The Threat

by Andrew G. McCabe

  The third big piece of training is firearms. Some in our class had never fired a gun before. Some had been marksmen in the military. No matter what their past experience, agents in training all start at the same level, learning the basic nomenclature, how to break a weapon down, and what every part and piece is called and how they work together. On the firing range, they learn sight alignment and trigger control. All forty of us shot thousands of rounds. By the end of sixteen weeks, we could all shoot very well.

  The schedule at Quantico changed constantly. We moved rapidly from one thing to another. We were acquiring a sense of discipline, a paramilitary sense of order. I recognized the flaws of this system. Prioritizing obedience to process could create a type of groupthink that stifles creativity, independence, and critical thinking. But the Bureau is bureaucratic. It is a law-enforcement agency. It is paramilitary in nature. It also depends for its success on keeping records. It is run according to a clear and distinct chain of command. So there is a set of very basic concepts that lead to an understanding of where you stand in this big organization. You start learning those concepts at Quantico, when you’re told on the first night that punctuality is not optional. If you’re not early, you’re late. If class starts at eight, you’re there at seven fifty. Anyone who isn’t early is noticed and marked as being out of step with the program. Quickly it becomes the case that no one is ever late under any circumstances. If you have only twenty minutes between your physical education class and your law class, and you have to shower, get dressed, and cross the campus to get there—you figure it out. You make it work. Those words could almost be an agent’s motto: Make it work.

  I embraced every bit of this culture, even the most arbitrary aspects of the discipline. Who I am fit with what this was. I wanted to look the way they wanted me to look. Loved wearing the same style of polo shirt every day for weeks on end. Loved the fact that everybody around me wore the same polo shirt, too. That polo shirt was a symbol of dedication. It announced your priorities. The more detailed the requirements of the academy experience, the more I responded to it. I wasn’t just acclimating to a place, I was joining a life. I felt like every quirky, inconvenient thing about this experience was necessary and important, and, in a way, even cool.

  The biggest shift entailed in learning to see the world like an agent is the shift toward altruism. It’s a huge change of mind-set to go from being Joe Private Citizen, where your worries are mainly about yourself—your own safety and happiness and health—to putting all that aside and saying, I’m going to worry about everybody else first. Mortal stakes help this shift along. In one class, the instructor talked about lethal force—the times when you put yourself in harm’s way to eliminate a threat to other people. There was never a doubt in my mind that this was the best thing a person could do. It’s not that I ever wished to be in that situation, but I did feel on some level a desire to live on the visceral edge.

  That desire inflects a thousand little shifts in perspective and technique, altering the way you see the world and make your way through it. You start to think of your whole life, almost every minute of every day, in terms of readiness. One example: In the car, when you unbuckle your seat belt, you slip the back of your hand inside the belt across your chest, you slide your hand down along the inside of that strap, and then you release the belt and push away with the back of your hand. You have to do it this way, because if you unbuckle it the way normal people do—reaching across your chest, overhand, and clicking the buckle with your thumb—then your arm is inside the triangle of the belt. And if you have to jump out of that car in a lethal situation, that could be the thing that costs you a tenth of a second and gets somebody killed.

  Part of our firearms training was running shoot/don’t-shoot scenarios in a video-training module, to gain practice in making split-second decisions. You knock on a guy’s front door, maybe he answers and then runs back into the house: What do you do? Do you go in by yourself? Do you call your partner? You hit these decision points, and depending on how you react, the video plays differently. This is not exclusive to Quantico—police agencies all over the world use some version of it now. It’s called Firearms Training Simulation—FATS, for short. In training we would all sit there in a line, dressed in our gear, and it was nerve-racking—I could hear screaming and gunfire in the video booth where the person ahead of me was training. For all I knew, the trainee had just lost his virtual life. And I was next.

  In the twenty-two years since I graduated from Quantico, FATS technology has improved. It’s all digital now, and the fake guns palpably recoil, which realistically messes with your ability to recapture your sight picture—the way you frame a shot with your gunsight. It tells you when your shot is lethal. But the best part of the whole session, as it’s run today, is the conversation after it’s all over, between the trainee and a lawyer. The lawyer asks, Why did you shoot at this point? And the trainee says, I thought I was going to die. The lawyer says, What did you see that led you to believe that your life or the lives of others were in danger? The trainee better have a good answer. Hard conversations like these teach agents to articulate every decision they make. A decision that you can’t articulate is probably a wrong decision.

  ‘I’m Being Racketeered’

  After months of learning in a fake city populated by fake characters, FBI Academy training culminates with the trumpet-blaring pomp of graduation, as if we’re all becoming knights of the Round Table. Then we get plunked down in field offices all over the country. When you go to Quantico, one thing you give up is any control over where you’re going to live after you leave. Here I am. Send me where you need me. That’s the deal. You get your chance to say where you’d like to go, but the three monkeys throwing darts at the map to make your assignments do not, typically, read your preferences. You get what you get, and it’s all to satisfy “the needs of the Bureau”—the infamous tagline that explains all manner of offense, real or perceived.

