Richard Murphy fell well short in “sophistication and flair” and also in flat-out competence. When the FBI executed a clandestine search of the Murphys’ New Jersey apartment in 2005, they were quickly able to access Richard’s computer address book, the websites he had visited, and the images he had downloaded. He apparently hadn’t bothered to clear his browser history. In an open book near Murphy’s computer was a page with the notation “alt control e” followed by a string of twenty-seven characters, which turned out to be the password that unlocked a software program that allowed the FBI to access readable text files sent from Directorate S in downloadable images.
The FBI detailed all this in its criminal affidavit, along with a recap of an embarrassing 2004 conversation captured on tape at the Murphys’ residence. Anybody who wishes to read between the lines of the FBI’s clinical recitation will detect some rather aggressive spousal hectoring couched as career advice: “CYNTHIA MURPHY advised her husband that he should improve his information-collection efforts. CYNTHIA MURPHY explained to RICHARD MURPHY that he would not be able to work at the top echelons of certain parts of the United States government—the State Department, for example. CYNTHIA MURPHY suggested that RICHARD MURPHY should therefore approach people who have access to important venues (the White House, for example) to which he could not reasonably expect to himself gain direct personal access.” He could not reasonably expect to himself gain direct personal access. Ouch, Spy-Boy.
Over and above his numerous tactical missteps, Richard Murphy just didn’t seem committed to his mission or his craft. After nearly twenty years in the United States, not much of America had rubbed off on him. “I was always puzzled by the inconsistency between a completely American name and a completely Russian behavior,” said a professor of international affairs who had been Murphy’s faculty adviser at the New School in New York for three years. Professor Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, had no problem spotting Russians, even when they were trying to hide their true identities. Richard Murphy was barely even trying. “He had a thick Russian accent and an incredibly unhappy Russian personality,” she said. “I knew he wasn’t American. I knew it was very odd.” Or as one of Richard Murphy’s Marquette Road neighbors told a reporter a few days after the arrest, as the tumblers were beginning to fall into place, “It was suspicious that he had a Russian accent and an Irish last name. Who does that?…He must have been the worst spy ever.”
The Oklahoma City metropolitan area could be a weird and occasionally exciting place, with or without the civic exertions recently employed to try to vault the region onto the roster of America’s major cities. In 2009, for example, there was the unveiling in Norman of a life-sized bronze depicting a nude Angelina Jolie breast-feeding her twins. The naked-Angelina sculptor had previously been best known for his graphic yet strangely romantic depiction of Britney Spears giving birth on a bearskin rug, on all fours. Also in 2009, the state’s Democratic governor, Brad Henry, proclaimed the Flaming Lips’ song “Do You Realize??” from the album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots to be Oklahoma’s official rock song: “You realize the sun doesn’t go down / It’s just an illusion caused by the world spinning round.” The move was not without its detractors: in the legislative debate over the song’s designation, the Republican lawmaker Mike Reynolds complained that members of the Flaming Lips—proud Oklahomans though they may be—had an unfortunate reputation for using foul language in public. “Their lips ought to be on fire,” Reynolds said.
But for all of the mildly controversial glories of Oklahoma’s homegrown strain of deliberate weirdness, starting round about 2010, things went weird in an altogether different way. There was, for instance, the bump in misdemeanor criminal activity around brand-name fast-food and retail outlets. In March 2010, a twenty-year-old woman, upset and confused about payment procedures at the McDonald’s drive-thru window, and maybe upset and confused about life in general, exited her car, climbed through the service window, and began “knocking milkshakes off the counter,” according to the arrest report. Then, in July, a woman dressed in black, sporting a blond wig, gloves, and with “underwear over her face held in place with yellow paperclips,” according to local media accounts, pried open an unmanned drive-thru window at a second and unrelated McDonald’s and absconded with an unspecified amount of cash. “I’ve seen a wide variety of crime over the last thirty years,” said the local police chief, “but this particular case is one of the strangest, based on her method of operation and weird disguise.”
