There was another reason for going for the Air Force at that point. This was 1966 and Vietnam was escalating. I wasn’t terribly political, generally considering myself a Kennedy Democrat because of my father, who was an official of the Long Island printers’ union. But the notion of having my ass shot off in support of a cause I under stood only vaguely wasn’t all that appealing. I’d remem bered an Air Force mechanic once telling me that they were the only service in which the officers—the pilots—went into combat while the enlisted men stayed back to support them. Having no inten tion of becoming a pilot, that sounded okay to me.
I was sent to Amarillo, Texas, for basic training. Our flight (what an Air Force training class is called) of fifty was about evenly divided between New Yorkers like myself and southern boys from Louisiana. The drill instructor was always on the northerners’ asses, and most of the time I thought it was justified. I tended to hang around with the southern ers, whom I found more likable and far less obnoxious than my fellow New Yorkers.
For a lot of young men, basic training is a stressful experience. With all the discipline I’d experienced from coaches in team contact sports, and as much of a jerk-off as I’d acknowledged to myself I’d been the last several years, I found the DI’s rap almost a joke. I could see through all his head trips and psych jobs, and I was already in good physical condition, so basic training was kind of a snap for me. I qualified quickly as an expert marksman on the M16, which was probably a carryover from the aim I’d developed as a high school pitcher. Up until the Air Force, the only riflery experience I’d had was shooting out streetlamps with a BB gun as a young teen.
During basic training I was developing another sort of badass reputation. Pumped up from lifting weights and with my head shaved close, I became known as "the Russian Bear." A guy in another flight had a similar reputation, and someone got the bright idea that it would be good for base morale if we boxed each other.
The bout was a big event on base. We were very evenly matched, and each of us refused to give an inch. We ended up beating the holy hell out of each other, and I got my nose broken for the third time (the first two having come during high school football).
For whatever it was worth, I ended up third out of the fifty in my flight. After basic training, I was given a battery of tests and told I was well qualified for radio-intercept school. But radio-intercept school was filled and I didn’t feel like waiting around until the next class began, so they made me a clerk typist—even though I couldn’t type. There was an opening in Personnel at Cannon Air Force Base, about a hundred miles away outside of Clovis, New Mexico.
So that’s where I ended up, spending all day long pecking out DD214s—mili tary discharge papers—with two fingers, working for this idiot sergeant and saying to myself, I have to get out of here.
Again, here’s where my luck comes in. Right next door to Personnel was Special Services. When I say this, most people think of Special Forces, like the Green Berets. But this was Special Services, specifically, Special Services—Athletics. With my background, that seemed an excellent way to defend my country in its time of need.
I start snooping around, listening at the door, and I hear one of the guys in there saying, "This program’s going to hell. We just don’t have the right guy."
I’m thinking to myself, this is it! So I walk around, knock on the door, and say, "Hello, I’m John Douglas, let me tell you a little about my background."
As I talk, I’m looking at them for reactions and "profiling" the kind of guy they want. And I know I’m clicking, because they keep looking at each other like, "This is a miracle! He’s exactly what we want!" So they get me transferred out of Personnel, and from that day forward, I never had to wear a uniform, they paid me extra money as an enlisted man for running all the athletic programs, I became eligible for Operation Bootstrap, where the govern ment paid 75 percent of my educa tion costs to go to school at nights and on weekends—which I did, at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales, twenty-five miles away. Since I had to overcome my D average from college, I had to get all A’s to stay in the program. But for the first time, I felt as if I had some focus.
I did such a good job of representing the Air Force in such rigorous sports as tennis, soccer, and badminton that eventu ally they put me in charge of the base golf course and pro shop, even though I’d never played a hole in my life. But I did look great running all the tournaments in my Arnold Palmer sweaters.
One day the base commander comes in and he wants to know what compression ball he should use for this particular tournament. I had no idea what he was talking about, and like my ninth-grade book report almost ten years before, I got found out.
"How in hell did you end up running this thing?" he wanted to know. I was immediately taken off golf and moved into women’s lapidary, which sounded exciting until I found out it meant stonework. I was also put in charge of women’s ceramics and the officers’ club pool. I’m thinking, these officers are flying over Vietnam getting their asses shot and I’m here getting chairs and towels for their flirtatious wives and teach ing their kids how to swim and they’re paying me extra for this while I get my college degree?
My other responsibility seemed to hearken back to my bouncer days. The pool was next to the officers’ bar, which was often full of young pilots training with the Tactical Air Command. More than once I had to pull wild, drunken pilots off of each other or off of me.
About two years into my Air Force hitch, while I was pursuing my undergraduate degree, I found out about a local association that helped handicapped children. They needed help with their recreational programs, so I volunteered. Once a week, accompanied by a couple of civilian staffers, I took about fifteen children roller-skating or to play miniature golf or bowling or to some type of sports situation where the kids could develop their individual skills and abilities.
