How to Catch a Russian Spy

by Naveed Jamali

  Later, Bush spoke appreciatively about Putin’s call, saying that under almost any other set of circumstances, our heightened military presence would have caused “inevitable tension.” But Putin’s call was “a moment where it clearly said to me he understands the Cold War is over.”

  My mind was racing all over the place but nowhere good.

  Finally, Ava arrived home. “Is it bad?” she asked.

  “It’s bad,” I answered.

  We stared at the TV and made phone calls the rest of the afternoon. I finally caught my breath.

  Within a few short hours, I’d gone from not thinking at all about my safety or the safety of the people I loved or the stability of American society to thinking of little else.

  If someone had told me in that period that the Canadians had armed themselves to the teeth and were taking over America, I would have said, “Why not?” Anything and everything seemed possible. Who knew what normal was anymore?

  * * *

  Ava had lived through the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. She’d been a student a few blocks away at Stuyvesant High School. If anything, she felt this new attack, far deadlier than the first one, even more personally than I did. She said she felt an overpowering urge to go back home. “Why are we still in Boston?” I asked.

  On Friday, September 14, three days after the attacks, we drove south in the Firehawk. Driving was the only option. Commercial planes were still grounded. We had the radio on the whole way. As we pulled onto Interstate 95, Rev. Billy Graham was leading a national day of prayer and remembrance at the National Cathedral in Washington. It seemed like half the American political hierarchy was there, including President George W. Bush.

  “We are here in the middle hour of our grief,” the president told the overflow congregation. No one could deny that America’s recovery was very much a work in progress—in the earliest of early stages. That afternoon, Bush flew up to New York. The president reached Ground Zero just as we were heading down the West Side Highway toward the Upper West Side. I turned the radio up as he spoke again.

  “I want you all to know that America today, America today is on bended knee, in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here, for the workers who work here, for the families who mourn,” he said through a bullhorn to a group of construction workers and rescue personnel down in the smoldering pit. “The nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut as we mourn the loss of thousands of our citizens.”

  The president was interrupted right there. “I can’t hear you!” one rescue worker called out from the back.

  “I can hear you!” Bush called back through the bullhorn. “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people, and the people who knocked these buildings down, will hear all of us soon!”

  The workers erupted in a loud, throaty chant. “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” They went on for a good long while.

  As we pulled off the highway and onto the streets of the Upper West Side, Boston felt like a thousand miles and a lifetime away from where the real action was. Ava and I knew then and there that we had to move back to New York.

  The next morning, we left her parents’ apartment and started the long, winding walk downtown. The streets weren’t quiet or empty. But everyone seemed to be in the same different, uncomfortable mood. The farther south we got, the stranger everything seemed. At Twenty-third Street, we turned west and walked the edge of Chelsea and Greenwich Village along the Hudson River waterfront.

  That was about where the smell got strong. The pit, we knew, was still smoldering. It would for several more weeks. Ash and bits of paper floated in the air, which had an acrid smell, the sky a hazy glow. As we walked down those blocks, our eyes burned. So did our lungs.

  Most of the way, we walked quietly. Not saying much to each other. Totally lost in our thoughts.

  We’d heard about the tight security. We assumed that at around Houston Street or Canal, police or National Guardsmen would turn us back. But as we walked the edge of the West Side Highway, no one told us to stop.

  We kept walking south until we got to Ava’s old high school. Outside Stuyvesant was a line of battered New York police cars parked on the street. Some of them had their windows blown out. All of them were caked in dust. First responders frozen in time.

  Ava knew the neighborhood well. We walked east, then north, then east, then south again. From where we stood, we had a straight-on view of the twisted steel and massive rubble pile of the collapsed towers. Four National Guardsmen were standing there. They had rifles and gas masks. They looked really young and really scared. So were we.

  We turned north, then headed back up to Canal Street.

  At Canal, there were huge lines of people trying to get south, unaware that they could loop around and avoid the barricades.

  We kept walking north until we reached Washington Square. We finally stopped walking and began to talk.

  “It’s like a city without people,” Ava said. “Like there’s no more civilization here.”

  “The signs are what really get to me,” I said. All over lower Manhattan, frantic people had taped up posters, desperately searching for information about missing friends and relatives. Most of them, we knew already, would never be found. We headed west and then north for the long walk home.

  As we passed St. Vincent’s Hospital, we saw people lined up to give blood. That was the hospital where the survivors would have gone. But the emergency room had been eerily quiet that day.

  Around Fourteenth Street, we turned west with four firefighters in uniforms that didn’t look familiar. Clearly, they weren’t from the NYFD. We asked the men where they were from.

  “Australia,” two of them said.

  “San Bernardino, California,” said the other two.

  “Thank you, thank you,” I said, shaking all of their hands.

  You couldn’t help but be impressed—all these people coming from so far, so quickly, for no reason other than to help, bringing their talent, their experience, their energy, and their drive.

  What could anyone say but thank you?

  * * *

  My experience of 9/11 was similar to that of many Americans. My loved ones all came home safely that day. But every little thing seemed magnified. Fear and worry were palpable. Cell phones were working only intermittently. Many people in New York, with no way to get home, were crashing with friends or coworkers. It took us several days to find my cousin JD, who worked in the Financial District. He was fine, but that was rattling.

