How to Catch a Russian Spy

by Naveed Jamali

  “The reason I went to Annapolis wasn’t because it was a fine institution or a prestigious school or anything like that. I went because my family couldn’t afford room and board, and I didn’t want to flip burgers.”

  He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1989 and headed out to sea, this time as an officer with a big career ahead of him.

  Our conversation shifted. He started asking questions about me. I told him about my own background. The French mother, the Pakistani father, the techie son now dating a brilliant Jewish woman from New York.

  He seemed to like all that. “America is a nation of immigrants,” he said. “I particularly like candidates who come from immigrant families in the first generation or two.”

  I told him that when 9/11 happened, Ava and I both felt bad about not being in New York. When she finished her doctoral program at Harvard, we would probably move back there.

  That was fine, he said. If I got accepted into the program, the navy would tell me where to report, but they wouldn’t care where I lived in my off time.

  As we talked on, he repeated some of the things I already knew about the extreme selectivity of the program, and he emphasized that the most selective specialty was Naval Intelligence.

  “We need skilled people for that,” he said. “A lot of the surveillance we’re doing now is with computers. We need techies. Maybe next year we’ll have too many techies and we’ll need people who can think. Then they’ll be telling me, ‘Send us all those professors and PhDs.’

  “After nine-eleven,” he said, “my phone started ringing with all these people who never would have thought about joining the military. Professional people. People with Ivy League degrees. People who’d already had good careers. They’re saying the same things: ‘I’ve had a great life. I have a great family. I have a great education. I’m making a great living. But I haven’t done anything for my country, and that doesn’t seem right.’ Any of this sound familiar to you?”

  I told Lino he was reading my mind.

  “You might be a good fit for this,” he said.

  He told me he’d gone over my application. Nothing was guaranteed, but he thought I had a solid chance of getting in. “You have good paper,” he told me. “You have strong technical skills. Working at Harvard is nice. You have the diversity piece. You seem to be doing this for all the right reasons. You know what you’re getting into.”

  He said he did have some concern about the depth of my work experience. “You are really just getting started in your career,” he said. “But I think you’ll be a competitive candidate. As far as I’m concerned, you make the initial cut.”

  Lino kept talking. And I kept asking him questions. About the great people he’d met in the navy. How serving had brought meaning to his life. About all the fun he’d been able to have. He lit up as he described one memorable cruise across the Mediterranean and an exchange program with the Turkish Navy. “There’s just a lot of opportunity to contribute,” he said.

  Up until that point, I’d had no idea what an intel officer did day to day. There wasn’t much explanation in the official paperwork beyond the fact that applicants needed a college degree. The rest I’d tried to learn in military chat rooms, though I’d noticed the intel officers weren’t big on sharing details until they really trusted you. I asked Lino if he had dealt personally with any intel officers. He nodded without saying too much. “They’ve always been professional.”

  I asked what specifically I might be doing if I got in. “You’ll know better once you are attached to a command,” he said. “They’ll tell you what you’ll be doing.” It was all a little vague, all very Maverick in Top Gun: “It’s classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” But I liked the fact that he spoke as if I was likely to be accepted. “When you get in,” he said, “you might want to choose a unit to drill with that’s close to home so it won’t impact too much on your home or work life. The reserves are very compatible with having a normal, civilian career.”

  He didn’t get much more specific, and I couldn’t tell how much he really knew. I asked if he thought I could get pilot training while I was an intelligence officer. He was very good at not saying much while still sounding encouraging. “It’s not impossible,” he said. “No doors are closed. A lot of different things can happen.”

  I didn’t want the lunch to end. I looked up and noticed a couple of other people in uniform in the restaurant. “I’ve heard good and bad about navy food,” I said. “You’ve been around. Where is the best?”

  “The submarine service has the best food,” he said without missing a beat. “Those guys have long hours underwater and not a lot of distractions.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  I could have listened to Lino talk all afternoon. But the main thing he left me with was the sense that as a navy intelligence officer, I would immediately be doing something important to help the country and that I had a good shot at getting in. That was all I wanted to hear.

  I knew I was in the company of one bad-ass military dude. I wanted to do what he had done: spent his young-adult years running around the world to exotic hot spots as part of the world’s greatest navy. That sounded pretty enticing.

  By the time I walked out of that Chinese buffet in Quincy, I was hooked.

  * * *

  The letter reached Queensberry Street on Saturday morning, June 7, 2003. Ava was with me when I got the mail from the lobby box. The return address said Navy Recruiting Command, 5722 Integrity Drive, Millington, TN 38054-5057. The envelope was thin.

  Walking upstairs to the second floor, I remembered what my high school friends had said when they were waiting to hear from colleges: You always want a thick envelope, packed with course selections and housing forms and moving-day tips and return-mail envelopes. When it comes to news-bearing envelopes, thin is never good.

  “Dear Mr. Jamali,” the letter began.

