The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  While bugs are made in the FBI’s Engineering Research Facility, they are secreted inside what TacOps agents refer to as a “host” or a “concealment” by the off-site TacOps Center. It could be a battery, a plaque, a calculator, or even a book. To allay suspicion, the center portrays itself as an industrial testing company.

  “We make it look like a functioning company with people driving in and out and machines going all the time, so the mailman, the delivery person, the county inspector will come by and think it’s a legitimate company,” Grever says.

  Besides TacOps agents, the center has a staff of fifty engineers, woodworking specialists, machinists, and other support personnel. There’s a machine shop, a high-speed engraving machine, and a stereolithography machine for making plastic items such as a mug that could conceal a bug in its base. The Tactical Operations Section, which includes the center, has a budget of $62 million a year out of the FBI’s annual budget of $8.3 billion. The FBI section receives some additional funding from the National Intelligence Program.

  To hide TacOps agents as they defeated the lock on a Baltimore townhouse, agents first photographed the brick exterior of the house. The TacOps Center then imprinted the image on a tarp that would cover the entryway and surrounding areas. One side of the tarp was coated with plastic, and the other side had a cloth finish, on which the image was printed. The tarp was attached to light plastic tubing so it could be folded and opened like an umbrella. Agents carried it in an elongated gym bag. In the middle of the night, they erected it two feet in front of the entryway. Then they worked from behind it to make a key to the house without being noticed by passersby.

  “Our TacOps machine shop made lightweight frames to hold the façade, and our TacOps print shop created a life-size drapery of the front of the townhouse,” Grever says. “We practiced hanging the façade several times to get it right and get it up fast. From twenty feet away in dim light, you could not tell it was simply a picture. The operation went like clockwork, and the many people who passed by that night were none the wiser.”

  For another job involving an organized crime target in Las Vegas, the TacOps Center created a bush to camouflage two TacOps agents so they could defeat the locks on a garage door and plant bugs in the house. An image of a bush was imprinted on cloth. As with the image of the townhouse, it was attached to plastic tubing and could be opened and folded like an umbrella. When unfolded, the bush was shaped like a cup turned upside down. Working on a dark night, the agents inched toward the garage door while shielding themselves from any passersby on the street, which was about a hundred feet from the house. While the agents could have hidden themselves inside the bush, they preferred to hold it in front of them so they could run away quickly if challenged.

  “The only difference between this bush and others around the target that night was that every few minutes, when all was quiet, the bush would grow legs and walk ever so slowly closer to the building,” Grever says. “Thank goodness no one saw us. We might have ended up on America’s Funniest Home Videos.”

  Before planting bugs in a yacht, agents practice breaking into an identical model. In penetrating supersensitive places such as embassies or other foreign government installations, TacOps agents may proceed in phases.

  “You may break into the first set of doors and take pictures of those,” Grever says. “You’ll do measurements, and then the next night you’ll try to go a little bit farther and locate sensors. We’ll wait weeks between phases just to make sure there’s no commotion.”

  While the easiest way to gain entry is with the help of an inside source, that source may be a double agent.

  “That’s a balancing act the case agents will evaluate,” Grever says. “Am I going to try to develop a source, or am I going to do everything covertly? There are instances where we would do both. We would develop a source inside, and then the entry operation is really to validate that source, to make sure that source is telling us everything he knows and to verify his information.”

  TacOps checks weather forecasts to help choose the right night for an entry.

  “We try to work when the weather’s bad, believe it or not,” TacOps chief Jimmy Ramirez says. “We like fog, cold, rain, and snow because people aren’t walking around having a good time.”

  But snow poses a special problem. “You have to be careful not to leave what we call bunny tracks going in and out of the target,” Ramirez says. “If it’s snowing hard and we’re going to leave evidence that we were there, we would abort the mission. If it is imperative that we get in, then we would make arrangements to have the streets and sidewalks plowed first.”

  Pretending to be good neighbors, FBI personnel will shovel the walks of a target home and the walks of adjoining homes.

  Another challenge is working with agents from the local field office.

  “I’m real careful when I work with a guy that I don’t know,” Ramirez says. “Is he going to leave a strip of wire on the ground? Is my lock guy going to leave some filings from a file when he was working on a key?”

  The last man out has the greatest responsibility.

  “You’re responsible for resetting the alarm, locking the doors, making sure that nobody left screwdrivers and wires,” Grever notes. “You have a lot of responsibility, you’re doing it sometimes in a short amount of time with very little sleep. I might not have slept all night, and now it’s four o’clock, five o’clock in the morning. That can be scary.”

  TacOps agents consider the greatest threat to be what they call the “Mrs. Kravitz factor.”

  “We know from a technical aspect that we’ve got this equipment that we’re going after, and we have the equipment to attack it,” Ramirez says. “But you can’t plan for Mrs. Kravitz getting up in the middle of the night and looking across the street and saying, ‘Something is not right with the Joneses’ house tonight.’ ”

  By 4:30 a.m., agents had finished a job in a single-family home in the San Francisco area and were ready to leave. “The two neighbors on each side of the house came outside and began doing t’ai chi, their morning ritual,” Ramirez says.

