The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  Besides bureau cases, FBI profilers work cases brought to them by local police. Sometimes police who have ignored the profilers’ advice have done so to their regret. When profilers advised police from an Illinois town that an unknown murderer might visit the cemetery of his victim on the anniversary of his crime, they staked out the cemetery all day, hoping the assailant would show up. Because the weather was nasty, they finally gave up. They left their video cameras in place, rigged to start when detecting motion. Sure enough, the killer showed up. But the police were not there to identify him. They have a videotape of a man, but they have no idea who he is.

  When I interviewed profilers in 1984 in the basement of the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, there were just four of them—Roger Depue, John Douglas, Roy Hazelwood, and Robert Ressler. Now the FBI has twenty-eight such agents housed in an unmarked office building near Quantico in Stafford, Virginia.

  Besides profiling, the agents began working on a number of other techniques for helping FBI agents solve crimes, such as how to confront suspects during interviews and how to evaluate their language. Based on an evaluation of the suspect, the profilers tell agents whether they should interview a suspect in the morning or at night, whether to use a hard or a soft approach.

  “If someone says, ‘My wife and I and our children went out shopping, and the kids got a little bit unruly’—in other words, he went from ‘our kids’ to ‘the kids’—a suspect is unconsciously distancing himself from the kids,” Teten says. “You would listen for that where there was no logical reason for distancing, perhaps suggesting that the father killed his own children.”

  The same kinds of observations led profilers to conclude that when a right-handed person looks to his left when asked a question, it may mean he is genuinely trying to remember the answer and attempting to tell the truth. If such a person looks to his right, he may be trying to create information—in other words, to lie. Conversely, left-handed people usually look to the left when they are lying.

  “If we are talking about memory, you shouldn’t be creating,” Teten observes.

  Since Teten began developing profiling, the term has taken on a sinister meaning, referring to singling out suspects solely because of their race. That kind of clumsy detective work is considered neither good profiling nor good law enforcement.

  8

  THREESOMES

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, MAY 23, 1976, THE WASHINGTON FIELD office called agent Joseph Judge at home. The command center wanted him to investigate whether federal money was being used improperly to pay a congressional aide who was performing no work.

  Elizabeth Ray, a voluptuous, thirty-three-year-old blonde from North Carolina, made the claim herself in a page-one Washington Post story that had appeared that morning. She said she was on the payroll of a congressman for the sole purpose of having sex with him. The sixty-five-year-old congressman in question was not just any member of Congress. He was Wayne L. Hays, an Ohio Democrat who was chairman of the powerful House Administration Committee. The committee controlled perks that are dear to congressmen’s hearts, from Capitol Police protection to parking.

  “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone,” the Washington Post story quoted Ray as saying. She began working for Hays in April 1974 as a clerk. Since then, she had not been asked to do any Congress-related work. Instead, she appeared at her Capitol Hill office behind a blank door in the Longworth House Office Building once or twice a week for a few hours.

  “Supposedly,” she said, “I’m on the oversight committee. But I call it the Out-of-Sight Committee.”

  Ray said she would have sex with Hays once or twice a week. Typically, Hays would take her to dinner at one of the Key Bridge Marriott restaurants in Virginia around 7:00 p.m., then they would adjourn to her Arlington apartment.

  Hays denied all, saying, “Hell’s fire! I’m a very happily married man.” Indeed, he had just divorced his wife of thirty-eight years and married his personal secretary but expected Liz Ray to continue as his mistress.

  Hays specifically denied ever having had dinner with Ray, but Marion Clark and Rudy Maxa, the two Post reporters who broke the story, were present on different occasions when Hays dined with Ray at the Hot Shoppes and Chapparral restaurants in the Key Bridge Marriott. They also listened in on phone calls between Hays and Ray, confirming their intimate relationship.

  The Post’s story had described Ray’s apartment as being in a high-rise building with colored fountains banking its entrance in Arlington. Agent Judge immediately realized that that described the apartment house where he lived.

