“The information briefing will be conducted by a navy intelligence officer,” the lieutenant commander wrote. “That’s the best way for you to get an idea whether this might make sense for you. Send me an email after you attend the briefing if you are still interested. We can meet, and I will answer any questions you might have. Maybe I’ll take you to lunch.”
“Rgr that,” I wrote.
* * *
I knew it was a high-end crowd when I saw the cars in the Fort Devens parking lot. A Mercedes. A Jaguar. A couple of BMWs. Strictly in terms of sticker price, my Firehawk was in the back of the pack. I found my way to a fluorescent-lit classroom with time to spare before the seven p.m. information session began. I wasn’t the first one there. A group of what looked like professionals had already gathered, about two dozen people in all, mostly men but three or four women, too. I introduced myself and joined a conversation with two lawyers, a stockbroker, a sales executive, an accountant, and a couple of midlevel corporate drones. No one was old, but I was one of the younger people in the room. And maybe one of the less successful. In the short time since 9/11, the navy had obviously seen some changes in the recruitment pool.
A woman in khaki pants and khaki shirt came in and introduced herself. She was squat, with a no-nonsense helmet haircut. She said she was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Intelligence Reserves. Then she repeated much of what I’d read on the website, only she said it like she was trying to convince us we shouldn’t bother to apply.
“You may have some misconceptions about the life of an intelligence officer,” she said. “It’s not all cloak-and-dagger. It’s not all James Bond. In fact, it’s mostly not James Bond. There is a lot of information gathering. A lot of analysis. A lot of finding out things maybe our nation’s enemies don’t want us to discover.
“My job is not to glorify this,” she went on. “My job is to tell you the truth. The navy appreciates your interest. But we want you to do this—if you decide you want to do it—with your eyes open wide. We are at a unique time in history now.” One of the realities that we shouldn’t take lightly, she said, was the distinct possibility of being deployed overseas. “I know we call it the reserves,” she said, “and I know that’s different from active duty. But let me warn you, there is nothing passive anymore about the Navy Reserves. Do not join if you are not open to having your life turned upside down.”
I knew she meant it as a warning. This lieutenant commander was an expert at discouraging anyone who wasn’t 110 percent certain. But I heard a different message. Turn my life upside down? I thought. Yes! Go ahead!
“If you are accepted into this program, there is a high likelihood that you will be deployed.” She paused and waited for that to sink in. “There are significant costs that you should consider carefully.” She began ticking them off. “There’s risk to your job, risk to your family, risk to your income—people who have high-paying jobs may very well have to take a pay cut.” I noticed several people stiffen. “I saw a lot of fancy cars driving into the parking lot,” she said. “If you like those cars, this probably is not the right program for you. We have people who were stockbrokers, making four or five hundred thousand dollars a year. Now they’re making seventy thousand as an ensign. Prepare for this. Ask yourself, ‘Can you do it?’ No hard feelings if you decide it’s not for you.”
I noticed a couple of people in the room shaking their heads and shifting uncomfortably in their seats. I was nodding. Leaning forward. Excited.
* * *
I did have some concerns about my physical condition. One concern, actually. On the navy’s official health-screening form, I was able to check the “no” boxes for cancer, heart disease, and a long list of other dire and not so dire ailments. No, I am not addicted to heroin, cocaine, or other narcotics! No, I do not suffer from a brain tumor! No, I don’t have flat feet! But the truth was, I wasn’t in such great shape. Working at Harvard wasn’t so different from being at a lot of tech jobs: We put in absurdly long hours. We sat at ergonomic workstations in ergonomic chairs, constantly on guard against repetitive-stress injuries. We chain-guzzled high-sugar, high-caffeine beverages. Hardly anyone went out for lunch. The whole workplace was designed to keep us at or near our keyboards, updating system architecture, building next-generation websites, writing never-ending lines of programming code. The heaping bowls of Twizzlers, the humming cappuccino machines, the twenty-four-hour buffet table—they were all designed to keep us there and sedentary but not starving. There was such a thing as a free lunch at Harvard—a free breakfast and dinner, too. It was our waistlines and cholesterol that paid.
I knew that could be a problem for me. So right after getting the email from the recruiter, even before I went to see the great dissuader at Fort Devens, I’d put myself on the Atkins Diet and started working out again. I weighed about 177 pounds when I got started. I am five-seven. The height-weight chart said I had to get myself down to 168. I got busy doing that the Atkins way. I ate bacon, hamburgers without the bun, and endless plates of broccoli. I ate no bread or pasta or anything with carbs and, truthfully, not too many other vegetables. What I sacrificed in variety, I made up for in determination.. The night before I had my MEPS appointment, my bathroom scale said 168.
I was due in South Boston at four a.m. This was so crazy early that Ava agreed to drive in with me. She had just gotten the proofs back for an article she’d submitted to a science journal. She said she would wait in the car, doing her proofreading, while I went inside to be poked, probed, tested, and barked at. Ava was encouraging, but I thought I saw her smirk at what I was putting myself through.
