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stationed at the front and back of the compound.
    Prosser stepped up his pace as he turned the corner from the alley onto rue Bliss, the main thoroughfare of the Minara district. He noticed immediately that he was the only person on the street except for the ISF machine gunners, the Saudis’ local contract guards, and a solitary youth sitting at a sidewalk café across the street.
    As he passed in front of the café before beginning the long descent to the Corniche, Prosser paid little attention to the handsome young Arab who sat drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. The youth had the trim physique of a runner or a swimmer and the relaxed self-assurance typical of the jeunesse dorée who made up the greater part of the student body at the American University of Beirut. Had Prosser paused long enough to look at him more closely, he probably would have supposed from the youth’s faded blue jeans, pink Lacoste polo shirt, and gold-rimmed Ray-Ban sunglasses that he was an AUB student stopping for coffee on his way to class.
    But behind the newspaper were no books and only a single spiral notebook that was too small to be of much use in taking lecture notes. A few seconds after Prosser passed by, the youth flipped open the notebook and wrote, then pulled from a rear trouser pocket a black-and-white photograph of a tall, sturdily built foreigner dressed in a dark business suit who had bent forward to unlock a car door. Written on the back of the photo was a Ras Beirut address. The address was that of the Hala Building, and the man in the photograph was Conrad Prosser.
     
    * * *
     
    Edwin Pirelli, first secretary in the economic section of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, occupied a small, rear-facing office with a marvelous view of the action on the women’s tennis courts at AUB. The office was barely large enough for its battered oak desk, its late-model, four-drawer Mosler safe, and its ancient red-leather sofa.
    After serving four years as a U.S. Army Ranger in the early 1960s, including eighteen months assigned to a series of hamlets in the Mekong Delta, Ed Pirelli had set two goals for himself: finish college and join the Career Training Program of the Central Intelligence Agency. Within three years of leaving the army, he had achieved both. As a combat veteran, an All-American third baseman, and a newly minted graduate of the University of Michigan with a major in Asian studies, Pirelli possessed a résumé that appealed strongly to Agency recruiters. Nor were they mistaken in their assessment of him, for Ed Pirelli turned out to be a superior intelligence gatherer and a natural recruiter of spies. Through consecutive tours of duty in Delhi, Karachi, Katmandu, Bombay, and Colombo, he had recruited an agent or two every year he had spent in the field, gaining rapid promotion from GS-7 to GS-14. Now, at the age of forty-five, he was the Agency’s chief of station in Beirut.
    That he knew no Arabic had not figured as a major obstacle in assigning Pirelli to a post in the Arab Near East. The important thing was that he was an experienced officer who felt at home in a country torn by civil unrest and knew how to recruit. For his own part, Pirelli harbored no doubts about his ability to run Beirut Station as well as anyone. His ambitions, however, extended well beyond the next promotion. For he had read in more than a few news articles that the newly appointed director of Central Intelligence, reflecting the views of a newly elected Republican president, was a staunch supporter of Israel and its Lebanese Christian allies, the Phalange.
    To Pirelli, this represented a God-given opportunity to be recognized as more than a mere recruiter of spies. From the day his assignment was handed down, he applied himself to the task of anticipating the Reagan administration’s policies toward the Middle East and, where possible, shaping the station’s reporting accordingly. If he succeeded in showing how the Agency could assist Israel with