The Portal

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They say the most critical battles of espionage are won through attention to detail. David Parsons didn’t know who they were, but he’d learned the hard way they were right. In a subsequent debrief of the evening’s events, he would confess to a number of sins, but one in particular proved to be the most egregious. He had violated one of the agency’s most fundamental rules when working in the field: never, never, drink more alcohol than your target.

And Parsons hadn’t just broken that simple maxim, he’d trampled it, spit on it, then beat it with a baseball bat. And when he had, he’d immediately ceded control to one Wu Mei-ling, the woman who was supposed to have been putty in his hands.

The disastrous night began auspiciously at a four-star Indian restaurant in central Taipei. Mei arrived promptly at 7:00 p.m. and was unabashedly ecstatic about the choice. What she may not have realized was that the decision to dine in that particular establishment hadn’t been the simple whim of her date. As with all decisions made by the CIA, the choice of restaurant had only been determined after a long and thorough examination of her personal file in Langley, Virginia. Mei’s social media posts betrayed a strong penchant for the cuisine of northern India, and Parson’s handlers also hoped spicy food might lead to a greater intake of alcohol.

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