Moskow used his year at the Kennedy School to rethink his career plans. After earning his master’s, he quit the CIA and went into real estate with Shaw in Mexico. He kept in touch with other classmates, and attended José Figueres’s 1994 presidential inauguration. When Figueres’s term ended in 1998, he and Moskow became partners in Costa Rican real estate.
It’s unclear whether, or when, Moskow’s Latin American classmates learned of his CIA background. Shelagh Moskow, his widow, said he wouldn’t have told them about it during the mid-career program. She didn’t know Moskow at Harvard—they would elope to Paris in 2000—but based her conclusions on subsequent conversations. Ken knew Latin Americans would be leery of the CIA, and he would have needed the agency’s permission anyway, she said. “He was very serious about what those rules were, abiding by those rules. There’s a strong culture in the agency of not talking.”
However, one Latin American classmate said that Moskow’s CIA connection was no secret. “Everybody knew Mr. Moscow [sic] was part of the CIA as so many of the students at Kennedy school,” said a spokeswoman for Roque Sevilla, an Ecuadorian businessman and conservationist. According to Shaw, Figueres (who didn’t respond to requests for comment) and the now-deceased Guatemalan defense minister Héctor Gramajo were clued in, too.
While Moskow’s “cards were always held close to the vest,” his agency past was “common knowledge” among his Harvard buddies, Shaw said. “It is certainly true that he would not have broadcast that information beyond that little tight circle.” For example, “he wouldn’t travel around with businesspeople in Mexico or Costa Rica and say, ‘By the way, I’m from the government.’”
Moskow still dropped by the Kennedy School, and he and Konoplyov became close friends. They surfed on Martha’s Vineyard and traveled to Ukraine, homeland of Moskow’s ancestors. When I asked Konoplyov whether the CIA stayed in touch with Moskow during the 1990s, he reminded me of Vladimir Putin’s dictum that “there is no such thing as a former KGB man.”
“It’s easy for the CIA to go to Ken and say, ‘There’s a conference, can you go there and talk to these people?’” Konoplyov continued. “Ken would say, ‘Of course.’ If you’re the CIA, FBI, Stasi, you don’t need someone on the payroll if you have friendly connections.”
Soon Moskow was a current CIA man again. After the September 11, 2001, attacks, he reupped. As a Paris station chief, he dashed across Europe and former Soviet republics to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, before retiring from the agency again in 2006 to spend more time with his family.
In his twenty-fifth-anniversary report to his Harvard undergraduate classmates in 2008, he acknowledged to them for the first time that he had been “recruited into the CIA” soon after graduation and “served as an undercover operations officer.” Seemingly sensing that his time was running short, he added, “With the recent passing of parents of college friends and watching both our own and friends’ children grow, it makes one further recognize the importance of taking advantage of each day and opportunities as they arise.”
Though startled to learn posthumously of the CIA officer in their midst, his Kennedy School classmates told me that they understand the reasons for the deception. Had they found out at the time, they might have been less forgiving, but the climate has changed.
“I have a different feeling about intelligence agencies and the work they do given 9/11,” said Barbara Grob, the West Coast media relations specialist. “Prior to 9/11, I would have been quicker to be judgmental. As a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, I’ve shifted on it. I don’t feel strongly that we have to know that about people.”
10
“I AM KEEPING YOU OUT OF JAIL”
This isn’t J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The Untouchables stereotype of ex-policemen pursuing mobsters and crooked politicians no longer fits. After Hoover’s death in 1972, the bureau began hiring women as agents for the first time since he’d become director almost half a century before; by 2012, they made up almost 20 percent of the force. Agents come from all walks of life, including former computer scientists, human resources specialists, airline pilots, even journalists.
Today’s FBI is a hybrid, an intelligence service grafted onto traditional law enforcement. It reports to the director of national intelligence as well as the attorney general. Increasingly, it operates worldwide, with seventy-eight offices and suboffices in U.S. embassies from Kuala Lumpur to Caracas, coordinating with the CIA and security agencies in the host countries.
