“Green Kryptonite?” he asked. “What are you, some kind of superhero?”
“No,” I told him, “although I am thinking of starting a line of capes.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He looked at me a little quizzically. But from what I’d seen on bulging biceps, beefy necks, and hairy backs around New York, people made all kinds of strange requests at local tattoo parlors.
“All right,” he said, “I can do that.”
I didn’t know Morse code. And I didn’t expect the tattoo guy to know it, either. So the night before, I’d gone online and found a Morse-code chart and carefully mapped the letters out: dash-dash-dot for G, dot-dash-dot for R, dot for E, dot for the second E, dash-dot for N, and so on.
He bandaged my arm, and Ava and I headed home.
On the way back, she asked me, “Did you think this through, Naveed?”
I just looked at her and answered, “Do I ever?”
I said nothing to the agents about my new tattoo. I hadn’t asked Ted and Terry for permission beforehand. They would have objected. As far as I was concerned, they weren’t going to tell me what I could put on my body. And I had to admit, keeping a secret from them felt good.
I’d have to be doubly careful around Oleg. Long-sleeve shirts from now on at Pizzeria Uno! My first bet was that he wouldn’t recognize the dots and dashes for what they were, even if he had learned Morse code in his school days. And what if he did crack my tattoo code? I could only imagine the questions the Russian might ask: What is this Green Kryptonite? Why is the kryptonite green? Are you Superman? There I’d be, trying to explain to him how Green Kryptonite was my nickname in college or that his mom and I got matching tattoos.
Call me immature if you want to. Call me impetuous. I’ll plead guilty. I even went on Facebook and threw up a picture of my freshly tattooed arm with the obnoxious caption “Getting inked up, yo!,” provoking my friend Benjamin Dash to comment: “You what? You got a tattoo? I hope you spelled my name right.”
I had done my share of boneheaded things in my life, but I’m not sure that anything was quite the equal of getting my secret FBI code name tattooed onto my arm, then bragging about it on Facebook—with photographic proof!
But that’s where my head was. That tattoo was my little F-U to everyone. It was like I was rebelling against my parents all over again. You can’t tell anyone, you can’t tell anyone, you can’t tell anyone—after a while, you almost have to tell someone, even it’s a biker-looking guy at a New York tattoo parlor who doesn’t understand what any of it means. I think that’s a normal human response to stress. It was my response, anyway.
Ava hadn’t said she thought getting a tattoo of my secret code name was a great idea. But she hadn’t fought me, either. She knew almost everything. After the maxi-pad incident, keeping secrets from her seemed almost as dangerous as Oleg figuring out what I was up to.
I did wonder what my parents would think of their Harvard-dropout son getting a tattoo. But they’d never connect my dots and dashes to what they’d started so long ago with the Russians. They had inklings, I’m sure, that my relationships with both the agents and the Russians had gone far beyond those they’d had. But they never asked me to tell them how far. I didn’t think they really wanted to know. I didn’t want to involve them. But that also left me feeling very much isolated and invisible.
I’m not complaining. But it can be more than a little rattling, living inside a compartmentalized cone of silence—hiding so much from friends and family, putting in the hours of painstaking prep, avoiding the inevitable questions about my peripatetic whereabouts, strictly maintaining my triple identity. Triple because it wasn’t just my double-agent double identity I was expected to keep straight. I was one person with Oleg. I was another person with the FBI. And I was yet another person with everyone else in my life. Sometimes I had a little trouble remembering what was real and who was me. If you think that isn’t disorienting, you try it sometime.
I had my Green Kryptonite tattoo. I was hoping I would never need one that said “Naveed Jamali.”
CHAPTER 19
* * *
PARKING GARAGE
I certainly wore long sleeves for when I met Oleg again. The last thing I wanted was Oleg eying my Morse-code tattoo as I handed over the Northrop Grumman cockpit manuals.
It was the early part of April—two months since our last short phone call—and he seemed unusually skittish. Oleg liked to control things. I understood that. But my Craigslist suggestion seemed to have rattled him far more than I’d anticipated. I told the FBI agents that I thought I’d scared him off completely. Really, Craigslist was just a way for me to reach him in a hurry, but he seemed to have interpreted it as my setting him up.
Whatever he was thinking, it didn’t keep him away from the bundle of goodies I’d been promising. He came back to me with his own new idea.
Instead of getting together at a restaurant or a coffee shop like we usually did, this time he said he would leave his car in the city and take the train to Westchester. That was fine with me. I didn’t care how he arrived, just so he came. The FBI had completed their meticulous examination of the Northrop Grumman NATOPS cockpit manuals and delivered the blue binders to me. I was itching to make the long-awaited handoff. I suggested to Oleg that he get off at the Metro-North station at Hastings-on-Hudson. I would pick him up there, I said, being doubly cautious about how I handed the manuals to him.
“It’s always good to be careful,” he said.
I had traded in a black 2007 Acura RDX, which I hated, for a 2008 Jeep Cherokee. Six months with the four-cylinder Acura had made me hunger for the four-door version of a muscle car.
