the café, averting his face from the CCTV camera — the security services had unfettered access to the hard drives — and returned to the street under a gentle fall of rain.

It was just as his father had shown him in the front room of their embassy housing in Hampstead. His father would extend his arm and on cue, four coins would drop from his sleeve onto the table. He would count them and smile, “Are you with me?”

Jack continued down the street toward Tajrish Square, the hub of the affluent neighborhoods of northern Tehran. The streetlamps lit the way before him, and behind him. His minders hadn’t made themselves known, if they were even there. He hailed a passing cab. It pulled to the curb, splashing through the runoff that had gathered into shallow lakes of light. He directed the cab three blocks south, then promptly ordered it to stop, hopped out and doubled back five blocks north where he arrived at Ammar Street, a quiet, leafy residential lane flanked by distinguished walled homes. Here even the most capable surveillance unit would be pressed to find cover. Jack wasn’t keen to make it easy for his shadows. He kept on down the street.

His father would place the coins in a line on his right palm and count out each one, again, deliberately. Then, he folded his fingers on both hands, the right one touching the edge of the coins. He smiled again. “Are you with me?” Jack would nod. His father sharply flipped his hands, the backs turned to the ceiling. He smiled, turned over his right hand and opened it. Three coins. He turned over his left hand. One coin. “Did you see it jump?”

On the opposite side of the street, Jack saw a white, stone villa surrounded by a high wall and a manicured garden. The lights inside were doused and the curtains drawn — save for one. Suspended in a window on the upper floor was the soft orange flicker of a candle. Jack took note and walked on. He would wait for contact. That candle in the window was all he could concretely know, the only static light in a field of shifting shadows, flickers, projections and charades — lies in the dark; a solemn sign his father had shown him twenty-five years before.

That candle had been snuffed out. But no one had ever taught Jack why.

Not yet.

“Timely, gripping, and unbelievably authentic…” Active Measures: Part I is available for purchase on Amazon.

Published by H-Hour Productions, LLC. Copyright © 2016 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.

The rusting fences and chipped white guard towers seemed out of place against the calm and picturesque villages of Germany’s Rhine Valley. Cinder block barracks and concertina wire still sat as tourist attractions, but the maze of tank ditches and patchwork of minefields had long been removed. From their perch atop a four-hundred-meter hill above the Fulda Gap, American forces positioned here would have had a direct line of sight into the Deutsche Demokratishe Republik and the Soviet 8th Guards Army garrisoned immediately within. Since the late 1940s, American and Russian soldiers flooding the hills eyed each other through barricades of steel and dirt, anticipating a conflict that never came. A border crossing anywhere else acted simply as a filter on an artificial line drawn along a map. However, this was more — it was a demarcation between two worlds: democracy and communism. This was Observation Post Alpha, and if war ever came between East and West, this latticework of fences and checkpoints would have been ground zero in a fight that would reshape the world.

In a Top Secret report entitled OPLAN 4102, US European Command scripted in precise detail how American forces would react hour-by-hour to a Soviet attack on the inner German border. West Germany would essentially morph into a massive military encampment as the US Air Force would ferry reinforcements, ready them for attack and place them under NATO’s command hierarchy. The plan described the movements of every individual combat unit in the rugged, rural terrain, creating an in-depth defense plan that even provided for nuclear and chemical release procedures. The region was one of two likely routes for a Soviet tank offensive, the second being the North German Plain near Hamburg, which declared itself an open city that would not stage any resistance to Russian forces. A third, less likely route existed through the Danube River valley in Austria. The geography of these lowlands was more favorable to a Soviet armored column than the alternate route to the north, which was likewise suited to a mechanized infantry assault. Allied and US emphasis on the Fulda Gap was not without reason.

History always relied on this corridor that cut directly through Germany’s core and provided a gateway to Western Europe. In October of 1813, Napoleon Bonaparte — limping away from a disastrous defeat at the hands of both the tsar and Mother Nature — sought to wrestle back control of Germany. His two-hundred-thousand-man Grand Armée — merely a shadow of its former glory — met the formidable Sixth Coalition at Leipzig in what became the largest military confrontation before World War I. Over the next three days, the allied Russian, Swedish and German forces nearly surrounded Napoleon and fought to a clear, decisive victory that ended the French Empire’s ambitions in Prussia. Napoleon’s army made a narrow retreat toward Paris through the Fulda Gap and the coalition gave pursuit. A year after, Napoleon was captured and sent into exile on the island of Elba. Two centuries later, the Warsaw Pact had a similar strategy to that of the Sixth Coalition, and the Pentagon had forty years to decide on a response.

