Three Minutes to Doomsday

by Joe Navarro

  “I’ve got to get ready for tomorrow,” I tell her, “and I feel terrible.”

  “Honest truth, Joe, you look awful. Go home. I’ve never seen you like this.”

  “I know you mean that well,” I say, gathering my things and giving her a hug. “Thanks for everything, Terry. I owe you a lot.”

  “Joe—”

  But whatever she’s going to say, I don’t let her finish the thought.

  “I gotta go. Cover for me, okay? I don’t want to be here. I need to rest.”

  I slip out the back door, avoid the media, and somehow make it all the way home without once again falling asleep at the wheel and careening through a strip mall.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, JUNE 8, I testify at Rod’s detention hearing while the accused sits across from me and his mother glares at me from the audience like I’m a whore in church. Mark Pizzo, Rod’s defense attorney, tries valiantly to tear into my methods and me. Mark looks like the actor Andy Garcia (my fellow Cuban-American) and possesses impressive street smarts. And I’ve got to say, he rises beautifully to the occasion with maybe four dozen reporters on hand, hanging on his every word. Meanwhile, Rod at the table beside him is doing everything he can to unnerve me. His eyes burrow into me the entire time I’m on the stand.

  One line of questioning clearly gets to both of us, even though I’m uncertain where Mark is heading with it other than to show that I’m a conflicted emotional mess—which, of course, is not far off the mark.

  “Isn’t it a fact, Agent Navarro,” he says, “that you hugged my client just about every time you met, before and at the end of your interview session?”

  “It is,” I agree. “I gave him an abrazo, a friendly hug.”

  “Would it be safe to say, then, that you cared deeply about my client?”

  There it is in a nutshell—love, hate, the whole endlessly contradictory nature of Rod’s and my relationship; a petri dish of transference and conflicted emotions—but I’m not going to go there.

  “I hugged your client, Mr. Pizzo, because I wanted to see if he was armed. He had, after all, told me that he once robbed a bank.”

  If I read Rod’s eyes right, he looks a little crushed by that, and in truth, I feel like a shit for saying it. But I’m sure the moment makes no difference in the outcome of the hearing. In the end, Rod is remanded to the custody of the US Marshals, pending trial. There’s no question of his being out on bond. If ever there was one, Rod is a threat to the security of the United States.

  * * *

  WHEN I LEFT THE house that morning, my fever was hovering around 102. It isn’t any better on the way home so I stop at the office of yet another Cuban-American connection, Dr. Juan Ling. Juan, it turns out, is away at a medical conference, but his nurse can see I’m teetering on the edge and draws enough blood to get the testing started. Even that, though, makes me queasy. Add in the heavy sweating that has been going on for days and the cement legs I was feeling even before my madcap dash to the Hyatt on arrest day, and I can barely get out of the car when I finally pull into my driveway late that afternoon.

  “Daddy!” Stephanie yells happily when I walk through the front door. To her, this is something almost new in history—a father home in daylight. But all I can do is smile at her, pat her on the head, and make straight for my bed. For her part, Luciana just stares at me as I move awkwardly through the house, seemingly in slow motion, unable to say a single word. I want to cry but I’m too tired even for that.

  For the next three weeks, I do try to go to the office regularly. There’s plenty more work to be done. I have to prepare for a trial, continue the investigation of Rondeau and Gregory, identify who else might be involved, corroborate everything Rod has said, plus the endless paperwork—this is the FBI, after all—but I can’t complete more than two hours’ work at a time.

  Somewhere in there, too, Jim Bamford calls to say that he thought we’d mounted a “magnificent investigation.” The only other time we talked, months earlier when he called with yet another leaked tidbit about the Ramsay case, I told him what I’d say to any journalist under similar circumstances: “I can’t talk to you, and I can’t confirm what you’re saying. If you’re going to publish, publish. There’s nothing I can do about it, or you.” This time, I think, he means the compliment sincerely, with no ulterior motive, and I take it that way. I have no beef with Bamford. Whoever has been telling him secrets hasn’t derailed the investigation. What has gone off the tracks is my health and my natural defenses.