  Having been assigned to investigate, Judge flashed his FBI credentials and confirmed with the manager that Ray lived in the apartment house. He got her apartment number. At ten-thirty in the morning, Judge knocked on Ray’s door, but she was not home. Two days later, he and a partner arranged through her lawyer to interview her in her apartment.

  “That was a circus because every kind of news media was out there in front of the apartment, and we were going in to interview her, and she was a captive,” Judge says. “We actually brought some groceries—lunch meat, bread, and milk—because she couldn’t leave.”

  In several interviews, Ray told the agents that she went to work at the Longworth House Office Building irregularly. If she decided to go in, she would arrive at ten in the morning and leave by two in the afternoon.

  “She was the only one who was able to bring her little dog to work,” Judge recalls. “And the little dog had toys and a water bowl in her little office. She had hair appointments and manicures, and she would talk on the phone. She never had any work to do.”

  What never came out until now is that Ray would arrange threesomes with Hays.

  “Elizabeth had to recruit other girls,” Judge says. “That was part of her job. I don’t think she ever had to get more than one other girl. Then Hays would put them on the payroll. He had virtually unregulated power, so he could get them a job anywhere on the Hill.”

  Judge found that such arrangements were not that uncommon on the Hill.

  “We ended up interviewing a lot of females up there on Capitol Hill on how everything worked,” he says. “You had these young girls coming and getting hired on Capitol Hill, and they were pretty and starry-eyed, and these are pretty powerful men. The best aphrodisiac in the world is power, and these guys had it.”

  A former congressional aide recalled how, in the pre-AIDS days, he participated in a monthly “gang bang” with a shapely twenty-five-year-old blonde who worked for Senator Alan Cranston, the California Democrat. “The Dirksen Senate Office Building has an attic,” the aide says. “The word would spread that the girl was out, and guys would go. You’d go up there and join the end of the line. She was very pretty.” The woman, who sometimes took on two staffers at once, became known affectionately as the “Attic Girl.”

  Eventually Liz Ray was given immunity from prosecution, and because the laws at the time were vague, “we eventually came to a plea agreement, and he [Hays] agreed to resign his chairmanship,” Judge says.

  One of Washington’s great scandals, the episode marked the end of Hays’ political career. He had hoped to be Ohio governor or Speaker of the House. Instead, he did not run for reelection. Hays died in 1989 at the age of seventy-seven.

  Freed from Hoover’s constraints on investigating politicians, the FBI in 1976 began a probe of bribes allegedly paid by South Korean influence peddler Tongsun Park to members of Congress. In what became known as Koreagate, the Justice Department indicted Park on federal charges that included money laundering, racketeering, and acting as an unregistered agent of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency.

  Park was never convicted of wrongdoing in a U.S. court. He fled to South Korea, and charges were dropped after he agreed to return to the United States and testify before Congress. Park told a House hearing that he distributed cash in exchange for favors to thirty members of Congress. Only two, Otto Passman, a Democrat from Louisiana, and
Richard Hanna, a Democrat from California, were indicted. Passman was acquitted, while Hanna was convicted.

  “Congressmen would receive envelopes from Park periodically with ten thousand-dollar bills in them,” says Allan E. Meyer, the FBI case agent.

  In the end, according to Paul R. Michel, the Justice Department prosecutor in charge of the case, Park’s claims to have paid off dozens of congressmen, as indicated by his own financial records, constituted “puffing” so he could receive the money from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency himself.

  “He was bragging to South Korea that there were a number of congressmen receiving money from him, and he was just pocketing the sums that supposedly had been paid to congressmen,” Michel says.

  As part of a plea agreement brokered by the South Korean government, “Park agreed to essentially endless polygraphing,” Michel says. “He would show up at eight in the morning in Seoul and undergo FBI polygraphing on the testimony he gave us the day before. We would walk him through every entry for three and a half weeks.”

  Because Park passed polygraph tests on what he told Michel, Michel says, “I had confidence that Park’s account ultimately was correct.”

