Ideology is another common motivation. From early patriots like Nathan Hale to sainted abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, some of America’s greatest heroes were ideological spies. Spying for ideology has been a factor in almost every nation and every war. Name a cause and someone has famously spied for it. Communism: Kim Philby and Klaus Fuchs. Anti-Nazi: Fritz Kolbe and Juan Pujol. Pro-Cuba: Ana Montes. The list goes on and makes for fascinating history.
Coercion, though less common, also plays a role. Torture is the most obvious and extreme example, though threats can work just as well. Once captured, some spies motivated by M, I, or E predictably claim they were coerced. But it does happen, sometimes quite ingeniously. During World War II, Mathilde Carré, working with the French Resistance, was captured by the Nazis and threatened with torture or worse unless she became a double agent. Svetlana Tumanova was told by the KGB that her family in the Soviet Union was in peril unless she played ball. To somewhat greater skepticism, Ronald Humphrey claimed he helped North Vietnam only to smooth the release of his Vietnamese wife. For centuries, military officers and diplomats were coerced to spy by the threat of being outed as gay. Worried about this possibility, intelligence agencies routinely investigated the sexual histories of applicants, fearing that “deviants” might be subject to blackmail. That kind of coercion is mostly a thing of the past, but anyone in a sensitive position is still a potential target of espionage blackmail.
Ego, excitement, thrill, arrogance—call it what you want to. Lots of people spy because it’s so much fun, even when other motives play a partial role. Robert Hanssen is a prime example. An FBI agent who spied for the Soviet Union, he was involved in what was called “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history.” He was truly propelled by his own cockiness. Jonathan Pollard was another one. A civilian American intelligence analyst, he was convicted of selling secrets to the Israelis, but he couldn’t imagine that someone as brilliant as he was could ever get caught. Christopher Cooke, a U.S. Air Force lieutenant who slipped Titan II missile data to the Soviet embassy in 1981, suffered from the same outsize ego. He was so fascinated with espionage that he could barely stop himself from diving in. At least that was what he told unsympathetic investigators.
So what was going to be my motivation? Was I an M, an I, a C, or an E? I had to have something. It had to be believable, and it had to be me. I was certain that Oleg had read as much about MICE as I had. He knew what to look for. Wasn’t all that restaurant conversation designed to pin this down? He wasn’t just enjoying the cheese stix!
Money was the answer for me. Of all the plausible motives for my treason, money was by a mile the most believable. If I was going to pretend to spy, nothing else felt true enough to act out. I wasn’t an ideologue. I wasn’t an Islamicist any more than my father was. I wasn’t up for endless discussions with Oleg about religion or communism or the glory of the Russian Empire or anything like that. I didn’t have passionate feelings against the United States—quite the opposite, in fact. I didn’t belong to a single subversive organization, unless you counted my fast-driving club. I wasn’t a card-carrying member of anything except maybe the public library and Blue Cross Blue Shield. I didn’t even have a Blockbuster card anymore.
Money was simple. It was clean. I understood money. Like most people, I liked what money could buy. Leisure time. The comfort of my family. And really fast American cars. I thought if I exaggerated my desire for money, it would be something that Oleg could understand. He’d grown up in the Communist Soviet Union. For decades they’d derided Americans for greedy capitalistic ideals. But he seemed to have adjusted to the wide-open capitalistic jag his country now seemed to be on. I suspected he, too, liked money, and he could easily see how I lived—the cars, the clothes, the job—as much proof as he wanted.
As did a lot of real spies, I added some E to my primary motivation. There is something fundamentally arrogant about deciding to commit such a grave act, the kind I was pretending to. Pollard and Hanssen were arrogant. So were most of the others. The real me—and the double-agent me—shared some of that. I couldn’t deny it. Adding a dose of superiority to what I wanted the Russians to believe was my motivation, that was easy. Around Oleg, I constantly wanted to convince him that I was smarter than he was. Lots of times I played the same head games with the FBI. And not for a second did I doubt my ability to outwit both. Like my real-deal role models from espionage history, I knew I was craftier than my trackers were.
That was a character I could play, money-hungry and abundantly sure of myself. It wasn’t me exactly, but it was close enough.
* * *
These movies and books might not have been the perfect teachers. But along with Ted and Terry, they were the teachers I had. Luckily, I had those agents to bounce my self-taught methods off. Before I saw Oleg again, I shared with Ted and Terry what I thought I had learned.
“It’s gotta be about money for me,” I said to the agents, “with a little arrogance thrown in. Nothing else makes any sense. I’m not a Communist. I don’t hate America. I just like stuff. I can’t pretend to be a nuclear physicist. I just won’t be able to pull that off. I can talk about most things. But I can’t convince a genuine subject-matter expert that I know more if I don’t. There’s no way of knowing what secret vaults of knowledge Oleg has hidden away. Wanting money is a story I can always keep straight.”
“I like it,” Ted said.
With their seal of approval, I climbed into the car and got to work.
