by Joe Navarro
* * *
I ARRIVE AT THE office promptly at 6 a.m. the next morning, Thursday, August 24, 1988, and am greeted as usual by the night agent finishing his duties and by the communications specialist, who hands me my envelope as he exits the vault. And by 6:02 I know there are going to be issues with this case. No, that’s the wrong word; I know there are going to be problems, maybe very big ones.
Before leaving the office yesterday, I submitted by overnight mail the paperwork to open a full field investigation. I also overnighted the piece of paper Ramsay had given me to the FBI Lab, specifically the unit that handles espionage paraphernalia. My instructions were straightforward and simple: examine the paper and the ink, and their origins, and photograph the numbers and compare them with known samples. I also wanted the paper scanned for fingerprints and tested for drugs in case it had come into contact with cocaine or other substances. I thought all that would be prudent of me to do as an investigator. What I didn’t expect was that the Washington Field Office—WFO, in Bureau-speak—would try to stop us from doing our job before we even got started. That’s just what they’ve done, though.
I study the communication classified “Secret/ORCON” (for “originator controlled”) over and over, thinking I must be missing something or maybe a word got dropped or a typo snuck in. Finally, I read the document from back to front—a good way to catch typos, by the way—but the basic message never changes: The joint FBI/Army-INSCOM investigation code named Canasta Player, we have now been officially informed, takes supremacy over all ancillary investigations, and thus everything involved in any way whatsoever with it has to be coordinated through WFO. Additionally, no investigative effort on our part should interfere with WFO’s work.
Wow, I’m thinking to myself, yesterday they needed me; today, not so much. Indeed, not at all. The prohibition against “interference” is very inclusive, so inclusive that the only safe course of action seems to be to roll over and just do as they please. But why should I? We have every right to open an investigation if we can justify it, and I’ve done that in accordance with attorney general guidelines. Also, Conrad is already in German custody. What can I possibly spoil for them by trying to gather more of the truth?
Instinctively, my hand reaches into my top desk drawer for comfort, but all I can find is an empty Tums wrapper. Koerner isn’t in yet, but his oversized Rolaids bottle never leaves and his desk is always unlocked. I find the bottle in its customary space, squeezed between an equally big bottle of Advil and his shoe-shine kit. Koerner is old school. Everyone in J. Edgar’s day kept a shoe-shine kit close by, and God help the agent whose shoes weren’t buffed.
I might raid the Advil later this morning, but for now, I dole out to myself three Rolaid tablets and settle back down at my desk to reread the Washington Field Office fuck-u-gram one more time. I went to bed last night thinking I had a great day ahead of me. Among the things I was looking forward to was partnering with Lynn Tremaine, an investigator with a bright future who would have done the initial interviewing with Al Eways yesterday if she hadn’t been out of town. To be honest, I doubt Lynn would have picked up on the same clues I did. She’s young—twenty-six, I think—and inexperienced in espionage matters, but, as I found out when we worked together on a case in Cape Canaveral, she has a great attitude, a rollicking sense of humor, and a fantastic work ethic. I’ve also noticed that she has an easy way around the younger guys in the office—she jogs with them, plays tag football, joins them for beers after work. From what little of Ramsay I’ve picked up on, Lynn would have the ability to get him thinking of her as his kid sister, the kind you like to have around.
As far as I was concerned, this was going to be a chance to have professional fun and do some mentoring in the process. Now it looks as though we’ll be battling the WFO, and almost certainly FBIHQ behind it, all the way. No wonder steam is coming out of my ears when Lynn and Jay come through the door about half an hour later.
Koerner’s hair is still wet from the gym as he grabs a pot of coffee, heads for his office, and promptly disappears behind the small mountain of paper that has come in overnight. Maybe two minutes pass before the top-secret communications custodian comes trotting in with the messages for which Jay has to sign individually. The custodian is just leaving when Koerner’s disembodied voice comes booming out his office door.
“Navarro, you been in my desk?”
“Yes, sir. Rolaids.”
