The Spy's Son

by Bryan Denson

  The hard-drive fragments also yielded a secret document about a closed-door briefing concerning Russian spies’ attempts to recruit CIA officers. In addition, analysts found summaries of the U.S. government’s debriefings of Ames, a nearly verbatim copy of a secret report about Chechnya, and a secret report on the embarrassing expulsion of CIA officers caught spying in Paris. They also recovered a lengthy report, in Jim’s own words, of one of his blown polygraphs at Langley. He included a detailed analysis of the questions posed to him about his contacts with a foreign intelligence service, and his insights into the polygraph examiner’s reactions during his testing.

  FBI agents also recovered a 3.5-inch diskette from the minivan, which held a CIA document on what are known as access agents. These agents are private citizens—some working for pay, others volunteering out of patriotism—whose travels and business relationships give them entree to information about foreign governments and companies that interest the CIA. The agency carefully guards the identities of those agents for their safety.

  The diskette also held summaries of three CIA reports (all dated July 18, 1996) that revealed confidential intelligence gathered by agency assets on the Russian economy and banking system; high-frequency radar research; submarine weapons systems designs; and the efforts of a foreign government to obtain Russia’s cruise missile technology. These summaries identified the sources’ code names, positions, and points of access to the information, leaving countless people exposed to Moscow’s reprisals.

  All this information was devastating to U.S. interests across the globe. But the most damning data found on the skeletal remains of Jim’s hard drive were the names, biographies, and assignments of hundreds of CTs, some of whom Jim trained during his two years at The Farm. Some of those trainees weren’t much older than Jeremi.

  The Russians wanted names and data on as many clandestine officers as Jim could muster. This information was precious to SVR officials. The Russians spent countless funds identifying and spying on the CIA’s spies. Knowing the names of the officers they’d go up against gave them a huge advantage. Instead of wasting time and money to identify CIA officers and keeping tabs on whom they met, the SVR would already know their names and could quietly sabotage them.

  Jim’s move from The Farm had taken him away from easy-to-­download files on career trainees. But now, in the heart of CIA headquarters, he would go headhunting in his own office.

  6

  Spy vs. Spy Under Langley’s Roof

  “Prescience cannot be gained from ghosts or gods, cannot be augured through signs, and cannot be proved through conjectures. It must be gained from what is learned by men.”

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  Langley, Virginia, late summer 1996

  John Maguire felt like a captive. Spying on another highly trained case officer put him on a wake-at-dawn, collapse-at-night schedule. In only a few months, he had performed more acts of espionage inside the CIA compound than over the bulk of his career. He had piled up so many fourteen-hour days that he felt guilty about neglecting his wife and daughters, often reaching home just in time to tuck the girls into bed. He was blessed with a wife tolerant of his suddenly-insane work schedule.

  Jahala Handy was accustomed to long hours. She had met Ma­guire during a shift change at The Horse You Came In On Saloon, a bar in Fells Point, on the Baltimore waterfront. She worked as a registered nurse in the Johns Hopkins Hospital trauma center. He worked on a bomb squad–sniper unit at a nearby pier, where the seventy-foot-high “Domino Sugars” sign cast an iconic neon reflection across the Inner Harbor brine. Both were battle-hardened by the nightly carnage on Charm City’s streets, and it’s amazing they met over cold beers, not a corpse. Handy was dating a buddy of Maguire’s, a brother officer, which gave them time to get to know each other without sexual tension getting in the way. Eventually, as Maguire recalls things, they became each other’s wingmen. She was perfect for a cop with a high threshold for mirth and a low tolerance for boredom, and it’s no wonder they fell in love.

  Handy supported Maguire’s interest in joining the CIA. The agency took him on in 1982, and they married the following year. Their roots in a working-class town, and their shared sense of comic fatalism, bound them tighter as Maguire’s employer bounced them around the world in what felt like long, exotic field trips. Maguire and Handy raised two girls, sharing the family secret with them only when they were old enough.

