She had been shot by other special agents—two of them, both men—during a raid to seize a fugitive.
The perp in question, Kenneth Barrett, had robbed an armored car and wounded a cop in Nevada, fleeing across state lines. An informant had placed him at the Silver Creek Apartments in Phoenix, shacked up with a girlfriend, and a Bureau team had rolled out to arrest him on October 5th. When the smoke cleared, Barrett was in handcuffs and Ahrens was dying, shot by two colleagues who claimed they thought she was their target's current squeeze.
Just chalk it up to a mistake—except this time, the blunder had been so egregious and so embarrassing to headquarters that both shooters were fired without the Bureau's usual letters of praise to land them soft jobs as security consultants. There would be no charges for their lethal negligence, of course. In Bureau culture, simply being exiled was enough. Now one of those dismissed was posing as a scapegoat, claiming higher-ups were covering their asses to avoid accusation of botching the raid.
A fat lot of good that did Ahrens, the twenty-seventh agent slain by gunfire on the job, and the first ever killed by "friendly fire."
Erin had felt compelled to make the journey from Manhattan to be present at the funeral, along with seventy-four other agents and Director William Webster himself. Webster had declined comment on the shooting, while Reverend Douglas Beauchamp told mourners at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, "Robin was one of those caring and committed persons who was willing to take that calculated and, what I call altruistic, risk and pay the ultimate price for her commitment, which she did."
From there, they'd followed the hearse and Robin's flag-draped coffin to Acacia Park Cemetery on Pilot Knob Road, where Ahrens was laid to rest. O'Hara had refrained from weeping in the church or later, at graveside, but she'd looked forward to raiding the minibar in her hotel room afterward.
And while she drank her way through half a dozen airplane-sized bottles of liquor, she tried to put the Bureau out of mind, forget about her work in Gotham, tracking spies. Still, when she switched on the TV, the nightly news was summing up results from Operation GREYLORD in Chicago. So far, a federal grand jury had indicted Judge Raymond Sodini and twenty-two other court personnel on various corruption charges, with no end in sight. As to how many would finally serve time…
Whatever happened to them next, they'd get a better deal than Robin Ahrens had in Phoenix, from the Bureau she had pledged her life to serve.
FBI Field Office, Manhattan: November 22, 1985
Six days until Thanksgiving, and while most media outlets were commemorating the twenty-second anniversary of JFK's death in Dallas, Agent Stephen Barnes was busy reviewing America's "Year of the Spy."
In fact, he knew from Bureau files, more spies had been locked up in 1984 than in the present year so far, but with the sole exception of traitorous G-man Richard Miller in Los Angeles, the other cases hadn't caused much of a stir. Today, the media was yammering ad nauseam about nine cloak-and-dagger rings vying for headlines and airtime.
Two cases had broken in May. First up was John Anthony Walker, a thirty-year veteran of U.S. Navy submarines and onetime Ku Klux Klan member who'd started spying for Moscow in 1968, banking an average $1,000 monthly for services rendered. Accomplices included walker's son Michael, also a navy vet, and senior chief petty officer Jerry Whitworth. The Bureau's Boston field office initially dismissed warnings from Walker's alcoholic ex-wife, branding her a bitter shrew, then belatedly polygraphed her and one of the couple's daughters, scrambling to play catch-up after months of negligence. In custody, John Walker turned state's evidence against Whitworth, to rate a lighter sentence for his son. Trials resulted in a life sentence for John, twenty-five years for Michael, and a whopping 365 years for Whitworth, garnished with a $410,000 fire.
May's second catch was Richard Kelly Smyth, a California physicist whose Milco International Incorporated was a major government contractor, supplying aerospace guidance technology to NASA and NATO. Somewhere along the line, he'd hooked up with Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan, a billionaire born in Israel, illegally shipping 810 krytrons—cold-cathode gas-filled tubes used as high-speed switches triggering nuclear weapons—to Tel Aviv through the Heli Trading Company. U.S. Customs had dropped the net on Smyth, part of their "Operation Exodus" crackdown on high-tech smuggling, but Smyth had posted bail and fled with his wife to a Spanish hideout as yet undisclosed.
