by Eric O'neill
Dies looked at Gene.
“We found a pattern, all right,” Gene said.
“And you wrote this in wha?” Dies said. “C++?”
I took a breath. “Actually, Microsoft Access.”
“Access!” Dies sat back.
You could cook an egg on my face. My interest in computer systems began in 1986 when my mother bought our first Apple IIGS out of the first proceeds from a catering company she started. I taught myself rudimentary programming so that I could modify video games and soon graduated to building my own computer systems and then to challenging my newfound knowledge by testing security as I explored the nascent World Wide Web. I could program, but I didn’t have time or funding to create a database from scratch for the FBI. “We didn’t have a budget, and Microsoft Office was already installed on the desktop Gene assigned me. Sir, I used what I had in front of me. Also, I’m used to using a mouse. I wanted to design something that didn’t look left over from the 1970s.”
Dies laughed, but I could hear the underlying morbidity in the mirth. I had touched on a sore spot for the FBI. After the turn of the twenty-first century, the FBI’s primary computer program was an obsolete, mainframe-based program called the Automated Case System. Because none of the FBI computers had enough horsepower to run a distributed program like ACS, the information resided on a powerful mainframe computer that the desktop in a squad office would connect to in order to access case information. To upload a single document into ACS, an agent had to traverse a dozen green screens that looked like they would fit right into the movie War Games. The system was incompatible with Microsoft Windows OS, which was already ubiquitous in the civilian world. And as slow and complicated as it was to use ACS, it was still ultimately just a filing system used to direct legions of assistants and clerks to hunt down paper files. In a nutshell, everyone hated it.
My system uploaded all our investigative logs into a Microsoft database that allowed the user to perform keyword searches over time and dates, either specific moments or ranges of them. It also allowed a user to instantly retrieve any surveillance log in Word format. No more hunting down old information in dusty file cabinets. You could keyword-search a Russian intelligence officer by name and see how many times ghosts had followed him over the past year to a certain telephone pole that we knew served as a Russian signal site. If the system showed that he had passed that signal site at three o’clock every second Tuesday of the month for a year, you could plan to set up ahead of him the next month and increase the odds of breaking a major case.
Of course, Dies didn’t know that I didn’t have entirely altruistic reasons for creating the database. I needed a way to spend more time at law school and less time out on the street missing class. I proposed the program to my supervisory special agent with the caveat that I’d code during the day on weeks when my team had overnight operations.
The idea had come to me when I’d started law school and began using Westlaw and LexisNexis, databases that served as searchable, cross-indexed law libraries. If every lawyer in the United States could call up every case related to the one they were working on with just a few mouse clicks, why couldn’t the FBI do the same? The FBI should have come up with the idea of approaching major systems designers to develop a Westlaw or Lexis for the bureau. Instead they had an investigative specialist in his mid-twenties coding modules in Access during rare days in the office and on nights and weekends. But the fact that my database worked got me noticed by the powers that be.
“Don’t worry, Eric,” Dies said. “We are going to change everything.” He reached across the desk to shake my hand. “Welcome to the team.”
A smile finally ghosted Gene’s face.
Once we were back out in the hall and safe from other ears, I asked Gene whether Dies knew about the Hanssen investigation. “That’s need-to-know,” Gene answered. “You don’t have a need to know.”
Gene led me back through the halls filled with the noisy chatter of FBI employees. We rode an elevator up two floors to the ninth and stepped out into a clinical hallway of white walls and drop ceilings striped with bright, cased fluorescent lights. Doors framed in dark wood stood an even-spaced sentry until the hall ended in a sharp left turn. Just to the right of the elevators, the bathrooms faced each other inside an alcove divided by a water fountain.
Gene looked over and chuckled. “What’s the first rule of surveillance?”
“Never inspect a bathroom, and never pass one by.”
He slapped me on the back. “Well done! Who told you that?”
