So far I hadn’t been asked to say a thing. This was, I thought dejectedly, less about meeting with a highly decorated navy man than sitting in an office listening to someone talk about me.
I knew Ted and Terry had tried to help, but they’d been so cryptic with the commander that their visit had raised more questions than it had answered and would only raise suspicions about me. I was sure Harris thought the person he was meeting had to be some kind of criminal. Aren’t those the people who end up cooperating with the FBI? People desperate to get out of jams of their own and strike a deal? I wished that Ted and Terry had made clear that I was never in any trouble, that there was a whole operation and it had been my doing, that I’d been the one to take the initiative with Oleg and the FBI and that even pursuing an appointment to the navy was something I’d started on my own. It seemed I’d wasted a trip to Long Island.
But then, unexpectedly, Harris seemed to put aside the FBI intro and started talking with me. “I can see you’re one of those guys who’s totally into reading a lot of stuff,” he said. “You like to sit back and absorb as much as you can about whatever is happening, someone who wants to understand the root cause of things. Am I right?”
Well, yes, I told him. I’d been imagining what the commander might assume about someone named Naveed Jamali interested in joining the ranks of navy intelligence. Given the odd prep and my Middle Eastern name, I was betting he thought I was tied up in terrorism. I believe I managed to dispel any of that. Whatever preconceived notions he might have started out with, I think he was pleasantly surprised to hear that I was reasonably well read and well spoken and well versed in both military and world events—and most important, after some direct questioning, he knew I had no obvious criminal or terroristic connections. As far as I could tell, he seemed to enjoy our back-and-forth.
That didn’t mean I’d forgotten the awkward opening minutes. As soon as I got out of there, I had to talk to Ted. “Dude,” I said, “you gotta stop showing up in suits, talking to these people in the navy, and saying cryptic things about what I’m doing for you. They’re starting to think I’m a drug dealer or a criminal or a terrorist. If this is help, I don’t want it.”
Ted let me go on, like he often did. After a while, he said, “I get it, but I can’t promise anything.”
* * *
On a sunny Saturday morning in late July, I was summoned to Fort Hamilton, a joint army and navy base on the Brooklyn waterfront, for interviews with the regional selection board. I met Juli in the base parking lot. She led me into a waiting area where six other nervous-looking young men were sitting uncomfortably. These were the other intelligence finalists from the New York area. I had some impressive competition: people who’d actually done stuff. A lawyer. A couple of men with law-enforcement backgrounds. Two air marshals, one of whom had a law degree. One guy was working on his PhD. Several had prior enlisted service in the navy.
Despite the seriousness of the occasion, we had all been told not to wear suits and ties or uniforms. Only one lieutenant, who seemed to know Juli, must have missed the casual-dress memo. He was wearing his navy-issue pressed khakis with several rows of ribbons on his chest. “I told you,” Juli snapped at him loud enough for the rest of us to hear, “they don’t wear uniforms here.”
I sat next to a finalist named Thomas. From a quick glance, I could tell that he and I were the only “ethnics” in the waiting room. He was Indian-American. We bonded instantly.
“So you here for a green-card interview, too?” I asked him.
“No,” he replied without missing a beat. “I’m here to audition for terrorist number three on 24. Is this the right place?”
“I don’t know. But if you and I are seen speaking to each other for another two minutes, we could be considered coconspirators, and the LT over there can legally shoot us.”
With that, we laughed and shook hands. Thomas was my age, recently married, with a young daughter. He had started at the NYPD before becoming a federal air marshal. Like me, he seemed impervious to insult. The fifteen minutes we spent BS’ing that day cemented a friendship that would last for years.
One by one, all seven of us were called into the conference room and invited to take a seat at a long oak table with shoreline views. The last time I had been at a table like this—for my board interview in Boston—I had ultimately lost out to applicants with deeper résumés, many of them boasting strong operational experience. Again, I was up against some seriously credentialed competition, but I was older now. I was running a company now. And I was an actual double agent now, even if we had to be careful in revealing some of the details.
The chairman of the regional selection board, Captain Gary Golomb, didn’t ask me a lot of technical questions. He didn’t want to know what a foc’sle was or show me any drawings of turning planes. He seemed interested in talking about current events. He asked for my opinion about U.S. relations with Iran. We got into a long discussion of one element of the Bush Doctrine, the notion that a nation harboring terrorists is just as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be held just as responsible when it comes to a U.S. military response.
The Bush Doctrine wasn’t really invented by George W. Bush. Similar arguments were made in the “Red October” days of the Cold War against the Soviet Union and their proxy states. But it’s been a key concept in America’s effort to combat asymmetrical threats since 2001—plausible deniability, WMDs, the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11—and it keeps coming up. Terrorists exist because states allow them to exist by not trying to stop the extremists and by providing material aid.
I love talking about that stuff, and it showed. As I expected, the board didn’t ask me anything at all about my activities with the FBI and Russians.