  I got New York City—lower Manhattan. It was a rude awakening, going from one end of the spectrum to the other. Quantico was regimented. The New York field office was a free-for-all. Where were the people handing me my new uniforms and cooking my meals?

  No one would tell me what to do. There were no supplies anywhere. They gave me a car, but no place to park it. The only parking place I could find was ten blocks away, and then I got to the office in a sweat because I was late—and realized that nobody cared. I came out of Quantico’s perfectly structured world, flush with idealism, and into a world where the bosses say, Don’t give me any of that Quantico bullshit, kid.

  Struggle and deprivation can be gifts. In the New York field office—the biggest of the Bureau’s field offices, with about eleven hundred agents and as many staff—you’re limited only by your imagination and energy. If you’re willing to work your tail off, even a new agent can take down the top guy in a crime family. I would spend the first ten years of my career focused on cases that grew out of two interlocking narratives: the evolution of organized crime in Russia and the export of Russian organized crime to the United States. These narratives traced a complex and inexorable process that would, despite the best efforts of the FBI as a whole, become only more dangerous. Russian organized crime today has deep ties to the Russian government. It saturates the internet. As most people are aware, the combination of crime, computers, and the Kremlin has in recent years taken aim at electoral politics—at American democracy itself.

  My first big case started with a phone call. I picked up the receiver—these were the days of landlines—and heard an old guy’s voice say, I think I’m being racketeered. It was February 1998. I had come to work early, because I was eager. It took a while for me to figure out that real work started late in the day. So when the switchboard for the main New York field office number put a call through to our squad, I was the only agent around to answer it. The old man on the phone spoke with a thick Russian accent. His voice was shaky and fearful. To protect his identity, I’ll cal
l him Felix. Felix ran a furniture store in Brooklyn. When I went to talk to him, he told me that a Russian thug was forcing him to pay one hundred dollars a week in “protection money”—this at a time when Felix’s business couldn’t have been pulling in much more than a thousand dollars a week. Felix needed genuine protection: protection of the law, provided by the Bureau. I would be the case agent.

  After Felix told his story, I went back to the office and wrote up a 302. I realized, now, that I was part of the conversation I’d been longing to join ever since my summer internship at Justice. With this case, my squad would take the playbook the Bureau had used to crack La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia’s five families, and turn it against the Russian mobsters whose activities had moved Felix to call. Before the end of that year, my squad became one of the first to use the RICO statute against a Russian-organized-crime group when we indicted the Gufield-Kutsenko Brigade, a gang that extorted not only furniture stores but also restaurants and jewelry stores; sold fake Medicaid cards and green cards; kidnapped businessmen; and burned down buildings. They played rough.

  Right when I was going after these guys, one of my New York colleagues was translating a fatwa issued in Arabic by a radical jihadist who was then all but unknown: Osama bin Laden. At the time, neither the Russian Mafia nor radical Islam had been getting much attention because the country was distracted by politics: the unfolding Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal, which ultimately led to impeachment proceedings and, along the way, jacked up tensions between President Bill Clinton and FBI Director Louis Freeh. That episode was just the latest in a series of struggles, such as those involving the Khobar Towers and “Filegate,” between the director and the president that had all but alienated the FBI from the White House. It is striking that this moment in the late 1990s, when radical Islamic extremism and Russian organized crime were emerging with new clarity, was also one when the poisonous personalization of politics deflected attention from those very threats. In the present moment, as I write, both of these phenomena—foreign terrorism and foreign organized crime—represent two of the greatest threats we face.

  The Bureau had a long tradition of ignoring organized crime. Old-school law enforcement was all about statistics, or “stats”—that is, measuring the numbers of arrests, indictments, and convictions. Those numbers proved the Bureau’s worth, at least in the eyes of presidents and of Congress, and justified our funding. Mob investigations, which are complicated and lengthy, tend to produce a low yield of favorable stats. Under J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the Bureau for almost fifty years, starting in 1924, the FBI paid scant attention to the problem.

  After Hoover’s death, in 1972, the FBI put some manpower on La Cosa Nostra. For these investigations, the Bureau mastered new ways of doing business. It learned to reckon with complicated international criminal structures, to collect and process evidence in other countries, and to overcome language barriers in order to navigate foreign courtrooms. By the end of the 1980s, the Bureau had built competence in all these areas, and the mob’s reign in New York was coming to an end. Louis Freeh helped make that happen, first as an FBI agent and later as a federal prosecutor. When Freeh became the FBI’s director in 1993, he brought this experience to the Bureau.

  Freeh had a personal authenticity that immediately won the respect of agents. Everyone referred to him as Louie, whether you knew him or not. He had been one of us. He became the kind of prosecutor we all wanted to work with. Time as a federal judge gave him an imprimatur of knowledge and authority. I traveled with Freeh on several overseas trips—to Budapest, Hungary; Almaty and Astana, Kazakhstan; Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia—as part of his security detail.