  9

  MOLE IN THE CIA

  HAVING BECOME FBI DIRECTOR ON FEBRUARY 23, 1978, WILLIAM H. Webster began appointing agents to develop sophisticated techniques to combat spying. Under Webster, a former federal judge and U.S. attorney, the focus of the bureau’s Intelligence Division shifted from going after assorted anti-war protesters and former Communists to chasing real spies from other nations and the American traitors who helped them.

  Instead of merely conducting surveillance of KGB officers assigned to the United States as diplomats, the FBI took what it likes to call a proactive approach. The FBI operated double agents to eat up the KGB officers’ time, to learn what they were after, and to eventually help expel them.

  In what became known as the foreign counterintelligence program, the FBI’s Intelligence Division engaged in a secret and highly effective dance with the KGB and the GRU—Soviet military intelligence—watching, learning, and moving in when necessary to thwart a spy operation.

  Because the largest contingents of KGB operatives were in Washington and New York, those were the main cities where counterintelligence operations took place. Under the nose of the press, the FBI kept secret the fact that many utility boxes contained video cameras for watching KGB operations. The FBI operated some stereo equipment stores so agents working undercover could befriend KGB officers. Neighbors of KGB officers would invite them to parties where the rest of the guests were undercover FBI agents. A nondescript office in Springfield, Virginia, was in fact headquarters for a highly effective joint FBI-CIA operation known as Courtship that resulted in the recruitment of at least one KGB officer within the Soviet embassy in Washington.

  Many of the cars that KGB officers drove in Washington were equipped with FBI bugging devices. Through sensors implanted in the cars, agents could track the location of KGB officers. An artificial intelligence program signaled when an officer had departed from his daily routine.

  Once caught, however, spies were not necessarily prosecuted. Because it was embarrassing to acknowledge traitors in their midst, the CIA, Defense Department, and other national security agencies had succeeded over the years in convincing the Justice Department not to prosecute espionage cases. Instead, Americans who spied for foreign countries would be allowed to quietly resign from jobs that gave them access to sensitive information.

  A year before Webster became director, Attorney General Griffin Bell changed the policy and began prosecuting spies to deter espionage. John L. Martin, a former FBI agent who took over espionage prosecutions in 1973 and became chief of the Justice Department’s counterespionage section in 1980, was the architect of the new policy. Before Martin took over the job, no spies had been successfully prosecuted in federal courts for nearly a decade. By the time he retired in August 1997, Martin had supervised the prosecution of seventy-six spies. Only one of the prosecutions resulted in an acquittal.

  “I’m a firm believer in giving them their full constitutional rights and then sending them to jail for a lifetime,” Martin, a handsome, perpetually tanned man, would say.

  The climax to the bureau’s effort to perfect its counterintelligence program came in 1985, known as the Year of the Spy, when the FBI arrested eleven spies. They included John A. Walker Jr., a Navy warrant officer; Jonathan J. Pollard, a spy for Israel; Ronald Pelton, a former National Security Agency employee; and Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a spy for the Chinese. All pled guilty or were convicted.

  While the Walker case was one of the FBI’s biggest spy cases, none was more bizarre than that of Karl and Hana Koecher. In 1962, the Czech Intelligence Service began training Karel Frantisek Köcher—his original name—to become a mole. While not formally part of intelligence terminology, “mole” is commonly used to describe an agent or spy who obtains a job with an opposing intelligence service to provide classified information on a continuing basis to his own intelligence service.

  At a party in Prague in 1963, Koecher met Hana Pardamcova, a nineteen-year-old translator who was also a member of the Communist Party. Five feet two inches tall, Hana was gorgeous, warm, and outgoing. Three months later, they married.

  A brilliant Renaissance man, Karl entered the United States in 1965 and developed an elaborate legend or cover story. Pretending to be a rabid anti-Communist, he claimed that Czechoslovakia Radio in Prague fired him because of his biting commentary about life under the Communists. Karl obtained excellent recommendations from professors at Columbia University and used them in applying to the CIA.