Defense of the Fulda Gap had been the primary responsibility of the American V Corps, which in the 1980s consisted of the 3rd Armored Division, the 8th Infantry Division, and the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment, which guarded the inner German border since 1972. Prior to that point, the border was the responsibility of the UK’s 3rd Constabulary Regiment and 1st Constabulary Brigade. The mission of these heavily mechanized reconnaissance units, equipped with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M60-series main battle tanks was two-fold: In peacetime, their role was to keep watch over the border for signs of Red Army movement that would signal an imminent attack. At war, the regiment had the responsibility to hold back a Soviet onslaught until the 3rd Armored and 8th ID — the V Corps’ backup — could mobilize and deploy. The armored cavalry would then act as a screening force, maintaining continuous visual contact with the Warsaw Pact’s forces, reporting on their movements and orders of battle.

Opposing American units on the opposite end of OP Alpha was the Soviet 8th Guards Army, reinforced by four armored divisions including the 1st Mechanized Infantry Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army, which four decades earlier had fought back Hitler’s armies at Stalingrad and gave pursuit all the way to Berlin. The 8th Guards had a well-deserved reputation for driving holes through Europe and in the 1980s was equipped with three motor rifle divisions and an armored tank division, plus support elements to ensure the future would not set a new precedent.

The residents of this quiet valley knew it was a dangerous place to live and if the order to invade ever came from the Kremlin, it was common knowledge that the Soviets would have trampled through the NATO units protecting them. Flanked by the Hohe Rhön and Knüllgebirge mountains, the Russians could move massive quantities of men of weaponry through the plains, affectively cutting West Germany in two and storming a path to the French border. The communists would hardly have stopped there; not only would the Soviets have reached the epicenter of American military power in Germany, including Ramstein Air Base and a host of barracks and munitions depots, but the Red Army would also be within striking distance of Frankfurt, West Germany’s main banking center and a key financial hub for the whole of Europe. Compounded with the loss of Hamburg, NATO would stand to forfeit Germany’s industrial heartland and the Rhine. The Americans would then be forced to fall back into Belgium and France and go on the defensive. NATO would lose the initiative and the armies of World Socialism might soon see the Atlantic, or at the very least, redraw the map in a way that favored Moscow.

While history and geography were both on their side, the Soviets knew that crushing the Americans and their allies was easier planned than accomplished. In order to further ensure the success of conventional forces in Germany and the rest of Europe, the Soviets enacted a bold plan that would target key facilities and personalities in the opening stage of World War III. This involved coordinated acts of sabotage, subversion and assassination. Power stations, airfields, ports, bridges and the central nodes of C3I — command, control, communications and intelligence — were canvassed by Russian special operations forces during the Cold War and prepped for elimination when the order finally came down from Moscow. However, this strategy was not exclusive to Europe alone. Russian military intelligence also penetrated deep into the United States where prepositioned arms sat in wait for use by bands of deep cover saboteurs. These weapons would be used for similar purposes as in Europe and were intentionally placed near the location of American leaders in the event of war. The tactic was designed to decapitate the United States and NATO, leading to confusion and disorganization on which the sprawling armored divisions stationed in the Fulda Gap and the rest of the Warsaw Pact would capitalize.

The GRU — the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff — took the lead in this operation. Relatively unknown to all but a few intelligence circles in the West, this agency’s power rivaled that of the KGB. To keep the Red Army in check and block any attempts at a coup d’état, the Politburo heavyweights always kept a watchful eye on their officers. They entrusted this task to the Second Chief Directorate of the KGB, which held the portfolio for counterintelligence and internal political control. Agents were placed in military units to watch everything and report on even the slightest hint of mutiny on the part of Soviet officers. However, the GRU sat outside this tight network of surveillance and was fully autonomous of their rivals on Dzerzhinsky Square. They kept their own watch on Soviet elites, managed a web of spy satellites and SIGINT stations around the world, and commanded a force of at least twenty-five thousand Spetsnaz commandos. These special operations units functioned much in the same way as the British Special Air Service or the American Delta Force. At the beginning of a war against NATO, Spetsnaz units imbedded in Western Europe would have activated these weapons caches, moved them to their targets and detonated them, crippling American forces.

