by Eric O'neill
“Thank you for that.” Hanssen saw O’Leary out and shut the door behind him. I expected my boss to say something modest or self-deprecating in response to the praise. Instead, he could scarcely control the rage written across his face.
“Everything okay, boss?” I asked.
“Do you have that definition of ‘information assurance’ yet?”
I had a perfectly workable definition, just not the one he apparently wanted. “Not yet.”
“Then everything is not okay.”
I hated to poke the bear, but Kate would want a report. “Who is Assistant Director O’Leary?”
Hanssen paused at his office door, his shoulders up in the hypermasculine pose my little brother Danny calls invisible lat syndrome. I readied myself for a tongue-lashing. Instead he deflated.
“He’s a Deputy AD for IRD.” Hanssen collapsed into a chair in front of my desk. “We’ve worked together in the past.”
I used the Robert Hanssen lexicon that I’d written in my head and translated. A deputy assistant director outranked Hanssen, and I’d come to know that my boss reflexively despised anyone above him in the chain of command. I knew that the Information Assurance Section fell within the IRD hierarchy. That made O’Leary one of Hanssen’s bosses.
“I’ve been down to his office,” Hanssen said. I detected a crabby quality to his voice that he rarely allowed to surface. “Huge window. Looks out over Pennsylvania Avenue. If you turn your head just right, you can see the Capitol.”
“So you two are old friends?”
“With that paper pusher?” Hanssen scoffed, and raised a pinky. “This finger knows more about computer security than he ever will. He probably has a secretary print out his emails for him.” Hanssen produced his pen and clicked through his angst. “He’s on the promotion track, so they bring him to headquarters and staff him in an office overseeing the people who do the real work. Garcia’s another one.”
“How so?”
“He spent his career in crime squads. What the hell does he know about information security or operations?”
I scoffed. “Criminal operations are all about security—”
“Open your eyes, Eric! The FBI is chasing left-wing, nut-job diversity.” His mouth turned down like he’d tasted something sour. “We’ve long been criticized for promoting too many people named O’Leary, so the FBI starts promoting Garcias.”
That statement certainly opened my eyes, but not in the way Hanssen expected. Did the FBI even have a Human Resources Division? I honestly didn’t know, which was problematic. But if they did, I had an arsenal of information about my boss to take to them. Not like I ever would. The only person who mattered in terms of the evidence I collected was Kate. And apparently the director. The thought of Freeh personally reading my logs still gave me the shivers.
I decided to change the subject. “It would be nice to have a window. These walls are pretty blank.”
Hanssen smiled—not the sort of smile that makes a baby coo, the other kind. “We can do something about that.” He pocketed his pen and paced the room. One hand jingled his keys. Each chime reminded me that I hadn’t stolen them yet.
“He keeps some paintings in a conference room on the sixth floor.” The jingling stopped. “I want you to get them for me.”
“You want me to ask him for his artwork?”
“No, you moron,” Hanssen said. “I want you to take them.”
“You mean steal them.”
“Don’t be such a Boy Scout, Eric.” Hanssen strode to his office. “Boy Scouts finish last.”
His door shut with a bang.
Hanssen had plenty of trigger words. Each time he called me an idiot or a moron, I lost control of the part of myself that measured and cut information. The investigation demanded that I keep my emotions tightly under wraps. But it was only by imagining what Kate would say that I was able to stop myself from punching him in the mouth.
I swiveled my chair to the FBI NET computer and logged into ACS. I used the full-text search to enter a few names of targets I had ghosted into the system. ACS covered most of the information with x’s—but not everything.
Hanssen’s words from a few days ago replayed in my mind. ACS is flawed and the FBI hasn’t a clue. I hadn’t listened then because his hands on my shoulders had distracted me, but now I made the connection. All the Russians have to do is recruit someone at the FBI with ACS access, feed him a name, and have the mole conduct full-text searches. Why would a spy reveal such an enormous flaw?
I conducted a few additional searches and then sat back with my hands steepled over my mouth. I stared at the screen and wondered if this is how a person became a spy.
It would be so easy. I knew the names of intelligence officers working for the Russian government. I knew their routines and where they slept at night. I even knew which of them dropped their kids off at the Russian school in the morning. If I approached them quietly, promising secrets, they’d lead me to dead drops and signal sites. No one would suspect me. I could even pin most of it on Hanssen if I wanted.
Juliana could have her piano. I could pay off law school and her classes at American University. We could move to a better apartment. Not too much better, but big enough that we wouldn’t feel like two cats thrown into a steel box.
I powered down my computer.
* * *
Kate pulled up outside the University Yard quad off H Street in Foggy Bottom, and I gave her a sobering report. Hanssen didn’t drink. He didn’t tell dirty jokes or mention women other than his wife. He was plenty weird, invaded my personal space at every opportunity, clicked his pen to drive me crazy, and got off on bullying; but nothing suggested he was a spy.
“The weirdest thing he’s done was play a Monty Python CD in the middle of the SCIF,” I said. “He even told us how a spy could exploit ACS to steal information. What kind of traitor tells us how to patch code?”
