by Eric O'neill
“Take this,” he said. “Anything else you need, just let me know.”
I politely begged off the firearm and bade the well-meaning cop to clear the area. I told him he had excellent initiative and agreed that he’d make a fine FBI agent someday. He’d already submitted his application.
I thought of that eager police officer on that rural neighborhood street as I walked out of my Criminal Law class and headed back toward FBI headquarters. The mile walk back to HQ would take me about fifteen minutes. By then, most FBI employees would have packed into their Crown Victorias and rumbled home. But plenty of personnel worked late or on the graveyard shift. One nosy person could ruin my night.
I could have asked someone from my class for a ride back to HQ or driven myself to law school and back, but I wanted to walk. Being a ghost involved plenty of walking, whether I was memorizing an area before a surveillance began or actively following a target. Successfully following someone without losing them and without being noticed requires a number of other skills too. The first is to know the target. Learning every possible detail about the target before you ever set off on their trail can transform a potentially chaotic and nerve-racking surveillance into a cakewalk. If the target embraces veganism, you know where to find them around lunchtime. If you’re following a jogger or a nature enthusiast, you’d better pack comfy sneakers. If they come from a country where everyone rides bicycles, you can expect them to drive well under the speed limit.
More often than not, I’d receive only basic information about a target. Vague descriptions that might include clothing and the make and model of their car would be the only arrows in my quiver when setting off on a hunt. In those cases, my second rule, know your environment, is the key. How many streets intersect the main thoroughfare? Are there shopping malls and coffee shops that a person can quickly duck into? Do the storefronts have large glass windows that allow a target to surreptitiously watch the reflections of those behind him? How many people are on the streets, and are they walking or in cars? How are they dressed?
Every stone tells a story. Every brick in every wall and every crack in each sidewalk marks a place where a person has been. We miss all of those details when we drive through a neighborhood or race down a busy street. But when you walk the same ground, you see the graffiti sprayed across the brick. You note a child’s handprint in the sidewalk. When we slow down to understand the details of the world around us we can follow my final rule: blend in.
The hallway to 9930 looked dark and haunted. The environment I knew had flipped upside down. During the day, voices carried along the narrow corridor. Good-natured shouts and muffled conversations competed with the sounds of footsteps and the click of doors opening and closing. Sometimes classic rock music from Garcia’s radio would escape his office and swing down the hall toward Hanssen’s SCIF. At nine thirty p.m., my footsteps echoed in the unnatural silence.
I cracked the door to my office and set my bag and coat down on my desk. If Hanssen reviewed the security log for the SCIF, I’d tell him I had forgotten my cell phone and needed to come by after school to retrieve it. Because the log showed in and out times, I’d have to be fast.
First things first. I lifted my phone handset and dialed Juliana. “Hi, honey,” I said.
“Where are you?” Her voice sounded tight. “Are you at the office?”
I called her from the office instead of my cell precisely because I knew she could see the FBI number on our caller ID. “Yes,” I said. “We had a server malfunction and I had to come in after law school to deal with it.”
“This late at night?”
“I promised them I’d come back and handle it after law school,” I lied. “I didn’t want to miss class.”
“Well, okay.” Juliana yawned. “Try not to wake me when you come home.”
I’d become very good at sneaking into my own home. “I won’t.”
We said our goodbyes and I set the phone down. Sometimes to catch a bad guy, you have to learn to be one. Lying to my wife was a start. Time to up the ante.
I activated the electronic lock on the SCIF door and left the mechanical ones alone. When I returned, I’d only need to wave my SACS badge and say open sesame to get back in the SCIF.
The nearby stairwell took me three floors down to the sixth floor. All along the hallway, computer boxes rested on small wheeled carts. I wondered if these were part of Assistant Director Dies’s dream to put a computer on every agent’s desk.
