Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  From Frankfurt, we’re whisked to a compound outside Koblenz, forty-five miles away, where the trial has been under way for several weeks. One of the first people I meet there is Gary Pepper, the army investigator without whom Clyde Conrad would never be facing these espionage charges. Gary looks like he’s still in his late twenties, but he’s already an investigative tour de force. As he describes for me his own multiple days of testimony, now finally completed, I can tell we’re going to mesh just right. He’s been using detail after detail to build a narrative that places Conrad at the center of his spy ring, just what I intend to do.

  That’s the good news. The bad news, Gary says, is that the media is all over this case. The New York Times, the Stars and Stripes, Der Spiegel, the Guardian, Le Monde—they’ll all be in the courtroom. Even the newly liberated Russians have sent several credentialed “journalists” who still somehow manage to look like thugs from the KGB.

  “The ‘Espionage Trial of the Century,’ ” Gary says. “That’s how they’re playing it. That’s why they’ve got us out here at this compound, but you can forget about privacy and anonymity once you walk into that courtroom tomorrow.”

  Truer words, in fact, have been rarely spoken.

  Koblenz, in the morning light, turns out to be a beautiful place, even pristine. The State Superior Court Building is one of its highlights—a lovely old pile overlooking the Rhine and Mosul rivers. One of my minders tells me Koblenz is usually a quiet enclave, a place where everyone’s privacy is respected, but when I try walking into the courthouse without being noticed, one reporter immediately calls out my name in unmistakable American English—“Yo, Joe, over here!”—which I ignore.

  The wood-lined courtroom itself must date back at least a century or more. It smacks of age and gravitas. So does the arrangement. This isn’t like an American courtroom: a judge in the front, jury of peers to the side, plenty of open space between all parties. In Germany, cases like Conrad’s are heard by a panel of six judges, chaired by a senior judge. This panel weighs everything you say, can question anything stated, and often does.

  I no sooner take all this in than I’m led past a gaggle of courtroom visitors to the witness chair. The last man I pass on my left is so thin and gaunt that I barely recognize him. From the many photographs that Rod had shown me, I assumed Clyde Conrad was still blond-haired and full-faced. Those candids always put me in mind of the confident CEO of a shady enterprise. But the Clyde Conrad I’m walking by now is white-haired and at least thirty pounds lighter than his booking photo. His chin is perched uneasily on his two thumbs with his index fingers spread to just underneath his nose.

  Rod has been talking about this demon for over a year, building him up in my imagination into some sort of evil titan. Instead, Conrad looks like one of those ex–Nazi prison guards from World War II who get arrested every decade or so—so underwhelming.

  It’s only when I sit in the witness chair that I realize I’m going to have more than enough opportunity to study Clyde further, and incredibly close up. Back in the States, witnesses and the accused are put at a reasonable distance, not close enough to claw at each other. In Koblenz Superior Court, though, the witness and accused are no more than a yard and a half apart. If Clyde were to lean slightly to his right and I leaned an equal amount to my left, we could hold hands.

  Next to Conrad, his defense attorney sits slightly slumped in his chair. At their own table farther away, the two prosecutors sit ramrod straight.

  “Herr Navarro,” one asks, “could you please tell the court precisely how you got involved in this case?”

  And with that, the show begins. For the next day and a half, nine hours of testimony in all, I take the court from Al Eways and my first meeting with Rod Ramsay, on the very day Clyde Conrad was arrested; through the early interviews with Lynn Tremaine; my year of no contact; how Rod then began to talk to me and Terry Moody, reluctantly at first, but each time with a little more information, until the confessions and revelations started spilling one on top of the other; and finally up to just a few days ago when I last saw Ramsay and told him I was going to Germany.

  “And what was his response to that, Herr Navarro?” Conrad’s attorney wants to know.

  “He asked me to bring him back some good Riesling.”