Once I was out of the apartment and away from the highly observant Ava, I made the switch. Only then could I see firsthand how much about me I’d changed. My demeanor. My strut. My aura. The way I drove. (Okay, maybe not the way I drove. I never drove bashfully.) Though I was unarmed, I had to ooze confidence and display no hint of fear. So even though I wore my regular clothes, left from my real apartment, drove my actual car, and gave the Russians the only name I had, I adopted the mannerisms and personality of somebody who was fully manufactured for Oleg.
To complete my transformation, each time I’d drive to meet Oleg, I had a carefully chosen playlist of music. It really did help to psych me into my new character. On my way there, I listened to a lot of things that amped me up—Jay-Z’s “99 Problems,” M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes,” Audioslave’s “Shadow on the Sun.” On the way home, as I eased back into real Naveed, I would substitute the harder-edged stuff for mellower music to cool me down—Eddie Vedder’s “Hard Sun,” RJD2’s “Ghostwriter,” and a dash of Wilco. “Theologians” was perfect for that.
I’d have a packet of documents at my side, props I could use to enhance my credibility. Those papers gave me the confidence that I had something tangible to trade and the arrogance that my brain was worth more to the Russians alive then dead.
By the time I pulled into a parking spot, I was a different person. Any fear had evaporated. It was like I had flipped a switch. I turned on an almost clinical out-of-body view of what I had to do next.
Yes, playing a double agent was unfamiliar territory, but I didn’t mind the newness of the experience. I was actually wired for it in more ways than one. My technology training served me well: I was used to using new technology. In my industry, that was the expectation. Whether it was a query, a loop, an object, or a select statement, if you understood the basic concepts, it just needed to be applied to the latest format.
It was the same with spying and counterspying. I didn’t know much about espionage. But I knew human nature, and I knew I could learn. This was just another new experience with its own basic concepts and language. And I was learning to adapt.
When I put it all together, I knew I had what it would take to convince the Russians I was the real deal.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
GAINING CONTROL
It was selling time, and the product was me.
When Oleg and I connected in April at Charlie Brown’s in Yonkers, I didn
’t wait for him to quiz me. Over a couple of buffalo chicken wraps, I described my plans for the company, how I was committed to turning a modest family business into an international data and research powerhouse. I had large ambitions, I explained. “Ink on paper is so yesterday,” I said. “The world is going digital, and we should, too.” I said I was committed to grabbing far more of the international market share. “We should be a much bigger business than we are,” I told him. “And I am going to make that happen.”
I expounded proudly for my lunch partner. My ego was bulging! There was money to be made! I was capable of anything!
All this had the advantage of being largely true, even if I wasn’t quite on the edge of world financial domination—yet. As I suspected, sticking with the money story was way easier than railing against oppressive American imperialism or quoting lengthy passages from the Koran. To support my young-businessman-on-the-make persona, I buried Oleg in a stack of Excel spreadsheets showing steady growth and increasing momentum for the company. He seemed impressed. The truth, even somewhat exaggerated, is easy that way. The ambitious business talk came tumbling off my tongue.
I told Oleg I’d been writing new software that would make it easier to keep track of what orders were filled. Everything had been on paper before. It wasn’t easy to get an overview. “Now,” I said, “we’ll be able to track and inventory items using bar code technology, checking every single book in and out.”
I mentioned that we might be hired to digitize some large volumes of technical military data. I talked about the National Defense University and some other projects that were winding up. “As we close out these projects,” I told him, “we’re starting some other new projects you might be interested in.”
“Yes?” he asked. He leaned forward, waiting for more.
“Just as a hypothetical,” I told him, “say you were interested in Tomahawk cruise missiles. Currently, you don’t know what information is available out there, right? I might have access to certain databases. It seems like you are missing a lot of stuff here. Hypothetically,” I repeated, “would you be interested in something along those lines?”
“We might be,” he said. The more I spoke, the fewer chances he had to quiz me about my family, my background, and my personal life. “You are very ambitious,” he told me.
Story, motivation, access—the pieces were coming together one bad lunch at a time.
* * *
Before I met with Oleg again, I had my usual strategy sessions with Ted and Terry. We discussed what I could dangle in front of him. I said I was eager to come up with something enticing—and soon. I teased the agents about who was slower and more bureaucratic, the FBI or Oleg. One day while we were hashing over various possible scenarios, Ted slipped in a question for me, Russian-style: “Oh, by the way, would you mind wearing this watch the next time you meet with Oleg?”
He was holding a large black G-Shock wristwatch with a black Velcro band. It was the kind of watch that a special-ops commando might wear, or a SWAT-team member, or an especially flamboyant rapper. It had a digital readout and a built-in compass and—you couldn’t see this last part unless you turned the watch over—a tiny digital tape recorder secreted inside.
Ted’s request didn’t bother me. The way he put it, I didn’t feel like there was any trust issue with him or Terry or the FBI. All along, I’d assumed they were listening in on my conversations with Oleg. I figured they had the table wired or undercovers sitting next to us or—anything is possible, right?—maybe the waitress wasn’t a waitress at all. Maybe she was a special agent with an order pad.