I passed a blank door that concealed key-copying equipment for if I ever found a way to relieve Hanssen of his keychain. Farther down the hall, past the servers and IT support, and administrative offices that built the foundation for the Information Resource Division, I found O’Leary’s office. Not far from there, I spotted the closed door to his conference room. His unlocked conference room.
I slipped through the door and closed it behind me before flicking on the lights. The prints O’Leary had arranged on the walls came right out of the men’s country-club handbook. One scene showed two men rowing a boat into choppy waters. Another displayed the idyllic expanse of a golf course. A sand trap dominated the bottom corner, danger hidden among the placid green. My favorite was a hunting scene. Two men and a woman in proper English coats chased a fox across a misty countryside, dogs baying at their heels.
The framing had likely cost more than the prints. Stained wooden frames surrounded triple matting in an array of complementary colors. The glass was pristine. I lifted one off the wall and flipped it over. On the bottom corner the artist had signed his name and added a number on the carefully stapled paper that sealed the print in the frame.
I doubted O’Leary wanted to lose these, but needs must when the devil drives. It took some time to liberate a cart. Each computer box I removed went onto a different loaded cart. I then arranged the remaining carts to fill in the space where my purloined one had rested.
The three prints fit in the cart perfectly. After a moment, I also wrested the hangers off the wall with a letter opener, and took the letter opener and a stapler while I was at it. I felt a little like the Grinch as I backed out of the room. I’d taken O’Leary’s art; now all I needed to do was get back to 9930 before Cindy Lou Who came out for a cup of water. The only explanation for someone moving prints at nearly ten at night was art thievery. And I couldn’t exactly show my badge and use the national-security investigation excuse inside FBI headquarters.
Voices sent me scurrying back into the dark conference room. I peered out the cracked door into the hall and considered my folly. Even if I managed to get the art back undetected, O’Leary would ask to see the surveillance tapes from the cameras that protruded like angry eyes out of every hallway corner.
A famous Soviet poster from World War II portrays a woman in a red kerchief who holds her finger to lips in the universal gesture for silence. The translated Russian verse says the following:
Keep your eyes open.
These days
Even the walls have ears.
Chatter and gossip
Go hand in hand with
Treason.
At FBI HQ, the walls essentially did have eyes and ears. I’d have to ask Garcia to work some magic to make this evening disappear.
When the hallway quieted, I maneuvered the cart through the conference-room doorway and locked it behind me, then dashed down the hall to the elevator. I pressed the Up button and thought of the annual Vegas trips my uncle John organized. My brother David and I would join the Italian side of my family for a weekend of drinking, cigars, great food, and plenty of gambling. I rarely gamble, but watching my uncle and his cousin Joe at the craps table was like racing down a crowded highway in a Porsche 911 with no brakes—all adrenaline with no care for consequence. You survived as long as luck held. This late at night the odds fell in my favor, but I reminded myself of Uncle John’s number-one rule about gambli
ng: Know when to walk away.
My heart relaxed as the doors opened. I dragged the cart into the empty elevator and moments later across the silent ninth-floor hallway to Room 9930. A rare sort of smile split my face. The kind that you’d never find on a Boy Scout. I used the stapler to hammer the stolen picture hangers into the walls above my desk and over the empty desk across the room. As I drove the first nail into drywall, I wondered what the monitoring team at WFO thought of my crime. By the second, I thought about Hanssen, and whether espionage delivered him the same satisfaction that stealing art had given me. I’d stolen three expensive prints from an assistant director and knew I would get away with it. I hung the boring golf picture over the empty desk and left the two men adrift at sea leaning against the wall in front of Hanssen’s office.
The hunting scene went over my desk. Kate’s certainty that Hanssen was Gray Suit had shaken my outlook on the case. The FBI’s long hunt for Gray Suit had given the spy legendary status. Catching Hanssen was the intelligence-community equivalent of dredging Nessie from Inverness’s deepest loch or trapping Bigfoot in the pine-forested mountains of Wyoming. I stared at the print I’d just stolen and made myself a promise. From that moment forward I’d no longer play the role of the fox, dodging Hanssen’s questions and carrying on the chase. It was time to join the hunt.