Just three weeks later, the owner of a Sinclair gas station near the University of Oklahoma took his young grandson for their daily drive past the seven-hundred-pound green fiberglass rendering of Dino the dinosaur that fronted the establishment. And got a rude awakening. “We came around and [Dino’s] head was sawed off,” the chagrined proprietor, Jerry Masters, told reporters, while police dusted the area for fingerprints. Then, too, the 2010 election was like no other in recent Oklahoma history and seemed to portend a very different kind of political future for the state. The slow, decade-long changeover from Democratic control of state government toward complete Republican control took a final hard lurch that November. The state’s Republicans won a thirty-two-to-sixteen advantage in the state senate, and a whopping seventy-to-thirty-one advantage in the state house. The Republican gubernatorial candidate, Mary Fallin, who had wrapped herself in the Tea Party’s “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, cruised to a twenty-point victory over Brad Henry’s lieutenant governor and would-be Democratic successor.
But for all the shake-ups and oddities of 2010, the strangest and most telling one was what entered Sooner lexicon as the “earthquake swarm.”
Earthquakes were not unknown in Oklahoma, but they were extraordinarily rare. In the three decades since the state entered the modern era of seismic activity monitoring, the Oklahoma Geological Survey had recorded a grand total of around forty earthquakes above 3.0 on the Richter scale. A little more than one a year. But in 2010 some seismic switch had apparently flipped. Monitoring devices in Oklahoma recorded more than twenty 3.0-magnitude quakes in the first half of the year alone. Draw a circle with a fifty-mile radius around Oklahoma City, and a very large percentage of the people inside it had felt a temblor or two. “Shook the windows and shook the house,” a woman who had felt six separate tremors in the previous few months told a reporter from local KOTV at Shuff’s Main Street Grill in Jones, just northeast of downtown OKC. “Horses taking off running, and dogs running off the porch. It’s kind of that magnitude, y’know.”
The locals had worked up a number of theories as to the cause of what KOTV calculated as a 10,000 percent jump in the number of felt earthquakes. “A bunch of gophers,” joked one man at Shuff’s. “The only theory that I have,” said his wife, “is that it’s a Biblical statement.” The more widely held suspicion in the community was that the earthquake swarm was a by-product of the enormous increase in hydraulic fracking in the area. Oil and gas drillers were pumping close to fifty million barrels of water deep into the earth’s crust every month in 2010. Most of the toxic water that flowed back up in the production process, drillers injected back into the ground for permanent storage. That had to have consequences, right? It at least was the obvious question. So the KOTV reporter went for an expert take to Austin Holland, the geophysicist/seismologist who was in charge of a small team of Oklahoma Geological Survey technicians monitoring earthquake activity across the state. The reporter put it to Holland directly: Did the data suggest that the enormous spike in earthquakes was tied to the enormous spike in hydraulic fracking? “I just can’t make the connection,” the state seismologist said. “There just doesn’t seem to be a link, and it’s the easy answer. Everyone wants to pin it on the oil activities, but it just doesn’t seem to be there yet.”
Austin Holland was a restrained, not overly demonstrative man, so you wouldn’t be able to tell from his matter-of-fact r
esponses to the growing number of inquiries about the swarm, but the truth was he was kind of excited. Still in his thirties, Holland had just parachuted into the ideal spot for a scientific inquiry into the phenomenon of induced seismic activity, a.k.a. man-made earthquakes. Oklahoma in 2010 was about as close as a geophysicist could get to a controlled experiment, and Holland meant to keep gathering and collating seismic activity data, along with whatever data oil and gas producers were willing to give him about the deep underground disposal of hundreds of millions of gallons of flowback water and wastewater and production water. He was hoping to be able to form some real hypotheses, based on hard evidence, about exactly what effect all that hydraulic fracturing and all that extra underground water might have on nearby fault zones. He was about to start living the geophysicist dream.