  His elder daughter was eleven when she stumbled onto the truth. The Maguires were living in Amman, Jordan. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and Maguire was heading to a business meeting, although no one in attendance would be wearing Brooks Brothers. Maguire was standing in his bedroom in jeans, putting on a Kevlar vest. There was $100,000 in cash on the bed, along with a Kalashnikov rifle. He was talking with his wife, who was blowing the smoke of a clandestine cigarette out the window. Suddenly Handy began making slashing motions with the flat of her hand across her throat. Maguire looked up to find his older daughter in the doorway, a teddy bear under one arm, eyes wide as saucers. She stared at her dad, then at her mom. Her gaze shifted to the assault rifle and the money, then back to her surprised father.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Are you a bank robber?”

  Maguire had prepared himself for this one. He and his wife had long ago agreed that lying to their kids about what he did for a living could emotionally damage them. They had kept his profession under wraps as long as they could, but now had come the moment of truth.

  “Look, honey,” Maguire told his daughter, “we’ll talk about this tomorrow. I’m not a bank robber. But don’t say anything in school about this. Mommy and I will talk to you tomorrow.”

  She went back to bed, and the Maguires told her the secret the next day.

  Handy enjoyed a broad understanding of her husband’s work without benefit of knowing precisely what he did for the agency. Early on in his CIA career, he had made it clear that he couldn’t share details. But when he was read in earlier that summer in the Nicholson case, he had the good sense to tell his wife a true but unrevealing version of what lay ahead.

  Maguire explained that he would be on a special assignment that would either spring him from his dead-end job in human resources or, if he failed, burn his career to the ground and salt the earth behind it. He said the operation involved a problem inside the agency, sort of like a city cop working an internal affairs case. He told her he’d be gone without explanation, work crazy, unpredictable hours, and wasn’t having an affair. Also, he said, the situation was fluid and offered no clear view of the end zone.

  “It can’t last long,” he told her, “because I’ll be dead if it lasts too long. Just roll with it.”

  She did.

  Maguire woke at 5 o’clock most weekday mornings to make the seventy-eight-mile commute to CIA headquarters from his home in the rolling farmland northeast of Baltimore. He badged in most days before 8 a.m. so he could duck into a basement black room or some other secretive hide to meet with his FBI handlers and plot the next move against Jim. Maguire’s handlers treated him so well it surprised him. They understood the physical toll of a protracted counterspy operation, and the emotional strain of undercover work. They also knew the gut-sick guilt of building a case against one of their own.

  His FBI handlers, top-shelf spy catchers, were excessively supportive. In their world, the best game plan was defense; it was their job to make sure Jim was caught before he could do grave damage to the nation’s security. What they lacked was an insider’s understanding of espionage, which is all about offense. That’s where Maguire came in. He would have to learn Jim’s motivations, think how he thought, and even befriend him. Maguire knew he and the investigators needed prescience to anticipate Jim’s next move.

  The FBI counterintelligence teams at Langley made Maguire an honorary member of the team. Together they would have to call the right countermeasures to make sure Jim d
idn’t flee the country, and that he never met another Russian on their watch. Once Maguire entered his CTC office, he was the FBI’s only eyeballs on Jim. The case was so highly compartmentalized that no one else in the center knew about it.

  Maguire’s primary marching orders, cast in stone by Curran, were to keep an eye on the materials Jim was accessing on his computer, and to make damn sure that if Jim so much as climbed out of his chair to stretch or hit the john, his FBI handlers knew about it. If Jim headed for the door of their branch, Maguire knew to pick up his green phone—a secure line inside the agency—to alert the FBI agents downstairs. A team of technical agents and analysts had set up a command post next door in the CIA’s New Headquarters Building, which overlooked the lot where Jim parked. If he made an unexpected move for his minivan, a slew of FBI agents stood by to tail him.

  The branch that Maguire and Jim supervised, dubbed “Other World Terrorism,” wasn’t created as a ruse to spy on Jim. It was a functioning office that performed real counterterrorism work. This forced Maguire to keep two jobs. He would spy on Jim while helping to supervise seven or eight other employees, including case officers and CTs, a few of them fluent in Arabic. The branch kept tabs on foreign terrorist groups, almost exclusively Sunni extremists who had taken up arms against the West. This played to Maguire’s talents.