“Can’t you buy your own?”
“I could, but yours are cheaper.”
“You’re welcome,” he shoots back as he slams his lower desk drawer. I don’t get it—I handle that Rolaids bottle as if it were nitroglycerin, but somehow he always knows.
Lynn is ready for coffee, too, but not the crap the GSA supplies to the office. Instead, we head down to Perrera’s, a little Cuban coffee shop that serves the best café con leche and Cuban toast anywhere around.
I’m ready to off-load on Washington, but Lynn is clearly looking at life from a rosier perspective. “Tell me all about the case,” she says as we wait for our order in a corner booth, both of us with our backs to the wall. And so I do—from the teletype that would have gone to her had she not been on leave, to trying to find Ramsay, to seeing him scurrying naked, to the two interviews, one at the house and the other at the hotel.
Lynn takes my word for it that the shaking cigarette means something, even though she’s been taught almost nothing about body language in the FBI. She’s also almost as excited as I am about the piece of paper Ramsay handed us and points out on her own that the number “9” is written in the German way, like a “g.” If I ever knew, I forgot that Lynn had studied in Germany and speaks the language fluently, another big plus if we can ever get this case off the ground.
By the time we’re heading back to the Bureau, I’ve calmed down considerably. Washington is still bound to be a pain in the ass, but Lynn is my kind of agent—eager to learn and ready to help out. As far as we’re both concerned, the sooner we can talk to Rod Ramsay, the better, but there’s yet another complication to that. Rod is under no obligation to talk with us. All he has to do is say, “I want a lawyer,” and everything stops dead in its tracks.
I’m thinking hard about the best way to approach him when we walk back into the office and Sharon Woods, the squad secretary, solves the problem for us. “Roderick Ramsay called,” she says. “He wants you to call him back.”
* * *
SURE ENOUGH, ROD ANSWERS on the first ring. This call is important to him—he’s been waiting by the phone. He starts out by wanting to clarify a few things he said the day before—a name here, a missed time sequence there. He’s worried that I might have gotten the wrong impression of him because of where he was house-sitting.
“There used to be some occupants in that house,” he explains, “who weren’t the best kind of people.”
“Does this relate to the gun in the cabinet?”
“Yeah,” he says. “That and some other things.”
In the end, it’s all small stuff. I tell him I’ll pass the added information on to Agent Eways. Then he asks if I’ve heard anything more from Germany. And with that I’m reminded of two things. The first is that while witnesses and victims make these kinds of calls all the time, I’ve had only one other suspect do this in my entire career. The second thing I’m reminded of is that that suspect was trying to find out where the investigation was headed and milk me for information. Maybe Rod is doing the same. Maybe he’s just lonely and wants to talk about German prostitutes again.
“Tell you what,” I say, “I do have questions I didn’t get to ask yesterday. Can I stop by with my partner, Lynn, because Eways is gone.”
“Sure,” he says, “come on over. I’m at my mom’s place.”
“I’ll be there in forty minutes,” I say, knowing we’ll be there in twenty-five. If Rod is setting some kind of trap for us, I want to spring it on our schedule, not his. Lynn and I spend our drive time going over safety issues ju
st in case things do go kinetic. I also ask her to let me take the lead and to hide all appearances of being an agent. No credential-flashing when we show up. No writing materials once we’re inside—if something important is said, I want Rod to give us the paper we make a note on. Since I was hoping to interview Ramsay today, I wore khakis and a polo shirt to the office—a big change from yesterday’s blue suit. Lynn came more casual than usual, too, because she was expecting to spend the day catching up on missed paperwork.
All that will help keep Rod’s guard down. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. rarely even loosened his tie all those years on The F.B.I. (Trust me, I know. I watched the TV show religiously even when I barely understood any English!) But in the real world of nuanced emotions, interviewees confronted with official-looking badges and starched shirts tend to batten down the hatches, the way Rod did when Al and I first confronted him yesterday.