  Everything in my life, it seems, has turned upside down. For months I got by on at best three hours of sleep a night. Now I fall into bed almost as soon as I get home and have to struggle out in the morning twelve hours later. The fact that more sleep isn’t helping suggests a more serious problem, and my stubborn refusal to accept the reality of what’s happening to me physically isn’t helping things.

  Finally, I’m able to get in to see Juan Ling, who pores over me for an hour, reviews the blood tests, gives me four prescriptions to have filled right away, and orders me to go home with bed rest and no work until further notice.

  “I suppose I could go in every other day for a while,” I concede.

  “No work,” he demands. “None! Joe, here’s my clinical assessment: You’re a mess.” And then he kindly details just how big a mess I’ve become: exhaustion, a high white-blood-cell count, Epstein-Barr virus, anxiety and panic attacks, and an enlarged spleen. Every lymph node in my body is swollen from my neck down to the insides of my legs.

  “You have too much stress in your life, and I suspect you’re clinically depressed. In fact, you have many of the features of post-traumatic stress,” Juan cautions.

  “You think so, Doc?” I try to make it sound like a joke, but by now, Juan is in no joking mood and I suppose neither am I.

  “Listen to me, Joe. You have to take your life and your health back, or you’re going to die. You hear me? You either get in bed and rest now, or you will die. Your immune system is compromised, your lymph nodes are trying to clean up your blood, you have a fever that would knock out a horse, and you’re suffering from these anxiety and panic attacks because your body is screaming at you to stop. ‘Stop or die’—that’s what the attacks are telling you.

  “Cuidate coño!” he blurts out in Spanish, trying to get through to me. It’s an admonition we Cubans give to each other: “Take care of yourself, dammit!”

  * * *

  JUAN TURNS IT AROUND for me. I start listening to what the attacks and all the other symptoms are saying, but that’s only the beginning. Illnesses I never imagined or thought only happened to others become my constant companions.

  For nearly nine months I lie in bed completely drained of energy, incapable of getting up on my own even to pee, living in a kind of hibernation. I can see my daughter through the window playing in the backyard, but I can’t raise my head or even smile as I try to enjoy those moments. Depression, I can tell you, is a terrible thing—you cry over the smallest happening—it attacks your mind and it doesn’t want to let go. People don’t understand that you’re in mental anguish, pain so bad it makes you think about killing yourself just to end it. That’s how bad it gets for me.

  The physical part of all this—at least I can see and feel it coming on. The depression catches me by surprise. I don’t realize I’m in the maze until I’m so deep inside I can’t imagine a way out. Thanks to a terribly structured insurance system, I see multiple therapists—some good, some terrible. Insurance rarely pays for the best mental health care, if at all, but I’m caught in a further Catch-22 because I can’t talk about the work that has led me into this box canyon until the FBI finds a clinician cleared at the top-secret level.

  Some of the therapists suggest, like Juan, that I’ve gone through post-traumatic stress. Others tell me viruses can bring on depression, while still others say that I’ve spent too much time with Ramsay. One literary-minded therapist and I spend an entire fifty-five-minute session talking about
what he calls my “white whale” problem, as if I were Captain Ahab and Rod my Moby Dick. “Ahab could have turned the boat around,” the therapist keeps insisting. “Why didn’t he? Why didn’t you?” I have no idea. Even in my tired, sick state, I know this white whale theory is a flimsy intellectual construct from someone who’s never been through anything like what I’m trying to crawl out from under. That whale was whatever Ahab turned him into in his own mind—his tormentor, his obsession, evil incarnate. Rod Ramsay, goddamn it, is real, and it was my sworn duty to pursue and bring him to justice no matter how many roadblocks my superiors placed in front of me.

  Then there’s the FBI explanation: Many agents suffer depression from the weight of their work but keep it secret so their record will stay clean and the longed-for twenty-five-years-and-out won’t be jeopardized. Instead, they turn to alcohol or other addictions. That much, at least, I’ve avoided, so far.

