Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  Turns out, Al Eways isn’t quite the sphinx I’d pegged him for. The drive from the Pickett Hotel to Tampa International is no more than ten minutes, but on the way, Al goes off script (on my prompt) and gives a good fill on the Conrad case.

  Someone recruited by US intelligence—Al can’t or won’t say more—tipped INSCOM to a spy burrowed deep among the 250,000 US Army personnel stationed in Germany, an unknown soldier who was stealing documents that were then making their way to the Soviet Union via Hungary. Army Intelligence and the FBI’s Washington Field Office have worked on this investigation for years, Al says. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but finally the investigation led them to Clyde Lee Conrad for two reasons: the length of time he was stationed in Germany (most soldiers rotated out after a few years) and, more important, the fact that for much of that time he was the official custodian for the very G-3 Plans that had been leaking the Soviets’ way.

  But the story doesn’t end there. By focusing on Conrad and using an undercover army agent named Danny Williams, investigators were able to identify Zoltan Szabo, a Hungarian émigré to the United States who’d won a Silver Star for valor in Vietnam only to turn traitor during his subsequent army posting to Germany. Szabo was the original Hungarian Connection. He’d been the first to peddle the documents via his onetime countrymen to the Soviets, and when he left the military, he recruited Conrad to succeed him as document custodian for the Eighth Infantry Division.

  The undercover agent had also helped investigators tumble onto two Hungarian-born doctors, brothers Imre and Sandor Kercsik, who used their sacrosanct medical bags to transport the stolen documents from Germany, where Conrad was stationed, to Hungary. The brothers had been detained in Sweden, where they were living, and, under questioning from the Swedes with guidance from the Germans, had quickly confessed to their role in the Conrad spy ring. Now, Al says, they’re under formal arrest in Stockholm. All of which is great, of course, but I can’t help wondering what exactly the American investigators—INSCOM and the FBI—have contributed to this picture.

  “How about Rod Ramsay?” I ask as we’re pulling up to the terminal. “Where’s he fit into all this?”

  “Most likely, nowhere,” Al answers. “Tens of thousands of people passed through the Eighth ID during the time in question, and maybe a thousand worked with or near Clyde Conrad. We’re talking to all of them ’cause that’s how we do things, but basically this case is over.”

  “Over?” I ask. He’s out of the car by now, grabbing his bag out of the trunk.

  “Yeah,” he says almost over his shoulder, hotfooting it to make a flight to I don’t know where. “Szabo lives in Austria. The Kercsik brothers are being detained in Sweden, where they live, and because espionage is considered a political offense in both countries, we can’t extradite them. As far as Conrad, he was picked up by German authorities eleven hours ago—that’s the 0400 hours Zulu in your teletype, right in the middle of his beauty sleep. It’s up to the Germans now. We’re out of it.”

  Al’s short take on the matter sounds airtight, but something is bothering me—I just can’t place my finger on it.

  We promise to keep in touch if anything fresh comes up, and next thing I know I’m looking at Al’s slumped shoulders racing for a gate. For my part, I should be racing in the opposite direction, back to the office. I can’t even imagine how high the paperwork is already stacked. Instead, I take three lazy passes around the terminal loop while I try to process what I’ve just learned.

  One, this was at least a two-generation spy ring. Why is everyone seemingly so certain that Conrad hasn’t recruited a third (or fourth, or fifth) generation of his own?

  Two, if INSCOM and the Washington Field Office really have been on this case for half a decade, what’s the big deal about spending another few months poking around while Clyde Conrad adapts to life behind bars?

  But here’s the thing I really can’t get over: the fact (a) that collaring Conrad has been left to the Germans in the first place and (b) that, according to Al, the Germans are now running the show. In the Bureau it’s an article of faith that if the US is the victim—the aggrieved party, the one that has suffered the insult—then it’s up to us to make certain that the US prosecutes that individual, even if we have to be a little imaginative in getting the accused back on American soil. And even with sophisticated crooks, that kind of creativity isn’t impossible to pull off.