  Another complication is a neighbor who decides to do yard work early in the morning, perhaps trimming his hedges.

  “We may go to their front door and ring the doorbell, and ring and ring and ring, and that gets him away from the hedge or stops the neighbors doing their t’ai chi just long enough to get the final guys out of there,” Ramirez says.

  Agents plan ruses carefully because they can easily unravel. Thinking it’s an innocuous statement, an agent may tell someone that he’s a high school teacher.

  “They’re going to either be a high school teacher, or they’re going to know a high school teacher from the school where you said you were teaching, and now you’ve got to lie more,” Ramirez says. “So you’ve got to be really careful with your cover story. You’ve got to think about it. Because if you don’t, and you kind of stutter and stammer, it’s not going to be believable.”

  TacOps may send an agent to a home posing as a pizza delivery man. When the front door is opened, he can see if the home has an alarm keypad and what kind it is.

  “They didn’t order pizza. But what if they decide they want some?” Ramirez says. “You can’t just have a cardboard box. You better have pizza in it or they’ll become suspicious.”

  Posing as a telephone repair crew can be a problem if real workers show up.

  “One time we were at a telephone company outside box, and some phone company guys showed up,” Ramirez recalls. “Fortunately, we were in New York, where one of the guys on the team knew the security guy for that area. The security person basically told them, ‘You guys just get the hell out of here,’ and they did.”

  In assessing a target, agents try to come up with a ruse that cannot be traced back to anyone. “We’d carry around posters with photos of a lost dog,” Clay Price says. “The dog could be one of ours. If anybody ever came up and asked, ‘What are you guys doing around here?’
we would say, ‘We lost our dog. Have you seen this dog?’ Then we just get lost.”

  In some terrorism or counterintelligence cases, TacOps may assess the target for as long as two years. It may take another two years before a case comes to fruition. In a kidnapping or missing-child case, the results are more immediate. TacOps microphones have picked up two parents discussing how they disposed of their child’s body.

  In the case of a motorcycle gang in Reno, it was too risky breaking into their club. Agents waited. Eventually a member was killed in a traffic accident.

  “They all went to the funeral, giving us an opportunity to do their clubhouse. They left no one behind,” Ramirez says.

  Similarly, in a mob case in Cleveland, agents planted bugs while the target was attending his daughter’s wedding at a nearby church.

  Still, TacOps agents experience close calls. In an entry in New Haven, the surveillance team had missed the fact that a restaurant owned by an organized crime figure received nightly deliveries of bread.

  “We get there, we’re in, we’ve got the alarm shut off, and the bread delivery guy shows up at four a.m.,” Ramirez says. “The owner trusts the bread delivery guy, gives him the key, gives him the alarm code.”

  When they heard the bread man enter the restaurant, the agents ran to hide. When he left, he reset the alarm. Heat and motion detectors would sense the agents coming out of their hiding places. But the agents had picked up electronic information from the alarm control panel and were able to turn it off remotely through wireless technology. Then they finished installing microphones in the Mafia figure’s office.

  In a spy case in San Francisco, a cleaning service crew walked in while agents were installing bugs in an office building. The agents pretended that they belonged there, and the cleaning people did their work and left without becoming suspicious.

  Before entering a store in Cleveland, agents had to open a heavy steel roll-down door covering the front. Obtaining the key was no problem. But when agents rolled down the door, it made a racket. Surveillance thought nobody was in the apartment upstairs, but that turned out to be wrong. The neighbor stuck his head out a window and yelled, “What in the hell is going on down there?”

  A supervisor yelled up, “Police business. Just go back inside.” The neighbor was involved in the case and reported it to the bad guy, saying he thought the men might have been serving a search warrant.

  As a result of the call, Ramirez says, “the subject got so nervous that he hired an attorney and walked into the local FBI office and says, ‘I want the best deal I can get. I know you guys have me. I know you’ve got recordings of me.’ He got so paranoid he went in and coughed up the whole story.”

  At a Mafia social club in New York, a padlocked steel gate protected the front door. A problem arose in extracting the cylinder of the lock, and agents had to pound on it, making a noise. In this case, the FBI was already monitoring the Mafia figures in an apartment above the store, where they were playing cards. The Mafia men heard the noise.

  “We got them on tape saying, ‘Well, it can’t be the FBI. They wouldn’t make that much noise breaking into a place,’ ” Ramirez says.

  The men continued playing cards.

  Back in the Hoover days, the program for break-ins in counterintelligence cases was code-named Anagram. When breaking into one Soviet-bloc embassy, an agent had a heart attack and died in the ambassador’s office. Agents carried him out, but his bowels emptied on an oriental rug in the office. The agents took the carpet to a dry cleaner that operated all night and had it cleaned. However, it was still wet when they replaced it, so they applied paint to the ceiling above to make it look as if the ceiling had been leaking.

  Agents find their surveillance sometimes picks up crimes in progress. In a chilling episode, an FBI bug picked up the sounds of Zein Isa, a Palestinian American, murdering his sixteen-year-old daughter. For two years, the FBI had been listening to the conversations that took place in the tiny St. Louis apartment he shared with his wife, Maria. The bureau believed Zein Isa was involved in terrorist activities.