I gathered up all the paperwork I needed—my health survey, my immunization card, a copy of my high school diploma, a state-issued ID. We left Fenway at three-fifteen and drove the easy-to-maneuver Honda into South Boston. MEPS was at 495 Summer Street, near the mouth of the Ted Williams Tunnel.
“Good luck,” Ava said as I kissed her goodbye.
I couldn’t help but notice how different the cars in this parking lot were. These were aging Chevys, Toyotas, and Fords. I saw a couple of minivans and a dented pickup. And instead of stockbrokers, lawyers, and accountants, it was mostly eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds in the waiting room. Several of them were talking about the night they’d just spent at a Holiday Inn Express, possibly their first time alone away from home. More than a few seemed somewhere between excited and terrified. These guys were there to join the real navy. Assuming they got through MEPS, they’d be shipping out the following morning to basic training.
The staff here seemed different, too. Instead of a lieutenant commander patiently answering condescending questions from after-work stockbrokers, the brusque MEPS personnel didn’t seem like they’d put up with anything. If Fort Devens was An Officer and a Gentleman, MEPS was Platoon.
I was shuttled through MEPS as if through an automatic car wash, station by station by station, each with a special function, until every square inch of me had been attended to. Muscle tests. Joint tests. I was given an eye exam. They checked my hearing, too. I went upstairs to have my blood drawn. Urine and blood tests. Drug and alcohol tests.
“Walk like a duck,” one of the proctors said to us. And a whole line of recruits did just that, duck-walked across the room.
I carried my stack of papers in a large manila envelope. The weigh-in was at the end. That was the station I was most nervous about. A corpsman with a clipboard stood by a beat-up Toledo doctor’s-office scale.
“This is where it all ends for me,” I said, trying to manage a charming smile. “Any advice?”
He was not about to be charmed. “Up” was all he said, and I climbed on the scale, recalling all those bunless burgers and bacon sides.
He slid the smaller weight to the right until the metal arm balanced at what looked like exactly 168 pounds. “Where are you headed?” he asked me.
“Navy,” I told him.
“Then you’re fine,” he said. “We’ll put it down as 167.”
He stamped my card and sent me on my way. It was past six-thirty by the time I got out of there. Most of Boston was still in bed, but my girlfriend had waited in the car for me almost three hours. I couldn’t wait to tell Ava I had passed the weigh-in. And I had one request: Could we please make a quick stop at Au Bon Pain? Finally, I was free to eat a mouthwatering toasted bagel with way more than a schmear of scallion cream cheese.
When she asked how it went, I said, “Fine. And please don’t ever ask me to walk like a duck.”
CHAPTER 6
* * *
COMMANDER LINO
I wanted to be Lino Covarrubias. I knew that five minutes after we sat down together at the Imperial Terrace Chinese buffet in Quincy, Massachusetts, and I asked him what he’d done in the navy before he became a recruiter.
“Surface warfare officer,” he said. “A jack of all trades, a master of none. In the Med and the Adriatic. On frigates, cruisers, and an aircraft carrier.”
That was how he spoke—simply, directly, like he had no need to embellish or to brag about anything. I nodded across the spring rolls at him.
“When the Balkans blew up in the early nineties,” he said, “we joined a NATO task force trying to keep weapons out of Serbia and Montenegro. The idea was to draw the violence down by starving out the weapons and ammo. We were out there inspecting ships, stopping black-market arms from coming across from Italy. A few got through at night on cigarette boats going sixty miles an hour. We couldn’t shoot at them. But that was maybe a few dozen firearms at a time. We were focused on the larger ships that could deliver thousands of weapons. It was a miserable winter, the sea so choppy, cold winds blowing down from the Alps. But we kept a lot of arms out of Serbia, I’ll tell you that.”
I was spellbound. I had read all those books about the military. I’d seen hundreds of war movies and TV shows. I’d heard stories as a boy from my French grandfather about his harrowing experiences in World War II. I’d had my short career in ROTC, for whatever that was worth. But none of that made me feel like this did, sitting across a restaurant table from this lieutenant commander in the navy, having adult-to-adult conversation about life on the inside.
“That must have been exciting,” I told him.
“It was,” he said.
* * *
I had taken the steps Lino had asked of me in his email. I’d filled out a whole stack of forms and applications, checking “no” in all the right spots. I had driven the Firehawk to the U.S. Naval Reserve Center at 85 Sea Street. Now it was time to meet the man who’d laid out the steps for me.
Quincy is an old industrial city on Boston’s South Shore. To an outsider, it looks less like its own city and more like another Boston neighborhood on its way to being gentrified. It has winding streets, triple-decker houses, and idle factory buildings turned into offices and condos. But Quincy still has a strong identity of its own. “QUIN-zy,” the old-timers like to say, as if the “c” were a “z.” I had read about Quincy’s place in American history. Settled in 1625, the city got its name from Colonel John Quincy, maternal grandfather of Abigail Adams. Her husband, John Adams, the second president of the United States, was born in Quincy, as was their son, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president. So was John Hancock, the Massachusetts governor known by children across America for his bold and stylish signature on the Declaration of Independence.