Interestingly, Rod is waiting outside his mom’s trailer when we pull up fifteen minutes early. He seems anxious but not on edge. Instead of lingering outside, he welcomes us quickly into the single-wide mobile home, pleasantly air-conditioned and even more nicely decorated. What I assume are his mother’s touches are everywhere: pictures on the walls and an attractive centerpiece on the small, spotless dinette table in the kitchen.
“Your mother keeps a nice place here,” I say.
“She does. She’s very good that way,” Ramsay replies.
“Yeah, very nice,” Lynn chimes in as Ramsay leads us into the living room—so different than his behavior the day before.
Lynn, as I expected, proves to be a natural fit with Rod. On the way over, I asked her to be playful. A lot of male agents have trouble with that—they want to go Sergeant Joe Friday from Minute One. Not Lynn. She banters easily with Rod about traveling in Europe and everything else except what we’re really interested in.
Not surprisingly, Rod is calmer, more relaxed and less tense than yesterday at his house-sitting gig, and thus he naturally opens up without prodding about where he’s from and the places where he’s lived—Japan and Hawaii for example, two more areas to explore.
As I had yesterday, and on my cue, Lynn pleads ignorant as to army things, and so I get to hear much of what Rod said repeated, and in fact, that’s a large part of my goal for today: How Ramsay retells and summarizes these army tales will be a useful guide to both his memory and his authenticity. I also want to press him more on the note he claims Conrad gave him, but only a little harder. If he has been—or still is—involved in espionage, forcing the issue might send him straight into the arms of an attorney and might possibly screw up the larger investigation in Europe.
National security cases are difficult to prove—they tend to be laborious efforts that can fall apart in the blink of an eye. The more an investigator ambles toward the finish line, instead of sprinting, the likelier he or she is to get through the race, and by now, Lynn practically has Rod convinced the two of them are out on a date, and I’m the designated driver.
Ramsay is stretched out on the sofa, feet up on a coffee table, as he talks about his mom, Dorothy, and how she’d moved to Tampa after retiring, only to find work again as an archivist for a local company. He speaks of his love of reading, how he inherited it from his mother and how he went straight from high school into the military.
“Why not college?” Lynn asks. “Someone who loves books as much as you do—”
“It wasn’t for me,” Rod says, cutting her off mid-sentence.
The curtness tells me there’s more to the answer than that, probably lots more, but I’m not going to take him anywhere he doesn’t want to go, and besides, he’s already telling us plenty with barely a push on our part—like that he has a brother (Stewart) and that his father had divorced his mother and Rod has had little contact with him over the years. There are other indications that the Ramsays aren’t a Norman Rockwell–type family, but as I look around the mobile home, it seems pretty clear that Rod’s mother has tried to carve out a normal life for herself and her stay-at-home son.
It doesn’t take long for Lynn to pick up on Rod’s high IQ, his knowledge of history, and his fluent German, and of course that pleases him immensely. He kids Lynn about her own German and how it’s colored by her broad, flat midwestern accent. I don’t know more than a dozen words of German, but Rod’s own accent puts me in mind of those SS colonels dressed in long leather coats in vintage World War II movies. The two of them even manage to crack a few jokes in German—about me, I think, since they seem to be laughing at my expense.
It’s not long either before Rod launches happily into the seamier side of his life in Bad Kreuznach—the heavy drinking, the visits to prostitutes (though he refuses to look straight at Lynn when he’s telling this), and the drugs that were available, including acid, marijuana, and nitrous-oxide “whippets,” which apparently could be bought at the post PX.
All this confirms for me Rod’s moral apathy, his lack of self-regulation, and how easily others can influence him, but he also speaks once again with obvious pride about his work with the Eighth ID and how that fit in with V Corps and America’s strategic interests generally in Europe. As if to prove his liberal-mindedness, Ramsay also notes proudly that an African-American general named Colin Powell took command of V Corps shortly after he left Germany, but fails to mention that the reason Rod wasn’t there to greet the new commander was because he’d failed the by now famous “piss test”—more evidence that action and consequence are loosely connected in Rod’s psyche.