Most of the youngsters faced serious challenges such as blindness or Down’s syndrome or severe motor-control problems. It was tiring work, for example, skating around and around a rink with a child in each arm, trying to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves, but I absolutely loved it. In fact, I’ve had few other experiences in life I’ve enjoyed as much.
When I pulled up in my car at their school each week, the kids would all run out to greet me, crowd around the car, and then I’d get out and we’d all hug. At the end of each weekly session, they were all as sad to see me leave as I was to have to go. I felt I was getting so much out of it, so much love and companionship at a time in my life when I wasn’t really getting it from any other sources, that I started coming in in the evenings to read stories to them.
These children were such a contrast to the healthy, so-called normal kids I worked with on the base who were used to being the centers of attention and getting everything they wanted from their parents. My "special" children were so much more appreciative of anything that was done for them and, in spite of their handicaps, were always so friendly and eager for adventure.
Unbeknownst to me, I was being observed much of the time I spent with the children. It must say something about my powers of observation that I never found out! At any rate, my "performance" was being evaluated by members of the Eastern New Mexico University psychology department, who then offered me a four-year scholarship in special education.
Though I had been thinking about industrial psychology, I loved the kids and thought this might be a good choice. In fact, I could stay in the Air Force and become an officer with this as a career. I submitted the university’s offer to the base’s civilian-run personnel board, but after consideration, they decided the Air Force didn’t need anyone with a degree in special education. I thought this was rather strange because of all the dependents on base, but that was their decision. So I gave up my thoughts of going into special ed as a career, but continued the volunteer work I loved so much.
Christmas of 1969, I was going home to see my family. I had to drive the hundred miles back to Amarillo to catch the plane to
New York, and my Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t in such great shape for the trip. So my best friend in the Air Force, Robert LaFond, swaps me his Karmann Ghia for the trip. I didn’t want to miss the Special Services Christmas party, but that was the only way I could get to Amarillo in time for the flight.
When I got off the plane at La Guardia, my parents met me. They looked grim, almost shell-shocked, and I couldn’t figure out why. After all, I was turning my life around and finally giving them reason not to be disappointed in me.
What had happened was, they’d received a report of an unidenti fied driver killed near the base in a VW that matched the de scription of mine. Until they saw me get off the plane, they didn’t know if I was alive or dead.
It turned out that Robert LaFond, like a lot of other guys, had gotten drunk and passed out at the Christmas party. People who were there told me that some of the officers and noncoms had carried him out to my car, put him in with the key in the ignition, and when he came to, he tried to drive off the base. It was snowing and freezing out; he hit a station wagon head-on with a military mother and her children inside. Thank God, they weren’t hurt, but in my flimsy car, Robert went into the steering wheel, through the windshield, and was killed.
This haunted me. We were very close and I was plagued by the thought that this might not have happened if he hadn’t lent me the good car. When I got back to base, I had to claim his personal effects, box up all his possessions, and ship them off to his family. I kept going back to look at my wrecked car, I kept having dreams about Robert and the crash. I was with him the day he’d bought a Christmas present for his parents in Pensacola, Florida, a gift that arrived in the mail the same day Air Force officers came to the house to tell them their son had died.
But I wasn’t only grief-stricken, I was also angry as hell. Like the investigator I later became, I kept asking around until I’d narrowed it down to the two men who had put Robert in the car. I found them in their office, grabbed them, and put them up against the wall. I started hammering on them, one by one. I had to be pulled off them. I was so mad, I didn’t care if I got court-martialed. As far as I was con cerned, they had killed my best friend.
A court-martial would have been a messy affair, since they would have had to deal with my formal accusation against the two men. Also, by this time, American involvement in Vietnam was beginning to wind down, and they were offering early outs to enlisted men with only a few months to go. So to smooth things out as best they could, the personnel people discharged me several months early.
While I was still in the service, I’d finished my undergraduate degree and begun a master’s in industrial psychology. Now I was living on the GI Bill in a $7-a-week, windowless, basement apartment in Clovis, fighting the legions of three-inch waterbugs that went into attack formation every time I came in and switched on the lights. Not having access to the base facilities anymore, I joined a cheap, run-down health club whose atmosphere and decor roughly matched that of my apartment.
During the fall of 1970, I met a guy at the club named Frank Haines, who turned out to be an FBI agent. He ran a one-man resident agency in Clovis. We got friendly while working out together. It turned out he had heard about me through the retired base commander and started trying to interest me in applying to the Bureau. Frankly, I’d never given a single serious thought to law enforcement. I was planning a career in industrial psychology once I finished my degree. Working for a large company, dealing with such issues as personnel matters, employee assis tance, and stress management, seemed to offer a solid, pre dictable future. The only direct contact I’d had with the FBI up until then was one time back in Montana when a trunk I’d shipped home had been stolen. One of the local field agents interviewed me, thinking I might have set up the crime to collect on the insurance. But nothing came of it, and if that was the kind of cases the FBI handled, there didn’t seem to me to be much to the job.