  He had spent much of the previous decade cultivating assets from Beirut to Baghdad. Maguire made his bones as a case officer by helping to run covert operations against Nicaragua’s ports to cripple the economy of its Soviet-backed government. Now he schooled Jim in the backgrounds of their dangerous Sunni targets, discovering that his boss was a quick study. But he could also see that Jim viewed his own job in the CTC as little more than an unpleasant layover on his way to another exotic chief-of-station job. Jim seemed resigned to cooling his heels until the next overseas assignment came along, one that would likely make things easier to communicate with his Russian pals.

  Jim held the agency in contempt and often complained to Maguire about senior management. Maguire commiserated about some of the jerks in the Senior Intelligence Service, hoping their mutual resentments would draw them closer. But he sensed Jim was as cutthroat as any of them. Maguire sometimes joked about the special Kevlar worn inside the agency; its protective barrier only covered one’s back from the knives of backstabbing colleagues. It galled Maguire that Jim burnished his image as a minivan-driving, Boy Scout–shuttling, father-of-the-year type. It seemed that Jim, much like a professional actor, had lost himself in the deceit of a role—just another cover in a career full of them.

  Maguire also saw Jim as rootless, with few if any close confidants in the building. Jim had forsworn allegiances to the Mormons, and was now attending Christian worship services. But he maintained friendships with brother officers in what has often been called the CIA’s “Mormon Mafia.” Maguire wondered what Jim’s Latter-day Saints pals might think if they knew he was bird-dogging women with abandon, earning a reputation as quite the pole vaulter. He was smitten with a gorgeous Lebanese subordinate. So much so that Maguire feared his boss would be accused of sexual harassment before they could indict him for espionage. While Jim wasn’t the best-looking boy in the building, he was prettier than a lot of the schlubs in the agency, and generous with his money.

  Jim held Friday evening beer parties in the office that subordinates dubbed “Vespers.” Jim liked to kick back with a few beers, preferring Beck’s and other imports. They drank and shared laughs and told stories. Nobody was supposed to be drinking in the building. But Jim’s branch sat behind a heavy door with a cipher lock, and the agency’s security officers weren’t exactly busting shoelaces to nail spies for blowing off a little steam after a hard week of work.

  Maguire watched Jim work the room.

  One of the skills that spies acquire on the job is elicitation, the art of asking questions and gathering intelligence without targets knowing they are being plied. Maguire seethed as he saw Jim subtly pulling the life stories out of his own employees. It was clear that Jim was taking mental notes, which he could later jot down and sell to the Russians, along with their colleagues’ names, ranks, specialties, skills, dates of birth, previous assignments, and even photographs. Jim’s subordinates trusted Jim with their lives. Maguire could only sit in silence as he watched Jim’s headhunting. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had gone into training each of these young officers, and his duplicitous boss was probably going to eighty-six their careers by exposing them to Russia’s spy network.

  Jim’s Other World Terrorism branch was created to cut fanatical jihadists off at the knees. No one knew it at the time, but the Sunni extremists on whom they were gathering intelligence—most of them from the Salafi and Wahabi sects—would pioneer an Islamic terrorist movement that would later come together under an umbrella organization that called itself al-Qaeda.

  “We were on the front end of the spear,” Maguire recalled, “and we have a spy that’s the boss.” He laughed so hard at the irony that I thought he might choke.

  That year, veteran CIA officer Michael F. Scheuer launched a specialized counterterrorism unit outside the Langley compound to track an emerging but little-known terrorist figure named Osama bin Laden. This was a pivotal moment for the agency—too early to connect the dots between the wealthy Saudi, a series of radical Islamic bombings, and the movement that morphed into al-Qaeda. But Maguire believes coupling Jim’s branch with Scheuer’s that year would have greatly improved the CIA’s odds of crippling bin Laden before al-Qaeda’s suicide pilots could kill 2,977 innocent people on American soil. Instead, key officials at the CIA—including Director of Central Intelligence John M. Deutch—crippled the CTC.

