Gray Day

by Eric O'neill

  Kate laughed. “ ‘Get me a beer, please’? Where did you learn that?”

  “Juliana’s dad. We can’t speak to each other, but we could power through bottles of German beer at their kitchen table. Each time we reached empty, Gerhardt would have Juliana’s little brother Hagen fetch two more from the basement—the keller.”

  “Sounds fun.” Kate sat back from her empty plate. “But you should learn German.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Did Juliana put you up to that?”

  “I’ll never tell.” Kate glanced at her watch. “On to business?”

  I sat back and crossed my arms.

  She ran a hand through her short hair. “We’d like you to make him angry.”

  I looked up. “Come again? You know he’s armed and I’m not. He wears a revolver in an ankle holster and keeps an automatic in his desk.”

  Kate took a sip of her coffee to hide her smile.

  “Fine,” I said. “Make him angry. Anything else while we’re at it? Should I get him to confess?”

  Kate gave me a look. “It would have been great if you had gotten those keys.”

  I bit my tongue; the case left no room for pleasantries with either of the German-speaking women in my life. Hours earlier, I’d exchanged angry words with Juliana over an argument manufactured by too little sleep and less time. She had wanted me to review a report she had written for class, and I couldn’t find the bandwidth to pull my face out of a frantic read of ancient case law. Any chance at morning conversation had spiraled past a pissing match over who had the more important homework assignment into which of us was more present in the relationship. My last shouted words chased Juliana’s rigid back before the door slammed behind her.

  After a cold walk to the Metro, I’d walked into the office to find Hanssen at my desk, on my phone, animated. He’d looked up and laughed, and then put the phone back down on the receiver with a single word: “Juliana.” My breath caught. Juliana and I hadn’t laughed together for days. The case was sending me into a free fall, and my self-flagellation didn’t end with business hours.

  Watching Hanssen laugh at some secret joke with Juliana had taken away what was left of my decimated confidence. Hanssen was playing me better than I was playing him; I had nothing while he had tendrils snaking toward the person I wanted to protect the most.

  Juliana and I had met two summers before. At the time I was living in a group house in Adams Morgan, so close to the National Zoo that I woke to the sound of monkeys screeching and lions roaring to shut them up. I was living there with another guy and two girls, all of us convinced that our brownstone, with its four bedrooms, large living room, and dining room, meant that we’d made it. It even had garage space for my bureau-issued car.

  During the summer, Patrick, one of my three housemates, moonlighted as a bartender at Capitol City Blues Café, which became a frequent meeting spot where we could count on great music and the occasional free beer. I arrived there late one Thursday night after a hot and lengthy shift chasing a terrorism target around Old Town, Alexandria. As I opened the door to the café, the cool air and strumming blues washed over me, but everything stopped when I spotted Juliana. Tall and beautiful, willowy in tight jeans and a short top, she had long blond hair that fell behind her as she threw back her head and laughed at some joke. I don’t know how long I was standing there staring, but eventually I realized I was blocking traffic, and one leg was still on the steps to the street outside.

  I pried my eyes away and walked over to my friends, who’d seen the whole thing. Patrick laughed. “Out of your league, man! But I have a beer for you.”

  A group of the guys had just returned from a backpacking trip in Germany, and they were holding court. “You don’t even need to speak German in Germany,” one of them joked. “You only need to know one phrase. Das ist wunderbar! That’s wonderful!”

  We tried the new words out over our beers, raising our pints and yelling over the music. “Das ist wunderbar!” Two knocks on the table. I turned. It was my crush of ten minutes ago, standing at the table next to me, fist poised. She knocked again and said, “Guten Abend.”

  The table fell silent for a long moment. And then, as though choreographed, we all yelled again. “Das ist wunderbar!”

  Her face flushed. She turned to run, realizing she had greeted not a group of countrymen, but a gaggle of drunk Americans. Of course, I stopped her.

  The months that followed were a kaleidoscope of color and light. I proposed to her on a quiet beach in Mazatlán, Mexico, under a full moon. We had been dating less than a year at that time, but Juliana’s professional exchange ended in two weeks. We came from separate worlds. I wanted her to take a part of me back to Germany.

  After a yearlong engagement spent apart, we married in an ancient church one village over from the place she grew up. My parents and brothers, my aunt Mary and uncle Don, and my best pal, Christian, made the long trip to attend a wedding held in German, English, and Polish—all the languages of our shared family. The hard work began after we returned to the United States.

  Juliana’s government-funded exchange placed a restriction on her visa that would not allow her to immigrate to the United States for two years. We had spent one apart and had another to go. We desperately sought the counsel of lawyers at my father’s law firm, wrote our Maryland representatives and senators, requested waivers from both governments, and filed volumes of pages of documentation with the US State Department. We took up our swords to be together.

  Eventually the waivers came through and we passed our green-card interview. Juliana became a permanent resident of the United States, and we could lay down our swords. But sometimes the battle becomes the thing that keeps you together. Now that we’d won the war, we had to replace our shared struggle with something grander.