Next up, in July, came Sharon Scranage, employed for nine years as a CIA clerk-stenographer. In 1983 she met Michael Soussoudis, a Ghanaian citizen nine years her senior, raised in West Germany and in New York, enamored Western women, who'd divorced his wife to become a playboy. He was also a spy for Ghana's Ministry of National Security, using persuasive pillow talk to turn Scranage, milking her for what prosecutors called "sensitive documents and the names of virtually everyone working for the CIA in Ghana." Before they were busted, Ghanaian police charged eight Agency spooks with treason, sentencing all to long prison terms. Scranage pled guilty and drew a five-year sentence reduced to two years on appeal. Soussoudis got twenty-five years but then was sent home in exchange for the eight CIA agents jailed over there.
September had exposed another mole inside the CIA. Edward Lee Howard was a former Boy Scout, altar boy, Peace Corps volunteer who'd done time in Colombia, and USAID loan officer in Peru. He'd joined the CIA with wife Mary in 1981, but two years later, on the eve of their posting to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, a routine polygraph exam caught Ed lying about prior drug use and petty theft, resulting in summary dismissal. Pissed off, he'd started drunk-dialing the Moscow embassy, naming Agency employees on a line he knew the Russians monitored. In '84 he'd started selling classified information to KGB agents in Austria, then dropped out of sight in New Mexico when defecting KGB Deputy Chief Vitaly Yurchenko blew Howard's cover. Soon afterward, he'd flown to Moscow, where the Kremlin granted him asylum, an apartment, and a new identity. Meanwhile, in November, alleged turncoat Yurchenko flew back to Moscow, leaving Bureau headquarters and Langley with egg on their collective faces, wondering if everything he'd told them was a lie.
November also exposed three more spies. The first was Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Texas-born Jew whose father later taught microbiology at Indiana's University of Notre Dame. Seventy family members had died in the Holocaust, Jonathan telling fables that his dad worked for the CIA and that Israel's Mossad had paid his tuition at Stanford. He'd tried graduate school at Tufts University in Massachusetts but quit in 1979 to become a U.S. Naval Intelligence officer. Promoted in 1984, he began feeding Mossad satellite imagery and classified CIA files, compromising his alleged "racial obligation" to Israel by accepting cash, jewelry, and a honeymoon excursion on the Orient Express with first bride Anne, his willing accomplice. Arrested by the FBI on November 18th, Pollard confessed selling Israel enough secret material to fill a trunk of some 360 cubic feet. G-men added charges against Anne Pollard when one of her neighbors, a naval officer, admitted storing a seventy-pound suitcase for her, filled with stolen documents. Trial was pending for both Pollards, with Jonathan expected to plead guilty.
Two days after Jon Pollard confessed, the FBI bagged Ronald William Pelton, who claimed a photographic memory and spoke fluent Russian, peddling those talents to the National Security Agency, hired as a communications analyst in 1966. Tiring of the job by 1980, he was also $65,000 in debt, a dilemma he sought to resolve by visiting the Soviet Embassy in Washington and volunteering to spy for Moscow. One of several projects he revealed was "Operation Ivy Bells," a plan to monitor Russia's underwater communication cables. The KGB paid him $40,000 but it wasn't enough. Pelton filed bankruptcy and quit the NSA in 1984, still offering to sell more information as he slipped into retirement. Suspicion arose as with Ed Howard in July, when faux defector Vitaly Yurchenko whispered Pelton's name to the CIA. Pelton pled not guilty and his trial was set for March.
November's last spy was Larry Wu-tai Chin, a Beijing native born in 1922, who'd entered U.S. service as an army transla
tor in the Korean War, then did the same job for the State Department at its Shanghai consulate, and finally for the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service. Through it all, he'd been a spy for China's Ministry of State Security, splitting his dual incomes between compulsive gambling and tenement acquisitions that made him a Baltimore slumlord. In 1980 Langley gave him a medal for "long and distinguished service." Five years later, they saw him jailed for espionage, caged in Virginia pending trial.
Finally came Randy Miles Jeffries, a messenger for the Acme Reporting Company, hired to shuttle sensitive files around Washington. The investigation began on December 14th, when watchers saw him leaving the Soviet military attaché's office. Six days later, a G-man posing as KGB agent "Vlad" met Jeffries at a motel, offering $5,000 for three documents, including minutes of a House Armed Services Committee's hearings on top secret military communications programs. Arrested when he took the bait, Jeffries still might wriggle off the hook, it seemed. On Christmas Eve, Federal Magistrate Jean Dwyer called the arresting agent's report "as thin an affidavit as it has been my misfortune to see in many years." Jeffries had delivered nothing to the feds, claiming he kept the documents "at another location." From jail, he said he'd only planned to scam "Vlad" out of cash to send Jeffries on a vacation with his wife. That was another matter for the courts in 1986, assuming that the charges weren't thrown out.