  I realized that morning there was no such thing as a safe world. This cocoon I’d been living in—skipping ROTC, working at Harvard with the Twizzler bowls and the Aeron chairs, our cozy apartment in the Fenway, the cushy job and the safe career, the decent money and nice cars—none of it could guarantee our safety. The world could change dramatically in a heartbeat. In fact, it just had.

  That’s what I was feeling. Then I started thinking: What the hell can I do? I had a sense that there was real work to be done out there somewhere, and I was home watching it on TV.

  “I want to be part of this,” I said to myself. “I want to feel like I’m contributing something here. I want to feel like I am making the world safer. I don’t want to sit on the sidelines anymore.”

  Over the subsequent months, I made the full transition from dude who enjoyed a good time to dude who realizes there is something he wants to be part of that’s bigger than he is. The only question was how.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  NAVY DREAMS

  It would take longer than I wanted to make those changes in my life.

  We stayed in Boston as Ava made swift progress through her doctoral program. My parents were working hard back in New York, building Books & Research, enjoying their lives in Hastings, feeling satisfaction at all they’d achieved as first-generati
on Americans. My Pakistani father had even become a U.S. citizen. For him, it wasn’t so much an expression of American patriotism or a question of national identity, although he did love America. He had gotten interested in local politics in Hastings and all riled up about a school-tax increase. He hated the fact that he couldn’t vote in village elections. So he took the U.S. citizenship test—aced it, of course—and was sworn in during August 2001, just before lower Manhattan was transformed into a massive crime scene.

  My friends from high school and college were mostly making money on Wall Street or hiding out in graduate school. None of them seemed to be feeling a whole lot of angst about the state of the world. So why did I have this empty feeling?

  It wasn’t like my life was in shambles. It was actually going pretty well. I’d been working at Harvard barely a year when I was promoted from a programmer position in the human resources department to managing my own team at University Information Systems. This was a great opportunity for me and something new for the university. It was as if we were running our own business under the umbrella of Harvard. We were allowed to be creative and entrepreneurial—­actually encouraged to be. I could run my team the way I wanted to. And if I did well in this position, I had every reason to think more good things lay ahead.

  I had a fine education. I’d been coddled all my life. I had all the benefits of growing up in New York’s affluent suburbs. Ava and I were young and in love. We had a great apartment and the Firehawk. We’d bought a commuter car, too, an easy-to-park black 1993 Honda Civic for quick trips around town. I’d been blessed with all these opportunities and advantages, but what had I done with them, really?

  Not nearly enough. Nothing I was doing seemed important at all.

  This was a life? Building websites for Harvard president Larry Summers? Sitting through endless meetings with pretentious people discussing initiatives I couldn’t care less about? Was this how I wanted to spend the next forty years? Liberally hiding behind high Ivy walls? It was a nice job with a nice future, cozy as could be. But I felt oddly disconnected. I was Peter Gibbons, the disgruntled programmer in Mike Judge’s Office Space. “We don’t have a lot of time on this earth,” Peter comes to understand. “We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day.” He was right. I felt totally adrift and out of the action, not that I knew where the real action might be. My great-great-great-grandfather, he knew action. I had the feeling I was wasting my life away. Nine-eleven definitely shone an uncomfortable light on that. My life was all about safety and comfort, and that didn’t feel right anymore. I was twenty-five but acting more like a complacent, settled-down forty-year-old. I had to do something. I had to make a change.

  But what? How? Where?

  Nine-eleven had not only inspired patriotism. It had reminded a lot of people that there were opportunities to do something worthwhile. The more I thought about it, the more I knew: There had to be something larger and more meaningful I could do. That was when I came up with the idea of joining Naval Intelligence.

  * * *

  I’d always read a lot about the military. Ever since I was a boy, I had played with toy soldiers and model planes. I’d seen more than my share of war and espionage films. Lately, I noticed, I’d been diving even deeper into that stuff. On the Saturday trips Ava and I made to the Barnes & Noble in Newton, I’d pick up a lot of geopolitical books, titles like Con Coughlin’s Saddam: King of Terror. None of this related to my IT job. I just loved reading about far-off adventures and knotty international crises. I imagined being immersed in some great world event and thought about how I would handle the issues. I read about great leaders faced with great decisions. I devoured books that told the inside stories, the real details that didn’t make the regular history books. I wanted to know how these leaders responded when they were confronted with unimaginable odds and impossible judgments. Did they do the right thing? Did their choices influence history? Did President Kennedy blink during the Cuban missile crisis? No. Would the Berlin Wall have fallen without Ronald Reagan? No. Was General Westmoreland a brilliant strategist, or did he totally botch the Vietnam War? Both. I teased out all these riddles. I rated the successes and failures of supposedly great men. And when my thoughts weren’t on real military, I was as obsessed with the fictional kind. In my mind, I went down all kinds of crazy paths. Which role did I see myself in? Saving Private Ryan or 13 Days? Was I tactical or strategic? Was I the guy kicking down doors and shooting people or the guy sitting back and putting the puzzle pieces together? Both roles are critical. But I was pretty sure my gifts were on the cerebral side.

