Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  I understand that the press has a job to do and Bamford is just doing his. But I’ve got a job to do as well, and I have a lot of concerns. Rod is a twenty-seven-year-old nervous mess with a pins-and-needles mother. I want him chilled out when we get back to serious interviewing, not glancing at the phone with every new query and thinking of the lawyer his mom has lined up. (And you can bet your last dollar Rod has the lawyer’s number stored for instant recall in his prodigious memory.)

  Around me, guys in suits, ties loosened at the neck, are standing over fax machines or hunkered over the club’s new IBM PS/2 computers, complimentary highballs at their elbows. Some of these wayfaring businessmen and lobbyists are maybe padding their expense accounts or exaggerating their success at getting in to see Congressman X or Senator Y or even Speaker Foley himself! More likely, they’re just filling out and filing whatever corresponds to an FD-302 in the corporate or lobbyist world.

  I’m dressed in a suit, too, but my tie isn’t at half-mast, and there’s a soda water at my elbow, not a Jack Daniel’s and ginger. Also, I’m working on a legal pad, not a computer screen—old-fashioned, just like the Bureau, where computers are still wood-fired and faxes a novelty. I’ve got two and a half hours stretched out in front of me—the 6:29 p.m. flight to Tampa was full. The next one doesn’t leave until 9:00. I figure it’s a good time to make sense of a nonsensical year, and for me, paper and pen is the best way to do that.

  * * *

  COLUMN ONE I HEAD “HQ/WFO” (aka Shitstorm Central), and here I list all the roadblocks, all the obfuscations, the outright lies, the bureaucratic swamps, and petty, niggling warfare that has dogged our investigation of Rod Ramsay from day one and particularly since last year’s edict not to talk to him or get near him again.

  Example One: The October ’88 decision prohibiting us from dealing directly with INSCOM and the army in this matter. Instead, we were told that all communication and information exchanged with the army would come through the Washington Field Office, which meant it would arrive weeks late or not at all. (Fortunately, we were able to figure out a partial work-around. Incredibly, the army has been more helpful to us than our own people.)

  Another example: The headquarters meeting about the same time at which the WFO’s Dale Watson and Bill Bray—respectively, the squad supervisor and agent handling the Conrad case—told Koerner and me in an ever-so-patronizing tone that this was just “too big a case” for a small office like Tampa. (And yet somehow too small for WFO to make any effort to investigate it properly?)

  Still another one: The way HQ and WFO fought tooth and nail to keep Lynn from going to Sweden to talk with the Kercsiks and to Germany to investigate the crime scene, and then, when they finally did let her go, barely let her open her mouth and wouldn’t allow her to investigate a damn thing.

  Recalling Lynn’s thwarted crime scene investigation reminds me of how incredibly slipshod the geniuses in our Washington Field Office have been about the most basic forensic details. We know that highly classified documents from the Eighth Infantry Division headquarters at Bad Kreuznach somehow made it into Hungarian intelligence hands. We know that such documents are frequently copies of original documents. We know what copiers Clyde Conrad and Rod Ramsay most often used in their capacity as document custodians for the Eighth Infantry HQ. And, critically, we know that every copier in the world has its own unique fingerprint—scratches, blurs, markings of whatever kind that are mostly undetectable to the naked eye. So why hasn’t WFO collected “fingerprints”—“exemplars” in FBI lab-speak—for every copier that the two men were known to use or might possibly have used, just on the off chance that a recovered document or two falls back into our hands? You don’t have to be Dick Tracy to come up with that idea.

  (I can tell I’m getting frustrated. My handwriting is growing bigger line by line, and I’m pressing down harder and harder.)

  Then there’s the crime scene itself: Bad Kreuznach, the Eighth Infantry HQ, the Document Section where Conrad and Ramsay worked, the safe they used, the burn pit where they destroyed documents. You’d think investigators serious about getting to the bottom of what happened would have photographs, schematics of where everything was, not just for investigative purposes but to eventually show a jury. But no, that would take work, not sitting on your ass, buffing your résumé. And perish the thought that anyone—WFO, the army, our people in Bonn—would actually do anything to secure the crime scene, just in case, say, a confederate of Conrad wanted to remove an incriminating piece of evidence so far undiscovered. There’s no other way to say it—this is a shit way to conduct an investigation. Period.