  At least two of the judges find that amusing, but Conrad sits stony-faced. Every once in a while as I testify, though, I catch him with the hint of a smile, on the left side of his face, the more honest side, especially when I say something he knows is accurate. One such moment comes when I describe how Conrad had sent Rod into the document vault to steal a file, then started banging on the door to scare him. It’s obvious to me that Conrad wants to laugh—he’s reliving the moment and deeply proud of how he tested Rod—but he catches himself at the last moment.

  This is far from a nine-hour monologue. The defense counsel, the panel of judges, even the prosecutors pelt me with questions. Conrad’s attorney seems especially upset that I do all this without a single note in front of me. Time and again, he’ll scribble furiously as I answer some question, then ask me the same question an hour or two later to see if I change a fact, a time, even the wording. I don’t, at least not by enough to be meaningful in the least.

  “How is it possible to deliver this testimony without notes?” he exclaims on the second day, throwing his hands dramatically into the air. “It’s not. It’s simply not.”

  I could tell him how it’s possible: not because I’m clever, but because this is what I’ve lived for two years. Rod’s words, his voice, his story—it’s all so etched in my brain that Luciana used to complain that I was repeating Ramsay’s interviews aloud in my sleep. That’s the reason she gave for moving her bedroom into the den: One of us had to have a chance to rest. Or maybe because there were three of us in the bed every night, Rod included.

  When I get to the most sensitive area of my testimony—the material from the Emergency Action Center, NSA’s “equities”—the judges ask a lot of questions on all sides of the matter, but I get the impression that this is just one leap too many for them. Fundamentally, they don’t think Rod could have done it, could have taken what he confessed to taking. If I were allowed to testify that NSA has already verified that Ramsay is telling the truth, we could end the matter right here and now, but then we’d have to get into how Leonard, Henry, and others corroborated Rod’s account, which would quickly lead us down a slippery path at the end of which top-secret matters would get divulged in open court. Score one for the Conrad team—and Clyde’s smirk tells me he knows he’s holding a winning hand on this issue—but the way his head keeps dropping lower between his shoulders also tells me that he knows the EAC material doesn’t really mean that much, at least to his immediate future. I’ve already corroborated all the other documents that have been introduced, including the OPLANs and CONPLANs Conrad and Ramsay were so eager to sell. Throwing PALs and cookies on that pile would just be adding more fuel to an inferno.

  As I expected, the court is openly surprised about the secret apartment. That seems to beggar everyone’s imagination. But what concerns them the most, as it turns out, is why Ramsay is talking to me at all. And it’s not just the judges. Defense counsel also wants to know if the government has made promises to Ramsay, if he’s received Miranda warnings, if Ramsay is being paid, if he’s worked out a deal with the prosecutors, and most unnerving—and this is when all the reporters, even the Russian ones, break out their pens and start writing furiously—why is Ramsay not under arrest?

  One of the jurists is particularly appalled: “Herr Navarro, surely he is in some form of custody, no? With all the evidence you’ve presented, how could he not be?” The question, I should add, isn’t directed solely to me. It resonates with everyone in the audience because everyone in Germany seems to get it—Ramsay should be in the clink by now.

  What can I say? That spineless bureaucrats fretting over their careers have refused to act? That Ramsay’s arrest is hung up in a pissin
g match between Tampa, the Washington Field Office, and FBIHQ? In the end, I opt, as I too rarely do, for tact:

  “In espionage matters, Your Honor, only the US attorney general can make that decision, and he has yet to do so.”

  * * *

  THE JUDGES HAVE JUST finished thanking me for my time at the end of my second day on the witness stand when Clyde Conrad clears his throat in what I take to be a meaningful way, and I look over at him. His face during my nine hours of testimony has run a gamut of emotions common to psychopaths: from narcissistic glee at hearing his “genius” confirmed, to the ice-cold stare he levels at me during short breaks or when I say something particularly damning, to a look best described as reptilian indifference, the outward and visible manifestation of a mindset that allows psychopaths to commit horrible crimes and do terrible things without feeling the least bit of remorse. There’s something of all that in the way he stares at me now: animosity, disdain, the tacit assumption that everything about him has value and nothing about me does.

