Suspected leak from within the Vienna station

The suspected leak from within the Vienna station is the fear that the hijackers learned Ahmed Najjar’s identity through someone with access to the station’s closely held information. It takes shape in two stages: first, a change in the language of messages attributed to Ahmed suggests that his communications have been taken over; then a brief call from Bill Compton’s line to Amman gives the investigators a specific, unsettling lead. The evidence sharpens suspicion, but does not establish who passed information to the hijackers or what the call concerned.

The Messages and the First Doubt

During the crisis, Owen Lassiter proposes that the person sending messages from Ahmed Najjar’s phone may no longer be Ahmed. The station’s assumption that the sender is its agent rests on the use of the agent’s phone, not on independent confirmation of who is using it. Owen’s warning turns that distinction into an immediate operational concern: Ahmed may have been discovered, killed, or forced to surrender his identifying information, after which the hijackers could use his phone.

The messages themselves complicate the question. Each is prefaced by the identifier Aspen3R95, which Leslie MacGovern finds in her papers and reads aloud. That code initially appears to support the identification of the sender as Ahmed. But if earlier messages remained on the phone, an adversary could read the identifier there; the code would then show access to the device, not proof of the writer’s identity. The possibility that Ahmed had been forced to provide his identifier also remains open.

The most telling indication comes from the language of the fourth message. The earlier messages attributed to Ahmed are incomplete and telegraphic, while the later one uses complete sentences, articles, and the more deliberate construction “it is” where Ahmed had used “it’s.” The new message also describes a camera on the aircraft’s undercarriage and assesses the hijackers’ attack plan, including the danger to those aboard. Reading the messages together, the narrator recognizes that the final one has a different author. The grammatical shift does not identify that author, but it changes the meaning of the apparent evidence: Ahmed’s phone is communicating, yet Ahmed may not be.

From Compromise to an Internal Leak

Once the possibility of Ahmed’s capture is raised, the investigation faces an important limit. The station cannot yet know whether Ahmed made a mistake that exposed him; that might only become clear after the crisis, if witnesses survive. Because there is no way to prove that explanation at the time, the narrator sets it aside and considers the remaining possibility: someone told the hijackers about Ahmed.

Ahmed Najjar’s identity appears especially sensitive because, according to his file, he works solely for the Agency and is not named in records outside it. Ernst Pul has reportedly not shared the identity with the Austrians. On that understanding, the information has remained within a small circle in the office: the narrator, Victor Wallinger, Leslie MacGovern, Ernst Pul, Bill Compton, Owen Lassiter, Henry Pelham, and Gene Wilcox, whose data-entry work necessarily gives him access. A leak from Langley is acknowledged as possible and not unprecedented, but it is beyond the narrator’s immediate ability to monitor. The practical inquiry therefore narrows to the possibility that information is reaching the hijackers from inside the Vienna building.

Language offers another clue, but not a conclusion. The hijacker on the phone speaks Russian, and the narrator considers Ilyas Shishani as a possible link. Yet the office has only one fluent Russian speaker: Henry Pelham. This observation gives the suspicion a direction while also showing how uncertain the inference remains. The use of Russian may matter, but it does not by itself demonstrate that Shishani supplied information, that Henry did so, or that the caller’s language identifies the source of the leak.

The Call to Amman

The search for a concrete lead moves from the messages to the office telephone records. The narrator asks Gene Wilcox for the logs, meets his patronizing refusal, and then obtains approval from Sharon, Victor Wallinger’s secretary. Half an hour after beginning this effort, the narrator finds a record that produces an immediate shock: at 9:38 p.m., extension 4952 placed a twenty-seven-second call to country code 962 and city code 6, identifying Jordan and Amman.

The record supplies a date-and-time entry, a duration, and a destination; it does not disclose what was said. Its significance lies in the destination and the office origin, not in any proven connection between the call and the hijackers. The narrator’s reaction is intensified by the speed with which a vague fear has become a searchable fact: the suspected route of information may run through the station itself. The record is described as almost absurdly unsophisticated, a direct call from an office phone rather than some elaborate clandestine method.

The call later becomes a means of confronting Bill Compton. Henry Pelham tells Bill that he personally reviewed the records a week earlier and found a direct call from Bill’s line to a number in Amman, lasting about half a minute at 9:38 in the evening. He uses the apparent carelessness of calling from one’s own office line to press Bill with the possibility that the call matters. The exchange makes the record personal and raises the stakes of the inquiry, but the evidence given does not establish the conversation’s content or prove that Bill informed the hijackers about Ahmed.

What the Suspicion Establishes

The station’s response reveals that the possibility of an internal leak was recognized before anyone openly named it. Bill later recalls that he and Owen discussed the difference between Ahmed’s final message and the preceding ones, and that the staff understood what the change implied but knew better than to say so aloud. Before Bill left that night, Victor Wallinger called him and Owen in to discuss the unresolved question of how the hijackers could have obtained information.

They considered alternatives that might place responsibility elsewhere. Iran was raised as a possibility; the Russian-language call pointed their thoughts toward Ilyas Shishani, but the idea that Russia would assist a Chechen terrorist seemed implausible to them. They also considered London because six British nationals were aboard the aircraft, then rejected that explanation when Owen observed that the British embassy was staying out of the dealings and would not know what to tell the hijackers. Each alternative offered a momentary way to locate the source outside their own office, but none resolved the discrepancy in the messages.

The episode therefore leaves the leak as a live suspicion rather than a solved case. The changed grammar supports the conclusion that someone other than Ahmed sent the final message; the limited circulation of Ahmed’s identity makes an internal source alarming; and the call from Bill’s line to Amman supplies a specific lead that Henry later uses in questioning him. None of those facts alone proves who exposed Ahmed or connects the call’s contents to the hijackers. Their force comes from how they accumulate: a compromised phone, a secret known to few, an unexplained foreign call, and a station whose members had already recognized the danger but hesitated to voice it.