RW04 - Task Force Blue

by Richard Marcinko

  One counterintelligence memo, citing a confidential informant code named Lancer, said that our deceased pal T. D. Capel had been seen by a friend of the CI’s in the company of an assistant to Imam Fouad el-Yassin of Dearborn, Michigan. I knew who the Imam was—because he’d been tied into the network of tangos who’d bombed six locations across the country last year and set into motion the chain of events recounted in Green Team.

  Imam el-Yassin’s weekly audiocassette sermons are played in hundreds of mosques all across the nation to a growing audience of Islamic fundamentalists. I’ve heard ’em. The sonofabitch brazenly advocates terrorist tactics—“American blood must flow,” he shouts. “American limbs must be cut off. Mothers must mourn their sons; wives must become widows …” But we can’t do anything about him because, according to the Michael Kinsley look-alikes at the ACLU, which has sued successfully on his behalf, he’s simply a humble cleric, exercising his First Amendment rights.

  Don’t get me started on that one.

  Another memo detailed contacts between an ADAM asshole named McNabb—I knew that name, too: he was one of the bad guys we’d waxed in Key West—and Rockne Washington, aka Shaquile Shabazz, aka General Mayhem, the supreme leader of the Zulu Gangsta Princes, America’s largest street gang, whose 25,000 members control vast portions of Chicago and Detroit, and sell their drugs along the interstate highway corridors running all the way to LA in the West, and Tampa, on the East Coast. It was, I read, the FBI’s “conjecture” that ADAM was selling guns to the Zulu Gangstas, as well as plotting terrorist acts.

  Now, you may ask why so much of this FBI counterintelligence information was being couched in such panty-waist language as “likelihood,” “probable,” and “conjecture.” The answer is twofold. First, confidential informants, or CIs as they’re called, are chronically unreliable as sources of information. Since they are often selling information for either cash or a reduction of sentence, traditionally they will—and they have—say almost anything they think the Feds want to hear, whether it is true or not.

  In fact, there have been half a dozen cases recently in which the Federal government has had to pay millions of dollars to the innocent victims of CI fiction. Therefore, judges, of late, have been reluctant of late to issue search warrants and other investigative paperwork based solely on CI information. It also meant that the FBI’s intelligence work had to be larded through with disclaimers, in case of a lawsuit. The wishy-washy language also told me they hadn’t been able to get a single judge to issue a search warrant, phone tap, or grant the Bureau permission to plant passive monitors—which was why they’d had to resort to covert methods.

  Back to the point I was making: in other FBI cases, however, ones like ABSCAM, in which they caught USG—that’s U.S. government—officials including senators and congressmen taking bribes, the Bureau must observe all the legal niceties. Corners cannot be cut. If they are, your bad guy will walk.

  That was the case here. In fact, the FBI was caught in a catch-22. The Bureau needed the kind of inside information that could most easily be obtained through phone taps, monitors, and other electronic observational techniques. But the judge had insisted that, since there was no specific charge leveled against the group, such devices and techniques were verboten.

  So the Bureau had simply gone out and done it anyway. But then, they couldn’t use anything they’d collected. Crazy, right? I think so. But that’s what happens when the bad guys have more rights than the good guys. Good guys have to play by the rules. Bad guys don’t. Guess who wins most often.

  I read on. I saw that the FBI’s efforts were further stymied because ADAM was a small, tightly knit group. It had probably been formed very much like a cell of the Islamic Jihad—a nucleus of people who had known one another for years, who augment their circle very slowly. It is difficult to penetrate groups like these because all strangers are regarded with suspicion. Now, ADAM, which was a small cell of tangos, had been decimated. But the weapons they’d sold in the Detroit area were still in circulation.

  As I read on, I realized that the FBI had not only screwed up the investigation, but it had also covered up its tracks. The most damning documents Wonder had discovered—the ones that had obviously been gathered through covert means—were filed in what might be described as an electronic wastebasket. The only reason he’d scooped them up was that he’d searched the FBI’s files using a rational data search program, which scanned the Intelink for any files or fragments of files that mentioned the word ADAM, or Alpha Detachment/Armed Militia.