“I can’t speak to his choice in music,” Kate said. “But there is more to this than you know.”
I scoffed. “There always is.” I looked past her at the redbrick buildings of George Washington Law School. The day students streamed out of a set of wide wooden doors to huddle around a keg. One student worked the tap and filled his classmates’ eager hands with red Solo cups. Night students passed by with wistful looks on their way to evening lectures. Day students had all the advantages.
“I’m behind in my studies,” I said, “Juliana and I fight more than we smile, and Hanssen tests me more than my law professors.” I closed my eyes. “It’s constant. I have to watch every word.”
“Welcome to undercover work.” I opened my eyes to catch Kate’s smile. “I hear you, kiddo,” Kate said. “No one said this would be easy. But we’re close.”
“Close to what? He loves his kids and grandkids, goes to church every day, and hates the Soviet Union more than Nazi Germany. He’d like to beat the pulp out of me, but—”
“We don’t just think he’s a spy, Eric,” Kate said. “We think he’s the spy.”
I kept my mouth shut and waited for her to continue. Hanssen’s favorite trick.
“We believe he sold out to the Russians decades ago. The code name we gave him—Gray Day—it’s a play off the code name Gray Suit. We believe Hanssen is Gray Suit, the mole the FBI has looked for since we found out that someone was leaking major national security secrets in the ’80s. Quitting’s not an option, kiddo.”
I slumped into the oversized seat and listened to the car idle. The quad had filled with day students warmed by beer and collegiality that defied the early January chill. My torts class would begin soon, but even Turley’s best lecture couldn’t compare to the bombshell Kate had dropped.
“You mean he’s suspected—”
“It’s him. It’s got to be him and you helped button that up. The analysts reviewed your notes on Felix Bl
och. No way could he have known those details about the briefcase unless he was the mole that called the Russians to warn Bloch off.
“Remember how you told me he seemed so giddy in the office the other day? Your old ghost team has been watching him.” Kate touched my arm. “He’s been shining a flashlight at a sign in a little park.”
I made my frozen tongue move. “He’s looking for signals.”
“Told ya you’re a natural at this,” Kate said. “Signals from the Russians. We think a drop could happen any day now. Step up your game. We need to be ahead of him.”
I understood. Bad guys beat surveillance when they force us to catch up to them. The best ghosts predict the target’s path and get in front of them instead of always following one step behind—which happens more often than not with US intelligence. In 1973, a Palestinian militant group named Black September attempted to detonate three car bombs in New York City during a visit by the Israeli prime minister, and in 1993 terrorists drove a truck filled with more than 1,000 pounds of explosives into the parking garage of the World Trade Center North Tower. Five years later, suicide bombers drove trucks filled with explosives into US embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks killed more than 200 people and put Osama bin Laden on the map as America’s public enemy number one.
We seemed to have a truck-bombing problem. In response, the FBI, police, and other law-enforcement and security professionals devised a system to prevent the careful parking of trucks beside or under buildings: we placed jersey walls and other clever barriers at a distance that would offset any blast. The FBI surrounded its headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue with massive planters. It began planting flowers along one city block between Ninth and Tenth Streets, but then either money ran out or the FBI tired of watering flowers. It filled the rest of the planters with gravel.
But while the FBI poured gravel into oversized planters along DC sidewalks, the terrorists were far ahead of us. They’d failed to bring down World Trade Center towers with a truck in 1993, but they eventually changed the world when they hijacked planes on September 11, 2001.
We suffer from a similar problem in the world of espionage. While the United States is used to playing defense, the Russians are going on the offense. The Russian sleeper-agent program (which US intelligence calls the illegal program) is a prime example of Russia’s willingness to fully commit the lives of their operatives to intelligence gathering. In this program, Russian spies working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) immigrate to the United States using fake business pretenses, identities robbed from dead people, or, in some cases, completely false cover stories. The Russian government spends large amounts of money and invests years of training into operatives who will become Americans so that they can infiltrate our society.
In June 2010, the FBI concluded Operation Ghost Stories by arresting ten “illegal” Russian spies working for the SVR. Each of the operatives worked under false names and identities on US soil, and none of them had diplomatic protection.
The most famous of the ten were Anna Chapman, Donald Heathfield, and Tracey Foley. Chapman, born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, a fiery-haired twentysomething socialite, had married a UK citizen to obscure her Russian identity before working her way into the Wall Street elite. The real Donald Heathfield and Tracey Foley had died in Canada years before Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, KGB-trained spies, assumed their identities and immigrated to America. Their two children, born in Canada but raised in the United States, did not learn of their parents’ true identity until the FBI kicked in the door to their Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to arrest Mom and Dad.