  My own diagnosis is that I’m mentally and spiritually drained. I’ve lost faith in so many things, and I’ve had to deal with so much that I never saw coming: plans derailed by other offices; the intransigence—and, later, skepticism—of WFO and HQ; endless hours of preparation to ensure we didn’t fail; the constant fear that Ramsay would disappear; the frightening suspicion that Rod had other secrets, that others were involved, that the Soviets had everything they needed to wage and win a war; the endless lying to Ramsay and his mother to keep them from securing an attorney; and the constant need to be creative, to find the right key to get Rod to tell us yet one more secret he was holding back.

  The toll of all this feels like a millstone around my brain.

  Perhaps, too, there’s an existential dread associated with what I’ve been through. Since 1947 the eggheads at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have been maintaining a so-called Doomsday Clock, with the minute hand moving ever closer to midnight, the point at which global disaster occurs. For almost two years now I have been one of the very few people aware of how close “midnight” actually is. Everything I’ve done—all that stomach-churning prep work, the ceaseless sprinting, the refusal to take no for an answer—has been at least partly spurred by my fear that America—and maybe the world—might not have much time left. Rod Ramsay has handed desperate people the means to lash out in an apocalyptic way. He has left the choice up to them, not us.

  I’ve known plenty of agents who’ve never felt the need to look back once a case is done. I’ve been that type of agent myself. But this hasn’t been the usual case, and Rod isn’t your everyday felon. In one way or another, he’s with me every day of the nine months I lie in my bed, wondering and questioning if I’ll ever heal, ever be myself again. And to be honest, there are times I think I will never be the same again. How could I be?

  * * *

  IN THAT WEIRD TWILIGHT state I find myself slogging through, for so many months after depression sets in and illness saps all my strength, the question of why Rod finally told me his secrets keeps surfacing—in my own head, of course, but also in queries from prosecutors and conversations with the few visitors who dare enter my dark world. Speculation is all over the place: transference (at some level, he longed to be me), narcissism (the Smartest Guy in the Room Syndrome), a guilty conscience, and on and on. With the exception of the guilty conscience—Rod is incapable of guilt; he has no moral compass—there’s something to all of them, but I think the best answer I ever get is from the one person who comes to know Rod and his motives almost as well as I do: Mark Pizzo, his defense attorney.

  “In the end, Joe, you seduced him,” Mark tells me, sitting in his office a year or so after Rod’s sentencing as part of a plea agreement. “Everything you did was so contrary to what he expected from having watched hundreds of hours of police dramas. He thought he could beat you. He never realized how slowly and insidiously you were luring him into cooperation.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “One hundred and thirty-seven pages of admissions he made. You know what a nightmare that is for a defense attorney?”

  “I didn’t think about that.”

  “I wanted to know, too,” Mark answers. “As part of our deal to cooperate with the government before sentencing, I asked Rod directly why he gave up so much, made all these admissions, put the rope around his own neck. You know what he said? ‘Because of Joe. Anyone else I would have told to fuck off, but Joe never seemed to be aggressive. He respected me. He never wrote anything down. After a while, I felt I could trust him, even if I knew my trust would never be rewarded. I couldn’t help myself.’ ”

  At some remote level of awareness, I know that large changes are taking place in the shadow worlds of intelligence, security, and nuclear weaponry as a result of what Rod has revealed. The army’s “fail-safe” communication system has to be reconstituted to make it secure again. Unknown to the Germans demonstrating against them, the Pershing II missiles stationed on their soil have been compromised by the efforts of Conrad and Ramsay.

  Vetting systems for classified personnel have obviously failed miserably—they, too, must be reworked from the ground up. In the wings, all the spies Ramsay and Conrad drew into their scheme have to be rounded up and emptied of whatever secrets they hold. Critical procedures have to be changed as well. Who will henceforth be chosen to be document custodians? And using what criteria? How will documents be stored or destroyed going forward? The list, I’m sure, is endless, but in my bed, with the curtains drawn against the relentless South Florida sun, this all feels as if it’s happening in a galaxy far away. It’s no longer my fight, but in my mind I keep kicking and punching as though it were, and that, too, grinds me down. The leads that haven’t yet been run down, the many holes still to be found in the investigations—I place those squarely on my shoulders.