  The ADAM files had been electronically “shredded,” much the same way Ollie North and his colleagues “shredded” the computer records at the National Security Council after their activities came under scrutiny back in 1986. But just as in that case, shredded did not necessarily mean destroyed. So, Wonder was able to reconstruct more than 80 percent of them—enough to give me a pretty good idea of what the Feds knew.

  Sure they’d shredded everything they could—their ADAM files wouldn’t be able to withstand any scrutiny. They’d obviously been gathered illegally, which would mean any case against ADAM would be thrown out of court. Well, with the Alpha Detachment/Armed Militia out of business because of termination by yours truly, a court trial was not part of the equation anymore.

  There was something else as well. When I looked at all the memos, I realized that the Bureau had been running into walls when it came to working against these seditious domestic groups, and had virtually been forced to work against them by covert means. You couldn’t tell that from reading them one at a time—you sort of had to lay them all out and look at the patterns. And the patterns seemed to indicate that every time the FBI made progress, it got knocked backward. It was almost as if the bad guys had been receiving inside information about what the Bureau was doing.

  Was there a mole inside the FBI? It was improbable, but not impossible. Like the CIA and NSA, the Bureau has had its share of turncoats in recent years, too. Well, internal security was a Bureau problem, not mine. I had other things on my mind.

  One of them was the Texas billionaire. We ran LC Strawhouse’s name. Wonder was able to retrieve and recompose the shredded FBI MEMCON—that’s MEMorandum of CONversation—telling us that Strawhouse himself had told the FBI’s assistant director for operations that he had “no damn interest whatever in talking to that damn expletive deleted bunch of fly-off-the-handle Michigan crazies acting on their own down there.” Hadn’t the FBI’s Miami SAC told me he was unavailable? This was more than “unavailable.” This was straight-out refusal.

  Wonder discovered another bunch of files that mentioned Strawhouse, buried in the Department of Justice’s Intelink bank. But he kept receiving “access denied” messages every time he tried to break and enter. He gave up after four attempts so as not to raise any suspicions. “This stuff is really restricted—they’ve probably got a random password that would take me months to find,” he said.

  “Can we do anything?”

  A wicked grin spread over Wonder’s apple-cheeked countenance. “Yeah—I have an idea or two.”

  He dropped off the Intelink long enough to get back into the NIS system. There, he used his superuser status to write a short program, which he managed to insert just under the Intelink’s skin. He called the damn thing a Trojan Horse. What he did was to create a bogus request for everyone who wanted information on LC Strawhouse, or the ADAM group, to enter their account names and passwords.

  It was a KISS program. Users would be asked “Enter your account” and then “enter password.” The system would then make them repeat the information—only this time it would be diverted to a ghost file that only Stevie Wonder could access.

  He looked at the lines of computer gibberish critically, then rewrote the last few, adding my name to the list of requests.

  I asked him what the program was all about.

  “See,” he explained, “when you type your password into a secure system, that password is encrypted into a nonse
nsical code. When, for example, I typed tophat on the keyboard, the system didn’t use those six letters to allow me access. It encrypted them—into something that might look like this.” He typed gqri@vcr on the screen. “Then it compared those letters and symbols with a master list of accounts and passwords, logged the entry, and approved it. That’s when I got the green light to enter Intelink.”

  “So?”

  “So, I entered the system as Jim, the NIS investigator.”

  Ah—now I saw what he was getting at. Jim the NIS asshole didn’t have access to files on LC Strawhouse. To get inside those, we’d need other, more highly compartmented account names and passwords.

  The program Wonder had just written did two things. First, it would hand us a list of working accounts and passwords in nonencrypted English. That would allow us to use Intelink as any number of users—making it harder for us to be traced. Second, we could also see who was searching for the same sort of information about the things we were interested in. It was a way of breaking in, and looking back over our shoulders—checking our six, as the pilots say.