The picturesque train station offered water views but little privacy. Instead of bringing the fat blue binders in the Jeep with me, I decided I would stash them in an out-of-the-way location and bring the Russian there. I’d let him inspect the binders, then hand him a tiny black thumb drive that contained the same material and would be a whole lot easier to carry back to the city. For our rendezvous, I chose an auto-storage warehouse on the east bank of the Hudson, barely a two-minute drive from the train station. I knew the place because I had stored my cars there. I figured I’d park the Corvette inside, leave the binders in the trunk, and pick Oleg up at the train in the Jeep. Then we’d drive to the warehouse, a giant brick garage without much in-and-out traffic, a perfectly discreet spot to hand everything over.
The early part of my plan went smooth as butter. We met at the train station. We drove to the garage. We easily got inside. I found my way to the parked Corvette.
Yes, there’d been a couple of bumps, literally and figuratively. The radar detector started squealing. I almost killed Oleg with the car trunk—or thought I had.
But the transfer got done, and I didn’t cause him any permanent brain damage. If anything, our trust seemed to be restored by that day.
“I like the way this is developing,” Oleg said to me before I dropped him back at the train station with a tiny black thumb drive in his pocket.
“Me, too,” I said.
And I think both of us meant it.
* * *
My relationship with Oleg was never quite a straight line. The super-spy rush I’d be feeling would evaporate when I didn’t hear a word from him for weeks or months at a time. Sometimes this drove me crazy. Before I knew it, I was channeling my inner Ronald Reagan, asserting my need to dominate him. I swear, the American red-baiters got at least one point right: You’ll never get anything from the Russians if all you do is equivocate. Strength and directness are what these people understand. Oleg obviously cared about working me and keeping me cooperative. He never stopped treating our relationship like a chess match. He didn’t mind having a strong opponent as long as he felt he was one move ahead and the game didn’t come to a stalemate.
So what was the proble
m with the FBI? Why were they so poky and unfocused? Maybe I needed to be as clear and frank with the agents as I was with Oleg. I half wanted to slam my shoe on the table like Nikita Khrushchev, or dust off my best Reagan imitation: “We begin bombing in five minutes.” After all the time and effort, my patience was running thin. This had to start paying dividends. And soon.
I met Ted and Terry in Riverside Park. It was early but already hot in the park. They were both dressed casually. It was the first time I’d seen Ted wearing his badge on his belt clip. Was that his way of flashing an “I’m in control” message to me?
“This is a lot of work on my end,” I complained. “It’s getting to the point that I’m having trouble justifying it. The returns just aren’t there for me. It is expensive. It is time-consuming. I don’t mind using the company to a degree. But the amount of work to process half a dozen books for Oleg is a waste of money. It’s a hundred-and-fifty-percent profit, but it comes out to like a hundred bucks. People in the office are starting to wonder why we’re doing this.”
Those were legitimate questions. But my lament went deeper than the paltry return on my time. I’d be willing to expend the time and energy and more if we could move along reeling in the espionage prize. When were we going to dangle something huge in front of him? When was he going to take the bait? I wanted to be a bigger double agent, not a book snitch. I needed something real to pass to him. I didn’t know how much longer I’d be able to hold his interest. “This all seems so piddling,” I told the agents. “For what we’ve done, we could have left things where they were when my parents were around.” I wanted some sort of conclusion, or at least some sort of action. I knew the famous John le Carré quote from The Russia House: “Spying is waiting,” the narrator Harry de Palfrey says. But all this waiting was getting to me.
The agents took an understanding tone. “Of course,” Ted said. “It’s a lot of work. It’s totally understandable the stress this puts on you and puts on the business. I am very grateful for that. We’re very grateful.
“These things take time,” he went on, as if it were the first time I’d heard this sales pitch. “If you rush it, their suspicions will be raised. They’ll wonder why you’re so desperate to help them. We’ve been pacing it just about right, I think. It’s important that they be the ones who are driving this. It’ll happen. It usually does.”
I appreciated the acknowledgment. It sounded genuine. But while Ted counseled patience, as he’d done countless times before, I was running out.
“Look,” I said, “I get that. I want to help you guys. I understand nothing happens instantly. But there are limits. You have to be respectful of my time. You are expecting me to be here and do this no matter how long it takes. I want to do that, I want to be involved, but I feel like it isn’t taking the course I expected.”
From what I read, I had the impression that things were escalating between the United States and the Russians, and I was sitting off to the side. “It’s like the Russians keep messing with us,” I said. “Did you see that story in the New York Times?” I had printed it out: “Factory Visit Tied to Ouster of Attachés from Russia,” by C. J. Chivers. I handed the printout to Terry.
“The Russians just threw out two American attachés,” I said. “They granted them permission to travel outside Moscow. Once the attachés reached wherever it is they were going, the Russians revoked their permission to travel and threw them out of the country for traveling without permission.”
Ted and Terry laughed. “These guys are bastards,” Ted said. “They rarely play by the rules. When we act, we have all kinds of rules we have to follow. We don’t throw you out until we’ve actually caught you.”