But Frank was persistent in thinking I would make a good special agent and kept encouraging me. He invited me to his house for dinner several times, introduced me to his wife and son, showed me both his gun and his paycheck stub, neither of which I could match. I had to admit, next to my shabby lifestyle, Frank was living like a king. So I decided to take a crack at it.
Frank stayed in New Mexico, and years later, our paths would cross when I came out to testify in the trial for a homicide he’d worked in which a woman was brutally killed and her body burned to avoid detection. But in the fall of 1970, this kind of action was far from my mind.
Frank sent my application to the field office in Albuquerque. They gave me the standard law test for nonlawyers. Despite my physical conditioning and muscular build, my 220 pounds was 25 over the FBI limit for my six-foot-two-inch height. The only one in the Bureau who could exceed the weight standards was the legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, himself. I spent two weeks on nothing but Knox gelatin and hard-boiled eggs to get down to the weight. It also took three haircuts before I was deemed presentable for an ID photo.
But finally, in November, I was offered a probationary appointment, at an initial salary of $10,869. Finally, I was getting out of my depressing, windowless basement room. I wonder what I would have thought at the time had I known I’d be spending a major part of my Bureau career in another windowless basement room, pursuing far more depressing stories.
Chapter 3
Betting on Raindrops
Many apply, few are chosen.
That was the message continually drummed into us as new recruits. Nearly everyone interested in a career in law enforcement aspired to become a special agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, but only the very best could hope to have that opportunity. A long, proud heritage went all the way back to 1924 when an obscure government lawyer named John Edgar Hoover took over a corrupt, underfunded, and badly managed agency. And the same Mr. Hoover—by the time I joined, seventy-five years of age—still presided over the revered organization it had become, ruling as always with a square jaw and an iron fist. So we’d better not let the Bureau down.
A telegram from the director instructed me to report to Room 625 in the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington at 9 a.m. on December 14, 1970, to begin the fourteen weeks of training that would transform me from an ordinary citizen into a special agent of the FBI. Before this I went home to Long Island, where my dad was so proud, he flew the American flag in front of the house. With what I’d been doing the last several years, I didn’t have any dress-up civilian clothes, so my dad bought me three "regulation" dark suits—a blue, a black, and a brown—white shirts, and two pairs of wing tips, one black and one brown. Then he drove me down to Washing ton to make sure I’d be on time for my first day of work.
It didn’t take long to become inculcated with FBI ritual and lore. The special agent leading our induction ceremony told us to take out our gold badges and stare at them as we recited the oath of office. We all spoke in unison, staring at the blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice while solemnly swearing to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. "Bring it closer! Closer!" the special agent ordered, until we were all staring at these badges cross-eyed.
My new-agent class was made up solely of white men. In 1970, there were few black FBI agents and no women. That wouldn’t really open up until after Hoover’s long tenure, and even from beyond the grave he continued to exert a ghostly and powerful influence. Most of the men were between twenty-nine and thirty-five, so at twenty-five, I was one of the youngest.
We were indoctrinated to be on the lookout for Soviet agents, who would try to compromise us and get our secrets. These agents could be anywhere. We were told particularly to beware of women! The brainwashing was so effective I turned down a date with an extremely good-looking woman who worked in the building who had actually asked me out to dinner. I was afraid it was a setup and I was being tested.
The FBI Academy on the Marine base in Quantic
o, Virginia, wasn’t fully built and operational yet, so we took our firearms and physical training there and the classroom work in the Old Post Office Building in Washington.
One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill. The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life. In the heat of the moment, you seldom have the latitude to plan your shot or time to indulge in a lot of mental gymnastics, and attempting merely to stop a subject or bring him down is too risky. You do not take any unnecessary chances for yourself or a potential victim.
We were given equally rigorous training in criminal law, fingerprint analysis, violent and white-collar crime, arrest techniques, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the history of the Bureau’s role in national law enforcement. One of the units I remember best, though, came fairly early in the course of study. We all re ferred to it as "dirty-words training."
"Doors closed?" the instructor asked. He then handed each of us a list. "I want you to study these words." The list, as I recall, contained such gems of Anglo-Saxon usage as shit, fuck, cunnilingus, fellatio, cunt, and dickhead. What we were supposed to do was commit these words to memory so that if they ever came up in field usage—such as during the interrogation of a suspect—we’d know what to do. And what we were supposed to do was to make sure any case report containing any of these words was given to the office’s "obscene steno"—I’m not kidding!—rather than the regular secretary. The obscene steno would traditionally be an older, more mature and seasoned woman, better able to handle the shock of seeing these words and phrases. Remember, this was all men in those days, and in 1970 the nation al sensibility was somewhat different from what it is today, at least within Hoover’s FBI. We were actually given a spelling test on these words, after which the papers were collected and—I presume—graded before being burned in the metal trash can.
Mindhunter Page 5