  WONDER TOOK THE REST OF THE WEEK OFF. ME? I SPENT MY time pondering the possibilities while taking out my aggressions on the one-ton weight pile that sits on a ten-by-ten concrete slab in a little hollow aft of the deck and outdoor Jacuzzi, and just port of the pond.

  Pumping iron out-of-doors was a habit I’d acquired in prison. You remember I did a year in stir back in the early nineties after a Federal jury—after two trials and despite a distinct lack of evidence—found me guilty on one count of conspiracy to defraud the government on the pricing of some special-ops grenades. I served my time at Petersburg, Virginia, about forty miles south of Richmond.

  Anyway, the weight pile at Petersburg Federal Bad Boy’s Camp and Mayoral Blow Job Facility is about 200 yards downhill from the dorm, on 150 square feet of concrete slab, right next to the South Bronx-style basketball hoops. Every morning at six sharp I’d walk past the guard tower, throw the hack (hack is prison slang for Horse’s Ass Carrying Keys) a friendly salute, then begin my PT routine. My outfit was always the same: a pair of nylon running shorts, a pair of Nikes, and a headband. I wore the same clothes whether it was fifteen degrees out, or ninety. I’d arrived at Petersburg on April 16. In November, the guards started taking a pool as to when I’d start wearing sweats—or at least a T-shirt. By February, as they watched me trudge back from my workout up to my hairy ankles in slush, ice crusting my matted beard and eyebrows, steam rising off my naked body, they realized there would be no winner.

  So I worked out and I came to some conclusions. The first was that, given the information we’d gleaned on the computer, I’d have ample material with which to fight SECNAV’s decision to have me disciplined. I knew I was right—and that her decision had been politically motivated. Second, I wanted to look deeper into the ADAM matter. There was a cover-up afoot, and I wanted to know why—because, given what Wonder and I had discovered, I realized I was being made the bouc—that’s zee French fall guy—for both the Navy’s intelligence lapse (SECNAV’s itinerary falling into ADAM’s hands was a major fuckup) and the Bureau’s illegal surveillance of the tango group.

  On Thursday afternoon, having set a plan in motion, I played back the tape. I had five calls from the deputy CO of the Navy Yard, a four-striper who always used his full name (“Captain Marcinko, this is Captain Steve Otway, United States Navy, calling …”), demanding to know where the hell I was, because I sure wasn’t sitting at my desk. Well, he was right about that.

  Half Pint Harris called to report that he’d been released from the hospital and the concussion had been a mild one, all things considered. Piccolo Mead called to say that Half Pint was a fucking liar—it had been a serious concussion and that he’d been lucky not to have broken his back and cracked his skull.

  Doc Tremblay phoned from Quantico, where he’d gone with a couple of his sniper friends, to try the new Stoner semiautomatic .308-caliber sniper rifle currently favored by SEAL Team Six’s shooters. He said he was having no problems making one-and-one-half-inch groups at five hundred yards. I thought of a couple of people into which he could put them.

  There were more than two dozen calls from assorted reporters, all asking for just a few minutes of my time, and one message from a Major General Harrington, who identified himself as being with the Defense Intelligence Agency. He said he was calling on Thursday at 0930 on a matter of some urgency and would call again sometime in the next twenty-four hours. He didn’t leave a number.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know any Major General Harrington. I did, however, know a Rear Admiral Pinckney Prescott III, and there were also thirteen—count ’em, thirteen—messages from his office. That was a nasty surprise. Pinky and I hadn’t spoken in almost two months. Not that speaking would be easy for Pinky these days, because his jaw is wired together and he sounds like shit talking through clenched teeth. Come to think of it, he sounds like shit even when his jaw’s not wired.

  I hear you all out there. You want to know why Pinky’s jaw was wired. Well, it’s wired because I broke it in two places, just about nine weeks ago, in London.

  Now you might think that breaking a two-star’s jaw would be sufficient conduct to warrant a court martial and a long sentence of breaking big stones into little ones at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. Under normal circumstances, it would be. But I have an insurance policy that protects me from such unhappy consequences where Pinky is concerned.