  President Clinton had appointed Deutch as CIA director in the late spring of 1995, but the cabinet-level position wasn’t Deutch’s first choice. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology–trained chemist wanted to be U.S. secretary of defense and took over the CIA somewhat grudgingly. It’s never good when the agency’s number one guy considers the job on the top floor at Langley his second choice, and by all accounts, Deutch never much cared for the place. He was variously described as blunt, brilliant, and a short-tempered “bull-in-a-china-shop bureaucrat.” As a professor at MIT, he had earned the nickname “Shoot-ready-aim,” and Pentagon officials dubbed him the “unguided missile.” Deutch made decisions that threw barriers in front of the CTC’s efforts to identify terrorists who later declared war on the U.S.

  Insiders say Deutch’s greatest mistake was hiring Nora R. Slatkin as executive director of the CIA, the number three spot in the agency. Slatkin was a little blonde from Long Island who caught Deutch’s attention while working as the Pentagon’s chief of acquisitions. Deutch essentially handed the day-to-day operations of a $3 billion, 17,000-employee spy agency to a woman described in news accounts as a data-driven, Diet Coke–­guzzling career bureaucrat with no experience in the intelligence field. Slatkin worked sixty-hour weeks at the $122,688 job, trying to improve morale at an agency still in the dumps over the Ames affair.

  Slatkin and Deutch swiftly instituted a prohibition against the recruitment and payment of foreign assets who violated human rights. These dirty assets, many of whom were extraordinarily helpful to U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the Middle East, were considered politically incorrect because they were criminals and nihilistic thugs. Scrubbing them from the payroll was part of Deutch’s “clean hands policy.”

  Maguire was incensed that Slatkin, whom CIA insiders nicknamed “Tora Tora Nora,” systematically jettisoned some of the best Middle East assets run by his branch, some of whom he knew personally. He explained that these dirty sources—working out of such strategic locales as Lebanon, Syria, and Cyprus—helped the CTC detect, deter, and dismantle Islamic terrorist cells. Jim’s branch had about twenty-five sources on the payroll in various stages of development, almost all of whom were thoroughly vetted. They were great assets, Maguire said, risking their n
ecks for the U.S.

  “They were bad people,” he said. “They were murderers. Terrorists. That was the problem we had with this whole asset scrub thing. There are not a lot of Franciscan monks that work in this organizational structure. If you’re gonna find out about radical Sunni Salafists in Lebanon, you can’t go to the Christian community and get that information.”

  The Clinton administration had deep concerns about putting violent wing-nuts on the payroll to spy on what appeared to be disparate groups of terrorists. The agency downsized its overseas spy operations, and Deutch ordered his minions at headquarters to focus on quality of foreign assets over quantity. This begat what has been called the “asset validation scrub” of 1995 and 1996, which put guys like Jim and Maguire in the business of rating their foreign assets check-box style. Deutch allowed Slatkin to cut all but about 20 percent of the assets working for Jim’s team.

  “That sowed the seeds for 9/11,” Maguire said. “We scrubbed our best cases.”

  Langley, Virginia, late 1996

  McClurg and his FBI technical team crept into Jim’s office one summer night to put another eye on Jim. They planted a pinhole camera above his desk, setting the lens in one of the thousands of tiny holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles. This would give investigators a real-time video feed of their target. McClurg and the technical agents had run countless yards of fiber-optic T3 lines above the ceiling. Now they painstakingly glued down each panel so their clever suspect would have to destroy the ceiling to determine whether he was under surveillance. They made sure to leave no particles or heel prints on Jim’s desk.

  Over the next few months, agents occasionally crept into Jim’s office, dodging shifts of custodians and security staffers, to shoot photos and look for evidence. These were quick sneak and peeks designed to find evidence that Jim was preparing files for the Russians. They skulked through the CTC late at night, avoiding contact with agency employees who could catch them in the act. Their biggest fear was that one of Jim’s CIA buddies would tip him off, and it’d be game over.