“Tom Reilly. While we worked the Earl Pitts case.” Tom was a counterintelligence agent, years my senior, who had taken me under his wing. One afternoon while rushing after Pitts, Tom had stopped us both by a public restroom. I’d told him to go ahead, I didn’t feel the need, but he’d lectured me about opportunity. “You’ll find yourself trapped in a car chasing a target though streets with no end and that’s when the need will strike,” Tom had said. “So when you have downtime, always hit the head. And when you’re in there, don’t inspect: get in, do your business, and get out quick before your target moves again.”
In all my years as an undercover operative, that advice had been the most important.
“Tom’s a good guy,” Gene said. “Here’s another.”
Gene led me through an open door into an office that looked pleasantly out of place in the otherwise drab headquarters. A glass-fronted bookcase of polished wood held thick volumes related to operations and investigations. A massive executive desk dominated one side of the carpeted room. A comfortable couch that matched the voluminous desk chair relaxed along the opposite wall. The walls and shelves were decorated with baseball memorabilia, along with numerous awards and plaques in both English and Spanish.
“Eric, meet Rich Garcia.”
Garcia’s exuberant smile under his burly mustache and thick glasses made the corner of my mouth tick up. We shook hands. “Anything you need,” Garcia said, “I’m here. Just right down the hall.”
I looked at Gene.
“Rich is in the know,” Gene confirmed. “As far as you are concerned, he’s the only person at headquarters that knows about the investigation.”
Richard Garcia’s FBI career had followed a unique trajectory. He had joined the FBI out of the Dallas Police Department and had continued to serve as a Dallas FBI agent until an assignment in San Juan, Puerto Rico, landed him a spot in Miami and then a position at FBI headquarters supervising a Colombian/South American Drug Traffickers Unit. Years later he would return to Texas as assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso office before finally returning to headquarters as section chief in charge of information technology operations.
“All the cameras you see in the halls, the security systems, the phone systems, and every lock on every door. That’s all out of my section,” Garcia explained. “We are installing tech in the office to monitor that bastard.”
“Got it,” I said. But I didn’t.
“I’m taking him to the room,” Gene said.
Garcia glanced at the unfinished work on his desk. “Kate’s there. I’ll be along later.”
I hiked up my shoulder bag and remembered that the letter Gene had shown me hadn’t just TDY’d me to HQ; it had also technically placed me under Garcia’s supervision. I realized I knew next to nothing about this assignment. Only that the FBI somehow expected me to help catch a spy.
“O’Neill.” Garcia stopped me before I could follow Gene from the room. “If it ever gets too hot in there, if you need help: I’m right down the hall.”
“Thank you, sir.” I could tell he was speaking in earnest, but I couldn’t decide whether his words comforted me or made me more apprehensive.
“The room is a few doors down,” Gene said. For once we didn’t have to thread a maze of featureless corridors broken only by red and blue color-coded markers. Ge
ne led me a short way down an empty hallway toward the rolling whine of drills and dull thumps of hammers.
“The room?”
Gene escorted me through a doorway framed in black steel. A massive door hung open on heavy hinges. I spotted holes in the top and bottom rails where bolts would secure the door to its frame. A combination dial bulged above a latch that I could fit both my hands on. A lonely placard displayed the room number in red, blue, and black: 9930.
“On paper, you are TDY’d to headquarters and to Garcia’s desk,” Gene said. “Covertly, you’re assigned to the WFO team investigating Hanssen.” Gene stopped me. “This is important. As far as you are concerned, no one knows about this case. Mum’s the word. Not me, not your wife or grandma. Not even Garcia. You discuss this case with only one person. Eric, meet Special Agent Kate Alleman.”
Special Agent Alleman had worked in army intelligence before coming over to the civilian side, and she moved with the grace of someone familiar with the track and the weight room. Streaks of blond shot through her short brown hair. Though her smile needed little prompting to break through, I could tell there was steel within her. I didn’t yet know it, but that fortitude would guide me like an evening star.