  I’d been watching those movies and reading those books and playacting the scenes in my head ever since I was a kid with my G.I. Joe Skystrikers and the Jolly Roger patches on my gray pseudo–flight jacket. As a child, I played those games between homework and bedtime. Now that I was older and had friends who were wearing real air force or navy flight jackets, one thing hadn’t changed: I’d chosen to leave the real adventures to other people.

  Not anymore.

  I had a plan. It would start with me doing what I was already an expert at—using technology to find out stuff. If there was one skill I had in abundance, it was data mining. I was hoping my technical abilities would loop me back to where I was always meant to be.

  We were still on rudimentary search engines like WebCrawler, Dogpile, and Ask Jeeves, and we posted on message boards. The Internet was growing slowly, allowing connections with people we wouldn’t ever be likely to meet. Someone I met in an IRC chat room pointed me toward military.com, where he said I could get all kinds of advice about getting into Naval Intelligence, and fast.

  Fast was critical. Patience was not my strongest suit. I wasn’t looking for a twenty-year process. I didn’t want to sit on a ship out at sea. Come on, I thought. My life is almost one third over. I’m not getting any younger here. How much longer can I wait?

  The people who posted at military.com—current and former officers and enlisted personnel—knew an amazing amount, and once they decided I was serious, they couldn’t have been friendlier or more willing to share. I wasn’t shy about asking. I said I wanted to be an officer in Naval Intelligence. I said I had a tech background, and I wanted to find a way to do it fast. Several posters mentioned something called the direct commission officer program, which I had never heard of. But it sounded perfect to me. It was part of the U.S. Navy Reserves. This wasn’t the career path for gung-ho eighteen-year-olds fresh out of high school. The DCO program was for people who had already started their civilian careers and had special skills the navy might need. Physicians. Engineers. Lawyers. Chaplains. Meteorologists. I could imagine the local TV weatherman from the eleven o’clock news stripping off his makeup with a baby wipe and racing over to the local base, radioing destroyer captains about squalls up ahead. Hey, why not?

  I might not have the background to predict low-pressure systems. But the requirements for Naval Intelligence officers weren’t all that precise. You just needed “significant civilian occupational experience in disciplines related to intelligence or cyber-related professions.” That could mean anything, right? I knew I was on the right track. I had the basic skills to spy.

  I’d spent a zillion hours in the computer lab at NYU. Everywhere I’d worked, I was known as a kung fu master at research and turning vague ideas into code. I had brand-name colleges and employers on my résumé—NYU, Columbia, and Harvard—that were bound to impress. I didn’t have to mention my unfortunate time at Hackley or my empty diploma case at Hastings. I was one of those techies who could actually talk to people on both sides of the digital divide, the super-bright code writers who were on my team and the foggy academics who were our clients. And I figured being half Pakistani couldn’t hurt. I didn’t speak Arabic, but I could probably pass on a street corner as someone who did.

  The whole idea of naval intelligence
called to me. It was a key part of our military strategy. But it wasn’t about overrunning the enemy. It was about outsmarting him. That was a realm I thought I could thrive in.

  As much as the idea appealed to the adventure-loving adolescent inside me, I knew that being a real-life Naval Intelligence officer wouldn’t be all car chases, secret drop-offs, and John le Carré. There’d be some grunt research and report writing and all the other boring stuff. But it had to be more fun and more exciting and far more meaningful than working in a university computer lab.

  I made a point of learning as much as I could about navy intelligence. Assuming I was accepted into the program—and given my background, how hard could that really be?—they’d whisk me through a two-week indoctrination at the Direct Commission Officer Indoctrination Course in Pensacola, Florida. The day I signed my contract, I’d be a full commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy Reserves. No service academy, no ROTC, no Officer Candidate School, no endless waiting around to begin the next phase of my life. As one of the posters at military.com told me: “You’ll be busy on your first assignment. People will be saluting you.”

  It was a commitment I was eager to make. I’d have to agree to serve for eight years. That could involve one weekend a month of training and two weeks of summer camp. Or, more likely, given the way things were headed in this post-9/11 world, an extended deployment on a naval base in the United States or in a war zone in Afghanistan, Iraq, or who knows where. Probably a little of both, the people on military.com explained. A path that was perfect for me. An adventure I was right for and ripe for.

  Waking up with a goal was incredibly invigorating. And it didn’t take me long to head off in search of it.

  I filled out the “for more information” form on the navy’s direct commission website. I clicked the box for “intelligence officer.” A couple of days later, I got a reply email from Lieutenant Commander Lino Covarrubias, the officer recruiter in New England for the direct commission program. With titles like that one, it sounded like the navy was as bureaucratic as I remembered the army being when I was in ROTC. The lieutenant commander said he’d be happy to meet with me. But first, he said, I should attend a direct commission ­information briefing for my intended specialty, naval intelligence, at Fort Devens, a reservist military installation near Worchester, ­Massachusetts, about an hour east of Boston. And I should go for a basic navy physical exam at MEPS, the Military Entrance Processing Station, in South Boston.