  I’m literally inches from Conrad as I leave the witness stand. Maybe now is the time to let loose with a little anger and disdain and even triumph of my own. I’ve finished what Gary Pepper started, and between us, I’m sure Clyde Conrad will not be digging up his hidden jars of gold coins anytime soon. Take that, you son of a bitch! But the truth is I feel neither joy nor sorrow. In fact, at that moment as I walk past Clyde Conrad, I feel absolutely nothing for him, as though he’s already dead.

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT WE HAVE a nice private dinner with the army folks, including Gary Pepper, and some of the investigators from the Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent of the FBI. Ihor, of course, has grabbed a couple bottles of Riesling for us, and one more for me to carry back to Orlando for Rod. We’re into maybe our fourth liter when Ihor leans over to me and says, “Joe, the sum total of these two days has been jaw-dropping—nicely done.”

  Of the many nice pats on the back that night, Ihor’s is the best, and also the last. In the morning, I’ll be leaving for Austria to hook up with Jane and begin searching for the meeting spots Rod has told me about. The last thing I need is to wake up with a splitting headache, and Ihor and the Germans seem to be settling in for a long, long night.

  I’m passing by the front desk at the compound when the night clerk asks me if I am “Herr Navarro,” then hands me a fax that he says has arrived from “Tampa, in Florida America.”

  I wait until I’m upstairs to read it just in case I can’t control my reaction—a wise move since, in fact, I cannot. The message is only seven words long:

  “RR cannot be located. Call office stat.”

  Not until I land in Vienna just before noon the next day do I find out what happened: Surveillance followed the wrong Yellow Cab out of Orlando International. For twenty hours before he’s found again, and just as news of my testimony in Koblenz starts circulating around the world, Rod Ramsay is on the loose and below the radar. For three of those hours, I lay in a bed in Koblenz, West Germany, convinced I was having a heart attack. So rattled was I that in the morning I forgot to pack Rod’s Riesling. It was still on the dresser as I left for the airport in Frankfurt.

  22

  PLACES, EVERYONE!

  Imagine the setting: an old building with poor lighting and anemic air-conditioning somewhere I can’t identify in the Greater Washington, DC, metropolitan area—a secure, off-site location furnished with Department of Defense hand-me-downs from World War II and before. We’re in a large conference room, gathered around a slightly scarred table big enough to sit twenty and, today, filled to the brim. And just like in junior high, everyone is sitting in packs.

  The delegation from the Department of Justice? Together, and tight as ticks. Ditto the representatives from the army, from NSA, from FBIHQ, and from our office. Terry Moody, back to work at last and beaming from her new motherhood, Rich Licht, Marc Reeser, and I all sit to Jane Hein’s left, with me on the wing, next to Dale Watson and the espionage squad he supervises at the Washington Field Office. Greg Kehoe is to Jane’s right, elbow to elbow with the folks from Internal Security.

  Watson begins the meeting by talking about information received from the Swedes. Why? This is probably the last thing that should be on the agenda. We can’t use anything the Swedes are saying at a trial—it’s all hearsay. Far better to spend our time on that small thing called “the trial of the century” in Germany or thank the army for having identified Conrad. But Watson’s thinking is as slow as his Southern drawl.

  When others in the room interrupt to talk about more pressing matters, such as the investigation of Rondeau and Gregory, Watson shuts them down just as he’s tried to shut me down throughout this investigation. In fact, I know exactly what’s going to happen next because I’ve lived this for over a year. I know who’ll rant, who’ll sit back complacently, who’ll cower like sheep, what everyone will say and object to and harp on, and who, of course, in the end will get kicked in the nuts: me.