  “Your application for appointment to the U.S. Navy Reserve Direct Commissioning Program has been carefully reviewed, but regrettably, due to program restrictions, you were not selected.”

  I read the first paragraph again. It didn’t get any better the second time.

  The usual happy horseshit followed. “Your application will remain on file for two years with this command. You should maintain contact with an officer recruiter should the program reopen in the future. He or she may request reactivation of your application should that occur.”

  And then the don’t-feel-too-bad-about-this part: “Please be assured that your nonselection is not an adverse reflection on you, but an indication of the intense competitiveness of the Naval Reserve Program.” And finally: “I regret a favorable decision could not be made in your case. Your interest in obtaining a commission in the Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer Program is greatly appreciated.”

  The letter was signed, “Sincerely, S. M. Heller, Lieutenant Commander, U.S. Naval Reserve.” His title continued: “Head, Inactive Reserve Section, Officer Programs Division, Operations Department.”

  At the bottom was one last line: “By direction of the Commander.” That made the rejection sound even more official.

  I’ve heard people say that when they got bad news, it felt like they’d been kicked in the gut. Well, I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut by a Clydesdale.

  “You really wanted this, didn’t you?” Ava asked, sounding very concerned. “At first I thought you were just playing around with the idea, like you thought it might be cool or it just sounded interesting. I figured you would lose interest along the way.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything more in my life,” I said. “How do I go back to work Monday? Everything seems so pointless.” I was oozing self-pity and acting like a victim.

  Ava’s reaction was not to throw me a pity party. Instead, she grabbed my hand and made me look her in the eye as she spoke firmly. “
Hey! What happened to the kid who didn’t get into college and then applied and got himself into NYU? Did that kid give up? Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re going to do just what you did at Hunter. You’re going to put one foot in front of the other and try again. If this is what you want, it doesn’t matter how many times it takes or how long. You. Don’t. Give. Up.”

  For a brief minute I thought she might punch me. But then her face broke into a giant smile. “It’s beautiful outside, and I don’t need to be in the lab. Why don’t we take the T-tops off the ’hawk and go for a ride by the shore?”

  * * *

  I called Lino on Monday morning. He’d already heard. “Don’t take it personally,” he told me.

  I knew he would say that. I also knew I would take it personally. How could I not?

  “What do you think happened?” I asked him.

  “It’s probably the work experience,” he said. “You haven’t been out of school that long. You’re just getting started in your career.”

  I’ve been out for five years already, I thought. How long am I supposed to wait?

  “Geography might have something to do with it,” he said. “For a program like this one, New England is probably the most competitive. It’s not just Harvard. It’s MIT, Yale, Brown—I mean, there’s a lot of them. Maybe if you’d come from Texas, it would have been easier. There’s a lot of good paper here.”

  He repeated what he and others had told me, that not getting in the first time was not that unusual. He said I had several other options. I could enlist in the navy, gain some experience, and move into intelligence work that way. Or I could get more experience on the outside and then apply again.

  “If you want something bad enough,” he said, “you keep trying. You may not be selected the first time. I know people who haven’t been selected the second and third time, and they kept trying and finally got in. They wanted it. They did what they had to. They got it done.”

  He asked if Ava and I were still planning to move back to New York. I told him we were.

  “Here’s what I would do,” he said. “The most important thing is you need to get experience that is relevant to this program. Being an IT person at Harvard is great. But just because you are Harvard, that isn’t enough. What you really need is experience in the intelligence field, something that would make you more competitive against these applicants. You might consider working for the State Department or the FBI or a law-enforcement agency that does intelligence. You should apply for that kind of stuff. We have people who are dual-agency, who work in other state or federal law-enforcement agencies, and they’re also in the Navy Reserves. That works out great for everyone. It doesn’t have to be that, exactly, just something so you can show ‘I have some actual experience in the field.’ Does that make sense?”

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to sound too discouraged.

  “And Naveed?” Lino said before wishing me luck and saying goodbye. “Let me hear from you, okay? Let me know how you do.”

  * * *

  I knew Ava and Lino were right. I couldn’t give up. Immediately, I started trying to figure out what I should do next. The obvious thing was to get a master’s degree. When in doubt, hide in graduate school. Since Harvard offered free tuition at the Extension School, I thought, Why not? So I applied and, much to my delight, was accepted into the master of liberal arts program. After reading Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, I decided to focus my studies on state sovereignty and the concept that some crimes are so heinous, they justify its breach. I debated passionately with my fellow classmates about when evil is so profound, it permits or even compels military intervention. This was during the early months of the war in Iraq and growing condemnation of U.S. imperialism. I can say that my prointervention arguments were not too popular on the Harvard campus. Additionally, I decided to take on the role of Harvard freshmen academic adviser and found myself helping a gaggle of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds navigate an unfamiliar campus. I traded in my old 1999 Firehawk for a silver 405-horsepower fiftieth-anniversary Corvette Z06. I dove deeply into the car scene in Boston, doing track days at New Hampshire International Speedway and Lime Rock Park and weekend car cruises across New England.

