by Joe Navarro
More Praise for
THREE MINUTES TO DOOMSDAY
“This book by an FBI agent who became one of the most creative and effective counterintelligence officers in the Bureau focuses on the pursuit of US Army traitor Rod Ramsay who, among many nefarious acts, helped spirit the defense plans of Western Europe to the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Three Minutes to Doomsday is a great espionage story told brilliantly—indeed, a must-read for anyone who wants to know the secret history of espionage.”
—David Major, founder of the CI Centre, retired FBI special agent, and former director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence Programs for the National Security Council
“As compelling and unputdownable as it is terrifying . . . For anyone even remotely intrigued by spies, tradecraft, Soviets, Cold War Europe, nuclear war action plans, the daily life of FBI agents, high-end espionage prosecutions, or simply how to tell if someone is lying to you, Three Minutes to Doomsday is a ride you have to take.”
—Nils Johnson-Shelton, New York Times bestselling coauthor of No Angel
“Both exhilarating and frightening, this is former FBI agent Joe Navarro’s account of discovering and ferreting out one of the largest and most insidious espionage breaches in US history. The tradecraft on display will remind readers of a John Le Carré novel, but, shockingly, it’s all true!”
—Robert K. Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team and New York Times bestselling author of Priceless and The Devil’s Diary
“Three Minutes to Doomsday invites you into the muddied waters of counterespionage—where often the rules are: befriend your enemy, lie to your friends, and watch extra carefully so that your own headquarters doesn’t stab you in the back. The price paid by our men in the shadows, whose job is to keep us safe, is rarely seen; nor is it visible how close our nation is to disaster at any moment. Joe Navarro’s book will send chills into readers as they consider the grave dangers we confront, and it will make them ache at the losses suffered by those who frequently risk all.”
—Glenn L. Carle, former CIA officer and author of The Interrogator
“There is mystery, intrigue, high drama, and humor. However, it is the mental ballet between author and superhero FBI agent Joe Navarro and Ramsay that borders on breathtaking. The reader is left hanging on every word, every movement, and wanting more. The book truly is a page-turner and one that doesn’t come along often. . . . A must-read.”
—Sandra Grimes, former CIA operative and coauthor of Circle of Treason
“A masterful work of suspense rivaling the work of any popular suspense novelist . . . For all those who want to know how these investigations get done, this book should be required reading. More than that, we should all feel lucky that at a perilous time in our nation’s history we had Joe Navarro covering our backs.”
—Gary Noesner, former chief of the FBI Crisis Negotiation Unit and author of Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator
“A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one FBI agent’s fight to capture a Cold War spy. Despite endless setbacks and chaos, Navarro never gave up. For our nation’s sake, you will come away hoping there are more Joe Navarros in the trenches, trying to do their job.”
—Fred Burton, vice president, Stratfor, former special agent for the Diplomatic Security Service, and New York Times bestselling author of Under Fire, Ghost, and Chasing Shadows
“[This] is one of the most unusual espionage stories of the modern era. The pace of Navarro’s gripping first-person narrative never slackens.”
—Brian Latell, author of After Fidel and Castro’s Secrets
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CONTENTS
Epigraph
Prologue
1 “Subject Ramsay Was Naked . . . ”
2 Lifestyle Issues
3 Tired and Wired
4 Clarifications and Evasions
5 Triumph and Despair
6 Work-Arounds
7 Taking Stock
8 My Year in the Desert
9 She-Moody
10 The Education of Navarro
11 Smartest Guy in the Room
12 This Changes Everything?
13 Cognitive Dissonance
14 “Something’s Got to Give”
15 First Date
16 Josef Schneider Plaza #4
17 Holy Shit!
18 French Cuffs and Suspenders
19 Inside the Antenna Farm
20 Multiple Choice
21 Up Close and Personal
22 Places, Everyone!
23 “Does Joe Navarro Know About This?”
24 Staying Alive
Photographs
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
To my daughter Stephanie—so you might finally understand why I was so often gone.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
—Epictetus
PROLOGUE
April 17, 1961
The place is Cienfuegos, at the crest of a large, sheltered bay on the south coast of Cuba. The time: early morning. I’m seven years old, on my way to the corner bodega to pick up fresh bread for our family breakfast, when the sky suddenly roars with the sounds of planes, flying low with guns blazing. I can hear my mother yelling at me, but I’m frozen, transfixed by what is happening above, when suddenly I’m tackled to the ground. My father is on top of me, his breathing heavy as he gathers his knees around me, enfolding me so nothing will be left exposed. My face is inches from a utility pole. I smell the black tar around its base as I study the cleat marks left behind by countless utility workers.
My father is whispering urgently in my ear to stay still, to keep down, but I stretch to see above me all the same. I can’t help myself. Something metal and shiny falls from the planes as they fire—not bullets (I later learn) but their shell casings. Afterward, we neighborhood kids will search for them for hours, but not now. Unknown to us, less than an hour’s drive away, at Bahia de Cochinos, the American-led Bay of Pigs invasion has begun.
The next day, Castro’s thugs come for my father.