  Also, let us not forget the article I mentioned earlier, the one that appeared in the March 10 New York Times and reported everything then known about the Conrad case, including these memorable paragraphs (I carry the clipping in my briefcase, but I’ve pretty much got it down by heart by now):

  The F.B.I., which investigated the Conrad case with the Army and West German officials, is now investigating as many as five Army associates of Mr. Conrad who are believed to have assisted him, according to American officials and Sven Olof Hakansson, the Swedish prosecutor who handled the Kercsik case . . .

  The assistance included help in copying and transporting stolen Army documents to the Hungarians, according to officials. A spokesman for the F.B.I. said the bureau would have no comment on the case.

  Note particularly that last sentence: “. . . the bureau would have no comment on the case.” Very interesting, I remember thinking at the time and still think, since the only way the Times could have gotten the full story was if someone inside the FBIHQ or WFO sang like a canary to reporter Jeff Gerth. What’s more, the only reason I could think of (and still can think of) to sing so richly and completely was to derail the ongoing investigations. Of the “five Army associates of Mr. Conrad” mentioned in the article, the only one leading this investigation into uncharted waters is our very own Roderick James Ramsay. He’s also the one most likely to have been so spooked by the article that he finally called that lawyer and will never say another word to us again.

  Suspicious? I guess I am, but usually for good reason.

  * * *

  6:45 P.M. TIME ISN’T exactly flying. I arm myself with another club soda, this time with a piece of lime trapped below the ice, and write “USSR” at the top of a new page. The Soviets, after all, are the end buyers of Conrad’s (and, in my mind, Ramsay’s) product. What’s been happening in the People’s Paradise? Well . . . lots.

  That virus the Soviets unleashed last November on the Pentagon, SDI Research, and a half-dozen American universities is way beyond my pay grade—I still think of the flu when I hear “virus”—but the way all computers are connecting with each other and taking over the world, these electronic viruses could become a major counterintelligence threat.

  More disturbing news: The Soviets have conducted nine nuclear tests since the Ramsay investigation was put on ice—nine!—most in the northeast corner of Kazakhstan and one within a week of Mikhail Gorbachev’s much-celebrated can’t-we-all-get-along goodwill tour of America. Nukes have burdened me with dark thoughts ever since the Cuban Missile Crisis, when trains ran twenty-four hours a day past our Miami duplex apartment, delivering war materiel to nearby Homestead Air Force Base. But nukes in the hands of the military in a country that’s looking closer and closer to collapse make those thoughts more vivid, even terrifying, and there has been plenty happening of late to put Soviet generals even more on edge.

  Estonia, for example, has announced that it’s now free of Soviet influence in its internal affairs. Journalists in Yugoslavia are clamoring for more freedom. Things have gotten so precarious in Czechoslovakia that the Soviet-proxy cops there have arrested Václav Havel—a writer, for God’s sake! It’s been almost five months since Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Party came to power in Poland. Only two weeks ago, the East German Communist Party seemed close to collapse—unthinkable!—and just last week there was news that sur
ely made Soviet politburo members’ blood pressure soar: Hungary has declared itself an independent country.

  Most analysts I’ve talked with think the NATO countries can ride out this storm so long as those Pershing II missiles in West Germany are staring down Moscow’s throat, but desperate empires do desperate things, and the commissars in the Kremlin wouldn’t be the first tyrants to try to save their skins with a convenient war—one begun by, say, sending a thousand tanks roaring through the Fulda Gap. Or something even worse.

  * * *

  AS I STARE DOWN at my legal pad, I try to cheer myself with optimistic thoughts. FBIHQ staffers behaved somewhat cooperatively at my meeting at the Mothership earlier today, and the Justice Department seems to be ginning up some interest. Also, the Germans put through a request at the start of October to use Lynn’s and my FD-302s in building their case against Conrad—that was a real morale booster.