  Isa disapproved of the fact that his daughter Palestina had gotten a job at Wendy’s and, without his permission, was seeing a young man. When the girl, nicknamed Tina, arrived home from work on the evening of November 6, 1989, her mother asked in Arabic, “Where were you, bitch?”

  “Working!” Tina shot back, according to the FBI tape.

  “We do not accept that you go to work,” Isa interrupted.

  “Why are you doing this to us?” her mother asked angrily.

  “I am not doing anything to you,” Tina said.

  “You are a she-devil,” her father hissed. “Listen, my dear daughter. Do you know that this is the last day? Today you’re going to die?”

  Realizing he was serious, Tina let out a long scream. There was a crash, and Tina’s screams became muffled. Her mother held her down as Isa began stabbing Tina in the chest with a seven-inch boning knife.

  “Die! Die quickly! Die quickly!” her father shouted, panting from his exertion.

  Tina screamed one more time. By then, Isa’s knife had punctured her lungs. Only the sound of the girl’s breath being expelled could be heard.

  When the tape was translated the next day, the FBI called in the St. Louis police. They arrested the couple. The tape even picked up Isa calling 911, claiming he had killed his daughter in self-defense.

  Contrary to the impression created by the tape, Isa killed his daughter because she was rebellious and knew too much about his group’s activities. One of the other terrorists had suggested he kill her to keep her from talking. Her father agreed, telling a relative, “This one should live under the ground.”

  Based on the tape, Isa and his wife were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die by lethal injection. While he was on death row, Zein Isa and three others were indicted for allegedly plotting to kill thousands of Jews, blow up the Israeli embassy in Washington, and smuggle money to members of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization.

  Zein Isa died on death row of diabetes. His wife’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without parole.

  In another case in Philadelphia, agents installed video cameras in an organized crime figure’s restaurant. Fifteen minutes after they left, a rival Mafia gang broke in and shot the man. It was all captured on videotape.

  Breaking into Mafia-owned Italian restaurants has its advantages. At one such establishment in Brooklyn, a TacOps agent admits he sampled some delectable shrimp scampi from the refrigerator.

  Burglarizing homes and offices may require courage, but one agent was afraid of dogs and refused to go into locations where they would be encountered. Another agent would not fly to a job in Houston over New Year’s Eve 1999. He was afraid that computerized instruments would fail when the new century began. Other TacOps agents covered for both agents.

  In monitoring bugs and wiretaps, agents often encounter illicit affairs. In one case, they opened a linen closet and found $2 million in cash. In another case, agents saw the suspect—an organized crime figure—having sex with his young daughter.

  “The surveillance team across the street broke in, forced their way in, took custody of the child, and waited for the police,” Grever says.

  But the greatest payoff is when an entry by TacOps stops a terrorist plot in progress, as happened with Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, who was planning to blow up the home of former president George W. Bush. Similarly, Najibullah Zazi was already mixing chemicals to make explosives to blow up New York City subways when TacOps agents obtained enough evidence to lead to his arrest. That included nine pages of notes they found on his laptop in his rental car with formulations and instructions on the manufacture and handling of initiating explosives, main explosives charges, explosives detonators, and components of a fusing system.

  While conducting surreptitious entries at Aldawsari’s Lubbock apartment was a no-brainer for TacOps, “the biggest obstacles were limited intelligence abo
ut the internal layout of the targeted apartment and unknowns such as how friendly and attentive were his neighbors and how alert he might be to possible surveillance,” Grever says. “He had a very erratic pattern of life—typical for subjects of his age—and the entry team had to remain on standby in close proximity to the targeted apartment for several days.”

  TacOps also played a crucial role in the arrest of 120 alleged Mafia members from seven East Coast organized crime families in January 2011. The largest FBI crackdown on the Mafia in history, the arrests proceeded after two court-authorized covert entries by TacOps teams.

  Like other FBI agents, TacOps agents are often amused by the difference between what they see in the media and what is really going on in the FBI. Ramirez, Grever, and a few other TacOps agents and their wives went to see the movie Breach, which gave support employee Eric O’Neill all the credit for cracking the Robert Hanssen spy case.

  “We had a blast together,” Ramirez says. “It was funny because we knew what really happened and what didn’t happen.”

  But being a burglar takes its toll.

  “Some agents eventually leave the unit because it’s too much stress,” Ramirez says. Those who stay usually have tremendous support from their families. “When you have a wife who will say, ‘I don’t know what you were doing out there, but I support you,’ that’s the only way we’re able to make it,” Ramirez says.

  Because the work is secret, agents can’t be given awards by the attorney general. “You can’t write it up, because you would be exposing so many things,” Price says.

  “We have stopped many, many bad things from happening in this country,” Ramirez says. “And we don’t want credit for it, we don’t get credit for it, we don’t need credit for it. A lot of times the SACs will call me and say, ‘Your team was out here the other night, and they were gone before I had a chance to say thank you.’ That’s because they’re either on to the next entry or they haven’t slept in two or three days. We don’t need that kind of stroking. But these guys and gals are the best in the business.”