How to Catch a Russian Spy

by Naveed Jamali

  I didn’t know what else to say. Terry seemed to be struggling with his desire for strict adherence to FBI rules and standards. It was Ted who tossed me a small life preserver.

  “There’s a guy in our office,” he said. “He’s about to retire. He’s one of those guys of indeterminate background. He could be Lebanese. He could be Hispanic. You just don’t know. He wears open shirts down to his belly button. Chest hair hanging out. He worked undercover for decades. He’s one of the most prolific undercover guys we have. And he doesn’t get drug-tested. There is an understanding—an expectation, I guess you’d call it—that at some point he might have to solidify the trust of the people he’s dealing with by sampling illegal drugs. This is really not so different than that.”

  I appreciated Ted telling me that story. It was a comforting analogy. There was an agent who would have understood why I had to give Oleg that document. I wanted to meet him before he retired. I almost wanted to hug him.

  “We understand,” Terry said, sounding a little calmer but no less concerned. His tone, I realized, was all business. “Listen, we’re gonna do a little damage control. The first thing we need is to get the name of the document and any other details you have.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I have everything.”

  “We’ll have to figure out what was in there,” Terry said. “We’ll have to let some people know.”

  It was only when I went back into my laptop that I saw this printed at the bottom of the document I’d let Oleg remove: “Under 22 U.S.C. 2778, the penalty for unlawful export of items or information controlled under the ITAR is up to ten years imprisonment, or a fine of $1,000,000, or both. Under 50 U.S.C., Appendix 2410, the penalty for unlawful export of items or information controlled under the EAR is a fine of up to $1,000,000, or five times the value of the exports, whichever is greater. For an individual, the penalty is imprisonment of up to 10 years, or a fine of up to $250,000, or both.”

  I didn’t know what all those statutes and penalties meant or how, if at all, they might apply to me. I’d seen language like that on plenty of government documents, many of which were totally innocuous. But in the frame of mind I was in, it was all a little rattling.

  “Fuck,” I told the agents, “I can’t believe I gave him that document.”

  We finished our debrief with me handing over the watch. Ted and Terry would take it back to the office like they usually did and download the audio. “We’ll turn it around as quickly as possible,” Terry said. “We’ll see where things stand.”

  * * *

  As I walked home from the Marrakech, the adrenaline of the past couple of hours was wearing off. The head cold had settled in fully. I was feeling shitty and sorry for myself. With each block north, my self-protective anger was turning more into despair.

  I can’t believe this, I thought. They are trying to motherfuck me. I take all the risk. The minute there is something questionable, they’re ready to throw me under the bus—then take turns backing over me. I was Matt Damon confronting Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed: “Just fuckin’ kill me.” I had gone from being the ally of a powerful agency to thinking the agency might turn on me. I’d gone from being livid to thinking maybe I had no one to be mad at but myself.

  I walked into the apartment. I threw my stuff down. I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, all hot. I shut the door and let the room fill with steam and lay on the floor.

  A few minutes later, the door opened. Ava walked in with me on the floor and the bathroom filled with steam. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  It was all I could do not to cry. “I screwed things up,” I said. “I can’t believe it. I fucked this up.”

  “Just tell me what happened,” she said.

  I told her all about Oleg and the thumb drive and Ted and Terry and how they’d reacted and how I was pretty sure I had ruined everything.

  She just stood there, hands on her hips, looking stern. “That’s it?” she finally said. “That’s what you’re worried about? Look, if they’re gonna pull the plug, they’re gonna pull the plug. You’ve done more than most people would have. More than most people would do in a lifetime, in a hundred lifetimes. You’ve had a great run. But this operation isn’t real life, not our real lives.”

  “But I really don’t want it to end yet,” I said. “I’m not ready. If it’s gonna end, I want it to end on my terms.”

  “Naveed,” she said sharply. “With all the work you’ve done for them, do you really think they’re gonna pull the plug? What would they gain by that? This may be a game to them, but it’s an important game. This is all about manipulation. I’m completely confident this is not the end of the story. By the time it’s over, something big is going to be achieved. I promise you. I don’t know what, but it will be.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Ava wasn’t finished. “But you have to look at this for what it is,” she said. “There is no future in this. There is no career. You have to find a way to be at peace with that. You do this because you want to do it. But it will end when it will end. You won’t have control over that. This doesn’t define who you are as a person. This is just something that you did.” Ava’s voice softened, “I promise you, Naveed, this won’t be the only accomplishment in your life.”

  I stared glumly into the steam.

  * * *

  Early Monday morning, while I was driving to the office in Dobbs Ferry, Ted got me on the phone. He sounded a couple of notches more serious than he had the day before.

  “You know,” he said, “they can do bad things with thumb drives. They could have put something on your laptop that lets them trace everything you do on there. We need your computer.”

  I pulled over to the side of the road. “I don’t want to give you my computer,” I said. “I don’t understand what the problem is.”

  “We need your computer,” Ted said again.

  “I don’t want to give it to you.”

