When I tried again, it would be different. It had to be. I was at the center of a real-life counterespionage operation against Russian military intelligence. I was the star of my own story, living a real-life undercover spy drama. Couldn’t this be the practical experience the navy had said I lacked? Fooling a senior GRU intelligence officer had to count for something. And didn’t I have the FBI on my side?
When I brought this up with Ted and Terry, they said three things to me. One, it might not be easy. Two, they could not guarantee results or subvert the navy’s procedures. And three, they would try to be as helpful as they could without divulging any more than they were allowed to. The whole process seemed shrouded in mystery. “It’s just one of those difficult situations,” Ted said vaguely. Still, he and Terry vowed to try. And they did.
Just before Thanksgiving 2007, Ted gave me the business card of a recruiter in New York who handled direct commission applicants. Her name was Lieutenant Juli Schmidt. She was, more or less, the New York Lino. Ted said she came from the south shore of Long Island and had attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. She had an office in the same lower Manhattan building as the FBI office, 26 Federal Plaza.
“Hello, Lieutenant,” I said when I got the recruiter on the phone. “My name is Naveed Jamali. I was told to give you a call.”
“Hi,” she said. “I’m glad you called.”
She was friendly and willing to help. She seemed very bright, I could tell that immediately. Annapolis didn’t accept too many idiots.
She never said how much she knew about my recent adventures with the FBI and the Russians, although the agents told me they had met with her and presumably shared some information. She clearly knew I was an FBI referral. I gave her a bare-bones rundown of the navy and me. “I applied to the direct commission program in 2003 and didn’t get in,” I told her. “And I’d like to try again.”
Ever the double agent, I didn’t broach my involvement with the FBI’s counterespionage operation, and she didn’t ask about it. I just mentioned what I’d accomplished since I had last applied to the navy: I was running a $2-million-a-year business, dealing routinely with high-level federal officials on their complex research needs. That should pump up my résumé, I thought.
“Very interesting,” the recruiter said, sounding like she meant it.
But in the vein of nothing worth having ever comes easily, four years had passed since I’d gotten rejected, so I would have to submit a whole new application and go through all the interviews and tests again. “If you’re up for that, we might as well get started,” she said.
“Let’s go,” I said.
She said I should begin with the navy’s basic ASTB, the Aviation Selection Test Battery. I didn’t want to blow it. It had been a few years since I’d had much practice at test-taking. So while the agents and I prepared for my next meet-up with Oleg, I bought a fat test-prep book and crammed like I hadn’t since eighth-grade history class.
The Friday before Christmas, I went down to the recruiting office and took the test on a computer. It was like the dreaded SATs and GREs, except that all the questions now had an aviation and maritime focus. There were drawings of planes at different angles: “Is this plane turning toward you or turning away from you?”
That wasn’t hard. It was impossible! You had to tell the orientation of a plane in a two-dimensional drawing without the benefit of any frame of reference. There was no way to prepare for those types of questions. I was guessing so I wouldn’t run out of time. I felt better prepared for the questions that required math or memorization. Convert knots into miles an hour? That I could do. Name the different parts of the ship—“Which is the starboard side? What’s a foc’sle?”—piece of cake.
As I was clicking away on my starboard and foc’sle, a loud burst of yelling erupted a few feet from me. Terry King, the office coordinator, was on a conference call with recruiting headquarters, and someone was furious that people weren’t joining the call on time. I couldn’t understand why the person was so angry, but I found his shouts a little distracting as I tried to decide whether yet another fighter jet was banking toward or away from me.
I finished my test and took a deep breath. I wasn’t sure if I had made the cutoff. I walked into King’s office and tried to chat him up. “What was up with that call? That guy sounded pissed. What did the navy do to that poor man?” I teased.
“Do to him?” King asked. “Listen, some people just don’t do well under stressful situations. But there is a way to treat people, and I’m pretty sure he’s doing it all wrong.”
He computed the scores and checked them against the required grades. Those few seconds were agonizing. Finally, he threw me a lifeline: “It looks like you did just fine, just fine.”
King seemed relieved that I had made the cutoff. That made two of us. As he filled out paperwork, he told me that some people have a tough time with the ASTB. He mentioned one woman who’d recently started the test on the same computer I had. “We went to check on her, and she was just gone,” he said. “Gone. She’d completed the test, must’ve known she bombed it, and decided, ‘This isn’t for me’—and then she bolted. We never heard from her again. But you don’t have to worry about that. You did fine.”
I wasn’t sure what the ASTB had to do with being an intelligence officer in the navy, except that I had to get past it, and there were about six thousand other tests to go. This was going to be a long, drawn-out process. I went to Navy Operational Support Center, in the Bronx, for my medical screening. I had to do follow-up blood work on Long Island, then back to the Bronx for a hearing test.
