Central Intelligence Agency

The Central Intelligence Agency is invoked in an interview between Oscar Fate and Khalil, a member of the Mohammedan Brotherhood, as part of Khalil’s speculative account of the September 11 attacks. The novel supplies no evidence that the agency organized or concealed the attacks; instead, its name enters a conversation shaped by Khalil’s conspiratorial reasoning and Fate’s questions, making the agency a focal point for competing claims about secrecy and power.

The interview and its setting

Fate meets Khalil and other Brotherhood members after agreeing to see them. In a basement near Baychester, Khalil speaks about holy war as a language for people who have been silenced. Their exchange moves from his claims about Jews and the Ku Klux Klan to Hollywood, bin Laden, and the attacks on the Twin Towers. The institutional setting matters: the agency is not introduced through an official statement or documentary evidence, but through a private conversation that Fate is conducting as a reporter.

The allegation

Fate asks whether Khalil believes Mohamed Atta was an undercover agent for the Central Intelligence Agency or the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Khalil does not confirm that formulation. Instead, he challenges the assumed account of Atta’s death, proposing that Atta may have died under torture or been killed and that his remains were destroyed and concealed. These are Khalil’s assertions, not facts independently verified by the narrative.

Khalil extends his suspicion to the identities of the people who flew the planes, suggesting they could have been anonymous inmates or other people recruited and manipulated for a suicide mission. His account turns disappearance into evidence of a hidden operation: he points to the many people who disappear in the United States without attracting searches, then speculates about concealed bodies and substituted perpetrators. The agency’s name thus belongs to an argument about what the public can know, not to a solved mystery.

Narrative significance

The exchange leaves the boundary between questioning and accusation visible. Fate presses Khalil for specifics, while Khalil answers with increasingly elaborate claims; the narrative records the claims as part of the interview rather than endorsing them. The Central Intelligence Agency functions here as a symbol within Khalil’s account of covert authority, but the scene does not establish its involvement in the events he describes.

The episode also connects political suspicion to the novel’s recurring concern with people who vanish and with the difficulty of making violence publicly legible. Khalil’s speculation about Atta and unidentified perpetrators offers no reliable resolution. Instead, it shows how an unanswered question can become the foundation for a theory, and how the language of hidden institutions can lend that theory an appearance of explanation.