Still, however they ended up, the cases had created further doubt regarding FBI procedures for identifying and arresting foreign agents. Every bit of mud that stuck to Bureau headquarters helped Barnes inch toward his goal of bringing down the overall system.
And while he worked at that, he kept one eye on Mother Russia and her various upheavals. Konstantin Chernenko had finally died on March 10th, succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev, best known to "free world" TV viewers for the blotchy birthmark on his balding pate and for his talk of bettering relations with the West through perestroika ("restructuring" of Soviet society) and glasnost (diplomatic "openness" or "transparency"). Ronald Reagan met with Gorbachev in Geneva, the week before Thanksgiving, and they'd cautiously agreed to hold more summits soon.
But nothing stanched the bleeding wound that was Afghanistan. It dominated nightly news broadcasts, tracking Russian offensives in Panjshir Province, where the so-called Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces—lately increased to 108,800 soldiers—divided its time between hunting mujahideen and staging "secret" raids into Iran. So far, 1985 had been the war's worst year, with 35,000 civilians killed, native guerrillas welcoming support from the U.S. and the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and now from the People's Republic of China. In May, rival factions of the Seven Party Mujahideen Alliance agreed to join forces against Red invaders, bombarding Kabul with rockets and, on September 4th, shooting down a domestic Bakhtar Airlines Antonov An-26 on takeoff from Kandahar International Airport, killing all fifty-two persons aboard.
Gorbachev clearly wanted out of Afghanistan, but the U.S. wasn't making it easy. In October the CIA flew exiled Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to Washington, where he'd refused to see President Reagan but deigned to meet with Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghani native and State Department spokesman serving Reagan as a senior advisor on his war-torn homeland. Subsequently, mujahideen commander Mohammad Yunus Khalis visited the White House, suggesting that the Reagans convert to Islam. Staunch "Christians" that they were, both declined.
Where would it end? Barnes had no clue and didn't care, but anything that harmed American prestige abroad could only help him in his lifelong quest to crack the Bureau he despised from the inside.
Bogotá: November 26, 1985
The last place Hardy Gantt had planned to spend Thanksgiving was Colombia, surrounded by a raging cocaine war.
It wasn't as if Langley had run short of flashpoints in Latin America, compelled to look for trouble when it didn't come knocking at home. Wherever Hardy put his finger on a map, from the Rio Grande down to the southern tip of Argentina, there was ample mayhem to keep every U.S. spy busy for years on end.
Start off in Mexico, where DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was kidnapped and tortured to death in February. Prime suspects included drug lord Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo; Dr. Humberto Álvarez Machaín, who'd kept Kiki awake for thirty hours with adrenaline injections; Manuel Ibarra Herrera, past director of Mexico's Federal Judicial Police; Miguel Aldana Ibarra, former director of Interpol in Mexico; and Rubén Zuno Arce, brother-in-law of ex-President Luis Echeverría. Unknown as yet to DEA headquarters, CIA agents had helped divert them from their search for Camarena while he was alive, fearing Kiki might reveal U.S. ties to Honduran narcotrafficante Juan Matta-Ballesteros, who spent $186,000 yearly to provide Nicaraguan Contras with "humanitarian supplies."
Nicaragua still remained at war, as did El Salvador. This year, loose-lipped Contra leader Edén Pastora complained of DEA harassment in contravention of ongoing aid from the White House, Costa Rica's Pubic Security Ministry, and anti-Castro Cuban exiles on loan from Langley, whose Brigade 2506 had famously been captured at the Bay of Pigs in 1961.
Farther south, America was still supporting Operation Condor's quasi-genocidal efforts to eradicate suspected communists from Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile and Argentina. Citizens of Uruguay had caught a break of sorts after massive inflation and riotous protests last year, forcing President Gregorio Alvarez to resign in February and ending the nation's twelve-year dictatorship.
