Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “To . . . ?”

  “To whatever satisfies the espionage statute, and I know that isn’t covered in basic agent training.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “That’s why we have to focus on what is important: small admissions that add up until they satisfy the statute.”

  “Go on.”

  “Seven ninety-four requires that we prove that the subject acquired classified material, that the said material was knowingly conveyed to somebody or some entity that had no right to be in possession of it, and lastly that it would do grievous damage to the United States of America.”

  “Doesn’t seem that difficult.”

  “That’s what I said on my first case. But try to get a suspect’s words to track with the requirements of the statute and you’ll see how difficult it becomes. That’s why each admission is so critical.”

  While Lynn is processing this, I run into a Cuban bakery I’m fond of and pick up some guava-filled pastelitos for Rod.

  As I get in the car, Lynn smells the bag.

  “God, that smells good,” she says, eyeing the bag as I strap myself back in the Bu-Steed.

  “Sooo good, and sooo fattening,” I tell her as I hand her one fresh from the oven.

  “I have a lot to learn about espionage, don’t I?” The flaky pastry has thrown her into a temporary, dreamy ecstasy.

  “We all do, Lynn. Every case is different, and they’re never easy.”

  * * *

  ROD, IT TURNS OUT, is fond of the pastelitos, too. He’s practically inhaled two of them. I’m waiting for my turn to dig in when Lynn looks at me with a slight smirk and tells Rod to finish the bag.

  “Really?” he says. By now, the corners of his mouth are cherry-red from the guava filling.

  “Really,” Lynn says. “Our treat.”

  Ha-ha. But no sense being sore about it, especially since I’ve already had my fill.

  “Rod,” I say, getting down to business, “you told us before that the base in Germany was pretty loosey-goosey. I mean, it sounds like there was hardly any adult supervision at all in the documents section where you worked.”

  He’s licking his chops like a two-year-old and nodding his head.

  “Can you give us some more on that? The army people know they need to tighten security over there. Your experience and insights would really be helpful to them.”

  Rod looks at me for a moment as if trying to decide just how much I’m bullshitting him—a good deal, in fact—but I’m betting that he can’t resist giving a little tutorial of his own, and that’s what happens.

  “Basically,” he begins, “with the documents, there was no supervision at all.”

  “So take us through the process.”

  “Yeah,” Lynn adds, “pretend we’re idiots.”

  “Pretend?” Rod’s in a playful mood today. Good.

  “Well,” he says, “it was kind of a cradle-to-grave operation. The documents arrived, and we logged them in. While they were there, we kept track of who had their hands on what, and when the documents were no longer of use, our job was to destroy them and sign off on possession.”

  “ ‘Our’? Who are we talking about?”

  “The document custodians.”

  “And who were they?” Lynn chimes in.

  “Me and Clyde.” And with that he just lights up like a Christmas tree. “It was up to us, do you see?”

  “In what way?” I ask, playing the eager learner. “Tell us more.”

  “Okay,” he says, slipping into the present tense as if he still is an Eighth Infantry document custodian, “we have these big heavy burn bags, and everybody just puts the documents in there. Then we seal them up with tape and truck them out, and, you know, when the burn facility’s working, we put the stuff we’re destroying in there. Basically, it’s like this giant pig-roast thing, a big wire-mesh contraption. You dump the documents in there and then turn it like you do a pig. It can be really messy and dirty, and it takes hours.”

  “And who watches over this while you’re doing it?”

  “Well, no one,” Rod says. “It’s just us, of course, the custodians, Clyde and me. Who else would there be?”

  There’s almost a smirk to his face as he says this, as if the question is beneath his consideration. In other circumstances, I’d waste no time cutting him down a peg or two at this point, but this isn’t an interrogation. Really, it’s not even an interview. This is an elicitation. I just need to keep Rod talking and wait to see what hints he drops as to what actually went on in Bad Kreuznach roughly three years ago, in the mid-eighties, before Rod peed cannabis and the army said goodbye.