The biggest challenge seemed to be finding out what the steps were and getting them scheduled. Invariably, there were cancellations and follow-ups and procedures I hadn’t heard of. If they had a test and it had an acronym, I took it. There was an air of random tediousness to everything. Luckily, Juli seemed to be plugged in to the right people and knew how to keep the process moving.
I was one busy guy. I had a business I was running and all the difficulties that came with that. I had a wife. We were still starting our life together. There were the cars. I couldn’t ignore them. And Oleg, of course. That meant keeping sharp with the split personality. On top of all that, I was applying to the navy again. Some days, I didn’t know where my head was supposed to be and which hat I was supposed to be wearing. Was I the boss? The double agent? The husband? The recruit? The young, fun-loving fast-car enthusiast? Each role demanded something different from me.
To make things even more complicated, although the navy and the FBI were both government entities, they were two totally different worlds. Everything about the navy was highly bureaucratic, with thousands of rules and requirements and endless layers of supervision and no clear answer to anything. By contrast, no one ever told me to study an FBI manual, Chapter 15, Section 10, Paragraph 25, so I would know how to cut my hair or speak to Russians. The agents and I had freedom to maneuver as we saw fit, and nobody was looking over our shoulders, it seemed. Here was the best part: So far, we’d been wildly successful.
While I kept inching my way through Juli’s process, Ted and Terry went off in hunt of some high-ranking allies to help my cause. Ted got me a meeting with naval commander Jeffrey Jones. The commander wasn’t part of the normal recruiting process. He reported directly to a three-star admiral at the Pentagon. I don’t believe he’d ever conducted a reserves-recruiting interview. He was an attaché to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations whose office was at the UN, but he agreed to see me at the recruiting office downtown.
The moment I met him, I understood this was one smooth professional, and it wasn’t just the strong jaw, penetrating eyes, and beautifully tailored dark gray suit. He was scary smart, totally low-key, and as deadpan as the flat-toned comedian Steven Wright.
“I like to get up early,” he announced as soon as I sat down across the desk from him. “Most p
eople get up at five in the morning to make love to their wives. I’m on the road to the office by then.”
He spoke without an ounce of intonation, then waited to see how I would react. I didn’t. This man meant business.
He asked me about my background, my family, where I grew up, where I’d gone to college, what I’d been doing lately, almost everything except what I had done with Ted and Terry. At the same time, I had the feeling that he knew a lot more than he was letting on.
He seemed eager to sell me on the idea of becoming a military diplomat. “You’d be perfect as an attaché,” he told me. “They’ll send you to school. Since you have a French mother and you’ve spoken French your whole life”—thanks, Mom—“you would probably end up in some African country. It’s great. You bring your family. They give you a driver. They’ll pay for school.”
I must have been smiling.
“It isn’t easy to find suitable people for these positions,” the commander continued. “When I go on leave, we have someone fill in for me. He’s a lawyer. Most of the people we have filling in—lawyers, investment bankers, other professionals—are very polished, very cosmopolitan. But they have little idea what it is to do real intel collection, to live in this world. There is a shift in the navy to find people for these roles who are more diverse and more well rounded. You are very polished. I could really see you doing this.”
He said he was set to retire in the next few months and was keen to get his report on me to his admiral before he left: He was driving down to the Pentagon soon and would make his feelings known.
I told him this all sounded amazing to me. “Anything I should be doing now?”
“You can’t apply right out of the gate,” he warned me, trying to reel in some of my let’s-do-this-now enthusiasm. “You have to get into the navy first. But you might look at taking some courses now. You’d find them interesting, I think, and they’d set you up well for the future.”
He told me I should check out the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute. I promised him I would. I told him how much I’d enjoyed meeting him and thanked him for his time.
After I left the office, there was no dampening my excitement. I got Ted on the phone immediately. “My bags are packed!” I announced. “He was trying to sell me on the military attaché program. I would totally be into that. When can I start? He made it all sound so exciting, so cool. Commander Jeff Jones—even the guy’s name sounds cool.”
“Sure,” Ted said noncommittally. Then he steered the conversation back to Oleg.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
WORTHY ADVERSARIES
“You up for lunch?” Terry asked me.
“Sure,” I said. “Where do you want to go?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
Ever since Oleg and I first left the office together, I’d been laughing with Ted and Terry about the Russian’s taste in restaurants. Oleg had the entire New York metropolitan area to choose from. He had a Russian Federation expense account. And yet he always seemed to find his way to the blandest American chains. Someone back in Moscow must have told him, “Cardboard-flavored foodstuffs are what New Yorkers really love!” I’d hoped Ted and Terry would start springing for some first-class New York dining establishments. They had expense accounts, too. Though that never happened, they had shown a knack for finding their way to tasty local joints.
As we drove east from the city in Terry’s Ford Taurus, he and Ted were oddly vague about where we were headed and the purpose of the lunch. “Just a couple of guys you should meet,” Ted said when I pressed him for more details. “You’ll just tell them a little about what you’ve been up to. Maybe they can be helpful somehow, I don’t know. They just want to meet you, that’s all.”