This part of Quincy didn’t look all that historic to me. The architectural style was more like “surplus cinder block.” I passed a couple of strip malls and a Blockbuster, a McDonald’s, a Burger King, and a Friendly’s. The brownish one-story navy building looked more like a decommissioned junior high school. I parked the car in the lot and walked inside.
The recruiters shared the building with the MBTA Transit Police Academy. The police recruits were down one hallway, the navy prospects down the other.
“I’m here to see Lieutenant Commander Covarrubias,” I told the navy clerk, doing my best with the five-syllable last name. The clerk nodded, and I took a seat.
I waited about ten minutes as people in blue uniforms came and went. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but they all seemed busy doing it. I stared at the recruiting posters featuring fit young men and women gazing off ship decks, leaping out of helicopters, and running purposefully through the surf. I could hear the police recruits down the hall.
Suddenly, a stocky man in his early forties breezed into the waiting room. He was wearing a khaki officer’s uniform. He said a quick “good morning” to the people in the blue shirts before looking over at me. He was about my height and had a shock of thick black hair parted on the left side. I counted five rows of ribbons on his shirt. I couldn’t say what all of them were, but I saw silver jump wings, a recruiter pin, and a gold surface-warfare badge.
“Hey,” he said brightly to me, reaching out his right hand. “How’s it goin’? I’m Lino. You wanna grab some lunch?”
His easygoing friendliness caught me off guard. “Yes, sir,” I said, standing up quickly.
“It’s Lino,” he said, brushing off the formality.
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “Lino.” I’d have been just as comfortable calling him “Lieutenant Commander.”
We walked a block to a Chinese buffet, probably chosen for convenience. It couldn’t have been the ambience. The room was dark and mostly empty. The food was all-you-can-eat, that’s the best I can say about it. Lino piled his plate with dumplings and spring rolls, and I did the same.
“So how did you get into this?” I asked him.
I started eating, and Lino began to talk. Even with this dim lighting, I could see the grease shining off his plate.
“It’s what I always knew I’d do,” he said. “You meet some of the greatest people in the navy. It’s something you really feel part of. I had some amazing times out there.” He started ticking off the ports that he and his shipmates had visited. “Toulon, France. Málaga, Spain. Corfu in the Greek Islands. Haifa, Israel.”
“Was that totally amazing?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. It is. There is nothing in the world like the Atlantic fleet coming into a port after a couple months at sea. We’re a dry navy, you know. No alcohol on board the ship. In a lot of your other navies, as long you’re off duty, you can have a beer or a rum, watch a movie, and go to sleep. In the U.S. Navy, no. You’re weeks or more at sea with nothing to distract you. So you’ve just hit port. You haven’t had a beer in a month and a half. That first beer hits you in the head like a rock. That picture of U.S. sailors out drinking, it’s quite true. Two or three days in port, you get in as much as you can.”
The way Lino told it, he made even the bad things sound good. No beer on the ship—for no matter how long—sounded like no big deal when he described the raucous camaraderie of another port call. The sailors, he told me, did more on land than drink, womanize, and unwind. They also tried to help people wherever they could.
“We would build a playground,” he said. “Or we would rehab an orphanage. We bring money into the restaurants and bars, but we also do these projects. People appreciate it. Most of the places we’re sent to, people are very happy to see the U.S. fleet come in. Most people like Americans.”
He seemed happy enough to talk, like it was a relief to have a recruit who was asking questions about him. I knew we would get around to discussing the direct commission program and my chances of getting in. But I kept pumping him about his own background.
“Covarrubias—is that a Greek name?” I asked him.
“Spanish,” he answered. “My family is Mexican-American. I grew up in Southern California, outside El Centro. It’s a pretty poor area near the Mexican border. There’s a Naval Air Facility in El Centro. It’s the winter home of the U.S. Navy Blue Angels. You’ve heard of them?”
Of course I’d heard of the Blue Angels,
the legendary acrobatic flying team. “As a little kid through high school, I watched the Angels every winter,” Lino explained. “They had air shows at the base. I was sold on the navy from the very start. It was the only thing I wanted to do. That was the way to get out of the poverty of the barrio.”
He enlisted right out of high school in 1984. After basic training, he was tapped for the BOOST program (Broadened Opportunity for Officer Selection and Training). “The navy needed more officers,” he said. “BOOST was for enlisted personnel from the fleet, a one-year prep school in San Diego that would prepare you for a Navy ROTC program at a college somewhere.”
Lino must have done well in BOOST. He was one of only ten students in his class offered a place in the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. But he wasn’t sure it was what he should do. He’d also been accepted to the ROTC program at UCLA. He’d seen the full-color brochures of the Los Angeles campus. It looked pretty sweet.
“My chief pulled me aside,” Lino remembered. “He said to me, ‘Covarrubias, you come from a poor background, right? Your parents, they don’t have any money. ROTC pays for tuition and books, not room and board. Who’s gonna pay for room and board? Your parents will pay for that? Most people have to work. I tell you what you’re gonna do. You’ll be flipping burgers. You ever been to Maryland?’ I hadn’t traveled anywhere. ‘Best seafood ever. You don’t have to work. Everything is paid for. It’s twenty-four/seven navy. No flipping patties.’
How to Catch a Russian Spy Page 6