  Instead of confronting him, I shrug my shoulders, mutter something about “stupid me” to a general chorus of approval from Rod and Lynn, and move on to what I hope will be a rich field to dig in.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’ve got it. You and Clyde seem to have pretty much ruled the roost.” A confirming nod from Rod, mostly Lynn’s way. “What else did you do together?”

  “We’d go out for a beer. We’d go on terrain walks.”

  “Terrain walks?” This is Lynn.

  “Yeah, sure. You know, we’d be looking at the topography, the lay of the land. One of our favorite walks was the length of the Fulda Gap, the place the Red Army tanks were going to come storming through if the Kremlin ever decided to set up a substation in Bonn. Napoleon—”

  “I know. I know,” I say. “Battle of Leipzig, retreat, et cetera.” I don’t want a history lesson right now, especially when it sounds as if Rod is heading somewhere interesting.

  “The Gap was what pretty much all the ops plans that passed through Documents talked about—if the Soviet tanks do this, we do that. If they do that, we do this. I mean, there couldn’t have been a lot of time in the Pentagon to strategize about anything else. It was like a living video game. Clyde and I would walk along the high side of the Gap and pretend we were each in charge of a tank division—one Soviet, one NATO. You fuck with my head here; I’ll fuck with your head there. Oh, and also destroy your people.”

  Lynn is shooting me a glance about now that says, “Unbelievable!” He’s admitting that he not only logged the ops plans in but read them, carefully, and I’m doing my best without taking my eyes off Rod to signal telepathically to Lynn that this is just what I was talking about in the car an hour ago. Ramsay isn’t your traditional spy. This guy knows what’s important, he knows the tactical and strategic value of documents, and he and Conrad were basically the unsupervised librarians for those documents.

  “Sounds like you guys had some real fun together,” I say to Rod, taking all the tension out of my posture, settling back into my chair for a good gab. Lynn picks up on my cue and practically sprawls at her end of the trailer sofa.

  “Oh, yeah,” Rod answers, stretching his legs out on the coffee table, next to the lacquered doll. “And not just fun. Clyde was a smart guy, you know. He’d sit there and read a book, and he’d tear the pages out as he read and throw them away. I still read the same way.”

  Me: “Weird.”

  Rod (with a laugh): “Yeah, I mean think about it. Why carry around the weight of those already read pages? If you’re done with them, you’re done. I learned lots of things from him, and he was always testing me.”

  Lynn: “Like school tests? Exams?”

  “No, not school tests,” Rod says.

  “What are we talking about, then?” I ask.

  “Well, for one thing, Clyde wanted to know how far I’d be willing to go in bending the rules.”

  “Rules?”

  “Yeah, he had lots of them. The first rule was that you always had to be indispensable. I remember he told me one day, ‘If your superiors think you’re indispensable, they’ll leave you alone.’ ”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they’ll never look in on what you’re doing; they’ll never check on you.”

  At this point, I’m thinking two things. One, Rod and Clyde are absolutely right:
Indispensable people make the best embezzlers, for example, because they’re never supervised; and two, if you don’t need to be supervised, then you can do anything you want, like copy classified documents and steal them from under the noses of people with some of the highest security clearances going.

  “Any more rules?” Lynn asks. “You said that was the first one.”

  “Sure,” Rod says, ticking more rules off on his fingers: “Always look busy. Always look like you’re in a hurry. Always have something in your hand. Always be the first person in the office and the last to leave.”

  “Wow!” I say. “Why all that?”

  “Well, just think about it,” Rod answers, settling back into his professorial mode. “If you always look busy, always have something in your hand, always rush from this place to that, and are always the first person everyone sees in the morning and the last one they see in the office at night, then . . . ”

  Rod pauses here to let us complete the sentence, and Lynn and I both do so at pretty much the same time and in the same words: “. . . you can do anything you want!”

  Rod is beaming at us, as if we’re star pupils, and I’m beaming back, not because I’ve guessed the answer but because Rod has just told us how to operate in the open, without having to sneak around during the day or risk breaking into the facility after hours or before the morning bell. None of this rises yet to the level of actionable information, but Rod is building our case for us, one small admission at a time, and I want to keep his roll going.