I was thrilled. I was still in the game.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
GRILLING OLEG
That Sunday morning was especially humid, one of those days when, the minute you climb out of the shower, you are instantly sweating again. The window unit in our prewar apartment didn’t have a chance. It didn’t help that my throat felt scratchy. I was getting a cold. But I loaded up on Sudafed D, called Ted and Terry, and let them know I was on my way to Long Island. “I’m not feeling great,” I told Terry, “but I’m going anyway.”
There are no paid sick days in the espionage business.
This was June 22, the second-longest day of the year. My meeting with Oleg was scheduled for noon. This time around, he hadn’t slipped me a business card. He’d given me a take-out menu. I preferred that, actually. I could give some advance thought to what I’d like to order.
We were going to Vincent’s Clam Bar in Carle Place. Vincent’s, I learned from the menu, was known for generous portions of baked clams and a “world-famous” tomato sauce. The place traced its roots to a family-style restaurant that opened in Manhattan’s Little Italy in 1904. It had to be better than Oleg’s usual diners and Pizzeria Unos. At Vincent’s, I figured, they could pour that famous red sauce over everything.
I had several pressing matters to discuss with Oleg that had come up since we’d met in April. I wanted to bring him up to date on my interview with Commander Jeffrey Jones from the U.S. Mission to the UN. I knew he’d be impressed by that.
I’d asked Ted and Terry if I could show Jeff’s business card to Oleg. They’d told me that would be okay. But most of all on that sticky day in June, I was eager to show the Russian the insides of DTIC and explain to him all the material I could retrieve. I knew DTIC wasn’t just the best move we had. It was the only move. I was itching to dangle the database in front of Oleg and see how he responded.
I decided to drive the big black Jeep. The ’vette could get you into trouble and out of it—fast. But it wasn’t happy sitting still. Even idling, that car sounded like a pounding bass drum. It was one mean-looking sports car. And people noticed it. Despite its size and profile, I knew t
he Jeep would attract far less attention in a Long Island suburban strip-mall parking lot than my high-idling, low-to-the-ground Corvette Z06, with its aggressive camshaft and the lights and badges all blacked out.
I brought along my laptop, a Lenovo T60, made by the Chinese company that had bought IBM’s personal-computing division. I also brought a 3G wireless air card and a battery charger in case the Lenovo needed a boost. Most important, I had a big stack of papers for Oleg.
That was one of the lessons I had learned from my time in both the university and business worlds. People want stuff: papers, reports, printouts, documents, certificates, directions—almost anything. This was true of Oleg. It was also true of the FBI. I liked to bury all of them in paper. It made them feel better. Somehow, all that paper made things seem more serious. When people walk away from a meeting with something in their hands, they can review it quietly later. They can double-check their faulty memories. They can explain things to their superiors and colleagues. They have actual evidence that they were there.
I took the Throgs Neck Bridge to the Cross Island Parkway to the Long Island Expressway to the Northern State. That was the best and quickest route I knew to Long Island from upper Manhattan, though it was busy even on a Sunday morning. Vincent’s was just across Old Country Road from the Roosevelt Field Mall, in a satellite shopping strip, between Toys “R” Us and Petco. We were a long way from Little Italy.
I pulled into the parking lot and pushed the record button on the watch, then climbed out of the Jeep and headed into the restaurant. The lights were low inside. The air-conditioning was humming. Oleg was waiting for me near the bar. “Hey, how are you?” he asked. “Is this okay?”
“This place looks great.” I left the rest of the sentence in my head: compared to the chain dumps you’ve been taking me.
“You want to sit down?” he asked.
“Sure.”
The hostess sat us dead center in the dining room. The place was two thirds full, I’d say, a pretty good crowd for noontime Sunday.
The waitress brought us a basket of focaccia and poured some olive oil onto a bread plate. We ordered our lunches—eggplant Parmesan for me, fried calamari for Oleg. Surprisingly, the focaccia was excellent, but the conversation grew tense right away.
“Shall we talk about DTIC?” I offered brightly. Even before I had a chance to explain the extensive reach of the defense-technology database, Oleg began asking questions that made me think he might be running a recorder of his own.
“Tell me what you’re offering to do,” he said.
“What do you want me to do?” I answered. “You want me to get you stuff, right? Things that you’re interested in.”
“What kinds of things can you retrieve with this?” he asked.
“It depends on what you want,” I said noncommittally. This back-and-forth felt more like an exercise than a conversation. Was he trying to get me to incriminate myself without offering anything in return? I started to feel uncomfortable.
I watched Oleg’s face carefully, trying to get a read, paying special attention to the Russian’s eyes. What was he thinking? As I stared, I couldn’t help but recall the day in 2001 when President George W. Bush said he’d looked into the eyes of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Bush said he’d seen the soul as “very straightforward and trustworthy.”
I can’t say that’s what I saw in Oleg’s eyes. I was more aligned with Arizona senator John McCain, who reacted to Bush’s observation with a sneer: “I looked into Mr. Putin’s eyes, and I saw three things—a K and a G and a B.”
“I can show you the kinds of things I have access to,” I said to Oleg.