  * * *

  EVENTUALLY, I DO MANAGE to let go and get better, healthy enough to return to work—although I don’t go back to the SWAT team or to flying surveillance immediately. The CI caseload hasn’t diminished while I was away. Jay Koerner is glad to have me back in the fold. The Behavioral Analysis Program, it turns out, is a good diversion for my interview and nonverbal skills—a chance to work with bright, highly motivated agents I can learn from.

  And Rod Ramsay’s arrest doesn’t end that matter for me either. For the next seven years, I serve as case agent for multiple trials in federal court in Tampa: Jeffrey Rondeau and Jeffery Gregory are sentenced to eighteen years each. Kelley Therese Church, née Warren, an army typist who became the fourth generation of the Conrad/Ramsay spy ring, recruited by Conrad after Ramsay left, gets twenty-five years. Rod is finally sentenced to thirty-six years—all deserved, but oddly, for years after, I get annual Christmas cards from Rod and his mother. Motives are always hard to read, but I like to think that they both realize I had a job to do and did it as best I could. More than once in these messages from prison, Rod thanks me for being a good role model—he holds no animosity toward me, or Mrs. Moody. After a time, though, I ask the Tampa office to intercept any further communications from Rod. I don’t want to read them anymore. I can’t.

  Clyde Lee Conrad dies in Diez Prison, in Koblenz, in 1998 at age fifty, of a heart attack. Zoltan Szabo, the godfather of the spy ring, is luckier. He remains in Austria, a so-called neutral country, and is never brought to trial in the US. In fact, Szabo still receives his US Army retirement check every month—no, you really cannot make this up. It’s directly deposited into his account. I talked with him once for several days at a location I’m not allowed to reveal. For some reason, he’s been reluctant to come to Tampa to repay the visit.

  Even today, I can still raise the hairs on my arm by thinking of how terribly, almost fatally, compromised the security of the West was at the height of Rod Ramsay and Clyde Conrad’s espionage.

  At Conrad’s trial in Germany, after I and dozens of others had testified, Chief Judge Ferdinand Schuth concluded that had the Soviets chosen to attack with the knowledge they possessed via Conrad and Ramsay, NATO would have been left with two optio
ns: “capitulation or the use of nuclear weapons on German soil.” These measured words shook the intelligence community as well as the military. No one suspected it was this bad.

  Ironically, others calculated the consequences as being even graver. At Ramsay’s sentencing—in federal court in Tampa, in August 1992—General Glenn K. Otis, Commander in Chief, European Command (CINCEUR) from 1983 to 1988, testified through a signed affidavit that Ramsay and Conrad’s acts of espionage had left the West so vulnerable and so stripped of its own defensive capabilities that its defeat “would have been assured” had the Soviets acted on their intelligence and launched an all-out war. That statement alone appears in no other espionage case in the history of the United States. To repeat: The defeat of the West, including the United States, would have been assured.

  That’s where Ramsay and Conrad left America and the West—without a plausible chance to defend itself. Not the Berlin Crisis, not even the Cuban Missile Crisis, had bequeathed the West the certainty of defeat. Both the German and the American courts were in agreement on this. Nothing in the annals of Cold War or American history comes anywhere near it.

  * * *

  DURING THE NINE MONTHS I spend lying in bed, all too often I ponder what this case has really been about. Each day yields a different answer. Sometimes it has been about being lucky enough to see a cigarette shake when it shouldn’t have. Other days it’s been about acknowledging that no security system is ever truly safe—that predators in whatever form can undermine any system. Espionage is always a threat, and it can have existential ramifications. As investigators, we need to dig deep and not assume we know everything that’s out there—we never do. We also need to keep in mind that not everyone in the Bureau or in Washington, DC, has our back. As one old-timer told me, “We FBI agents make our own luck.”

  At a deeper level, the Ramsay case has also been about human frailty—avarice, hubris, jealousy, contempt—a facile criminal mind, and what happens when these go unchecked; about a moment in time when we were minutes away from assured destruction had the dice of history rolled just slightly differently; and about a scrawny, sad, fucked-up genius whose life could have been so much more. All that potential, all that evil—that’s what I can’t let go of.