Did this have to do with the Russian operation? Or getting me into the navy? Or were these people relatives of Ted’s and Terry’s who’d always wanted to meet a Pakistani-French-American who liked fast cars? I had no idea. I assumed we weren’t running a random meet-and-greet campaign. We were trying to keep our activities on the down-low. Whatever. I’d taken another day away from my office and was already in the car. I didn’t feel like I had much choice. Plus, it was almost noon, and I was hungry.
Given all the talk about Oleg’s tacky taste in restaurants, I was more than a little surprised when Ted, Terry, and I pulled in to a Chili’s off the Seaford–Oyster Bay Expressway in Bethpage, Long Island. Had the agents gotten their hands on a copy of The Russian Diplomat’s Dining Guide to New York? I knew this couldn’t be the pinnacle of Long Island cuisine.
Waiting at the table for us was an agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The NCIS has a big job to do, investigating and defeating criminal, terrorist, and foreign-intelligence threats to the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. “On land, on sea, and in cyberspace,” as the NCIS agents like to boast. Oh, and on TV, too. Most people knew the organization’s name only as the title of a long-running CBS television program starring Mark Harmon as Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs. The real NCIS agent brought along a former marine pilot who now worked for Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor Terry had mentioned. I knew they had a big facility in Bethpage.
It was a very weird lunch.
After we got our Tex-Mex orders in, the NCIS dude went on for about forty minutes about his diet and exercise regime. “I haven’t had sugar or flour in five years,” he declared proudly. Really, he and Terry should have had a bizarre-eating habits throwdown: Processed mystery meat versus shredded lettuce! May the strangest diet win! The man went on to recount how much weight he’d lost, how low his body-fat was, and what great shape he was in, physically and mentally. He did look lean and healthy, but no sugar or flour, how could it possibly be worth it? Obviously, he had no plans to dive into a Southwest quesadilla—another reason to question why, of all places, we were eating here. I was waiting to see if he scraped all the cheese out of the skillet queso dip when it arrived.
Somewhere along the way, the marine pilot, a pleasant enough guy in his late thirties, got to squeeze in a couple of quick battlefield anecdotes about ditching his helicopter over water and getting picked up by “Pedro, the rescue bird.” If he’d had time to tell the story properly, it might have been interesting. He explained quickly that he went to work for the defense contractor after leaving the marine corps.
Sitting there, I felt trapped in a scene from Dogfight, the River Phoenix movie about the group of marines and their fervent competition to bring the ugliest girl out to dinner: Whoever has the homeliest date wins. The marine pilot was brought by the NCIS agent. I was brought by the FBI. We sat there looking at each other politely and not saying much. Finally, the pilot handed me his business card and said quietly, “You can give that to your friend.” I was more than a little surprised when the FBI agents nodded. That smelled like trouble immediately.
It was the first time I’d seen the FBI involve anyone outside the Bureau or my family—any outsider at all—in what we’d all agreed was a highly secretive relationship between me and my Russian spy. It was also the first I was hearing about me playing human conduit between the Russians and anybody else. Wasn’t the whole idea of a business card to deliver your contact information so that somebody could—oh, I don’t know—contact you? In other words, once I handed Oleg this card, he could reach out directly to Mr. Attack Helicopter Pilot, his badass self. After all my conniving and groundwork, was our active operation moving in a whole new direction—without me?
I didn’t make any promises either way. And since the NCIS agent seemed to have completed his diet-and-fitness lecture, we were all free to leave. We climbed into Ted’s car. They weren’t any more charmed by the NCIS guy than I was. “What a fuckin’ asshole,” Ted said. “We drove all the way out here to hear Mr. Jenny Craig?”
“He only eats the things that I don’t eat, and I don’t eat anything that he does,” Terry said. “Why di
d we meet him again?”
As far as I could tell—and as far as Ted and Terry were willing to hint—the NCIS agent was maybe going to connect the agents to the navy for me, and the marine pilot was some sort of contact for us at Northrop Grumman. It would have been nice if Ted and Terry had mentioned that to me going in. Weren’t we working together? Was something bigger at play?
“Why should I give that card to Oleg?” I asked. “Am I the cutout here?”
The agents looked a little startled by my question. “The cutout?” Terry asked.
“I can see how this goes,” I said. “I give the card to Oleg. The two of them start talking. He becomes Oleg’s new connection. Oleg goes with this guy. They don’t need me anymore. I am left high and dry, cut out of the entire operation. What value does any of that have to me?”
“That’s not anyone’s intention,” Ted answered. “The marine is just a contact for us at Northrop Grumman. He might help us get some stuff if we need it.”
“Why should I do this?” I said. “You told the NCIS guy we need to get in to Northrop Grumman, and he decides to send in some military guy who’s already on the inside, and squeeze me out. Suddenly, I’m yesterday’s news.”
How to Catch a Russian Spy Page 16