Austin Holland had three consuming interests growing up—the outdoors, science, and computing. When he wasn’t in school, or working to save money for college, or working toward his own Eagle Scout badge, he was out backpacking or rock climbing in the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park, which were just a few hours’ drive from his hometown of Idaho Falls. The beauty, and the breadth, and the sheer power of the natural world left him both awestruck and eager to understand it. His parents encouraged his outdoor hobbies, just as they encouraged his keen academic interests. They went to bat for their son at Idaho Falls High School when he needed special permission to take an extra science class. They let him take on extracurricular work as a computer programmer with the school district. They cheered when he built a gas chromatograph that won him the Eastern Idaho science fair. Even arranged for him to travel to Montana Tech for a monthlong mineral education program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. By the time he enrolled in college, eighteen-year-old Austin Holland was confident that his professional future was in the sciences. And he proved himself talented and able enough to snare a series of summer internships and then a full year’s postbaccalaureate fellowship at the seismic monitoring program at the Idaho National Laboratory. Holland’s fellowship included some memorable work concerning the town of Challis, an unprepossessing little burg that happened to fall within a geologic region called the intermountain seismic belt.
Challis had a long and storied history of measurable earthquake activity. A magnitude 7.3 quake had hit near Challis in 1983, and during his Idaho fellowship just a dozen years later Austin Holland could climb right up to a spot where he was able to see and touch the vast scar left behind. “What happens is that when the earthquake ruptures, the mountains go up and the valley goes down,” he explained in a 2017 deposition for a civil suit. “And then that way, you’re actually stretching and extending the crust and creating new earth. In this case it was only, you know, a few feet of horizontal new earth, but the mountains I think went up approximately 14 feet.”
Earthquakes continued to be a constant around Challis, so there was plenty to keep Holland busy at the monitoring station. The budding scientist was captivated. “When I started my undergrad I wanted to be a geological engineer [the sort that scouts the deep earth for the best places for oil companies to drill], and that was partly because my dad said they make more money than geologists,” he would say. “And maybe they still do, and I probably should have chosen to be a geological engineer in that regard. But I fell in love with seismology.”
By the time Holland arrived in Oklahoma in 2010, fifteen years after his seismic epiphany, big and weird things were happening there. Oklahoma was taking what Holland called “a significant departure from [its] historical naturally occurring background seismicity rate,” and the National Science Foundation was installing new seismic monitors at forty locations around the state. People were already talking about the possibility that these new earthquakes were man-made and perhaps caused by the oil and gas industry’s current enthusiasm for fracking. The implication of that theory, of course, was that the earthquakes could be stopped. If mankind could turn them on, couldn’t we turn them off, too? “From the moment I got into Oklahoma, that was one of the questions I was asked to examine,” Holland said. “That was the question everybody wanted answers to.”
From the outside, this looked like an opportunity for Austin Holland to do what he had dreamed of: gather reams of new live data, make deep scientific inquiry, and publish important and maybe groundbreaking findings in the field of triggered seismicity. From the outside, you could say, Holland looked like a man who had a chance to make a name for himself. But he was not the type to get carried away. Austin Holland remained, as always, governed by professional and personal humility, a prisoner to his long training in the scientific method. He was always mindful of what he did not know. Always cautious. Always aware that there was much more than a single variable at play in the fault zones deep beneath his feet. “When you’re a geologist you can’t control your experiments because you can’t see inside the earth,” he explained in his deposition. “We can’t control properties inside the earth.”
So while the running total of 3.0-magnitude-plus earthquakes in Oklahoma climbed near forty in his first year on the job, Holland kept his head down and gathered his scientific string. He eschewed drama and headlines even in the immediate heady wake of a 5.1-magnitude quake that erupted near enough that it shook his office on the University of Oklahoma campus. Nearby residents were less calm. Locals described the experience of that October 13, 2010, quake as a feeling akin to a tractor trailer or a trash truck crashing headlong into their house, or a 747 landing next door. How exactly somebody knows what a 747 landing next door would actually feel like is hard to say, but the use of the image does speak to the frightening novelty of the sensation they experienced. Some said the rumbling lasted for a full and harrowing thirty seconds. “That sucker it rattled my whole house,” said a man who lived within a mile of the epicenter. “It literally shook the whole thing.” The quake had knocked one do-it-yourselfer off his ladder and landed him in the emergency room with a broken ankle. And he had been on the other side of Oklahoma City, a dozen miles away. The tremors had reportedly been felt nearly seven hundred miles from the quake, in Brentwood, Tennessee.