After the 9/11 attacks, the bureau’s priorities shifted from catching mobsters, drug traffickers, and white-collar criminals to preventing terrorism, foreign espionage, and cyberattacks. This transition steered the FBI’s gaze to academia. The bureau’s target “is not just the more traditional spies passing U.S. secrets to foreign governments.… It is also students and scientists and plenty of others stealing the valuable trade secrets of American universities and businesses.”
Dianne Mercurio epitomizes this transformation. Her path was both typical of the modern FBI and startling in its swift ascent. Like Dajin Peng, the professor whom she recruited, she had known little but success in her career, and was confident, perhaps overly so, in her ability to handle any situation.
Also like Peng, she became a Floridian in adulthood; her roots lay elsewhere. The second child of Dale and Marilyn Farrington, Dianne Leigh Farrington was born in 1968 in Burlington, Vermont, where her father worked as a draftsman for General Electric’s Armament Division. The division manufactured automatic weapons for U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, and Dale Farrington shared patents for two devices that improved the machine guns’ performance—a lubricating device and a “muzzle brake torque assist.”
When Dianne was four, her father transferred to a GE division in Greenville, South Carolina. The Farringtons bought a home on Candlewood Court in nearby Mauldin, which was evolving from a farming village into a middle-class bedroom suburb. Its population rose to 23,808 in 2012, up 52.1 percent from 2000. Predominantly white, Republican, and Protestant, one of the few South Carolina cities with a higher household income and lower poverty rate than the national average, Mauldin is known for fiscal conservatism and police speed traps. “It used to be a big red dot on the AAA travel maps,” says John Gardner, Mauldin’s former planning and economic development director.
Mauldin High School was built in 1973, the same year that the Farringtons moved to the city, and renovated in 2002, the year that Dale Farrington retired from General Electric. With a 91.9 percent graduation rate, and average SAT scores of 503 in critical reading and 506 in math, it is considered one of South Carolina’s best public high schools. Future NBA Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett may be its most notable former student, though his arrest following a racial melee in the hallway prompted his transfer to Farragut Career Academy in Chicago for his senior season.
At Mauldin High, Dianne Farrington was a solid student and a standout athlete. A member of the girls’ basketball, powderpuff football, track, and cross-country teams, she set school records in the 400 and 800 meters, and was a state champion in the 800.
“She was a lot of fun in the workout settings and socially as well,” recalled track and cross-country teammate Dana Purser House, now cross-country coach at Bluffton High in South Carolina. “She and I would go back and forth competing, pushing each other.” House, who transferred to Mauldin High as a sophomore, said some teammates treated her as an interloper, but not Dianne. “She was always very nice with regards to that. We had a mutual respect.”
Delmer Howell, her high school coach, wasn’t surprised that she became an FBI agent. “She was a leader on the team,” he said. “She has the kind of intelligence and perseverance they’re looking for.”
Her college choice demonstrated her independence and self-assurance. While Mauldin High graduates typically stayed in-state at Clemson or the University of South Carolina, Dianne headed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We had very few kids who
got into UNC, it was tough for out-of-staters,” said Martha Oakhill, her guidance counselor. Surprisingly, Dianne didn’t run track in college, though she played ice hockey as a club sport. She majored in psychology.
After graduating in 1990, she moved to Tampa and then returned to North Carolina. In 1994, she became a social worker for Orange County, which includes Chapel Hill. Based in the county seat, Hillsborough, she helped run a subsidized day care program for foster and low-income children that enabled their parents to work or go to school. She impressed supervisors and colleagues alike as efficient and unflappable.
If another social worker was anxious at the last minute about whether a family would qualify for the program, Dianne “was one to say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get it done, day care will pay,’” recalls one social worker, Patty Clarke. “She was a great team player. If she didn’t get her stuff done, money wouldn’t get paid to day care, and kids would get kicked out. It never happened.”