  “Well,” I say, “just between us girls, did you ever get the impression that Clyde might have been up to no good?”

  For a long time, Rod just sits there with a smile on his face. I have no idea what’s going on in his head, but I don’t see any of the usual body language of fear or anxiety—the hand to the mouth, the bouncing Adam’s apple. Then, as if this trailer park living room is full of people and he wants to speak only to us, Rod leans forward in his seat, waits for us to lean in toward him, and says almost in a whisper: “That was part of what he was testing me about.”

  “Bending the rules?”

  “No, more than that. He was always testing my morality—testing it in all these ways.”

  “Well,” I ask, “why would he do that? You guys were friends, pals.”

  Then Rod gets this sheepish look on his face, leans in even closer, and whispers still softer: “Because he had this business going on.”

  “Oh,” I say, leaning back into my chair, trying to take some of the tension out of the moment, “a business, huh? Like those black-market cigarette coupons you were telling us about? It doesn’t sound like he was stretching your morality too far with that one.”

  Lynn has leaned back as well. Before long, Rod takes the cue and pulls back himself. You can almost feel the room filling back up with air again.

  “Clyde,” Rod starts to say, then pauses for a beat or two, gathering his thoughts or maybe parsing them in advance to make sure he doesn’t give away too much. “Clyde was a conniver, a schemer. He always had something going on, and you know, some of it was a little out on the edge.”

  “Like what?” Lynn asks.

  I follow up with “Yeah, give us an example.”

  “Well,” Rod says, “what if, hypothetically, Clyde wanted to set up a video-rental business?”

  “Pirated copies, you mean?”

  That gets a little smile from Rod. “Hypothetically,” he adds.

  “Of course,” I answer. “Purely hypothetical.”

  “But what if this ‘hypothetical’ video-rental business,” Rod continues, “wasn’t really about renting videos?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” I say. “What else, hypothetically, might it be about?”

  “Information?” Rod answers, twisting the word into a question at the last moment. “Information, he used to say, was everything. What if, hypothetically, Clyde really wanted to use the video-rental business to get information from the soldiers who came in?”

  “What would he do with it?” Lynn asks. “Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically,” Rod says, “he could maybe sell it.”

  I’m dying to say, “To whom?” but Rod has been intentionally talking in “hypotheticals.” He’s playing a game with us, teasing us with hints and probably satisfying his own risk-taking needs at the same time. Odds are, if we ask him to be any more specific, he’ll decide the game is over and clam up. Instead, I nod toward the bathroom and ask with my eyes if he’d mind.

  “Sure,” he says. “Go right ahead.”

  Inside, I flush the toilet and splash some water around in the sink, to make it sound real. I’m hoping that Lynn will take over in my absence and that maybe, without me in the room, the talk will loosen up, and that seems to have been the case. As I’m leaving the bathroom, I hear Lynn asking about Clyde’s other buddies—a good question, one I was heading toward myself. By the time I settle back into my chair again, Rod is making a distinction between Clyde’s “poker players” and his “poker-poker players.”

  “Whoa,” I say, “I get ‘poker players’—stud, five-card draw, all that. But what are ‘poker-poker players’? Are these the guys who play for really big stakes?”

  “No,” he says, “poker-poker players are Clyde’s really good buddies. They do all sorts of favors for him.”

  “Like what?”

  But Rod doesn’t answer that one.

  “How about you, Rod?” I say. “Were you a poker-poker player?”

  “Maayyybbbbeeeee,” he says, stretching the word out as long as it will go, then disappearing behind his grin. And that’s when I know we’ve done all the good we can do here today.

  Lynn is still slipping back into her shoes when I put my hand on the front doorknob.

  “Look, Rod,” I say, turning around, “this has been incredibly helpful once again. You’re really giving us a great sense of how things went down at Eighth Infantry HQ. I’m going to talk today with our people in Bonn and see what else they need, but I’m sure we’ll be calling you soon to see if we can stop by again.”

