The FBI may also recruit a surrogate, who is a party to a conversation or who works in an office or home, to introduce a Trojan—an almost invisible listening device implanted in a lamp, for example, which is switched for the original. Using photos taken through a window or by an agent posing as an exterminator, a health inspector, or a telephone repairman, TacOps will have fashioned an exact replica of the lamp in the targeted office or home.
However, in most cases, a covert entry is required, offering the greatest gain but also posing the greatest risk of being caught and possibly shot by a homeowner, security guard, police officer, or foreign intelligence officer who thinks the agent is a burglar.
In selecting agents for TacOps teams, the FBI looks for men and women who have relevant experience and have worked undercover, since those agents are good at maintaining a façade. The teams include agents from all ethnic backgrounds to blend into particular neighborhoods.
Of the FBI’s 13,807 agents, about 20 percent are female. They participate in the full panoply of TacOps activities, including conducting covert entries, serving on perimeter surveillance teams, and participating in “quick-react contingency teams” that will rush in to bring a dangerous situation under control.
To give agents plausible cover, male and female agents may walk together, holding hands. However, “Contrary to the James Bond movies, our female agents aren’t allowed nor asked to use sex to manipulate or control a subject,” Grever says. “Flirting and a smile at the right time are perfectly fine, but nothing physical.”
In conducting surveillance, agents may use any type of vehicle—a bucket truck, a Rolls-Royce, or a U.S. Postal Service truck.
Agents are assigned to jobs randomly. “You could be on the Robert Hanssen case, you could be on the Aldrich Ames case, you could be on the John Gotti case, you could be on the Umar Abdulmutallab case or the Zacarias Moussaoui case,” Grever says.
Over the years, the FBI has conducted successful covert entries at the Russian and Chinese embassies or their other official diplomatic establishments, as well as at the homes of their diplomats and intelligence officers. Because of the obvious sensitivity, Grever and other current FBI officials would not discuss these operations. In breaking into an embassy, the FBI may try to develop an insider to help with the entry. Once an entry has taken place, code books or electronic encryption keys used by foreign embassies are the greatest prize.
Agents on the TacOps teams have what are called deep aliases, meaning that if someone runs a check on their driver’s license or social security number, the appropriate agencies would confirm their fictional identity.
“When our operators are home with family, they are simply Special Agent John or Jane Doe, but as soon as they leave the house and particularly when on a job, they become Jim Brown, Hector Garcia, or Andrea Simmons, complete with all the right documents, including alias driver’s license, passport, and credit cards, and all the right stories, including fake family, fake job, and fake history—all fully backstopped,” Grever says.
When returning home, undercover agents make sure they are not being followed. If pulled over for a speeding violation, they would not reveal that they are agents.
Arrangements for undercover operations are made by an FBI program code-named Stagehand. If $2 million in cash is needed as front money, Stagehand provides it. If a yacht or airplane is needed as a prop, Stagehand can provide one that was confiscated in a criminal case.
Stagehand sets up front companies so agents can hand out business cards showing they work there. The companies have real offices staffed by personnel who actually work for the FBI. Stagehand also creates front companies so agents can gain access to a target.
“One day we will be Joe’s Plumbing, complete with a white work truck, company label, uniforms, and telephone number,” Grever says. “If called, FBI personnel will say, ‘Joe’s Plumbing, can I help you?’ Another day it will be Joe’s Survey and Excavation Services, with the same level of backstopping.”
A full wardrobe of about fifty assorted uniforms hangs on racks at the TacOps Support Center. A graphics expert designs custom-made uniforms, fake ID and badges, and wraps with fake signs for trucks. Agents will pose as elevator inspectors, firefighters, or utility workers. Alternatively, they could pose as tourists, wearing shorts and taking snapshots. They could be homeless people wearing tattered clothes. Agents select oversize clothes where they can secrete their tools for breaking in. And they go in with guns drawn.
“Usually we practice cover stories beforehand,” Grever says. “If they confront you, and you give them one cover story, and then they confront me, I may give them something different.”
To avoid ethical issues, TacOps agents won’t impersonate a member of the clergy or a journalist. They may pose as telephone repairpeople or FedEx or UPS delivery people. But they try to avoid posing as an employee of a real company because if they are challenged, “our cover story can quickly break down if someone calls his local FedEx or UPS outlet and asks if we really work there,” Grever says.
If a TacOps agent’s identity is exposed because he or she is called to testify in court about an entry, that agent can no longer serve on the covert entry teams.
The strategy and contingency plans for each break-in are laid out in operations orders. Agents are required to read the court order authorizing the intrusion so they know exactly what they may and may not do.
A successful “job,” as TacOps agents call it, takes weeks of planning—to determine the schedule and habits of occupants, to study the alarms and surveillance systems that need to be defeated, and to plot escape strategies.