Robert Brizendine, who shared an office with Dianne, realized that she was destined for greater things. “She was a very intelligent young woman who took the job because she needed something to do. There wasn’t a great deal of future in social work, particularly the position she was in,” he says. “She had the capability of doing something more meaningful, and more lucrative as well.… She was definitely overqualified.”
She confided in Brizendine and others that she had a more challenging career in mind—one that few social workers aspired to. She was applying to the FBI, and they might be contacted for background checks. She kept in top physical shape, running and working out, preparing herself for the bureau’s grueling training regimen.
“I knew from the beginning that she was interested in the FBI,” says Deanna Shoffner, her social work supervisor. “She talked about it. She wanted a different career. Going to the FBI was quite unusual. I didn’t know anybody else who had done it in all my years in social services.”
Applicants to become FBI agents must be U.S. citizens between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-six-and-a-half, with a bachelor’s degree and three years of work experience. They’re disqualified for having a felony conviction, a student loan default, or failure to file tax returns or pay court-ordered child support. Hiring is highly selective; in fiscal year 2011, the FBI had 22,692 applicants for 543 vacancies.
Dianne met the criteria, and beat the odds. Hired in 1997, she completed mandatory training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, and was assigned to the Tampa office. She paid her dues by probing a variety of crimes, and joined the FBI’s Innocent Images International Task Force against child pornography. She helped investigate a Florida pastor, Lawrence Kilbourn, whose daughter had found a videotape showing him molesting girls aged six to twelve. Kilbourn “made statements to” Mercurio “as to his alleged videotaping of sexual acts with young girls,” according to a court document. Kilbourn pleaded guilty to state and federal charges and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison.
On a trip back to Chapel Hill, Dianne got together with old friends and told Brizendine that she found FBI work fulfilling and enjoyable. Her personal life was blossoming as well. She married Matthew Mercurio, a State University of New York graduate who works as a medical device distributor. They have two daughters, who attend a private school in Tampa and, like their mother, are athletic. Dianne herself ran the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco in 2008, shortly after turning forty.
Like many Floridians during the boom, the Mercurios speculated in real estate. From 2004 to 2006, they bought and sold at a substantial profit three lots in The Cliffs at Glassy, a development about forty-five minutes’ drive from her parents’ home in Mauldin featuring a golf course designed by Tiger Woods and breathtaking views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A fourth lot, which they acquired in 2007 and held on to, dropped in value as The Cliffs sank into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012.
* * *
SOON AFTER THE Kilbourn case, Mercurio expressed interest in a transfer to the counterintelligence squad. Its head, J. A. Koerner, chose her for the coveted slot over several other applicants. “She was good at working people,” he says. “She could talk to them, and get them to talk to her. On a scale of one to ten, she was an eight or nine.” She was also “a good shot,” and instructed other agents in firearms.
The terrorist attacks of September 2001 stunned the FBI, especially the Tampa office. Three hijackers had attended flight school in Venice, Florida, within Tampa’s jurisdiction. The bureau shifted every available agent into Koerner’s domains, counterterrorism and counterintelligence. “On September 10, 2001, I had seventeen people working for me. On September 12, I had a hundred and seventeen.”
The biggest target was Sami Al-Arian, the USF computer professor accused of bankrolling Palestinian terrorists. (His case, as we’ve seen, led Pennsylvania State University president Graham Spanier to reach out to the FBI and CIA.) Although Mercurio interviewed one of Al-Arian’s alleged co-conspirators on the day of their arrest in 2003, she caused some waves within the bureau by avoiding any deeper entanglement in what was a quagmire of Dickensian, Jarndyce versus Jarndyce proportions.