  Though naturally quiet, Freeh was a superb diplomat. In Russia, he drank vodka shots with officials of the MVD, the interior ministry. In Central Asia, he ate the eyeball from a barbecued goat. No matter where he was, he liked to get up early and go for a run. This meant that his advance team had to plan the running routes and run them ourselves at the exact time Freeh would, so that we could gauge lighting conditions, access routes, traffic, and crowds. Freeh held a strong seven-and-a-half-minute-mile pace. He always invited the cops or agents from the local service to join him. At every location, some local cop would want to race the FBI director to show what he was made of. Somehow, the local stallion always won. On the last night of each trip, Freeh would invite the entire team up to his room for drinks.

  Under Freeh’s leadership, the Bureau developed a more international perspective. Freeh opened many legal-attaché offices—called legats—overseas, including one in Moscow. He built relationships with law enforcement in Russia and in Armenia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and throughout the Caucasus. These relationships fed Freeh’s awareness of organized-crime networks in Eurasia and how they operated in the U.S., mainly in the Russian-immigrant communities of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Miami.

  This work got little support from the Clinton administration. In the heady first years after Soviet communism fell, President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore wanted to see democracy and free-market capitalism take root in Russia. Who didn’t? But they wanted so badly to see this that they failed to understand how firmly organized crime had taken hold in all of the former Soviet republics. You have to wonder what might have happened if the U.S. government had taken Russian organized crime more seriously during those years—but beyond a certain point, it’s also pointless to wonder. Nobody can see everything.

  In 1996, the New York field office had the largest organized-crime operation in the country. There were several Italian-organized-crime squads. There were Asian-organized-crime squads. And there was a new one, just started in 1994, for organized crime in Eurasia, including Russia. As shorthand, we used the terms “Russian organized crime” and “Eurasian organized crime” interchangeably.

  My first assignment had been Italian. The Colombo family. The first thing you do, on any assignment, is your homework. You read the binders. I started plowing through the whole history of investigations of the Colombo crime family, and before long I found a surprise: the names of a couple of people I knew. One had been to my wedding and given me a wedding gift. This seemed like a problem. I asked my supervisor. My supervisor said, Stop reading the binders. I was given another assignment.

  This turned out to be the best possible bad luck. I got moved to squad C24, Eurasian organized crime. At the time, Russian mobsters were seen as the junior varsity when compared to the Italians. Both kinds of gangsters were interested in the same targets of opportunity—drugs, human trafficking, money laundering, and financial fraud—but if the Italians got involved, the Russians would go running.

  The criminals’ hierarchy also applied to cops who chased them. New York City loves its Mafia. It’s part of the culture there. So those of us who worked Russian organized crime were like redheaded stepchildren. The Cosa Nostra squads had twenty-five years of intelligence collection to draw on. They knew who was in what family, who was affiliated, who was at war, who had cooperated, and they had a deep bench of grand old men. We had nothing like that.

  Second fiddle suited me fine. And like a lot of underdog teams, our squad had the best coach. In style, Raymond Kerr was a G-man’s G-man: rock-square jaw, purse-lipped smile, steel-gray hair, pants creased, shirt tucked. He must have had a suit coat or blazer around somewhere, but you never saw it. He wore gold-rimmed glasses for reading. Every two years, Kerr would trade in his immaculate Bureau car—his Bu-ride, a Ford Crown Victoria, the legendary Crown Vic preferred by old-school cops and taxi drivers everywhere—and get an even more pristine new model. I can still hear the soft whoosh of the SWAT-issued Gore-Tex raincoat, sleeves sliding on side panels, as Ray walked into the office. But what I remember most is his voice.

  Kerr was the ultimate agent’s supervisor. He was completely focused on cases and operations, and on throwing bad guys in jail. He would sit in his office for hours and talk to us about the people we were chasing, the informants we were using, and the prosecutors who we
re building cases with us. He was our strategist, our sage, our cheerleader, and our conscience. He pushed us to meet aggressive goals and helped manage our expectations when things didn’t quite measure up. After a colossal mistake on a case where my partner and I arrested the wrong person, Kerr told us that if we made the best decision we could with the information we had at the time, we had nothing to worry about. Then he made sure we had our professional liability insurance paid up. Even though we were federal government employees and theoretically protected by the Justice Department, you never knew when you’d need a backup policy. Kerr taught us to be prepared, always do our best to get things right, and not take it out on ourselves if things didn’t go our way. The only sin was to do nothing at all.

  When Kerr was angry, you knew it. He wasn’t a screamer. Instead, he got quiet. The rock-square jaw got rockier. And before he told you what he really thought, Ray would toss a quick glance to each side, over his shoulders, as if there might be somebody standing behind him listening. It was the kind of thing you would expect an informant to do, in a dark alley, in a 1940s movie. There never was anyone listening in—it was just a tell, his way of emphasizing that the next thing he said was for you and no one else. After the side-to-side look, he’d look you straight in the eye, point his finger at your chest, and say, That guy’s not just a moron. He’s a fucking moron.

  Kerr had been in charge of the first Asian-organized-crime squad, so he knew how to build from the ground up. He found people with real knowledge about Russia, like Michael McCall, to add to the team. A fluent Russian speaker who came over from counterintelligence, McCall brought an understanding of how organized crime worked in the former Soviet Union and an awareness of how it was being exported to the U.S.