He has been detained for nineteen days—roughed up, threatened, barely fed, one of thousands being held without charges at a local sports facility—when a fellow prisoner loans him an identification card. The man knows my father hates Castro and eventually will be fingered as a counterrevolutionary. The ruse is thin but, in the confusion, just enough to set him free. He comes home to us—my mother, me, and my two sisters: one older than me and one younger—but only for a precious hour or two. Father gathers a few things, no luggage, and tells my mother he must leave before the guards realize their folly and he ends up like so many other counterrevolutionaries—on the paredon (the wall), awaiting execution. And indeed within weeks, thousands are shot, or simply disappear.
Where will he go? My father won’t say. He doesn’t want us burdened with that knowledge when the soldiers return. Instead, he hugs us all and kisses me last. True to the patriarchal society that Cuba is, his final words to me are: “You’re now in charge of the family. You must be a man.” Tears are falling down my face, my skinny legs shaking: This is the moment my childhood ends.
&nb
sp; A week after my father’s departure, Cuban soldiers—who’ve been secretly surveilling our house—arrive one night and thunder from room to room, searching. Eventually they go, but only after herding all of us into the living room and flashing their gun barrels at us. The message is clear: We have to leave, and America is our only hope.
* * *
JUMP AHEAD TO 1971, ten years to the day since the Bay of Pigs invasion. The place is South Florida. I’m seventeen years old, finishing my final year at Hialeah High, where I’ve played defensive end well enough to attract more than thirty scholarship offers. Evenings, I work at the Richards Department Store on 103rd Street in Hialeah, minding the cash register in the sports department. That’s where I am when the manager calls my extension and says in an urgent voice, “Stop the two men walking side by side down the middle of the store. They’ve just robbed us!”
As I race toward them, they disappear into a rack of clothes. I run ahead and am blocking the store exit when one of the men reappears from the rack and runs straight toward me. At the last moment as he lunges, I see the knife. My body twists, my left arm tries to move away and up to avoid the blade, but it’s not enough.
By the time the doctors are through with what the knife has done to me, I have 180 stitches, internal and external, in my arm. The doctors have sewn my bicep and tricep together. They’ve repaired my slashed arteries. The severed muscles in my arm have retracted into my chest, and the surgeons have pulled those back into my arm, too. For twenty-one days I linger in the hospital. I’ve lost immense amounts of blood. My arm is badly infected, and I can barely feel my fingers or move them.
I do recover, but my athletic career is over. I won’t be able to lift my arm above the shoulder for another two years. But once I finally come out from all the medications, electrical stimulation, plastic surgery, and rounds of vocational therapy and rehabilitation, there’s a letter waiting for me from President Richard Nixon, thanking me for my “heroism.” Nixon’s worst days—Watergate most dramatically—still lie ahead. For now I’m honored that an American president would take the time to thank this immigrant for doing nothing more than his civic duty.
* * *
FROM AN EARLY AGE, three powerful forces have combined to set my True North: a love of America for taking in my family, an abiding sense (still with me) that I can never pay this country back in full for the opportunities handed us, and a deep belief that, in Emerson’s words, “When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ / The youth whispers, ‘I can.’ ”
In the years ahead, Rod Ramsay will test that call to duty in ways I can’t yet imagine. At times I’ll fear he might even beat us. His intellect and interests will prove jaw-dropping, and yet it will be clear that he cares deeply about few things—least of all what matters most to me: country, honor, patriotism. That’s what will make him so dangerous, not just to this nation but to the entire world.
1
“SUBJECT RAMSAY WAS NAKED . . . ”
August 23, 1988
I’m thirty-five now, and I’ve been working for the FBI most of my adult life, since I was twenty-three years old. My recruiter told me back when I joined up that I was the second youngest person ever offered a position with the Bureau. I don’t know about that, but strangely enough—since I can never play football competitively again—the sport is what landed me on the FBI radar screen, at least in a roundabout way.
While I lay in that hospital in Miami, watching my senior high-school year drift away, thirty-one of my thirty-two athletic scholarship offers disappeared. A single one survived, from Brigham Young University. LaVell Edwards, BYU’s coach, called one afternoon to say that he still liked me, that I was big and fast. Why not give it a try? I did just that, for three days, by which time the arm I’d nearly lost a few months earlier was swollen to three times normal size and the docs were talking blood clots and possible nerve damage.
That was the official dead end of my dreams of gridiron glory, but I stayed on at BYU, supporting myself with a mix of scholarship money, loans, and odd jobs, including one as a campus policeman, at the suggestion of my criminology professor. And thus when the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI came recruiting at BYU, as they always do in abundance at Mormon-dominated schools, my background seemed particularly apt: campus cop, graduate of the Utah Police Academy, a devout anti-Communist in general and a Cuban émigré stridently opposed to Fidel Castro in particular, and ardently in love with America. Maybe I really was the second-youngest recruit. What better combination of traits could the Bureau have been looking for?
As for me, I was so desperate for paying work that I said yes on the spot, really without giving it another thought.