I wanted to steer the agents back to the selfish part—for me. It seemed like we had almost forgotten why I had begun all of this in the first place. “It’s because of the navy,” I reminded them. “Whatever I do with you guys, I want to reference the work for the navy. I want us to achieve something they can look at and say, ‘He did this.’ Do you think we can make that happen? Maybe it’s time we try to get that back in gear.”
Almost on cue, two U.S. Marine attack helicopters came roaring up the Hudson with a couple of Hueys in the mix. They flew in so loud, they almost made the concrete park benches rattle. “You know,” Ted said, “the military is amazing. Every now and then, it is really impressive what we can do.”
“So do you think we can try to rev up the navy process? That would help me justify all this time and effort.”
Ted sounded as soothing as ever and just as noncommittal. “That’s possible,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do.”
While I was waiting, I focused on the success we’d had with Northrop Grumman and the NATOPs manuals. I was still eager to make DTIC a reality. But I couldn’t just walk up to a window at the Defense Department and say, “Hi, I’d like freewheeling access to all of your military, scientific, and technical information.” I needed someone who would vouch for me. I discussed this with Ted and Terry. I knew the authority of the FBI could swing open that access. And it did.
“Our boss, Frank, pushed pretty hard, and we’ve gotten the okay,” Terry told me.
Though I had heard Frank’s name, I didn’t know much about him other than that he was the agents’ supervisor. But I liked his willingness to get behind us. To me, he was Robin Masters, the unseen authority figure on Magnum, P.I.
Under the Books & Research name, I signed a written contract to “provide consultation and research services to FBI Procurement in regards to trends and patterns of federal academic, research, and training institutions on such subjects as catalog management, digitization, and other related topics. The secondary objective will be to provide book and other material procurement services.”
Talk about a mouthful!
Originally, I’d told Oleg I thought the Russians would have to pay me about $10,000 to register on DTIC. It was actually $16,800, and it was paid with a check from the GSA, the United States Government Services Administration. By going this route, I didn’t have to rely on funds from the company or my personal checking account. And I didn’t have to wait for notoriously slow-paying Oleg. As far as he’d know, he owed me a big wad of cash.
Now I had the contract. More important, I had the documentation to prove to Oleg that I had online access to DTIC. An amazing cache of material was waiting for me. There were plenty of mundane charts and memos and reports, but also plenty of files that would have Russian mouths watering.
“Under no circumstances are you ever to give the Russians your DTIC credentials,” Ted warned me. I thought that was a given. I assured him I wouldn’t.
I thought incessantly about how I should present the details to Oleg. Night and day, I asked myself if I were a real traitor, how would I offer something like this? Very carefully, I concluded, focusing obsessively on not getting caught.
I had credentials and permission. I had a license from the FBI, who had paid my ticket aboard. And I had a clever answer when Oleg inevitably asked how I would avoid detection. I knew exactly what to do: I would bury the Russian requests in a batch of innocuous searches. I’d employ the same distraction technique we’d used for buying beer in high school. I would slip it past ’em, hiding my nefarious queries right in plain sight.
I decided to tell Oleg that the documents had to be retrieved in a specific manner, time, and place to avoid detection. That would sound reasonable. It would also protect me from any insistence that I deliver huge armloads of data at a time or hand over my log-in and password.
I discussed all this with Ted and Terry, who reported back to their superiors. There was a real feeling of excitement. We were finally building one hell of a sting to catch some real bad guys.
It was startling how much I had access to, a massive trove of government-funded research. Some of these studies had taken years to complete with seven-figure budgets. The data in any one of them could be
genuinely damaging to United States security. None of this was intended for hostile foreign eyes. With this new access, even the most technical detail seemed potentially powerful.
* * *
On May 29, 2008, I had an eleven-thirty a.m. appointment in Amityville, Long Island, with David Harris. Like Jeff Jones, he was a commander in the navy. Harris was the officer in charge of the New England region for the intelligence reserves. Through some strange quirk of military geography, that region included New York. I’d had to remind Ted about my navy agenda. But he had come through for me and set this meeting up.
One hour before I arrived at the second-floor office, Ted and Terry had already been there and left. When I showed up, the first thing the navy commander said to me was this: “So these guys with suits came in right before you did, saying, ‘We can’t tell you what he is working on. We can’t tell you anything about it. But we can say he’s a very intelligent and bright person.’ I’m sitting here thinking, ‘Now, what I am supposed to make out of that?’ ”
I said nothing. I didn’t have to. Harris continued, “I’m just a simple sailor who spent the majority of his career chasing Chinese and Russian subs. It’s all very interesting, isn’t it?”
I nodded and agreed that it was.
The two commanders I met could not have been more different. As much as Commander Jones was understated, that’s how bombastic Commander Harris was. They even dressed differently. Harris wore a khaki navy uniform, while Jones had come to our meeting in a pressed gray suit.
Listening to the commander, I had the sense that this was a strange way for a top official to start an important meeting. The commander had said his piece in a matter-of-fact manner. He didn’t follow it with any questions or seek additional clarification. He’d just described his exchange with Ted and Terry and left it hanging, as if repeating an annoying comment he’d overheard that morning in Starbucks—although I couldn’t imagine Harris in a Starbucks. He was definitely more the ship-mess-deck type.
How to Catch a Russian Spy Page 19