  “Tomorrow?” Rod asks in a hopeful voice. He has enjoyed today’s gamesmanship immensely. That’s obvious. “I’m free. How about it?”

  “Maayyybbbbeeeee.”

  * * *

  BEING DIGNIFIED PROFESSIONALS, AGENT Tremaine and I wait until we are well out of the trailer park before celebrating the day’s progress with a high five—or as high as you can five in a Bu-Steed, which in this case happens to be a 1983 Chevy Malibu. No, we don’t have a confession in hand, but we have something far better as far as I’m concerned—a ladder of admissions that, when we finally get to confession or even if we don’t, will allow us to build the kind of rock-solid criminal case that can stand up against the toughest defense.

  Rod Ramsay has fessed up to bending the rules, to having his morality tested by what we soon hope will be a convicted spy, and to being tutored and influenced by same. He has also willingly spread hints of nefarious activities on Clyde Conrad’s part and of intimate knowledge of those activities and some of the “poker-poker players” who were possibly Conrad’s co-conspirators. Conrad and Ramsay are tight and unsupervised, and this is the kind of story a jury will buy.

  Not a bad haul. I’m happy for Lynn, who has proved herself an able partner and quick study despite her tender years. Most of all, I’m happy for Jay Koerner, who has more to lose than either of us—more salary, more time invested, more upside potential. (My upside potential is going to sink to zero if this war with Washington keeps up.) Koerner gave me ninety days. That’s all anyone could ask under the circumstances. And in less than a month, Lynn and I have built a case that justifies his faith almost to the maximum degree.

  “By the way?” I say to Lynn as we swing around a fender bender on Kennedy Boulevard. “I want to thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “The way you’ve handled this case, the way you’ve handled Rod. Most agents wouldn’t be able to do that.”

/>   “Ya think?” she says with that unmistakable Midwestern accent.

  “Yeah, I do. You go with the flow. I call an audible and you’re there, ready to catch. I really appreciate it.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot.”

  “Jay was right—you’re a good agent. But more important, Rod likes you.”

  “Yeaaaah, he kinda does,” Lynn responds. It’s a credit to the way she purposefully shows delight with anything Rod has to say, but I also suspect that he appreciates any female giving him her attention.

  “Good,” I say, “let’s keep it that way. And one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t wait to interview that goddamn weasel again!”

  “Me, too, Joe,” Lynn says. “Me, too.”

  Lynn would never get the chance. Nine days after our September 20 interview, the Kercsik brothers pick Rod Ramsay out of the photo lineup we sent and confirm he was involved in the Conrad case. The next day, FBIHQ once again orders us to break off all contact with Ramsay—an all-caps ORDER this time, the kind you can’t ignore. By the time I’m again allowed to talk with Rod Ramsay, 357 days later, Lynn Tremaine is married and gone from the Tampa office, and the case against Ramsay has gone cold as a Russian winter.

  8

  MY YEAR IN THE DESERT

  Washington, DC—October 29, 1989

  Good news: I have permission to talk with Rod Ramsay again!

  Bad news: The Ramsay investigation pretty much sat on the shelf for twelve months and eight days—but who’s counting? And who spent every day of those twelve months tormented by the fact that he couldn’t officially pursue a guy who he was sure had done America great harm?

  Maybe worse news: Storm clouds are gathering, not outside the windows of the Eastern Air Lines Ionosphere Club, here on the second floor of the main terminal at Washington National Airport, but in more ominous places. Rod has been getting calls from ABC News. Maybe someone has tipped one of Ted Koppel’s Nightline producers to Rod’s possible connection to Conrad; maybe the World News Tonight staff is just doing due diligence, following up on last March’s piece about Conrad in the New York Times. Worse-case scenario but also the most likely: James Bamford is sinking his teeth into the Conrad case. National security types were leaking substantial information to Bamford even before he wrote The Puzzle Palace—his international best seller that pretty much stripped bare the National Security Agency. Now that he’s (a) famous and (b) heading up ABC’s Washington-based national security investigative team, the intelligence crowd is falling all over itself to get on his good side, and the Clyde Conrad case seems to be doing the trick.