  It was my computer. I used it for my real work. I brought it home at night. I had personal things on there. I had my mail. My banking. Personal stuff. This seemed invasive to me, to have someone looking into my life like that. I wanted to know that, if I ever wanted to walk, I could walk. This felt just like Oleg asking me to sign a receipt: Sign here if you want to be caught doing something illegal. From the start, I had thought of myself as the agents’ civilian partner. Now I was feeling more like their target.

  “Are you saying I have to? You’re going to force me to?”

  “Look,” Ted said, “no one wants to go down that road. Let’s do this the friendly way.”

  What was the alternative? Bright lights and rubber straps? Weren’t we all on the same side? Again, I didn’t feel like I was being given much of a choice.

  No one threatened me directly, certainly not Ted or Terry. But I was definitely being told there were no other options. They never said explicitly what would happen if I refused to turn over my computer. But isn’t the fear of the unknown always greater than the actual thing?

  Finally, I agreed to give it to them. And they agreed to take it for one day, image it, and give it back to me.

  I got to the office and did what every perp in history has done when he thinks someone is coming after his computer: I spent the rest of the day trying to wipe everything clean. I deleted my personal email. I removed the battery. I disconnected the laptop from my work and home networks. I formatted the hell out of the whole machine, which I knew was unlikely to make much difference but I did anyway. They’re the FBI. They can retrieve anything they want to without much trouble, even data that’s been theoretically deleted or overwritten. I went through the motions anyway. I had to assume the Russians had compromised the laptop. I would have preferred to trash the hard drive the second I got home.

  I met Terry at Ninety-fifth Street on June 27. He gave me a piece of paper that looked like a warrant
. It wasn’t. It was more like a please-and-thank-you warrant.

  The document was quite specific. “Agents will take possession of the computer for a period of one day,” it read. “Two copies of the hard drive will be generated. There will be a review of the imaged drives. The FBI will search for any evidence of a potential computer intrusion by a foreign intelligence service.”

  “Voluntary surrender,” the document said at the top. But none of it felt very voluntary to me.

  CHAPTER 23

  * * *

  HOOTERS

  Had one tiny thumb drive changed everything? The agents returned my laptop in twenty-four hours. They didn’t seem to find anything troubling on it. But in the days that followed, no one seemed to know where anything stood—least of all Ted, Terry, or me. We were in a holding pattern of some sort. We just didn’t know exactly what was being held and for how long.

  “What do I do if he gets in touch with me?” I asked. “What do I say when he calls?”

  No one seemed to know. Only one thing seemed to be sure. “You are not to bring the computer,” Ted emphasized.

  He’d said it more than once, and it was starting to feel a little insulting. After what had happened, did anyone really believe that I’d put myself back into such a risky situation? Even a child doesn’t touch a hot stove twice.

  I was itching to get back to whatever normal was. I hated having heard nothing from Oleg since handing him that document on my thumb drive. If he’d been testing my willingness to hand over anything he chose from DTIC, I guessed I’d passed. But then he went radio-silent. It was nerve-wracking.

  Finally, he called and said he wanted to meet with me. We already had the location.

  “I’m good to meet him?” I asked Terry.

  “Go” was all he said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, what am I gonna show him when I see him?”

  “Just don’t bring your computer,” Terry told me. I’d already agreed to that. “Print out some documents and show them to us first. Our people want to see anything before you give it to anyone.”

  I didn’t appreciate the not-so-subtle reminder that I’d given away a report without authorization. I had worked with preapproved paper plenty of times in the past. If I didn’t have the actual DTIC database to dangle again, at least I would have something.

  I chose a shady spot in the empty parking lot behind Hooters. Even at eleven-thirty on Sunday morning, it was August-hot along the strip-mall paradise of Route 23 in Wayne, New Jersey. I took a moment in the Corvette’s AC to pull myself together before meeting Oleg. I double-checked the papers I had brought along. The most important one was a fifteen-thousand-dollar invoice for the money he owed me. I pulled up the flap on my G-Shock watchband and pressed the little button to turn the recorder on. But while I was waiting for the red light to blink, I saw Oleg striding purposefully toward my car.

  Oh, shit! I thought. I’m not sure the recorder is on.

  I quickly lowered my arm to my lap, smiled, and opened the door. I was greeted by casual Oleg—jeans, a brown-and-green polo shirt, and large aviator sunglasses. He looked trimmer than he did in his boxy sport jackets. I hardly recognized him without a trench coat.

  The casual attire had a reverse effect on me. I greeted him with an extra dose of formality. “Hello, Oleg. How are you?”

  “It’s going well,” he said, big smile as usual.

  I had been to Hooters once before. The chicken wings were spicy and the waitresses, too. Our server, in her orange short shorts and low-cut white tank top, gamely tolerated my asshole idiot friends. I suppose that’s the whole point of Hooters.

  Before heading inside for the breastaurant’s world-famous hospitality and provocative views, we lingered next to my car in the steamy parking lot and talked some business. Oleg told me that his people in Moscow had finally had a chance to review the stack of Northrop Grumman documents.

  “And?”