  So why have I come? Because we somehow have to coordinate the largest espionage case in FBI history and make an arrest before everything falls apart, me included. And I’ve brought my core group with me (Susan Langford excluded, so someone can be by the phone in case Rod goes missing again or calls in from the ledge of a tall building) because through all this bureaucratic shitstorm, I’m determined that someone, goddamn it, will say thank you to them.

  That contingent—the Tampa group, the very people I want to experience some gratitude, to feel some love—is predictably the first to come under withering assault.

  Watson’s superior from WFO decides he has something nasty to say and barges into the monologue, acknowledging the presence of “the young, but I’m sure hardworking, First Office Agents Moody and Licht” and then lamenting “how this large and delicate case requires the expertise and nuanced handling of a much more experienced office”—WFO, for example. And in that short presentation I realize why the word “patronizing” was invented.

  Another senior manager from WFO jumps in, asking, “Why do we have a line attorney here?” with the same tone of voice she might use to object to, say, a dead mouse in her Diet Coke. “This is a counterintelligence working meeting.”

  Jane informs the group that Greg is actually the first assistant in the Middle District of Florida, and as if scripted, someone grumbles from the Washington Field Office side that the only attorney present should be the first assistant in the District of Columbia.

  Greg himself ignores this salvo—he’s been a trial attorney too long to let this insult raise even a single eyebrow. But other gloves come off immediately. Everyone starts taking shots at us, even though we’ve done all the work, including the crime scene work WFO never saw fit to do. In a burst of hyper-enthusiasm, one of the senior managers from WFO even questions why any attorneys are being brought into the case at this stage.

  “Premature, I would say,” he concludes, tugging on his pastel French cuff for effect.

  Does he even know about the Koblenz trial? The nine hours of testimony, all directly related to Ramsay? Can he even imagine the flight risk we’re now under with our only prosecutable suspect? Maybe not. Maybe it’s true what they say—once you’re inside the Washington Beltway, common sense is sucked right out of you.

  Next, right on schedule, come the more personal attacks on me. Moody, Licht, even Marc Reeser (generally well liked at FBIHQ) are miscalculations enough—rookies on a case that needs seasoned hands—but why, Agent Navarro, would you insist on taking control of this case when (a) the WFO is ground zero of FBI field offices, (b) all the relevant big players (NSA, CIA, NSC, more initials) are in the Washington area, and (c) Tampa has so little experience in these major espionage matters?

  Once again, playing my part, I just sit there and listen, even though I’ve worked more spy cases than anyone on Watson’s WFO squad.

  Then it gets worse: I’m being uppity, running an investigation it’s not my place to run, asking other offices to do
our work, placing demands on our legal attaché in Bonn and the other offices in Europe, etc.

  It’s when I’m accused of being “imperious” that I decide I’ve heard enough. I stand up to speak, but before I begin, I take the desktop podium that has been sitting idle by Watson and move it so that both the podium and I now tower over him. Then I start in.

  “Guilty as charged,” I say, raising my hands in surrender. “I have pursued this investigation because that is what I get paid to do and that is what Agent Moody and Agent Licht also get paid to do. We did so with the support of my special agent in charge. If you have issues with how we’ve proceeded, I suggest you take those up with him, not me. As has been suggested more than once, those supervisory issues are well above my humble FBI pay scale.

  “Now, with that out of the way, let me tell you why I brought Agents Licht and Moody with me today, and asked Marc Reeser to join us as well. The fact is, I thought you might want to take this opportunity to thank them for a job damn well done. For hustling to make up for what was not done in this investigation.”

  Here, I admit, my voice begins to rise.

  “Thank Agent Moody, for example, for the untold hours she’s put in helping to interview Rod Ramsay, the countless trips back and forth between Tampa and Orlando, her deft skill in getting Rod to relax and open up, and for doing all this not only while handling all the other duties expected of a special agent but also while being pregnant with her second child.”

  I pause for a second, just in case someone wants to mumble his or her gratitude, but that would be off script, and no one is going there.