The Heathfield-Foleys and Chapman blindsided the FBI by embracing new spy technology to communicate with Moscow. Anna would sit in a coffeehouse in the middle of the day like so many other young professionals, clicking through her laptop over a latte. Donald and Tracey would upload pictures of their beautiful family and white-picket-fenced home to a file-sharing site. Covertly, as Anna sat in the coffeehouse, her laptop would directly pair with the laptop of a Russian intelligence officer parked nearby. A different intelligence officer in Moscow would download and decrypt the Cambridge couple’s pictures, revealing through digital steganography the secrets hidden within. As the US government defunded its peacetime counterintelligence programs, the careful and methodical spies had infiltrated our business, politics, and communities.
Russia versus the United States is a story of action versus reaction. The FBI needed to flip the script and get out in front of Hanssen. Apparently the Felix Bloch reveal had put everything into perspective. It was key evidence that made the team confident that they weren’t wasting their time. But it wasn’t enough. Now we needed to find the smoking gun before Hanssen could reload.
“How much time do we have?”
Kate’s resolve flickered. “Could be tomorrow, could be next week, could be a month. You never know with these things.”
The drop was about to happen. Which meant that everything was now time sensitive. More likely than not, Hanssen would see the finish line and keep his head down until he got there. I had to keep him feeling safe; I had to keep acting like the Information Assurance Section was real. In other words, I had to make sure Hanssen didn’t sway from suspicion to paranoia, I’d have to keep returning to 9930 so he could play lord of his castle. But I also, somehow, had to get him to make a mistake.
“Do you know Eugene O’Leary?”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, nice guy. Assistant director.”
“Deputy AD, but yeah. Hanssen wants me to steal his artwork.”
“We’ll have to tell the AD.”
I thought a moment. “Don’t.”
Kate crossed her arms. “Any reason we shouldn’t tell an assistant director that his artwork is about to be stolen?”
“I want to see his face when he walks into the SCIF.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it and finally laughed. “When will you do it?”
“I’ll put it into my report.” I dragged my bag onto my lap and pushed open the door. Kate stopped me.
“Eric,” she said. “Be safe. That thing in the garage…”
I raised an eyebrow. “You wanted me to make him angry.”
“I was there, you know,” she said.
“I know. I heard you.”
“You don’t miss anything, do you?” Kate smiled.
“Neither does Hanssen.”
Target: Robert Hanssen
GRAY DAY SUIT
Compromised national security
Planning a drop to the Russians
CHAPTER 14
THE ART OF THIEVERY
January 25, 2001—Thursday Night
The gold FBI shield and identifying credentials are not get-out-of-jail-free cards. Ghosts only identify themselves as a last resort, which means the successful ones are tremendous improvisational actors. When you can’t throw down a badge at the first sign of trouble, you learn to always have a story ready.
Early in my career at the FBI, I set up at a choke point in a suburban neighborhood. The life of a ghost isn’t all ducking into shadows and driving fast on the Beltway. Most of the work happens in glacial moments anchored to one spot with the task to wait and watch. Hours might drift by before a target moves. We’d often say that in a ten-hour surveillance shift, we lived for fifteen minutes of go time.
Suburban neighborhoods are complicated for surveillance. I preferred deserted alleys in dangerous parts of town where minding one’s business means survival, or busy parking lots where one car blends into legions of others. Suburban streets are flush with nosy neighbors, kids riding by on bicycles, dog walkers, neighborhood-watch programs, and the occasional roving police cruiser. In other words, civilian countersurveillance. Nine times out of ten, when I parked on a neighborhood street someone would finally brave their way across a la
wn and knock on my window. I had a whole bag of excuses:
“I’m an Arlington County traffic-control surveyor, ma’am. We’ve had some complaints of speeding on this street, so I’m counting traffic….”
“I work for the gas company, sir. Our meter trucks will be through shortly and I’m a review supervisor to make sure they are polite and friendly….”
“Hi, kids! I’m a location scout for a local production company. My job is to check out streets that we might want to use to shoot a movie. No, I can’t tell you about the movie. Super-secret, but between you and me, Tom Cruise might run down your street one day….”
I could spin a story as easy as breathing. These social-engineering techniques, while technically lies, put normal people at ease. No one wanted to see an FBI badge and hear the truth that a spy lived a few blocks away, or that a known terrorist sympathizer’s kids went to the local school.
Sometimes the badge is necessary. A local police officer once knocked on my window and wound his hand in the roll it down motion. I was parked in a depressed neighborhood in rural Virginia. My target had entered a shabby house up the street for a potential meet, and I had eyes on the brightly lit kitchen window. I couldn’t afford for the target to glance out and see a patrol car parked behind my undercover car. The cop had to move.
I showed my badge and didn’t waste precious moments dissembling. “I’m FBI on a national security investigation. My target is close by, so I would very much appreciate you leaving the area before your patrol car spooks him.”
The officer examined my credentials and looked like he might test my gold shield with his teeth, but he eventually handed them back. “Are you armed?” he asked.
Police officers always want to know this. I gave an honest answer. “No, sir. I’m unarmed and undercover.”
“Damn, son!” He threw up his hands. “That sounds dangerous.”
The officer then walked back to his car and returned with a shotgun. I had no idea what to say until he tried to hand it through my window.