Agents from TacOps and from the local field office fall into four groups: a survey group, which scopes out and controls the site; a mechanical group, which picks locks and opens safes and mail; an electronics group, which focuses on computers and BlackBerrys; and a “flaps and seals” group, which concentrates on special techniques the occupants may use to detect intruders. That group is also responsible for “target recovery,” making sure the team leaves behind no sign that agents were there. For one job, more than a hundred agents may be involved.
“We will send agents in, and they will spend days looking at the target, the patterns of life around it, day and night, weekends and weekdays,” Grever says. “We are interested in people’s sleep habits, and when they will be in a deep sleep cycle when a loud noise will not necessarily wake them up. We will track everything because—I’m not being melodramatic—our lives depend on it.”
Sometimes the FBI offers bogus prizes to get occupants to leave the targeted home.
“We give people opportunities to travel and do exotic things,” Grever says. “ ‘You’ve won the lottery! You’ve won a trip, a free dinner! Congratulations, we picked your business card out of a bucket.’ That wasn’t luck. That was us, trying to present an opportunity.”
To cover up noises or divert attention, the FBI may drive garbage trucks through the streets and bang the garbage cans around. They may start up a wood chipper or use a jackhammer to attack a piece of concrete that has been delivered to the location and dumped on the street. They may use high-pressure water jets to clean the sidewalks, sending passersby scurrying. Agents may enlist local police to park their cruisers with lights flashing nearby. Seeing a police car, passersby will assume that the person climbing a ladder to enter an apartment or office can’t be a burglar.
Agents may remotely freeze the view on closed-circuit television so security guards watching for intruders will not see them enter. During the operation, at least one of the agents does nothing but watch out windows or doors to make sure no one is approaching. TacOps agents refer to the period when they are inside an installation or defeating lock systems as the “exposure time.”
While security guards are a problem, “our biggest fear, quite frankly, is innocent third parties such as a neighbor with a key to the premises and a gun,” Grever says. Perhaps a suspect is away for the weekend and leaves his key with a
neighbor.
“The neighbor may be nosy and sit around the home,” Grever says. “If he hears something unusual, instead of calling the police, he tries to defend the neighbor’s property with a gun. That’s when your tennis shoes for running away fast can come in very handy.”
If the neighbor calls the police, that is not necessarily considered a bad thing: The FBI scans police dispatches and usually enlists the aid of local police assigned to joint task forces. Instead of a dispatched police car showing up, an officer in league with the FBI will arrive on the scene and pretend to take a police report. By that time, the agents are long gone.
As a safety precaution, agents bring with them devices that peer under doors. They check for explosives and radiological or biological hazards. In some cases, the purpose of the entry is to determine if suspects are making bombs or developing weapons of mass destruction, as happened during the investigation of anthrax mailings.
Drug dealers will booby-trap their buildings to guard against competitors and thieves. They may rig a lightbulb so that if it’s turned on, it will explode and ignite gasoline or dynamite.
Instead of breaking into an office building or government facility at night, agents may stage what they call a “lock-in.” They hide inside the office building until occupants have left for the evening, then break into the targeted office. They may hide in a telephone utility closet or on top of an elevator. In one such case involving terrorism, TacOps agents rode up and down on top of an elevator for hours.
“The building finally closed up for the night,” Grever recalls. “Surveillance teams outside and in neighboring high-rises where we had rented space could watch and report movements of the night security staff. When the time was right, we called our elevator to the floor just below our target, using controls we can operate remotely by plugging into the elevator command-and-control circuits. Using elevator control keys we have, we opened the doors from the inside and went to work on our targeted suite of offices undetected.”
After the work was done, the agents positioned themselves on top of the elevator again and waited for the building to open in the morning.
“After changing back into our business attire, we walked out with the rest of the people who were visiting that building that morning,” Grever says.
In some cases, agents are delivered to a compound inside a sealed shipping carton. In the middle of the night, like soldiers in a Trojan horse, they emerge and break into the target facility. To break into a home, an agent sealed in a refrigerator carton may be delivered to the front door, where the carton shields him from passersby as he works on the locks.
“We typically construct containers that even the most suspicious freight workers or longshoremen couldn’t open without a lot of effort and time,” Grever says. “Even if they did try to open our container, our emergency action team—FBI agents rushing in with raid jackets on—would be there in time to avoid a confrontation.”
To make sure they are not caught, TacOps assigns field office agents or special surveillance teams to follow occupants of homes or offices—called “keyholders”—to watch them to see if they start to return. If they do, agents tailing them radio that they are heading back and estimate the time it will take them to return. Agents working the premises know their own “breakdown time,” how long it will take them to gather their equipment and leave without a trace.
“If the breakdown time is fifteen minutes and the target is five minutes away, we’ll have a plan in place to slow them down,” Grever says. “Since we’re in our own backyard, we can involve the police, fire department, public health and public safety officials, the sanitation department, the U.S. Postal Service.”
Perhaps there is a “sudden traffic jam,” Grever says. Or there could be an “accident in front of them, or police could pull them over. There could be a little local natural disaster—a fire hydrant is turned on and is flooding the street, and they have to go around the back way.” Letting the air out of tires is another stratagem.