  I’m thinking for example of an operation I was in on four years earlier. The Mexicans had asked our help in running down Arturo Durazo, the former chief of police of Mexico City, who was wanted for corruption. By then, Durazo was sprinting from one Latin American country to another, seeking a safe sanctuary, and we were chasing him without a lot of success until, through Bureau sources, we identified his girlfriend and convinced her to sell lover boy on relocating to an island in the Caribbean, a crook’s paradise where there’s no extradition treaty with either Mexico or the US. A tall order? For sure, but so persuasive was she that Durazo eventually boarded of his own volition our undercover FBI twin-engine aircraft, with his girlfriend, his bodyguard, and a million dollars in cash. Unfortunately for Durazo, the island we did fly him to was under American jurisdiction: Puerto Rico, where we promptly arrested him and seized the stolen money on an international warrant, and shipped him back home for trial. If we can go to creative lengths on a case that isn’t even ours, the Washington Field Office should have moved mountains to get Conrad back in the US.

  Was it lack of vision, lack of will, or lack of balls that delivered Conrad to the Germans? Who knows, but I’m not betting against the missing cojones.

  * * *

  THE NEXT TIME AROUND the terminal loop, I follow the appropriate exit signs for downtown Tampa, but my mind is still looking backward, not ahead. Conrad was, as Al said, a needle in a haystack consisting of a quarter of a million military personnel who passed through the Eighth ID HQ in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany, in the late seventies and early eighties. But really, if you peel all the wrappers back, Clyde Conrad was a Day-Glo needle in a thin, dull-colored stack. The timing worked. He had access to the documents in question. Opportunity beckoned, almost begged.

  Finding a co-conspirator among the ten thousand–plus people whom Al, I, and a host of others have been dispatched to interview—that would be the true coup. And by the time I get to the Bureau office on Zack Street in downtown Tampa, I’m beginning to think that an acne-scarred, dope-smoking, scrawny 150-pounder with an outsized intellect who happens to live right in my backyard might be looking like a prime possibility.

  * * *

  MY CAREER AS A campus cop had a lot to do with the FBI’s hiring me, but counterintelligence is what hooked me on the Bureau once I was inside the door. CI was only part of the brief at my first posting, in Phoenix. There were drugs to run down, border issues, money laundering, just about anything illegal that crossed state lines—i.e., the whole overflowing banquet table of federal crime. But my next stop, in New York City, was all counterintelligence all the time: running double-agent operations, developing intelligence sources, and neutralizing spies assigned to the United Nations, which in the case of the Soviets was pretty much their entire UN workforce.

  That was part of what I loved about New York—the spy action was nonstop. The other part was the special agent in charge of the Bureau: Don McGorty. He ran the largest CI program in the country, and he didn’t take shit from headquarters because no office knew more or produced more than his. Don’s dual approach to dealing with FBIHQ soon became my own: “Better to apologize than ask for permission,” and “No one at HQ knows more about your target than you.”

  Puerto Rico, my next station of the FBI cross, introduced me to another legendary special agent in charge, Dick Held, and Dick passed along his own wisdom about dealing with Washington: “Do what it takes to get the job done so long as it’s legal and ethical, and don’t take no for an answer—especially from HQ.” For me, though, Tampa was always the p
rize I had in mind. Not only had the Tampa office tried a disproportionate number of espionage cases; it moved me nearer to my expatriate Navarro clan, by now spread all over Southern Florida.

  Another Tampa advantage: my immediate boss, Jay Koerner, a rising legend in his own right among those of us dedicated to CI, the kind of supervisor too rare in sprawling bureaucracies prone to eating their young. Jay has HQ’s respect even though he has never served there. Just as important, he isn’t falling all over himself to join the Bureau careerists who swarm to the Mothership like bees to a hive.

  Unfortunately, Jay doesn’t always feel that I am an equal blessing in return. Today is a case in point. He’s on the phone when I barge into his office. As usual on these occasions, he fixes me with a look that says, “You can see I am on the phone, right?” Pretty much as usual, too, I set about straightening his desk—he’s an office super-slob—then start pacing back and forth right in front of him so he’ll know what I’m about to say is important.