* * *
ONE THING I SOON learned: There are no normal hours in the FBI. Contractually, I work ten and a half hours per day, but I’m constantly being asked to do more and more with less and less. It’s not just my own cases that eat away time. There’s always some new shortage, always “the needs of the Bureau”—a term that pecks at me every time I think I’m going to have a weekend off and instead have to cancel family time once again.
While I’m stationed in Puerto Rico, they need SWAT operators to work on terrorism cases, so I get volunteered by my supervisor—“volunteered” as in one day I see my name on a list to attend Basic-SWAT for four weeks and that’s that. Not that I mind all that much. The training is fun, and really, who doesn’t want to have an MP-5 Heckler & Koch suppressed submachine gun in the trunk of his car? But suddenly, every few weeks, on top of my regular work, there are the SWAT operations, and some of those last days. They can involve anything from an airplane hijacking to a takedown of the Machetero terrorist group (macheteros means “machete wielders,” but these guys were good with guns, rifles, and bombs, too).
But what really eats up my spare time is the flying. In researching my background, the Bureau learns that I received my pilot’s license in high school. Once I come on board, it isn’t long before I start getting calls to help with aerial surveillance. Do I complain? Not really. Going from the bare-bones Cessna 150 I’d trained in to a Cessna 182 with retractable gears and air-conditioning is a huge step up, and this time I’m being paid to fly, not the other way around. But the hours are killers. Often, I work a regular shift, then pilot 6 p.m. till midnight—a great time to fly because the air is generally calm at night—but add it all together and I’m putting in way too many sixteen-hour days. When my family does see me, I’m so tired I sometimes doze off standing on my feet in line at the supermarket.
Ultimately, the flying and the SWAT operations take a mental backseat to what I really enjoy—counterintelligence work or “CI.” The thing about CI work is that it connects you to the world. It makes you pay attention to what’s happening in faraway places. Any country can tolerate bank robberies, carjackings, rapes, even riots, but espionage is the only crime a nation can potentially not survive. With the right kind of intelligence, you can render another nation inert or change the course of history. That’s why I love CI—because it really matters.
I start just about every work morning with the daily intelligence brief that comes clacking in over our teletype machine a little after sunrise. Today’s no different. Last night I was up almost to midnight, flying lazy circles over Tampa Bay, helping out another squad short on surveillance agents. This morning, I’m touring the world’s hot spots, searching for anything in the overnight synopsis that might find its way back to Central Florida.
Example: Police in Lima, Peru, yesterday raided the plant that prints the newspaper El Diario, thought to be the voice of the Maoist guerilla group Sendero Luminoso, aka Shining Path. Sounds like a stretch, I admit, but when Maoist guerillas in South America get upset, I take notice because Cuba’s Americas Department funds extremism in the region, and the Marxist ex-guerilla in Havana can sometimes get a little itchy himself.
Some things I can pretty much take a pass on. I’m sorry that hundreds died and thousands were injured in an earthquake that rocked northern India an
d Nepal, but there’s not much I can do about plate tectonics that far away. The state of national emergency just declared in Pakistan is another matter. A few days ago President Zia and ten of his top generals disappeared in a midair explosion. Now Zia’s successor, Ishaq Khan, is telling reporters that “the enemy has penetrated the inner defense of the country.” Does “enemy” mean India? Probably, but unrest on or near the Subcontinent can easily spill over borders, and Tampa has been home since 1983 to the United States Central Command, whose responsibilities include Central Asia. Part of my job is to watch CentCom’s back. The Pakistan-India conflict is also a proxy tug-of-war between China and the USSR—this could get ugly overnight.
As always, the Middle East is thick with violence and intrigue. In Haifa, a hand grenade tossed into a crowded sidewalk café has wounded twenty-five, including seven members of a single family that had been admiring the window display at a toy store.
Another dog-bites-man story: The IRA has struck again in Northern Ireland—eight dead and twenty-eight wounded this time when a bomb explodes aboard a civilian bus carrying British soldiers. The bomb, which the IRA said was fashioned from two hundred pounds of Czech-made Semtex, left a crater six feet deep. This story is also less distant than you might think. We have IRA financial supporters in Tampa who probably woke up cheering this very morning.
Counterintelligence is inevitably biased toward the biggest gorilla in the room, and that’s the Soviet Union. They have the most spies, the most money, and they get most of my attention, but the Warsaw Pact countries are nothing to snicker at. East Germany is far smaller than the USSR, but its intelligence service, run by the legendary Markus Wolf, is even tougher to crack than the KGB. Not just tougher. Better—in a very scary way.
In Poland, I read, seventy-five thousand coal miners are out on strike, demanding that Solidarity, the outlawed trade union, be legalized. Moscow can’t be happy with this. The KGB would love nothing better than to get rid of Pope John Paul II and his influence over his fellow Poles. In fact, the Soviets via the Bulgarians have already made one assassination attempt. Now Moscow is witnessing what it sought to erase: influence over power. The Pope is making the KGB quake. Yet another hot spot: In Czechoslovakia, source of the Semtex that blew the British police to smithereens in Northern Ireland, a small group gathered two days ago in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to sing the Czech national anthem on the twentieth anniversary of the day two hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops and five thousand tanks rolled into the country to crush the so-called Prague Spring.