Kate shook my hand and pulled me into Room 9930. This was where I would be working one on one, side by side, with Robert Hanssen. I still had no idea who Hanssen was, what he was suspected of doing, or what kind of dirt I was expected to find, and Kate wasn’t about to tell me. She dodged my questions and broadly explained the crux of the situation: after a career of rattling the wrong cages, never shy about letting his superiors know he thought them foolish or incompetent, Hanssen had been banished to an obscure desk job at the State Department. (I was also told he’d had a dispute with a subordinate that involved him screaming, and ended with her sprawled on the floor.) This was because the government rarely fires an employee, even for cause. Instead, the FBI shuffles its unwanted souls to administrative hell, where they’re put out to pasture, left to boredom or advancement Siberia until they quit or retire. Which was exactly our problem: Hanssen was about to hit mandatory retirement in just a couple of months.
You might think that the FBI would wish the suspected spy good riddance, but then you wouldn’t understand the spy game. The only way a spy hunter could possibly catch Hanssen in an act of espionage was to keep him working at the bureau—meaning the FBI needed to woo Hanssen back from his cushy, if boring, job at State. They needed to coax him back into the fold in a way that would mend his fractured ego, give him access to juicy information, and encourage him to spy. And they needed to do all that without tipping him off that he was walking into a mousetrap. Much like the way Donner’s squad operated during the Earl Pitts case, the squad investigating Hanssen wanted to slowly build a case. A key difference was that no FBI agents would false-flag Hanssen. We wanted him to spy for the actual Russians.
To accomplish this impossible task, the powers that be decided to give Hanssen his dream job. He’d spent years complaining that the FBI’s systems were vulnerable to outside hackers and inside spies, and the FBI had spent years ignoring his concerns. Now, at the twilight of his career, they were capitulating. Imagine Hanssen’s surprise when the FBI told him not only that he would be returning to headquarters to start a new squad to protect the FBI from computer espionage but also that the new role included a promotion to executive service. Hanssen would make more money and get the fancy office he had spent twenty-five years dreaming about. The deal was too good to pass up—but also too good to be true.
Contractors had split Room 9930 into a main office for Hanssen and a second, larger squad room for me. Hanssen would have an executive desk and a credenza, a coatrack, and a TV stand—all standard issue for an agent in executive service—as well as a safe rated for special compartmentalized information (SCI). My office would contain a few more modest desks, a separate computer station for accessing the Internet, and a copier. The extra desks were just for show. Hanssen would only ever have a staff of one.
In the meantime, however, workers had been busy gutting the room that Kate walked me into. Wires slithered from unfinished walls pocked with holes. Uninstalled equipment waited on top of every flat surface. I couldn’t identify half of it. The FBI had classified the room as a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF—pronounced “skiff”). This meant that within 9930, Hanssen and I could analyze and access information classified as top secret/SCI. It also meant that 9930 was in an interior office without windows, that technicians had soundproofed the walls and vents, and that they’d installed a door that belonged on an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb. There were hidden cameras and surveillance equipment all across the room.
“If you have all these cameras, what do you need me for?” I asked.
I received the first of many trademark Kate grins. Somewhere between supportive and condescending, it had a way of making you reach back inside yourself to answer a question you’d just asked.
“You never rely on technology alone,” Kate said. “The most important wins come from people. Not machines. We can’t see everything. That’s your job. Watch and listen.”
I nodded, chewing over the question that had needled me since Gene pulled me out of bed: Out of everyone in the bureau, why had the agents selected me for this role? At age twenty-six, I could dress up to play the part of a seasoned corporate professional, but I could also stroll through a high school without attracting a second glance. As a ghost, I could 21 Jump Street across a college campus, but since meeting Juliana, I’d been shouldered into second-string cases. This feeling drove me to push the boundaries: selecting choke points ahead of targets in shadowed alleys, hanging off the edge of rooftops to find the perfect camera angle, spending nights and weekends developing a target-tracking database to make the entire squad more efficient. All these things lent me a certain reputation, but they didn’t change the fact that, according to the training manuals, I was the wrong person to take on what appeared to be a high-level suspected spy. But sometimes in the spy game a perceived disadvantage can become an asset. Maybe an older, more seasoned and well-trained agent couldn’t do the job that I could.