  Just over two years ago, I discovered that the Admirals’ Gestapo—which is what they call the Naval Investigative Service around here—had launched a highly classified investigation of Pinky. I came upon his file the night when I broke into NIS headquarters during a security exercise I was conducting at the Washington Navy Yard. If you want to learn more about why I was there, you can read about it in Red Cell. Anyway, the file, code named Foxhunter, was in the offices of SLUDJ, the top secret NIS Sensitive Legal (Upper Deck) Jurisdiction witch-hunting unit whose investigators are known as Terminators, because they never quit until they win.

  Since I always play for keeps, too, I took the file for safekeeping.

  Eight weeks ago, about six hours after I flew back from London, I went to visit Pinky, who was recuperating at home. I brought with me a single photograph from the Foxhunter file. It was a grainy but completely identifiable likeness of the good admiral in flagrante delicto—that’s Latin for “during flagrant pussy-licting”—with a known Japanese foreign agent.

  The night I visited Pinky in his Ashcroft town house I never said a word. Explanations weren’t necessary. Neither were threats. I just slid the eight-by-ten black-and-white across his eighteenth-century Williamsburg reproduction coffee table, watched his face change color, and then bid him a warm “Sayonara.”

  So, no way was I going to return Pinky’s calls. Let the son of a bitch wait. Ditto all the reporters, the NIS lawyer, and the XO of the Navy Yard, Captain Steve Otway, U. S. Navy.

  That left Major General Harrington from DIA. I called the main number there and asked to be connected with his office. The operator said there was no Major General Harrington at DIA.

  Hmm. A DIA project code named TFB, whatever that meant, had been mentioned in half a dozen of the FBI’s electronically shredded memos. Now a two-star from DIA, who the operator had just told me didn’t exist, had come a-calling. Happenstance? Coincidence? What do you think?

  I double-checked by perusing the current Defense Intelligence Agency telephone book and discovered that just as I’d been told, he wasn’t listed anywhere. That said Harrington was a spook of some sort. The question was—I sang this to myself as I pondered the possibilities—what sort of spook he was, who wasn’t listed there.

  There are beacoup ways to find out about spooks without alerting the subject of your interest. The easiest way is to ask someone you trust. In my case, I dialed my old friend Tony Mercaldi’s ninth-floor office at the Defense Intelligence Agency. If anybody knew about Harrington,
Merc would. After all, he’s an Air Farce colonel who works some of DIA’s spookiest projects. During the Gulf War, Merc was tasked with directing all U.S. covert ops against Saddam Hussein. He himself was part of the seven-man team that got caught in Baghdad just after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and had to be smuggled over the Turkish border by agents of the Polish intelligence service. In December 1990, Merc was the guy who told me that if I volunteered, he could get me out of prison long enough to lead an op somewhere in the greater Baghdad metropolitan area and reduce the mustached son of a bitch to a cinder. Since Desert Storm, Merc has had to learn a lot about the former Soviet Union for reasons I can’t go into—unless you readers all have top secret clearances.

  Anyhow, maybe Tony knew who the fuck Major General Harrington was, and what the fuck he wanted. I dialed. His phone rang four times and then switched me over to his DIA telephonic mailbox and message service. That meant he was out of town. Doom on me.

  I thought of calling Irish Kernan at No Such Agency, which is what we SEALs call the National Security Agency. But calling Irish is like talking to your tootsie-wootsie on a Hell’s Kitchen party line. You whisper sweet nothings, and the whole fucking neighborhood knows.

  Well, that left me on my own. It’s amazing how much information about supposedly classified subjects—or people—you can find if you know where to look. The Soviets (remember them?) understood that. In fact, that is precisely why they used to ship more than 450 tons—almost a million pounds—of books, magazines, newspapers, as well as congressional reports, committee transcripts, and oversight investigations, as well as thousands of U.S. Government Printing Office documents back to the USSR every year.