From here to the end, I knew that surveillance and countersurveillance would be part of my life, even if I never knew when or how. I tried not to become too obsessed with it. I tried to compartmentalize. But I couldn’t help wondering as I went about my daily chores: Is that van on my block following me? Is the couple in the next booth listening in? Maybe. Maybe not. But I discovered eventually that if I wanted to keep paranoia from mingling with observation, I had to keep my frisky imagination on a very short leash. If I had a question or a concern, I couldn’t obsess about it. I should note it, report it, and move on. I wasn’t alone. I did have some professionals on my side.
We joked about the watch. “I have a small wrist,” I told Ted and Terry. “This thing is huge. It looks like a Flavor Flav timepiece, to tell you the truth. You buy it off Flav? Was he selling it on eBay?”
“Hey, it was either this or a key fob,” Ted told me.
“A key fob?”
“Yeah, a key fob. One of those little things that hangs off a key chain.”
“I know what a key fob is,” I said. But there were all kinds. I’d seen teenage girls with Hello Kitty key chains. Grandmas with fobs that opened their 1990 Oldsmobile 98s. “You were gonna put the recorder in a key fob?”
“We could have,” Ted told me. “But we chose to go with the G-Shock instead. I think it’s cooler. They made it just for you. No one else has this.”
On balance, I agreed the watch was better. Jason Bourne never busted anyone with a key fob.
The watch came with a charging station. I had to leave it plugged in so it would be ready when I went to meet Oleg. As far as I know, he never paid attention to the watch at all.
That watch changed many things. In subtle ways, it changed the character I had created. When I started recording our meetings, I felt like I had become a genuine double agent.
“We’ll have to meet with you afterward and download everything,” Ted warned me.
“I understand.”
“Every time you meet with him, you’ll have to record everything,” he said. “Everything you tell us will be verifiable.”
From that day forward, my FBI handlers would know if I was full of shit. I was already confident they believed what I was telling them. They’d invested enough time and energy in me. But I was strangely happy to relieve any doubt that might be lingering. My debriefings had all been on the level, but only as well as I could remember what was said. Now the agents could independently verify any part of it.
There was one other reason I liked wearing the hidden recorder: It would show Ted and Terry how deftly I’d been handling Oleg, what a crafty negotiator I was. (Ego.) I was proud of my talents as a manipulator, and I didn’t mind for one second that the agents would get to hear me in action from now on.
They got an immediate earful.
Oleg called in early June. We met at the El Dorado Diner on Central Avenue in Scarsdale. Before going inside, I made sure no one was watching and did what Ted and Terry had taught me: I removed the watch from my wrist and pressed the two buttons that activated the recorder. I checked to see that a tiny light hidden on the underside was flashing. That told me the recorder was running before I slipped the watch back on.
I carried a stack of papers in my computer bag. I thought it was important to validate for Oleg two specific points: that the business was experiencing an exciting new-revenue spurt and that I was truly in charge. As soon as I settled into the booth, I set the papers on the table between us and, one by one, showed them to him. Contracts. Government certifications. And most of all, copies of the stock certificates that showed my parents had transferred their shares in the company into my name. I was the owner of record.
Oleg shook my hand warmly. “Congratulations,” he said, beaming. “It looks like we have something to celebrate today!” Though he’d grown up in the collectivism of the Communist Soviet Union, he knew that owner was better than worker any day.
He asked me about France again. “France is nice” was all I said.
Then he asked me about Ava. “What is your wife’s name?” he asked.
I didn’t like him asking about her. But I knew it was public record, and there was no point in attempting to evade his question or lie. When I told him Ava’s name, he came back with a follow-up: “Do you have any children?
”
Oleg was quizzing me again and not as gently as before. I didn’t want any part of it, but I told him anyway.
“Well, God is great to bless you with this success,” he said. It was so out of character, so forced. So obviously designed to test if I was Muslim. He was probing to see what might motivate me. I wanted to control that story line. I didn’t want him to. I had to stop the phony-friendly interrogation. Thankfully, my story was thoroughly crafted. For the first time in a public place, I erupted at Oleg. “Look,” I shouted over the clacking plates and shouted orders of the busy suburban diner, “don’t fuckin’ talk to me about my wife.” The waitress glared over. I didn’t miss a beat. “And don’t fuckin’ talk to me about God,” I said. “We are here to do business. I don’t want to talk about my family. We have covered enough of that. Let’s discuss how we can do business.”
Suddenly, I really was in the business. And I got down to it. Remaining deadly serious but lowering my voice, I asked directly, “What can I do for you, Oleg, that you can pay me for? I can’t help you unless you tell me what you want. I’ll tell you if I can do it. I’ll tell you how much you have to pay. You decide. It’s binary. It’s simple and clear. That’s all that matters. That’s all I can do. Anything else, I am not interested in.”
How to Catch a Russian Spy Page 14