  Life together made our dank apartment seem brighter. We still missed the sprawling brownstone high above Adams Mill Road, and a stone’s throw away from the clubs and restaurants of Adams Morgan, but we had made this home together. Our cold, rent-controlled apartment was a palace as long as we shared it—at least until I was tasked to the Hanssen case. Now we were spending far too much time fighting, and had raised those swords against each other.

  I muttered into my steaming mug.

  “It’s tough stuff, kiddo,” Kate said. If anyone else had called me that, I would have blown my top. But Kate was becoming more like an older sister than a handler. She was, after all, the only person I could talk to about the case.

  After giving me a minute to drown my sorrows with caffeine, Kate went on to tell me that since Hanssen was such a low talker, she could barely hear anything through the audio feed. She instructed me to work harder on remembering things for my logs.

  “What’s wrong with the logs?” I asked.

  Kate handed me a sheet of paper. “I keep this framed on my wall. I took it down and copied it for you. Give it a read.”

  I turned the page over and looked at a large-font quote attributed to Charlie Donlan, an FBI instructor:

  There will be times when the answer will lie at the end of a maze so complicated by the law and circumstances that if we try to guess the next turn, we will simply be lost forever. No. We simply report what we have seen, clearly, honestly, without regard for the consequence. We are witnesses of the truth. It is our foremost priority. Truth is a splendid wild stallion whose presence will give us unparalleled strength. If we try to saddle it with our own purpose, its power and satisfaction will never ride our way again.

  CHARLIE DONLAN

  FBI AGENT

  LEGAL INSTRUCTOR

  When I looked up from the page, Kate was smiling. “You got it, kiddo?” I did. My role was to observe, record, and investigate without inserting my personal opinions and thoughts. I thought back to my previous logs and kicked myself. How often had I drawn a conclusion based on limited know
ledge, or thrown in some irrelevant thought drummed up at two a.m. while sleep deprived and shivering in my pajamas? Fact versus opinion—it was a crucial distinction I needed to make if I wanted the case to succeed.

  The FBI needed agents like Kate, willing to follow the facts where they led without jumping to conclusions or twisting facts with their own preconceptions. I’d learned in psychology classes that observation requires distance from emotions. Ideas that come from outside a controlled study corrupt the results. It’s the reason that jurors are sometimes sequestered to lonely hotel rooms without access to newspapers or television during high-profile cases. Outside influences can distort facts and thread bias through what the jury observes in the courtroom.

  Kate’s Donlan quote reminded me that my FBI Academy instructors had thumped the objective observations of facts into me until my surveillance logs read like a robot had drafted them. That was by design. When investigators draw subjective conclusions, they miss clues that can break cases. A few more people with Kate’s investigative sensibilities in senior management might have meant catching Hanssen more than a decade earlier.

  The year 1985 was a terrible one for US intelligence. During the “Year of the Spy,” the FBI identified and arrested more than eight highly placed moles in the US government who were passing secrets to foreign intelligence services. In the same year, the KGB identified and eliminated as many as eleven Soviet double agents who were providing information to US intelligence. Three of the top Soviet spies for the CIA disappeared within the same year. Boris Yuzhin had spied for the United States from the Soviet consulate general in San Francisco. The KGB arrested him one afternoon in Moscow without warning, and Soviet courts sentenced him to twelve years in prison. Valery Martynov, an intelligence officer charged with stealing Western technology who was also working as a double agent for the US government, and Sergei Motorin, a mole spying for the United States out of the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC, were coaxed back to Moscow and executed. Between 1985 and 1991, Soviet human assets continued to disappear without warning or explanation, and technical operations unexpectedly fizzled and died.

  Soviet counterintelligence in Moscow was good, but it wasn’t that good. The only way so many espionage efforts could have fallen apart without warning was if a mole was betraying the US intelligence community from within.

  Between 1987 and 1991, the FBI launched two studies to identify the mole they code-named Gray Suit. The first study analyzed historical allegations of a possible mole in the FBI. By late 1988, the team had chronologically reached the 1960s. In the summer of 1989, they issued an interim report and abandoned the study.

  The second study focused on more than fifty operations compromised since 1986. Although the final report detailed problems with the FBI’s Soviet operations, it refused to entertain the possibility of an FBI mole and instead concluded that the KGB had recruited a spy from within the CIA who began his espionage in 1985.

  Things turned around in the 1990s. The FBI and CIA hugged it out and formed a joint investigation to find the mole, and senior management got out to the field to supervise. In 1991, the FBI worked with the CIA’s Special Intelligence Unit to prepare a list of suspects that could account for the staggering intelligence losses caused by Gray Suit. None of the suspects on the list were FBI agents.

  After arresting Aldrich Ames in February 1994, the FBI cranked all counterintelligence efforts up to eleven and turned its powerful searchlights fully onto the CIA. Despite finding a number of clues to the contrary, the FBI continued to believe that the mole festered within the CIA and pursued a suspected spy named Brian Kelley. The bureau code-named Kelley “Gray Deceiver” and dogged his heels long past the time when we should have turned our attention elsewhere.