And then, there was Colombia, home of rival drug cartels based in Medellín and Cali. At the moment, Pablo Escobar and company from Medellín were edging out their competition, earning a roughly estimated $60 million per day. That kind of money on the table meant pervasive government corruption from Bogotá out to the hinterlands, despite erratic efforts to cooperate with DEA investigations. And how well could those succeed, when they were being undercut by Langley and the Reagan State Department, both complicit in the drug trade while it financed their illegal war in Nicaragua?
Even so, Colombia had signed an extradition treaty with America, permitting narcotraffickers to face trial and imprisonment stateside, where they had less influence over judges and prison wardens. Dubbing themselves "The Extraditables" native drug lords declared, "We prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States." Escobar declared war on his enemies in government, beginning with July's public assassination of Superior Judge Tulio Castro, who had recently indicted Pablo.
But the worst still lay in store. On November 6th, M-19 nationalist guerrillas hired by Escobar stormed Bogotá's Palace of Justice, seeking to destroy government files collected on the Medellín Cartel. Before the siege ended on November 7th, at least 181 persons died: 12 of Colombia's 35 Supreme Court justices, 36 government troops and other employees, all 35 M-19 gunmen, and 98 civilians (with another 7 reported missing). The raiders burned some 6,000 documents but were overrun before staging their intended mock trial of President Belisario Betancur.
Trapped as he was between the proverbial rock and a hard place, Gantt had been distracted in March by news from Beirut, where a truck bomb killed eighty-three persons and wounded another 200. Islamic militants blamed the CIA, calling it a botched attempt to kill militant Hezbollah cleric Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, and they could be right. More telling from a PR standpoint was a sign that had appeared amidst the wreckage, reading "Made in the U.S.A."
Hardy didn't care who'd set the bomb or why. Its blast recalled grim memories of his father' death in the U.S. Embassy bombing four years earlier, immediately followed by his uncle's suicide in Washington. If Langley had belatedly attempted to redress that crime, Gantt knew he should be glad, but all he had to show for it was yet another grand snafu.
Sacramento, California: December 12, 1985
Agent Wyman Gantt was tired of pundits talking about America's "Year of the Spy." To him, 1985 had been a thunderous Year of the Bomb.
After nearly three years of inaction, the Unabomber had resurfaced in May at UC Berkeley. Graduate student and U.S. Ai
r Force captain John Hauser had picked up a package in the school's computer lab and triggered a homemade bomb inside it, suffering loss of four fingers from his right hand, severance of an artery in the same arm, and partial loss of vision in one eye.
A month later, employees reported a suspicious package at the Boeing Company's office in Auburn, Washington, summoning bomb squad officers who'd defused the device with no injuries.
Cut to November in Ann Arbor, when research assistant Nick Suino opened a parcel at the home of psychology professor James McConnell. Suino suffered shrapnel wounds and burns, while McConnell got off "easy" with temporary hearing loss.
Finally, just yesterday, the bomber's eleventh device had claimed the first fatality. Hugh Scrutton, owner of RenTech Computer Rentals in Sacramento's Century Plaza, tried to remove an apparent scrap of lumber from his shop's parking lot. The resultant explosion killed him instantly, riddling Scrutton with nails and wooden splinters. Net result: a $25,000 reward for the bomber's capture.
But whoever he or she might be, the Unabomber wasn't operating in a vacuum. Both the United Freedom Front and the May 19th Communist Order—composed of former Weathermen and Black Liberation Army guerrillas, alternately called the Armed Resistance Unit, Red Guerilla Coalition, Resistance Conspiracy and Revolutionary Fighting Force—were still hell-bent on punishing "aggressive" America with terrorist tactics, unaware that they were running out of time.
The year's first and last revolutionary bombing occurred on February 23rd, with a blast at Gotham headquarters of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, a union that defended officers charged with brutality and corruption. M19CO members Timothy Blunk and Susan Rosenberg had been in custody since November 1984, arrested in New Jersey for their roles in the 1981 Brink's robbery. On May 11th, G-men busted members Marilyn Buck and Linda Sue Evans in Dobb's Ferry, New York, then bagged Linda Whitehorn in Baltimore the same day, at an apartment rented by Buck and Evans. Twelve days later, the Bureau dragnet snared Alan Berkman and Elizabeth Ann Duke outside Philadelphia, but the pair posted bail and vanished. Agents were still searching high and low for fugitive Donna Jean Borup, believed to be in hiding with Duke.
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