  To anyone halfway paying attention, it would have seemed I’d settled back into my pre-9/11 contentedness. But I still felt that these were all poor substitutes for what I really wanted: a commission as an officer in the United States Navy. I was still going nowhere. In January 2005, after Ava was awarded her doctorate in genetics, the newly minted Dr. Brent and I loaded our two cats into a box truck and headed with all our worldly possessions back to the city of our birth.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  SPECIAL AGENTS

  Boston was quickly feeling like yesterday.

  Ava and I were New Yorkers on an atomic level. With my hopes of joining the navy on hold, leaving Boston—and with it, my unfinished master’s degree at Harvard—hadn’t been hard at all. At first I debated whether to take a semester off from my studies and then commute or transfer to a graduate program in New York. But even that felt like another excuse for delay.

  New York was a new start for both of us. I went back to work—temporarily, I told myself—at Books & Research. We’d barely unpacked when I suggested to Ava that we do something major now that we were back home. “Let’s get married,” I said.

  It wasn’t a big wedding. Neither of us wanted that. On February 9, 2005, a week before our birthdays, we went to city hall and said “I do.”

  One Saturday morning a few weeks after that, Ava Brent Jamali was reading journal articles as I paced in the living room. “Hey, Ave,” I asked for perhaps the thirty-seventh time, “now that I’m not in school, what do you think if I tried to get some work experience for the navy? You think that would help?”

  “Uh-huh,” she replied without looking up.

  “Well, I was thinking, you know, maybe I should try and do an internship, like with the FBI, maybe. What do you think?”

  I noticed my voice sounded intense and high-pitched. Ava had put down her articles and was looking at me. “Seriously, Naveed,” she said. “Are you scheming again?” The last time I’d decided to join the navy.

  “No, just listen.”

  “Okay, Naveed,” she said, “why don’t you just call the FBI and offer your services? But in the meantime, if you want to save the world, would you pick up some kitty litter? We’re out.”

  Challenge accepted—on both counts.

  * * *

  That Monday, I asked my mother for the phone number of the latest FBI agent she and my father had been dealing with, explaining that I wanted to see if one of the agents might have some advice for me about the navy. Perhaps pitying me—her little boy was still trying to decide what to do when he grew up—she gave me a number. In her heavy French accent, she said: “Be careful, these are not people to trust.”

  A product of the seventies, I thought. Suspicious of “the man.”

  Excitedly, I dialed the number my mother had given me. The agent answered on the second ring.

  “Is it okay if I call you Bambi?” I asked after introducing myself. I was trying to sound friendly and casual.

  “If you want to, sure,” she said, sounding slightly confused. “But if you’d like me to answer, it’s probably better to call me by my actual name. I’m Randi.”

  I should have known better than to ask my mother for the agent’s name. With the French accent, “Randi” had come out like “Bambi,” and I’d just made a fool of myself with the agent I was eager to impress. So much for instant rapport!

  I explained that I was calling on behalf of my parents. That was true enough and a better opening line, I thought, than “Hi, are you hiring part-time help?” I said that the man from the Russian Mission had stopped by, and I had been the one to take the order. “As you know,�
� I said, “my parents are getting older. They’ll be retiring soon. From now on, I’ll be the one dealing with the Russians.”

  Maybe she was having a slow day. Maybe she just wanted to lay eyes on the idiot kid who’d called her Bambi. But she suggested that I come downtown and meet in person with her and her partner. We settled on a meeting place—outside the FBI’s New York office at 26 Federal Plaza, near city hall and the courts in lower Manhattan. “We can walk somewhere from there,” Randi said.

  * * *

  It was a beautiful spring morning when I went to see the agents. They seemed happy enough to meet me.

  Randi seemed to be a smart and savvy young woman. Her family came from Colombia in South America. She said she had recently returned to New York from Seattle, where she’d been shocked to find that traffic stopped for her the minute she stepped off the curb, whether she had the light or not. “Very different out there,” she said.

  Her partner was named Terry. He seemed to be the junior agent. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. He was thin and wore glasses and spoke in a slightly nasal voice. He came from an Italian-American family in Pennsylvania.

  We darted across the heavy Broadway traffic to a Dunkin’ Donuts. When Randi warned, “Be careful, Terry,” he teased her about her concern for his street-crossing habits. “You’ve been in Seattle too long,” he said, laughing.

  Terry asked if I wanted anything to eat. “No,” I said, “that’s okay. Just some water.”

  With a slight smirk, Randi asked Terry if he wanted some fruit. He looked annoyed and didn’t answer. “How ’bout an apple turnover?” she asked. “I hear they have good apple turnovers here.”

  Terry just scowled. I liked the fact that, even though they were FBI agents, they seemed to have some personality. They seemed looser than the stereotype. “Terry won’t eat anything natural or with certain colors,” Randi said to me. “Literally, he has not eaten any fruits or vegetables or anything green in years.”