  Finally, he gets the message and wraps up the call. “What?” he asks—although his New York accent makes it sound more like “Wat?” and his expression is pretty clearly saying “Hey, Navarro, do me a favor and drop dead.”

  “I just dropped Eways off at the airport,” I reply, sitting down and loosening my tie.

  “You’re stomping up and down in front of my desk to tell me that?”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay, how’d it go?” There’s a bit of a sigh to his voice now. He seems to be bracing slightly, aware that I’m about to drop something on him.

  “I want to initiate a full field investigation of this Ramsay character.”

  “Why, what’d he say?”

  “Nothing much,” I reply.

  “Nothing much?”

  “Well, he was cooperative.”

  “So that’s what we’re basing this full investigation on, then? His cooperative spirit?”

  “No, his cigarette.”

  “Cigarette? Smoking’s a federal crime now? I missed that act of Congress.”

  “Ramsay’s cigarette shook.”

  Koerner cracks a smile. He knows I’ve spent a long time studying body language. He also suspects me of being a little nuts. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Not just once,” I say. “It shook three times.”

  “Let me get this straight, Navarro. You want to open a full field investigation under the AG guidelines based on this interviewee waving his cigarette around?”

  I’ve expected this. The attorney general guidelines were put in place a decade or so ago to curb the abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s reign. The guidelines are exhaustively long, but simply put, they specify when a “full” investigation can be initiated and for how long, and they set the bar high, where it should be. A full field investigation requires reasonable cause to believe that a crime has been committed or that intelligence activity is afoot. Admittedly, a shaking cigarette, even thrice-shaking, is pushing the envelope a bit, but why give in on small issues?

  “Yes,” I reply, hands draped territorially over the edge of the chair arms. “That’s exactly why we should open this investigation.”

  “You trying to get us all fired?” Koerner is shaking his head now.

  “I think Ramsay is involved in this case.”

  “What case, for crissake?”

  I’d forgotten that. From reading the original teletype, Jay knows no more about this case than I did seven hours ago. While I give him a quick fill on what I learned from Al Eways after our interview was done, Jay pulls an extra-large bottle of antacids from his top desk drawer. At least in Tampa, America’s domestic protection is built on a firm foundation of Rolaids.

  “Ah,” he says when I’m through. “The army had this case, and now the Germans have it, but you want to open a separate investigation all on your own here in Tampa?”

  “Correct.”

  “What about Washington Field Office? They have an open case?” This is an important question since we’re clearly edging toward FBI jurisdictional disputes, which can get as nasty as two ferrets in a bag.

  “According to Eways,” I explain, “WFO has been helping on this case for years, but they have nothing to show for it, and besides, their case is now a German case.”

  “What do you mean ‘nothing’?”

  “You saw the communication that came in. Whatever WFO might actually know, they have absolutely nothing to offer us. But listen, Ramsay is somehow involved with the guy they arrested in Germany, and I want to prove it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Every time the name Clyde Lee Conrad was mentioned his cigarette shook.”

  “Conrad?”

  “The guy the Germans arrested with the help of the army. Ramsay worked for him.”

  “So just because Ramsay worked for Conrad and his cigarette shook, you want to open an investigation?”

  “That’s right. You got it. Congrats.” I’m on my feet now, ready to get started on the paperwork, but Jay isn’t quite through.

  “You really are nuts, aren’t you? I can just imagine the hearing. ‘Yes, Madam Senator, I authorized the investigation of this American based on work proximity and a nervous twitch while he smoked.’ Christ, Navarro, think about it.”

  I smile, thinking of Koerner squirming in the hot seat. “Nuts, maybe,” I say. “You’ve suggested as much before, but I really do want to open the investigation, Jay.” The “Jay” is important. I use his first name in conversation sparingly, only when I want to drive a key point home. “Ramsay was a bundle of nerves during the interview even though we told him we weren’t interested in him. He exhibits enough antisocial traits and lifestyle issues to make me want to focus on him.”