CHAPTER 15
A FLAW IN THE SYSTEM
January 26, 2001—Friday
I kept my expression neutral when Hanssen walked into the office the next morning. He unbuttoned his coat with exaggerated movements, eyes shifting from one print to the other. I prepared myself for the inevitable demand that I exchange the hunting scene over my desk for the boating scene I’d left in front of his office. As usual, Hanssen caught me by surprise.
“This will do nicely.” He tucked the print under one arm.
I brandished my stolen stapler. “Want me to hang it for you?”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m very handy.”
I flipped through my DayMinder. “We are due at the data center at ten.”
A smile brushed Hanssen’s face before he disappeared into his office.
* * *
I followed Hanssen through the first security door, and a guard scanned my SACS badge before admitting us through the second. We were about to get a VIP tour of FBI headquarters’ data center. I scanned Hanssen’s shirt, his pants, the lump in his back pocket, his shoes. Hanssen wasn’t just a suspected spy, he was the suspected spy. Gray Suit. The game had changed, and yet it remained exactly the same.
Checking out wasn’t an option. If the FBI’s suspicions were true, we needed proof. I needed to find Hanssen’s flaw. Either Hanssen would have to misstep, or I’d need to find hard evidence—a letter, an electronic file, or something similar linking him to Gray Suit—that a Justice Department attorney could use in order to prosecute him.
Finding flaws in a system requires the methodical collection of data over time. Successful criminals spend long hours in preparation. If you want to rob a house, you case it first. Note when the lights are on and when the family is away from home. Observe whether a dog prowls the yard, and if a cleaning service or a nanny might appear. Determine whether an alarm system protects the home. If so, does an external company monitor the windows and doors and motion sensors, or could a simple snip of an external Internet cable defeat a pricey, do-it-yourself installed wireless system?
Spy hunting presents similar challenges. My FBI Academy photography instructor always reminded us that the eye does not necessarily see what the camera does. Sometimes we miss flaws that are right in front of our face.
During one lengthy investigation of a terrorism target, I found myself standing across from a restaurant in Old Town, Virginia. The entrance was on a quiet street, with little traffic and few pedestrians. The only cover was a low stone wall. I sat on the wall, trying to look nonchalant in sunglasses and a leather jacket that belonged on the set of Donnie Brasco, not near-suburban Virginia.
A car stalked up the street and stopped right across from me. Another ghost, one of my colleagues, rolled down the passenger-side window and thrust a camera in my face. The SLR had a massive telephoto lens hanging off it, meant for low-light situations when using flash was out of the question.
“He’s coming out with the wife,” the ghost, code-named “Panther,” told me. “You need to get some shots.”
I grabbed the camera and stepped back as Panther sped away. Bastard. I couldn’t stand there with an 80–200mm F/2.8 telephoto lens hanging off my camera. The thing looked like an assault rifle. And for a target suspected of terrorist activities, a ghost with a camera would be worse than a cop with a handgun.
A few doors down was an office building with dark tinted windows that faced the street. It made the building look as if it had put on sunglasses. And that gave me an idea. I plastered my best smile on my face and strode through the door. The guard at the internal security station looked from me to the camera hanging at my side and frowned.
“I don’t want to go up,” I said. “Can I hang out in the lobby for a minute?”
Skepticism curdled on his face, and he picked up his phone.
“Wait!” I raised my hand. “Did you know that Tyra Banks is in town?”
The phone stopped halfway to his face. Everyone knew the supermodel had come to town; celebrities setting foot in DC always caused a local media sensation.
“I’m paparazzi. She’s right in that restaurant!” I held up the camera and turned a liability into a prop. “I just need a few shots for my editor and I’ll be out of your hair.”