“A lot of people didn’t want to work it because there were ten years of tapes, interviews, translations, documents, plus a lot of press attention. It was under a microscope,” says one insider. Mercurio “was assigned to it. She said no. If I was a supervisor, you don’t get to say no.”
Koerner says he didn’t want to put Mercurio, a counterintelligence agent, on a counterterrorism investigation. He had another beat in mind for her: Chinese espionage. Chinese efforts to penetrate Tampa’s research facilities had worried Koerner for years. In the 1990s, China’s consulate in Houston had offered a Chinese student at the University of South Florida an incentive to spy: if he would provide information about his friends working for defense contractors in Tampa, his ailing parents in China would be allowed to move closer to a medical clinic. The student briefly cooperated with Chinese intelligence before contacting the FBI and asking how to extricate himself. Its advice, which he followed successfully, was to tell the Chinese official that “the FBI saw me talking to you.”
Before retiring from the FBI in 2004, Koerner began to give China-related cases to Mercurio, and she took courses on China. Her beat occasionally brought her to South Florida’s campus. In March 2011, for instance, she and another FBI agent questioned Hao Zheng, an associate professor of computer science, about a Chinese graduate student in his classes, Zheng said in a telephone interview.
“I was a little bit nervous,” Zheng said.
While it’s not clear how Mercurio first came across Dajin Peng’s name, she was likely aware of the concern at FBI headquarters about Confucius Institutes and began keeping tabs on the one sprouting at USF and its director. Presumably she also developed sources in Tampa’s Chinese community, in which Peng was active on behalf of the Confucius Institute.
Mercurio must have discovered Peng’s FBI file, because she phoned Nick Abaid, the agent who had cultivated him at Princeton. She struck him as “a fairly new agent who was feeling her way in the Chinese field.”
* * *
IN DECEMBER 2009, a month after the draft audit accused him of expense account and visa transgressions, Peng flew to China to teach there over the holiday break, as was his custom. On his return, the Department of Homeland Security examined his computers and discovered a document titled “FBI and I,” in which Peng briefly recounted his relationships with Abaid and Mercurio.
Mercurio “knows very well about my case and has detailed information about the USF Confucius Institute,” Peng wrote. “She even suspected that the CI has spying missions. I had to explain to her that the CI is a purely academic and cultural institution and it has no spying mission at all. Then she asked me to help to get some information,” such as the names of students in the graduate business courses Peng taught in China for mid-career executives. “I also found that the FBI knows all the information the investigators know as the investi
gation proceeded.”
Peng had written it at the request of the criminal lawyer he had just hired, Stephen Romine, a former prosecutor. Romine recognized that the FBI might play a role in the case, and he was also concerned that Mercurio might exploit her access to Peng to elicit information damaging to him. But a homeland security officer thought he’d caught a spy reporting to the Chinese government. The officer alerted Mercurio, who “got really nervous” until Romine cleared up the confusion, Peng said.
Mercurio continued to monitor the university’s audit. USF police called her office twice on December 17, 2009; one conversation lasted more than fourteen minutes. When the final audit and compliance report came out on January 28, 2010, it was virtually identical to the earlier draft. That day, Mercurio spoke on her mobile phone for twelve minutes with university police. “It is my understanding that she is asking USF police to not do anything with their case until she can assess your situation,” Romine emailed Peng on February 17, after conferring with Mercurio.
“Until she can assess your situation” was a tactful way of saying, “Until you decide to spy.”
“She made no promises regarding your cooperation and stopping any charges against you,” Romine continued. “They will evaluate everything only at this point. She has agreed to not question you about the allegations involving USF.”
On the afternoon of March 9, Mercurio met with Peng and Romine in the lawyer’s office. They agreed that Peng would cooperate with the FBI, and Mercurio would advocate for him with the university. It was in the FBI’s interest for the university to let Peng off easy, not only because he would be in her debt, but also because he would be less useful as an informant if he were to lose the professorship that gained him entrée to Chinese intellectuals, government officials, and business executives.
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