During an entry, one agent is in charge of making sure everything is returned to normal. At the beginning of the operation, he photographs the rooms so everything can be put back in place. If a chair or sofa is to be moved, agents first place tape on the floor to mark where the legs are.
“Trained foreign intelligence officers set traps to warn them of an intrusion by leaving a door ajar a certain degree or arranging magazines a certain way,” Grever notes. The owner of a desk may never open one drawer but sets up an item inside to fall over, tipping him off if an intruder opens the drawer.
Working with the CIA, the FBI interviews defectors to learn tradecraft used by adversaries to detect FBI intrusions. Every other week, Grever meets with his counterparts at the CIA to compare notes on the latest bugging and surveillance devices.
So that nothing is left behind, each tool used during an operation is numbered and marked to identify it with the agent using it. Before leaving, agents take an inventory to make sure they have all their tools. To smooth out marks their shoes may have left on carpets, agents carry a small rake.
“We have a light that we’ll use to see whether or not dust marks have been disturbed,” Grever says. “We carry a supply of dust. We can throw a little bit of additional dust on if needed to make everything look as it was.”
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OMERTA
FOR TACOPS AGENTS BREAKING INTO HOMES, OFFICES, AND embassies, the greatest threat is dogs. They could be guard dogs or household pets. All spell trouble.
“A barking dog is as much a problem as an alarm going off,” Louis Grever says. “There are several ways to deal with animals, the first being you avoid them, if you can avoid them.”
Agents may befriend dogs over a period of weeks, feeding them. During a job, they may place them in soundproof crates outfitted with food and water. Or they may tranquilize them with a sedative dart from a tranquilizer gun. When the job is finished, they will give them a shot to wake them. The dosages are determined beforehand by a veterinarian on contract.
“We will provide the vet with pictures and a description of the dog in question,” Grever says. “He’ll look at their size and age, and he will tell us the potion to mix for them. We carry a kit with all of the narcotics and the sedatives. The point is certainly not to kill the dog, because that poses a risk of being found out.”
Agents may train a fire extinguisher on a particularly aggressive dog. The blast scares it and freezes its nose. After a few blasts, simply showing the dog the fire extinguisher will make it run away, tail between its legs. In one entry at a Mafia social club in New York, the fire extinguisher ran out. A quick-thinking agent made a swooshing sound like a fire extinguisher, and that was enough to keep the dog at bay.
Another ferocious dog became docile after repeated blasts from a fire extinguisher. Later in the night, he wound up playing with the agents, bringing them toys and stuffed animals that they would throw back at him as they did their work.
“The only problem was that he tore up one of his little stuffed animals, and we had to vacuum all of that up before we left,” Grever says. “We carry a quite expensive, very quiet vacuum cleaner in a backpack, and we will clean up while we’re there. But we don’t clean up too much, because we want to make the place look lived in.”
When agents had to plant bugs in one major drug dealer’s apartment, they found it had a French Fichet lock, which has a four-inch-long key and would take some time to pick. Meanwhile, nearby tenants could come out of their apartments and spot the agents. So under cover of night, both McDevitt and his partner Mike Uttaro went up on the roof of the four-story building and rappelled down. They landed on the drug dealer’s balcony on the top floor. Having been on the roof, the two TacOps agents—who were referred to as “the two Mikes”—were dirty, and the drug dealer’s apartment had a white carpet. So before entering the apartment, they began removing their sneakers. In the process, Uttaro accidentally dropped one of his sneakers, which tumbled four stories to the gro
und.
“A dog went crazy, and a security guard came on the scene,” says McDevitt, who conducted more than two thousand covert entries and later headed TacOps. “One of our surveillance agents saw that and began rustling some bushes, then took off. The security guard assumed the dog had been barking at the person in the bushes.”
In another incident, agents came prepared to snare a dog inside the home of a major organized crime figure, but as soon as they caught the dog, a cat ran out.
“Cat just left exit, running west through the alley,” an agent radioed. “Described as gray in color, about fifteen pounds.”
“Roger, we’re on it,” an agent radioed back.
TacOps agents are equipped with night vision goggles, and they kept looking out the windows to see if other agents had found the cat. If the cat was not caught, the target could realize that the FBI had broken in, compromising the entire case. After an hour, an agent radioed, “Cat’s in custody.”
The agents placed the cat in the house. But the dog began barking, while the cat hissed. The agents thought the two were upset about the intrusion.
“The entry team goes back to the hotel and goes to bed,” Grever says. “You’ve been working all night, and you’ve got to get some sleep. The worst thing that can happen is you get a phone call saying there’s a problem. Usually it’s the next day, when the morning team comes in, and the mics are up and running, the camera’s running. One of their first jobs is to detect whether or not somebody found a wallet inside their house or thinks a chair is out of order.”
In this case, the entry team was called in and told there was a problem.
The Secrets of the FBI Page 2