  “They didn’t find it of any interest,” he told me. “That material has no value to them.”

  I knew the manuals weren’t particularly hot items in and of themselves, but was Oleg messing with me? Was his response a ploy designed to undermine my confidence?

  Yes and yes. I don’t believe he could help himself.

  “But we want to do business with DTIC,” he added quickly.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Oleg wasn’t done. His friends in Moscow had given some thought to how I might be compensated for my DTIC research. “Here is how we would like to move forward,” he said. “We have a proposal.”

  I thought we already had an understanding, if not an ironclad deal—the same one that had generated Oleg’s unpaid bill. With the Russians, no deal was ever fully done. I kept learning that lesson over and over.

  “This makes no sense, Oleg,” I told him. “We had an agreement at the last meeting. You already owe me money. Now you’re telling me we’re gonna negotiate that?” Here we still were at step one, two months after I’d explained how he would have to cover the cost of registering for DTIC and how he’d compensate me for everything we got out of that database. I was feeling like a one-man collection agency, but all I could do was roll with it. “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  “You will give me the files,” Oleg said. “I will bring them back. We will analyze them. We will tell you what each file is worth.”

  I couldn’t believe he was suggesting this, although I gave him points for taking a stab at naked American-style capitalism.

  “For certain files,” he said, “we will pay a hundred dollars. For certain others, we will pay several thousand dollars. The files have different values. The payment will reflect what those different values are.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” I exploded. “That is the stupidest idea I have ever heard. I give you a file and wait to hear how much you think it’s worth, and then maybe I’ll get paid? Or maybe I won’t. And you’ll decide how much?” I barely stopped to catch my breath. “Oleg, you don’t understand the risk I’m taking. Not only do I have to maintain access to the DTIC system, I have to hide my searches. I have to embed the work I’m doing for you inside legitimate work so it can’t be discovered. My costs are fixed whether I get you five files or a thousand files. The work is the same to me. The risk is the same to me. The individual files have no value to me. It is the time and risk I am taking on your behalf. Don’t give me this bullshit that you’ll analyze the files and tell me how much they’re worth. I can’t believe you’d even suggest that.”

  As I barreled on, the Russian looked increasingly alarmed. I wasn’t sure whether this was just his next rehearsed move in a long negotiation: Propose something crazy, display concern over the hostile reaction, end up with 50 percent more than you deserve. Or maybe he’d respect me for not swallowing his first tiny dangle.

  “If you want to do business, we’ll do business,” I finished. “If not, you’re wasting my motherfuckin’ time.”

  I really meant it. I was so pissed at him, I was ready to climb back in my car without seeing even one deep-cleavage Hooters Girl and drive straight home to New York.

  Which I would have regretted immediately. I had a larger goal than maintaining my self-respect with a slippery Russian negotiator. In the big picture, it didn’t matter how strong a bargain I drove with Oleg. I had to keep him talking, keep him wanting, then keep him wanting more.

  I remembered what Ted had told me in our earliest conversations. “Be rough with Oleg. Threaten to leave. They have to believe if they don’t treat you right, you really could walk away.” Before joining the FBI, Ted had worked in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, where he dealt with suspects and ran investigative stings. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to be belligerent. Don’t always be agreeable. It’s okay to walk away. If you’ve laid the right foundation, they will always come run
ning after you.”

  I put my hand on the Corvette door and said, “What’s it gonna be, Oleg? We doing business or not?” I held my breath. I was pushing harder than I’d ever pushed and, for the first time, making a deal for something I wasn’t sure I could deliver.

  But Ted was right. Oleg moved my way immediately. “Look, look, look,” he said.

  I lifted my hand from the door.

  “It’s okay, Naveed,” he said. “Calm down. Everything is fine.”

  Oleg reached into his back jeans pocket and removed three envelopes. He laid them on the hood of my Corvette. They were thick. This was money, but I had no way of knowing how much. That was when I handed him the invoice.

  “I want to get paid,” I said. “You say this is all about trust and goodwill. You can’t even settle your bar bill, and you’re trying to do new things? You have my money?”

  “We’ll make this work,” Oleg said. He opened the flap on one of the envelopes. I could see a stack of bills. He handed me that one and the other two. “Here’s something to get started with. It’s eight thousand dollars.”

  I did calm down. “Look,” I told him, “you have to understand. There is a huge amount of risk I am taking here. I could go to prison. I could lose everything. This has to be worth my time.”

  “I understand,” he said. “Why don’t we go inside, where it’s cool, and get something to eat.”

  I put the envelopes in the glove compartment. I made sure the car was locked. I walked with Oleg to the front of the building, then underneath a bright orange awning into the restaurant. Several of the waitresses were milling around the edge of the bar while a hostess in standard Hooters skimpies led us to a table in the middle of the dining room. We’d met in a lot of restaurants, but I found it a little surreal to be walking with a Hooters Girl and a Russian spy to a table. Suddenly, I remembered the scene in Spy Game when Nathan Muir and his protégé, Tom Bishop, are scanning a busy restaurant.