  Best of all, not only do I have permission to talk with Ramsay again, but we were actually able to find him, and believe me, that wasn’t easy given how long this case has been on the shelf. We can’t keep tabs on people just because we think we might want to collar them someday. J. Edgar Hoover got away with that kind of stuff, but those days are long gone. Also, surveillance like that requires a good deal of expertise. You don’t want it being done by amateurs who are either going to lose the subject constantly or be so heavy-handed about following him or her that the subject bolts for cover.

  We began the Rod-hunt with multiple phone calls across every shift at the Bob Evans restaurant out on Highway 60, his last known place of employment. The stories were always different: Rod’s mother was sick; his car was fixed and ready to pick up; etc. But Rod was never there, and we got the sense that most of the people we talked with had never heard of him. So we sent one of our youngest agents out there, pretending he was a long-lost friend, and that at least netted us the information that Rod had quit months ago and was maybe driving a cab in Orlando, eighty-five miles to the northeast.

  I used that thin piece of intelligence to pay a visit to Rod’s mother, Dorothy, and I’m glad I did. ABC News had been calling her, too, and she was worried that Rod’s being mentioned on air in connection with the Conrad case would somehow expose him to danger.

  “Rod was assigned to that job, Mr. Navarro,” she reminded me. “He didn’t seek it out. You can’t be held guilty just because you worked with a criminal.”

  I liked Dorothy immediately. She was full of energy and clearly had a big heart. In fact, she reminded me very much of the librarian in my junior high—a woman who always treated antsy seventh- and eighth-grade boys with a smile and was quick to forgive our many behavioral excesses.

  It was a miserable afternoon. A driving rain had swept in from the Gulf and found a hole in Dorothy’s metal roof. A plastic bucket sat on the kitchen floor, slowly filling up. The drip-drip was background music to the tea and cookies Dorothy insisted I share with her.

  “Rod won’t talk to his father or his brother,” she told me, “but the three of them are a lot alike, all smart as whips. Unfortunately, back when Rod was in high school, the family fell apart. Rod’s father went one way. Stewart went another. And Rod and I were left with each other,” she said, her face betraying how much she wished things had been different.

  “Rod,” she went on, “at least found the army. I’d hoped it would settle him, but, oh, the marijuana. It’s always something with him.”

  Perhaps a good deal more “something” than she could imagine, I thought, but how do you tell that to a mother?

  “Maybe he’ll settle down,” I said. “Some people just take longer to find their niche.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, but I didn’t hear much hope in it.

  We talked on for another twenty minutes or so, a calm moment in the usual storm of my day, and in the end Dorothy was able to confirm that Rod had relocated to the Greater Orlando area and was driving a cab, but exactly where he was living and which company he was driving for were mysteries to her as well.

  “You know,” she said as I was preparing to dash through the rain to my car, “Rod is a rolling stone. He moves around a lot.”

  No doubt about it, Dorothy is a nice lady, doing the best she can in tough circumstances and more than willing to help us, but knowing that Rod was in Central Florida driving a cab these days still left us with a big challenge. Thanks to Disney World, Epcot Center, SeaWorld, and a dozen other lesser tourist destinations, Orlando probably has as many for-hire car services per capita as any place in the United States. The sheer number of possibilities forced us to send in a dozen undercover agents. We were just about out of faces young enough to make the cover credible when we finally glommed on to the right cab outfit and were able to ID Rod coming in the next morning to pick up a car.

  Even now, though, we still have to walk lightly. We already know that ABC News is sniffing around Rod. If he senses that the national media and the FBI are both about to come down on him, who knows what he might do. This is a guy who lacks the normal range of inhibitions.

  * * *

  IT WAS ABOUT A month before making this trip to DC, on September 26, that I finally got to see Rod Ramsay again, after our twelve-month forced separation. No other way to put it: The guy was a complete mess.