  Part of a 2003 DOJ Inspector General Report reviewed the FBI’s pursuit of Gray Deceiver. The IG found that in the 1970s and 1980s the FBI suffered from a lack of cooperation with the CIA and from inattention on the part of senior management. In 1985 and 1986, the CIA and FBI lost nearly every significant human asset then operating against the Soviet Union. Despite these unprecedented losses, senior FBI management failed to thoroughly investigate whether an FBI mole had caused the deaths of our sources. The DOJ inspector general wrote:

  The FBI should have seriously questioned its conclusion that the CIA suspect was a KGB spy and considered opening different lines of investigation. The squad responsible for the case, however, was so committed to the belief that the CIA suspect was a mole that it lost a measure of objectivity and failed to give adequate consideration to other possibilities.

  The FBI had allowed bias to color the investigation. Instead of witnessing the truth, FBI agents had saddled it with their own purpose. The FBI’s refusal to abandon the Gray Deceiver investigation and look elsewhere blinded us to the possibility that the spy might be one of our own.

  * * *

  “I’ve made edits to your logs and highlighted in blue areas where you added your own thoughts to the observation.” Kate handed me a folder. “Remember, you observe everything. Write down just the facts. Save all your thoughts and impressions for debriefs with me.”

  “It’s not like anyone but you sees my logs,” I grumbled.

  “Yeah, not anyone.” Kate laughed. “Just the director.”

  I set down my coffee mug before I could drop it. “The director?”

  “He sees your logs every day.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  Kate’s smile slipped off her face. “Eric, Director Freeh is running the case personally. What you’re doing is more important than you know.” She paused. “Than you’re allowed to know.”

  I flipped through the slim folder. Blue highlights crossed each page like slender rivers bisecting a map. I could do better. “What about searching his office? I went in there to look for his keys, but didn’t see anything.”

  Kate sat back in her chair. “Marching orders?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t. You don’t search his office or go in there unless we tell you to.” Her eyes crinkled at hard edges. “This guy…he’s unlike other spies we’ve gone after.”

  “You can say that again!”

  “He’s careful. He’s…”

  “Crafty.”

  She smiled. Some of the tension fled from her face. “Bingo! Crafty. Leave the search to the search teams. That is, unless I tell you to.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Good.” She checked her watch. “Looks like lunch is over.”

  CHAPTER 10

  STRAIGHT LINES

  January 22, 2001—Monday

  Can you inject coffee directly into a vein? I considered the thought as Juliana’s words washed against and past me like a river around an obstinate rock. We were sitting beside each other on the couch, but my mind had already turned to the case. I’d spent the night reworking my surveillance logs on my secret laptop and researching a definition of information assurance for the boss. The Donlan quote that Kate had given me hung on the wall over my computer desk. Truth might be a splendid, wild stallion, but what I needed was sleep.

  “Are you here?” Juliana said.

  I opened my eyes and eyed my cup of coffee the way a drunk checks whether his beer has spilled after a momentary lapse of consciousness. Focus. I bit the inside of my cheek.

  “I’m here.” Liar.

  Juliana had her schoolbooks spread across our small coffee table. I vaguely remembered she had macroeconomics in the morning over at American University. A spike of adrenaline roused me into a panic. Corporations! I had spent so much time working through Kate’s highlighted lines, I’d forgotten to study for law school.

  “Hey, you with the nose in your face.” Juliana touched her voice with the soothing quality you use with a wild animal, or a recalcitrant husband. “Are you okay?”

  I smiled at the old joke between us. She
had once translated the old saying plain as the nose on your face to plain as the nose in your face, which I’d found hilarious. Now it was our private joke, the kind of small connection that glues a couple together. Except these days, I felt like I was becoming unglued.

  “I’m just tired,” I said. “There’s a lot going on at work.”

  She placed her pencil into the seam of her open book and spent a moment tucking her long hair behind her ears before turning to lock eyes with me. Each small, delicate movement reinforced my love for her. “Look at me.” It may have been a quirk, or the fact that English is not her first language, but Juliana believed that all conversations require complete attention.

  “I’m here.”

  “Are you?” She took my coffee and replaced the mug with her hands. Her long fingers, the same ones that coaxed magic out of any piano, gently held mine. “You haven’t been for days.”

  There’s always a storm before a flood. A moment of warning before the water sweeps everything away. A hurricane surged in my wife’s eyes, green and gold and held at bay by a gentle touch. We could sandbag the flood together or let it sweep us apart. The choice was mine.

  “I’m not stupid,” she said. “You have a nine-to-five computer job at headquarters, but you’re working more than you ever did when you worked all those crazy shifts.” Her hands squeezed mine. Holding on. “I thought the idea was to work less and go to law school more.”

  Guilt has a funny way of turning to anger, especially when stress and lack of sleep are added in. The rational part of my brain spun up presentations and diagrams proving that Juliana was seeking to comfort me. But I couldn’t get past all the demands. Law school classes I hadn’t studied for, bills I needed to pay, mounting debt from paying for my law school and Juliana’s undergrad degree on a GS salary, Parkinson’s disease stealing my mother’s voice and balance, a spy to catch…a wife to love and lie to. It was too much. I let go of her hands. Let the fucking storm come.