  On February 5, 1973, Koecher became a CIA translator with a top-secret clearance. The first known mole in the CIA, Koecher translated written or tape-recorded reports from CIA assets. Because of Koecher’s knowledge of science and engineering terms, the CIA gave him some of its most sensitive material to translate from Russian or Czech.

  Karl reported directly to the KGB. For his efforts, Koecher won multiple decorations from the KGB and the Czech intelligence service. Hana helped by engaging in “brush contacts” and filling “dead drops” to receive cash or pass along information.

  Through his translation duties, Karl was able to piece together the identity of Aleksandr D. Ogorodnik, a critically important CIA asset. Ogorodnik—code-named Trigon—worked for the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow. He provided the CIA with microfilms of hundreds of classified Soviet documents, including reports from Soviet ambassadors. The information was so valuable that it was circulated within the White House.

  The KGB arrested Ogorodnik in 1977. He agreed to confess and asked his interrogators for pen and paper. “By the way, for some years, I have written with the same pen, a Mont Blanc pen,” he said. “I think it’s on top of my desk. If one of your people happens to go near my apartment in the next few days, I’d like to have it.”

  The KGB delivered the pen, which contained a poison pill carefully concealed by the CIA. Ogorodnik opened the pen and swallowed the pill. Within ten seconds, he was dead.

  Aside from his translation duties, Koecher had an unusual way of obtaining classified information: attending sex parties. A redheaded man of slight build with a graying mustache, Koecher introduced his wife to mate-swapping. Hana liked it so well that she became a far more avid swinger than he was.

  Karl and Hana regularly attended sex parties and orgies in Washington and New York. They frequented Plato’s Retreat and the Hellfire, two sex emporiums in New York open to anyone with the price of admission. They also enjoyed Capitol Couples in the Exchange, a bar in Washington, and the Swinging Gate in Jessup, Maryland. Known as the Gate, it was a country home outfitted with wall-to-wall mattresses and equipment for engaging in acrobatic threesomes.

  Karl and Hana had a wide circle of married friends with whom they swapped spouses. For example, they met a couple from New Paltz, New York, at a swinging party. With white hair and a ta
nned face, the husband looks like Cary Grant. His wife has blond hair cropped short, with skin like something from an Ivory Soap commercial. When they met, Hana, fully clothed, was sitting on a sofa. He sat down beside her. After introducing himself, they went up to a bedroom and engaged in sex, he told me.

  Because of her extreme sexual proclivities, Hana quickly became a favorite on the orgy circuit. A sexy blonde with enormous blue eyes, Hana liked to accompany Karl to Virginia’s In Place, an elite private club organized in 1972 by a suburban Virginia real estate man who was bored with his wife.

  For the club, the man rented a spacious home in Fairfax, Virginia, just minutes from Koecher’s CIA office in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. The home had a large circular driveway and was framed by four tall white pillars. It was a rendezvous for weekend sex parties.

  Hana was one of the most active partygoers. Described by one of her partners as “strikingly beautiful” and “incredibly orgasmic,” Hana loved having sex with three or four men on the double bed. While Karl participated, he often retreated to the living room and chatted.

  If both spies enjoyed swinging, they also found the orgies a good way to meet others who worked for the CIA or other sensitive Washington agencies. Because security rules at agencies such as the CIA banned such activities, participants placed themselves in a compromising position in more ways than one. The Koechers took full advantage and picked up valuable information from other partygoers who were officials of the Defense Department, the White House, and the CIA.

  In early 1982, the FBI learned about the Koechers from a defector and began conducting surveillance of them. The FBI arrested both Koechers. After Koecher pleaded guilty in a secret court proceeding in New York, the Koechers—with spy prosecutor John Martin there observing—were included in a prisoner exchange that included Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident, in February 1986. The exchange took place on a snowy day over the Glienicker Bridge, which joined East Germany and West Berlin. It was the same bridge where the United States had exchanged U-2 pilot Gary Powers for KGB officer Rudolf Abel more than twenty years earlier.