The public service button on the Oklahoma Geological Survey website—“Ask a Seismologist”—lit up like Christmas that day, and the next, and the next, as little aftershocks rippled through the surrounding area. Holland was also fielding press inquiries from all over the country. When the science editor of the website Boing Boing called for comment, Holland was patient, straightforward, and plainspoken. He explained the tectonics of Oklahoma, where “the North American Plate has been pulled apart and where old plates fused together.” He explained the difference between California’s renowned faults and Oklahoma’s, where the rocks are older, smoother around the edges, and stronger: “Here in central U.S., the energy from an earthquake gets radiated much further than in California, because the rock the seismic waves travel through is more solid. It’s just like how sound carries faster and louder through metal, than through wood or Styrofoam.”
He suggested that history proved an even bigger quake was not out of the question. But Oklahoma’s lone—and much overworked—official seismologist was still not willing or able to isolate any particular cause for the recent swarm. What was it now, a 20,000 percent increase over the historic average? “We don’t know for certain what triggers peak years,” Holland said, when the Boing Boing science editor asked if the boom in fracking was the culprit. “The research is still in its infancy. I just started here in January….The jury is still out, I’d say. Until I can prove with good science that it’s the case, my assumption is that this is natural seismicity. Earthquakes have happened naturally here in the past. It doesn’t have to have an outside cause.”
* * *
—
By the time of the Oklahoma quake outbreak in 2010, Aubrey McClendon—the closest thing America had to a public face of the national frack-fest—might have suspected his natural gas revolution was built
on shaky ground. Aubrey was happy to explain, though, that if you looked at it from the proper perspective, everything was peachy. He had weathered the financial storm, and his personal net worth was on the rise again. The company he had founded and continued to lead stood as a behemoth among America’s natural gas suppliers. That year, it ranked number two in average daily domestic production. Only Rex Tillerson’s ExxonMobil (thank you, XTO merger) was loosing more natural gas from the earth. Chesapeake had forty-six thousand wells (87 percent of its product was natural gas) and owned mineral rights on properties in twenty-three different states, from New York and Pennsylvania, to Arkansas and Louisiana and Oklahoma and Texas, to Colorado and Utah and Wyoming. And Aubrey was on another buying spree in the spring of 2010, executing one of the biggest landgrabs in the state of Michigan—figuring to shell out about $400 million for mineral rights on 450,000 acres. When one of his subcontractors there praised McClendon as “the most successful Landman in the world,” Aubrey emailed him back immediately: “That is the nicest title anyone has ever given me.”
The Michigan play was a typically daring McClendon move. Chesapeake’s balance sheets weren’t ideal just then. The selling price of natural gas had fallen to around $4 per million BTUs, well off its 2008 precrash high of nearly $14 per, and there was a bit of a glut in supply. Chesapeake was barely able to break even. But Aubrey was still bullish on natural gas. And he prided himself on being able to locate surprising new veins of financing to keep Chesapeake’s land acquisition and drilling operations humming, even in the most challenging times. Especially in the most challenging times. Just a few days before the 5.1 earthquake hit outside Norman, for example, the government-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation agreed to pay Chesapeake $1.1 billion for a one-third stake in Aubrey’s enormous shale play in south Texas. China further agreed to fork over another $1.1 billion to help pay for Chesapeake’s enormous drilling costs in the region. Aubrey insisted that it was a win-win: the energy-hungry China tapped a new source for fueling its rapidly expanding economy; Chesapeake would be able to speed the pace of its drilling operations in south Texas, which would create more jobs, and ensure “payment of very significant local, state and federal taxes.” Increased production would move the United States of America that much closer to everyone’s favorite important-sounding national-security-ish industry buzz phrase: “energy independence.” Never mind the awkwardness that in this case it was being funded by the Chinese.
Blowout Page 18