In a chrome-and-plastic lounge of Orly international airport, Colonel Dastgerdi of the Syrian army waited. The casual sports clothes he wore had been purchased in a Madrid men's shop. His lightweight headphones lulled him with a Spanish pop ballad. Surreptitiously he watched the entrances, studying the face of every passenger who emerged from the terminal.

Two days earlier he had flown from Managua to Madrid. After a few hours' delay, he continued to Paris, and there spent a night in a luxurious hotel, enjoying the French cuisine and an expensive Vietnamese prostitute. Recalling the pleasures of that evening, he consulted his wristwatch. In a few minutes he would be departing on another long flight. Destination: Damascus.

A man approached, also wearing the lightweight headphones of a portable cassette player. His nondescript Semitic features and cheap clothing — a gray sport coat and gray slacks — made him appear like a poor, grubby, foreign laborer, one of thousands in Europe. The portable cassette player enhanced the image of the hardworking Arab returning home to the distant East with his savings and a few luxuries after a year's work in the West. Dastgerdi looked elsewhere as the man crossed the lounge and sat beside him.

In Arabic the man asked, "What are you listening to?"

Dastgerdi pulled the tape player from his coat pocket and ejected the cassette. "See?"

The man took the cassette, looked at the label. "I don't read Spanish." Passing it back, he took another from his pocket. "You might like this. Play it when you are home."

It was pocketed. Though the case bore the label of a Swedish singing group, the tape carried digital information that could be decoded only by an American desktop computer, like the one in Dastgerdi's Damascus office.

A United Nations diplomat had purchased several of the small computers from an ordinary electronics shop in New York City.