Next thing I know, Rod has moved on to the document-keeping process and how riddled with potholes everything was.
“They had all these safes, all these procedures,” he says, “but if somebody wanted to take something, all they had to do was put it in a burn bag and then pull it back out of the bag before they got to the burn facility.”
“What do you mean, burn bag and burn facility?” I ask.
“That’s the thing,” he says, “you couldn’t burn things where we kept all the documents. The burn facility was two blocks down and one block over. At the end of the day, we’d bag up the stuff they wanted destroyed and haul it over to be burned. Nobody questioned us when we were leaving our building or made sure that every document carried out was put in the furnace at the other end.”
“That’s a huge vulnerability,” I say.
“Huge,” he agrees.
I can’t tell if Rod is dropping crumbs he expects me to follow or if he’s simply in an expansive mood, but in this more relaxed setting, he’s definitely smoking less, and the conversation seems to flow easily, especially from his side. Something else: Rod isn’t playing all those smartest-guy-in-the-room games he played yesterday with Al Eways and later with me. All that’s great, but after an hour or so, I decide it’s time to narrow the focus and edge the conversation toward Clyde Conrad and that mysterious piece of paper with its six numerals.
“How about your friends in Germany,” I ask, “the guys you hung out with?”
“Oh,” he says, “they were mostly about my age. You know, drinking buddies, that sort of thing.” The question clearly hasn’t upset him, so I press on.
“I mean, did you guys travel around together? See the sights?”
“Sure, but once we left the base, a lot of them were dependent on me. I was the one who spoke German, and I was just about the only one with a passport as well.”
Sounds like innocuous stuff, I know, but now I’ve learned something else. Most soldiers have only their military IDs to travel on, which means they’re limited to countries under the status-of-forces agreement, but Rod’s having a passport meant he could go anywhere he wanted without revealing that he was in the military.
Not all his friends were single, Rod goes on. Some of the married ones were allowed to bring their families over. They weren’t running around with prostitutes all night long, obviously, and their wives were often good for a home-cooked meal.
“What about your boss, Conrad?” I ask. Rod’s not smoki
ng at that moment, and the timing is intentional. I want to test him in another way.
“He’d married a German national and lived off-base,” Rod answers, pulling twice on his shirt collar—ventilating behavior that’s as telling as a shaking cigarette.
“I guess you got to eat home-cooked meals at his house, too?”
“I did. Annja, his wife, is really nice and a great cook. Her schnitzel is the best.” He looks at Lynn as he says this, as if only she can appreciate how good a schnitzel can be.
“Was it hard to live off of the economy?” I ask. We’d gone over this yesterday, but I want Rod to get back to comfortable ground before I move on to the paper he pulled from his wallet, and I’m curious to see if his response will be different this time around.
Ramsay laughs and says, “The dollar was strong at first, but then it declined. Some of the soldiers sold the rationed items on the economy to get by.”
“Like what?”
“Cigarettes, Jack Daniel’s, gasoline rations, stuff like that.”
“Did you?” I’m rolling my eyes with playfulness.
“Mayyybeeee,” Ramsay says, with the look of a naughty boy, just like he had yesterday.
I laugh back. “I’ll take that as a yes.” Then we all chuckle. One thing you don’t do when you’re interviewing with Al Eways is engage in a mass chuckle. Rod is feeling so comfortable that he pops to his feet and offers to get us a round of lemonade. I wait until he’s served up the three glasses before moving on to the second subject I want to cover.
“By the way,” I say, “that note you gave me yesterday—the paper feels weird, doesn’t it?”
Ramsay carefully puts his glass down on the coffee table, then pushes his glasses right up onto the bridge of his nose and pulls once again on his shirt collar before answering. “I was with Clyde at a novelty store when he bought the paper.”
“Ah, that explains it, then, because it doesn’t look like regular office stationery.”
“No, no, it’s different,” Ramsay says, coughing. “It’s called flash paper. Magicians use it—they wet their hands and the paper dissolves.”