  “Great, I can add that to my Senate testimony, just before I go to prison: ‘Senator, he has had lifestyle issues.’ Navarro, half the people on Earth have lifestyle issues. You, for one.”

  That stops us both cold.

  “Listen,” he says, after a long pause. “I’m sorry. That was unfair, way out of left field.”

  Koerner is a rangy six-three, with blond hair and a big mustache like one of those Oakland A’s pitchers from the early seventies. He’s got a reputation, locally and within the larger FBI, for not taking any shit. But he’s got a heart of gold, and this is one of those moments that show it. My wife, Luciana, was born and raised in Brazil. She’s still getting used to life in America. The fact that we’ve moved three times in the last seven years hasn’t made it easy to build social connections either, but Jay is also aware that there are other issues at home.

  I rarely venture far from work in our conversations, but Jay is my supervisor. He has a right to ask when he can see I’m too distracted by outside matters. He knows Luciana has had some health issues. On more than one occasion, I’ve also let on that Luciana has been complaining I’m not home enough, and when I am, that I’m not attentive enough to her or our daughter, Stephanie. Ask any agent: It’s a common work hazard for those who aren’t jockeying a desk all day long.

  “Don’t apologize,” I say now. “Luciana is right. I’m going to work on that. But, Jay, I wouldn’t ask this if I didn’t think there was something going on here. I tested Ramsay to make sure. Three times that cigarette shook like a polygraph needle when I mentioned Clyde Lee Conrad.”

  “Oh, come on!” Jay is pushing his seat back, looking up to the heavens for guidance.

  “I’m serious. Let me go back and talk with him a couple of more times just to see what he says. What if he was involved, what if he—”

  Koerner cuts me off. “That’s a lot of what-ifs—the AG guidelines are very specific. What does Eways say?”

  “Nothing much. Ramsay flunked the piss test and that’s about it. They don’t have anything on him other than that he worked for Conrad.”

  “Christ almighty, Navarro!” Jay has given up on heavenly guidance, it seems. Now he’s rolling his eyes in exasperation.

  “There’s one more thing. When Ra
msay was getting ready to leave, I asked him if Conrad had ever given him anything. Yeah, he says, and he reaches in his wallet and pulls this out.” I’m showing him the contents of the hotel envelope as I speak, but without letting him touch it.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t know yet—Ramsay said it was a phone number.”

  “And he carries it in his wallet?”

  “Yes, but here’s the thing. There aren’t enough digits on the number to call anywhere.”

  “It’s not illegal to have a phone number in your wallet, whether it’s complete or incomplete. You know that.”

  “Jay, listen to me. Ramsay’s dirty. I know it. I want to run that phone number, I want to check for fingerprints, I want to compare handwriting, I want to check the paper out to see where it originated, and I want to see if Ramsay has been in contact with Conrad and how. If he’s dirty, I’ll have a confession within ten interviews. Guaranteed.”

  “Ten?”

  “Okay, five,” which might just be over the top, but I’m running out of time. In fact, I just have.

  “Out,” Jay says. “Get out of my office—I have other work to do. Fortunately, some of the agents in this office are actually sane.”

  Jay is fumbling with the papers on his desk, messing up the neat piles I made fifteen minutes ago, anything to avoid looking me in the eye.

  “Let me think about it,” he finally says, but I notice Jay is already dialing HQ before I close his office door.

  Mickey’s big hand is on the nine and his little one is nearing six when Jay finally pops out of his door again. By my count, he has taken four calls and made five during the four-plus intervening hours. I’ve seen him cajoling, pleading, even in a few instances shouting—but who’s monitoring?

  He approaches my desk. “Do the paperwork,” he says. “Open it up, but don’t put anything in there about body language or shaking cigarettes. And interview him tomorrow. You’ve got ninety days. After that, I shut it down.”

  “Thanks, Koerner,” I say, but Jay is already headed for the Bureau door, shaking his head like a moose that just lost its antlers.