In the 1990s, a number of former Soviet intelligence officials from both the KGB and the GRU came forward and revealed that high explosives and small arms were not the only things secreted away behind enemy lines. The defectors revealed the existence of small, man-portable nuclear weapons with yields of one to ten kilotons that could be detonated with only thirty minutes of preparation. “Suitcase nukes,” as they became popularly known, would have been the Soviet trump card in any Cold War conflict. Their explosive power was not nearly enough to obliterate a large metropolitan area like Paris or Brussels, but the devices packed enough punch that they would cause considerable devastation. GRU Spetsnaz operators placed the weapons near key ports and depots in Central Europe and command bunkers in the United Kingdom and France. Minutes after the order was given, NATO’s hierarchy would lay in a smoldering ruin and vast swaths of the North German Plain and the Rhine Valley would be showered in radioactive fallout. Moscow’s strategy would ensure that if communism could not have exclusive dominion over Europe, neither would any power. In World War II, the Soviets fought for years to seize valuable ground and cement their hold on the eastern half of the continent. For the next global confrontation, the Kremlin’s top thinkers sought to advance at a brisker pace.

And it is here that the story has its proper beginning.

In November of 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, not by exploding artillery shells or the overpressure of a thermonuclear warhead, but by the might of individual East Germans striving for the same rights and freedoms enjoyed by their families in the West. Over several whirlwind months, tens of thousands of East Germans poured down through the splintering Warsaw Pact to rejoin their relatives and reap the benefits of a free market society in the Federal German Republic. This created an unstoppable chain of events. The Iron Curtain — miles of razor wire and machine gun turrets constructed to keep the oppressed in rather than American GIs out — was now a redundant relic of a bygone occupation. There was neither a need nor a way to fight it anymore. The Soviet Bloc was coming down and it was only a matter of when rather than if. Cries for reunification came swiftly and soon Berliners stood atop the wall that had kept them apart for generations. The communist dream of a single Germany was realized, but not in the way its followers anticipated.

With the triumph of democracy in Europe, the Soviet Union now struggled to maintain its fragile empire of client states and withdrew its forces from the continent to maintain order at home. This new reality fell hard on many in the military and intelligence circles who recently witnessed defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of zealots dwelling in caves and now came to see their own domain, the Warsaw Pact, crumble before them. Yet few in the West understood the paranoia of Soviet intelligence officers, the lengths to which they went to further the Marxist cause, and their utter obsession over a showdown with the United States. To the GRU, still strong despite the gutting of the KGB and the dissolution of Soviet forces in Germany, a third world war was still, eventually, inevitable.

These officers had the means to ensure when that unavoidable confrontation erupted, Russia would keep the upper hand. Since the 1950s, protocol dictated that no single military branch or intelligence service held complete control over the Soviet Union’s vast nuclear arsenal. During the Cold War, this was accomplished in the field by the Red Army’s possession of mobile ICBM launchers and the KGB’s control of individual nuclear warheads. Yet the GRU’s small, man-portable atomic weapons had no such system of joint-ownership and the highly classified nature of their production, storage and deployment kept them free from oversight of arms reduction treaties. It was simply as if these weapons never existed, and it made them the perfect tool for an illegal operation outside of the Kremlin’s oversight.

On February 25th, 1990 — when most Soviet units were pulling back from the inner German border — a small Spetsnaz unit deployed under the cover of a raging blizzard into the dense overgrowth of Baden-Württemberg’s Black Forest with a mission to conceal what would be the GRU’s insurance policy. The forest’s location, a few kilometers from the French armored brigades poised on the opposite bank of the Rhine, or several hours’ drive on the A5 autobahn to the American military communities in Stuttgart and Heidelberg, provided a wealth of attack options should the GRU’s prophecy come to pass.

A small holiday cottage, one of dozens peppered among the snow-laden fir trees, was covertly purchased through the GRU residency at the Soviet embassy in East Berlin. The Spetsnaz operators arrived as the storm spun into its full fury. They posted sentries around the cottage, covered the windows with sheets of ply, and descended to the basement. A section of the brick wall was chiseled away and they excavated a cavity in the foundation just large enough to fit a watertight container approximately the size of a steamer trunk. Attached to the trunk by a set of wires was an antenna similar to the kind used by submarines to receive transmissions under the Arctic ice shelf, and a battery pack that maintained the integrity of the trunk’s plutonium-239 core and neutron generator. The one-kiloton RA-115 Atomic Demolition Munition was designed by its Soviet engineers to be neglected, and with a dry, temperate climate it could linger for years without maintenance. The Spetsnaz operators laid new bricks in the wall, entombing the trunk inside, and cleared away any trace of their passing.

And the bomb would sit for a quarter century while life above eased on, unsuspecting and ignorant of what slept just out of sight, ready and waiting.

"Timely, gripping, and unbelievably authentic…” Active Measures: Part I is available for purchase on Amazon.

Published by H-Hour Productions, LLC. Copyright © 2016 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.