KGB, SVR, GRU—it didn’t matter. This was my day to outmaneuver Oleg. I pulled out my stack of papers. I showed him a copy of my registration for DTIC. I showed him a couple of screenshots of the DTIC search engine. I showed him a list of the many libraries that DTIC had access to. I kept my voice low. A crowded family restaurant wasn’t the best place to conduct a full sales presentation on top-secret military data. But I didn’t mind giving a small taste. I hoped he was impressed enough to recognize the value.
“I’d like to move forward,” I told him. “But there are a couple of things we have to resolve first.” Taking charge was the best way to mask my uneasiness. “You have to pay me. You still owe a balance. If we’re going to move forward, you have to settle that.”
He looked at me blankly. Was he truly confused or just negotiating? Negotiating was my bet. And that pissed me off.
“There is significant risk involved,” I said sternly, not giving him the opportunity to slip in another question. “I need an understanding here. We need a business plan. There has to be a benefit for me. You have to pay for the DTIC registration fee. I’m starting to feel stiffed.”
I knew the FBI would eventually get me repaid for the money I’d put out. But Oleg didn’t know that. Cheap as he was, he would understand cheapness from me and assume I wouldn’t want to be floating money to the Russian Federation. They were a semimajor world power. I was just a little guy in New York.
“I can pay you some money now,” he said. “But I’d like to get a better sense of—”
“No better sense,” I cut him off. “I put myself at risk. We had an understanding. I’d like to get compensated for my time. If you want to go forward, know this: I am not going to get into a relationship where, every time I meet you, we have to discuss whether you’re gonna pay me or not.”
I sounded angry. That was my intent. But Oleg wasn’t backing down.
“You have to understand,” he said, “we want to do business. But I need to see what kinds of things we can expect. Tell me what you’re offering to do.” He handed me a receipt. “And you have to sign this receipt.”
That set me off even more. There’d been times when my anger had been a carefully orchestrated act, but not this time. Could he possibly be serious?
“I’m not gonna sign a fuckin’ receipt,” I told him louder than I intended. “You want me to sign a receipt for you saying I’m doing this? This is treasonous. You go to jail for the rest of your life for doing this shit. How do I even know who you are? How do I know you’re not a cop? How do I know you’re not working for the FBI?”
I caught my mistake as soon as the words slipped out. Stupid! But I didn’t give him a second to focus on it. “It seems like you’re trying to trap me,” I finished.
He looked around nervously, checking to see if my outburst had attracted any unwanted attention. Clearly, he wished I wouldn’t talk like that in such a public place. He was right about that part. I needed to calm down. It might be better, I thought, to lower the temperature, mine especially. I needed a minute to collect myself and think. Call it a stall if you want to. Sometimes a short stall is good. The point of this whole meeting, after all, was to show DTIC to Oleg and get us started with the federal military database. Whatever provocative things he might be saying, I didn’t want to derail us. So I threw Oleg a curveball.
“Show me your ID,” I demanded.
Oleg hesitated.
“I’d like to see ID that says you work for the UN,” I said. “I’d like to know.”
He sighed aloud and smiled like a man who’d seen the first spear of light in a dark, dense forest. This was a demand he could answer. He opened his wallet and removed two laminated plastic cards. “Of course, of course,” he said. “This is my UN ID. This is my residential ID.”
I looked at the identification cards. They looked legit to me, as I’d expected them to. If he hadn’t been the real deal, the FBI would have known. But I’d dialed the tension back and maybe thrown him off for a moment. I handed them back to Oleg.
My cold was really kicking in. My throat was getting scratchier. I was feeling feverish. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
I got up from the table and
walked to the men’s room. When I finished at the urinal, I went to the sink and started splashing water on my face. As I toweled off, a thin man came in. He was in his forties and had sandy hair. Something seemed odd about him. He didn’t say anything, so I didn’t hear any accent. But he definitely looked Russian to me. The man stopped on his way to one of the stalls, turned, and stared for several seconds at me. Was I being paranoid? Why did I feel like I was being followed? Maybe I was. Without reacting at all to him, I went back to the table and sat with Oleg. Our lunches had arrived.
“When we’re finished, we’ll go outside,” I told him. “I’ll show you some things I have for you on my laptop.”
We ate in silence, and although the food was good, we both wanted the meal to be over with as quickly as possible. Oleg finished his calamari first and stood to leave. I put down my fork and followed. On the way to the door, he handed the waitress several folded bills—I couldn’t see how much—and said, “This should cover it,” hardly slowing his stride. He and I walked out into the sauna of suburban Long Island to my even hotter black Jeep. The moment he climbed inside, I threw the air conditioner on full blast and drove out of the parking lot in search of somewhere quiet we could talk. The unpleasantness in the restaurant didn’t change a thing: I was still eager to show him what we could do together with DTIC.
CHAPTER 21
* * *
THUMB DRIVE
“Why don’t we go into the parking garage,” Oleg said.
The garage was on the mall side of Old Country Road. After I pulled the Jeep past the entrance, Oleg said, “Drive up to the second level.” From there, he directed me to an empty spot a third of the way down the left row: “Pull in here.”
How to Catch a Russian Spy Page 20