  Not that I expected a lot out of the meeting. I just wanted to reestablish contact while we assembled a support team that could meet the demands of every agency that had skin in the game: from the National Security Council to the Department of Justice. The real interviewing was to come.

  When I first reached Rod by phone at the cab office, he told me that he couldn’t talk freely, but he did manage to let me know that he was living in a camper with a woman, although not very happily. According to Rod, she had another boyfriend who regularly stopped by and kicked him out of his own camper. When that happened, he wound up sleeping in his car. What a life!

  We agreed to meet at seven-thirty in the lobby of a hotel in Kissimmee, near Disney World, but I got there early and waited upstairs so I could see Rod coming in without his seeing me. Once I confirmed that he had nothing in his hands that might go Bang! in the night, I approached him from the back and surprised him. Even from behind I could see that he looked disheveled, but once he turned around, I was almost shocked. A lot of weight had dropped off his already skinny frame, and it was way too easy to tell that he hadn’t bathed in days. The first thing he did after we shook hands was to take out a comb and try to make sense of his tangle of greasy hair.

  Either this guy is a volcano about to explode, I found myself thinking, or he’s on the edge of collapsing into his own sinkhole. Whichever the case—and maybe it’s some of both—Agent Navarro is going to have to be Dr. Navarro, Nurse Navarro, Headshrinker Navarro, and Father Confessor Navarro, too, if Rod Ramsay is going to become the asset I know he can be.

  * * *

  DOES ALL THIS AMOUNT to progress? Well, in an up-and-down way, yes. The people at headquarters don’t seem to hate me as much as I thought. The door to Ramsay has been cracked open again. If I wasn’t packing heat, I might even order a Cuba libre with Bacardi rum. Instead, I ask for another club soda, this time with bitters. The bartender is just sliding it my way when ABC World News Tonight pops up on the TV behind him . . . and the shitstorm begins anew. Clyde Lee Conrad is the lead story. “Goddamn it!” I say loud enough for the three people sitting nearby to hear me.

  “ABC News has talked to investigators, had access to investigative documents, and talked to self-admitted participants in the suspected spy ring,” the broadcast begins. “Our national security correspondent John McWethy has the story.”

  McWethy does indeed have the story, all of it: Zoltan Szabo, the Hungarians, Conrad’s suitcases stuffed full with top-secret documents—“everything but the nuclear go-codes, the codes that could actually launch the nuclear weapons,” McWethy reports, citing one admitted spy-ring participant. There are even mini-interviews with Conrad’s wife, Annja, and his son. But it’s
the close of the segment that has me almost gasping for breath.

  Conrad was the only one arrested on that day in West Germany. Since then, a massive US investigation has been launched—one of the largest espionage probes the FBI has ever handled. Sources say there were many others working in the spy ring. What began with Szabo in 1967, then expanded to incorporate Conrad in the mid-1970s, eventually included a whole new group of people, a third generation of spies that sources say Conrad himself recruited in the mid-1980s.

  Government sources claim the FBI now is keeping track of more than a dozen of these suspects. ABC News has learned that one of Conrad’s recruits continued to work for Conrad back in the United States, illegally exporting hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips through a dummy company in Canada to the Eastern Bloc. According to the man himself, who asked not to be identified, Conrad paid him to make the purchases.

  Want to guess who the Conrad recruit is who got involved in the computer-chip scheme? My guess is it’s a skinny guy who doesn’t recognize the difference between right and wrong and who now is or very soon will be shaking in his boots. (Actually, I’m almost certain who this is since Rod’s mother told me that ABC people had been calling him specifically about computer chips.)

  Want to further guess who fed all this to John McWethy? Probably the same person who force-fed Jeff Gerth at the Times more than seven months ago and now has upped the stakes with even more insider knowledge. And unless I miss my bet, that has to be one of the very people I met with today, someone who sat through that entire four-hour session secure in the knowledge that however much progress I might have felt I was making at HQ, ABC World News Tonight was going to torpedo the whole damn investigation before the day was through.