“Any tips for me?” I asked.
“Just be yourself,” Kate answered.
I tried to swallow, but the sound of the ticking clock made my mouth go dry. It was January, and Hanssen’s twenty-five-year retirement was coming up in April. I didn’t have much in the way of information, but I did know I only had a few months to help catch a suspected spy.
CHAPTER 5
THE WEAKEST LINK
January 16, 2001—Tuesday
The chilly January morning layered Washington, DC, in stark grays. Black streets cut precise paths past stone buildings and forgotten monuments, everything solid and immobile under the heavy sky. The air frosted ahead of my labored breath. I’d jogged up the many escalator steps emerging from the Archives–Navy Memorial Metro station and then walked with purpose toward the sandstone-colored temple that was the FBI Building. Now my hurry had stalled against the weight of a single moment. Kate had advised me to “be myself.” How could I be myself when I felt like an actor playing my part in a movie?
It had taken the going-away party with my ghost squad for me to appreciate how strictly the FBI had compartmentalized the Hanssen investigation. Officially, only a handful of my fellow ghosts tasked with surveilling Hanssen knew why the FBI had transferred me to headquarters. The rest of the Special Surveillance Group (SSG) in WFO believed the same lie I had told Juliana: I had accepted a computer-security job. I knew that the teams shadowing Hanssen’s every step would never tell. The SSG is the most highly compartmentalized group in the FBI. Ghosts learn to say nothing about the work they accomplish for fear that an errant word might reach the wrong ear. The Roman poet Juvenal wrote in his Satires “Quis custodiet ipsos custodies?” The Latin question literally means “Who will guard the guards themselves?” but is more
commonly translated as “Who will watch the watchers?” Among the secret hallways of the SSG, we silently watched one another.
Our silence with respect to classified matters did not stifle the usual banter and interpersonal drama that blossoms within a close-knit team. We could care about one another while burying our secrets. And so, a few days before I stood in front of FBI headquarters on that cold January morning, the assortment of oddballs and jokers that I trusted to have my back each day we chased spies and terrorists through the DC streets celebrated my move to the Big House.
Friends circulated flyers for “Eric O’Neill’s Luncheon” in our office. We descended on a buffet at Charlie Chiang’s in Shirlington, Virginia, and clinked beer glasses in a toast to my future as an FBI HQ computer nerd. I smiled along, but secretly wondered how many of my fellows knew what my actual role would be and were laughing inwardly as they watched me pretend graciousness. How many would later learn that the “promotion” was a smokescreen for the FBI’s grandest spy-hunting operation? Would they see the deception as another secret tucked into one of many compartments? Or would they feel that I had cheated them out of a $13 lunch?
I’d had the same sick feeling over New Year’s. Juliana and I rang in the first moments of 2001 with our best friends Mike and Vivian under fireworks in Orlando, Florida. I had known Mike since we shared a desk in Ms. Fredrickson’s first-grade class at the Saint Jane Frances de Chantal elementary school in Bethesda, Maryland, and I was overjoyed when his longtime girlfriend Viv started becoming close to Juliana. Juliana eventually asked Viv to be her maid of honor at our wedding. We were excited to celebrate the holiday together, and we’d planned a weekend of amusement parks, great restaurants, and maybe a little drinking to excess. But that was all before Gene had shown up in front of 626 E Street. During a New Year’s Eve party, I stood and listened as my oldest friend and my very new wife applauded my new job. Maybe it was the Champagne that brought a smile to my face at my pal’s flowery words. Or maybe the lies that now continually crossed my lips were starting to flow more easily. Neither possibility sat well with me.