The guard dropped the phone and came around his desk to stand next to me. Everyone loves a good story. The trick is selling the right one.
Within a few minutes the guard had called a crowd of employees down to the lobby to see the “supermodel” who would soon emerge. They pressed around me and squinted through the tinted windows toward the empty door across the way. Each jostle and shove made me smile. Some might feel crowded, but I welcomed the cover.
When the target and his wife came out, they stopped on the street in front of the restaurant and faced each other. I snapped through a roll of film and loaded another, my hands working while my eyes never left the street in front of me.
When I put my camera down, the expectant crowd murmured in confusion. Where was the supermodel?
“You have to be fast to catch those supermodels,” I said over my shoulder on my way out of the building. “They know how to hide in plain sight.”
So did I.
I won an FBI award for one of the photos I took that afternoon. I couldn’t see the flaw with my naked eye, but the picture told a different story. The target and his wife were angry; her eyes were shot through with scorn. In one frame, the target balled a fist as though ready to hit her. The FBI exploited that flaw by turning the wife against her husband; it led to our big break in the case.
Now all I had to do was find Hanssen’s flaw.
As the door slid open, cold air speckled my forearms with goose bumps. The change in temperature and the slight pressure against my inner ear as I adjusted to the controlled environment inside the data center reminded me of descending during a scuba dive. I looked around. Computer systems towered around us. IT staff hunched behind various computer screens. A few agents, distinguishable from the tech staff by the guns on their hips, wandered the corridors between the dull gray metal servers. Drop floors and ceilings gave the sterile environment a futuristic sheen. My work with Hanssen in the Information Assurance Section was theoretical; this is where the magic happened. The Automated Case System ran from here, and so did FBI NET, the FBI’s internal network. I looked at Hanssen. His slumped shoulders and usual smirk couldn’t hide the buzz of anticipation and hint of childish wonder that such a place sparked in every computer nerd.
We were greeted by a man with a shock of white hair an
d a mustache impressive enough to land him a role in a Clint Eastwood film. He introduced himself as Joseph Kielman, the FBI’s chief scientist for the Information Resources Division. Hanssen’s Information Assurance Section technically fell right under the chief scientist. That technically made Kielman Hanssen’s boss—though Hanssen’s unilateral transformation of our security team into a section blurred the lines of reporting enough that the FBI probably couldn’t have said who supervised whom.
Kielman had degrees in physics and biophysics and a doctorate in genetics. As chief scientist, he was responsible for the FBI’s information services, laboratory, and operational technology. The affable gentleman shaking hands with my irascible boss was the closest the FBI had to Bond’s “Q.” I could tell that Hanssen hated him the moment they met. The contempt bubbled past his placid mask the way it had when O’Leary first walked into 9930.
Hanssen’s attitude around another of his bosses revealed a minor flaw. Hanssen had little respect for those he saw above him in the chain of command. It wouldn’t break the case, but it might be useful. I filed it away for later.
As Kielman showed us around, Hanssen muttered to himself or tapped on his Palm Pilot. He only perked up when Dr. Kielman mentioned ACS.
“I have grave concerns about the ACS system,” Hanssen said, tapping his Palm Pilot against his leg with one hand and spinning the stylus through the fingers of the other. “The system is flawed,” he continued. “All it takes is one bad bureau person to invalidate all the security.”
We stopped at a computer displaying the ACS terminal, with its green monochrome screen.
Kielman placed on hand on top of the monitor. “ACS audits keystrokes, you know? We’ve opened a number of OPR investigations when we determine that someone is looking where they should not.”
I glanced from Kielman to Hanssen. OPR meant the Office of Personnel Responsibility. You definitely didn’t want to get on the bad side of the ethics investigation team. I needed to remember this conversation. In my mind, I imagined writing each sentence of the exchange in longhand. I captured the imaginary pages in my mind, college ruled and notated in thick number-two pencil.