by Eric O'neill
Juliana warmed at dinner. She played the role of the dutiful daughter-in-law and spent most of her time with my mother. Watching them together made me fall in love with Juliana all over again.
The skill I had just chastised Juliana for made her one of my mother’s closest confidantes. Parkinson’s had stolen my mother’s true voice. What remained defeated my ear and frustrated my thin patience. My dad often joked that “Juliana speaks Vivian.” My mother’s forced words and thin, robbed-of-breath voice were just another language for Juliana to master.
That evening, in the attic, we lay a handbreadth apart in a little iron-framed bed. I glanced at her and watched shadows cross her face. I could always look at my Juliana and see that laughing girl in Capitol City Blues Café. One person can promise an entire future. If you let them.
The old Victorian house whispered to us in creaks and pops as it settled for the night. We exchanged amorphous apologies that solved nothing but chipped the walls enough for an embrace. We made a date for Valentine’s Day, and I promised to open up about everything.
* * *
I wanted out of this case. The FBI wanted Hanssen wrapped up in paper and a bow for the Justice Department prosecutor. I’d have to take some risks if I wanted to align both goals.
Hanssen himself put the idea into my head. He’d told me that Boy Scouts finish last, and challenged me to steal the art from an assistant director. What he meant was that winners take risks. It took a spy to help me remember the lesson behind all of my best successes as a ghost.
I’d forgotten the crazy places I’d climb for the perfect camera angle, or the way I’d talk my way into buildings or through security. I took risks to ghost my targets. Hanssen was the biggest target of all.
I followed my shadow across the threshold into Hanssen’s office.
The smaller room raised goose bumps on my arms even though one thermostat regulated all of 9930. It wasn’t because I feared that Hanssen would jump out from behind his desk. The last I’d heard from Kate, a team had him headed west on Massachusetts Avenue past Dupont Circle.
I moved slowly with patient purpose past the spot where the search team had shifted Hanssen’s TV stand and bought me a face pressed into the thin carpet. My hands found each other behind my back in quiet agreement not to touch anything.
Then I saw Hanssen’s messenger bag. Five minutes later I called Kate.
“Remember when you told me never to search GD’s office?”
Kate sounded harried. They had followed Hanssen to his old haunt at the Office of Foreign Missions and had no clue why he’d returned. “Yeah. Don’t tell me you—”
“Guilty,” I said. “But before you get mad, hear me out.” Kate held her tongue. I took that as an okay to continue. “I went in his office. I didn’t touch anything. But then I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“His bag. He never leaves it.” I shifted the phone to the other ear. “I mean never. I couldn’t pass it up.”
“Okay…so you called me right away, right?”
“Wrong.” I unclenched my jaw. “I searched it.”
“Oh. My. God. Eric.” Kate’s voice dropped to a hushed whisper. I could hear her moving. “You took a colossal risk. What were you thinking?”
This time I stayed silent. Waiting.
“What did you find?”
Probably best that Kate couldn’t see my grin. “Bad news is that he took his Palm Pilot.” I didn’t bother stating the obvious. Hanssen had taken his car, so he had his keys. “But there is a data disk. And a current passport, financial statements, a computer disk, and a cell phone I’ve never seen before.”
Kate’s footsteps echoed. “I’m coming there now. Don’t touch anything else.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said. “Did I mention that he never leaves his bag behind?”
Her car roared to life. “I get it.” She paused. “Aw crap, Eric. I don’t know whether to scream at you or hug you.”
“The Versa data card is eight megabytes,” I said. “I looked it up. Five hundred pages per megabyte. That’s potentially four thousand pages of information.”
“You did your homework.”
“I prefer the hug over the shouting.”
* * *
Hanssen spent most of his day bumping into former State Department colleagues at the Office of Foreign Missions. I spent several slow, agonizing hours nervously anticipating Kate’s report on what the team found after they copied the devices and I put them carefully back where they’d come from. At around three p.m., Hanssen returned to grab his bag and left just as abruptly. I logged the time and let Kate know he’d rushed right back out of the office. The SSG team wouldn’t have any downtime.
I also told her I planned to leave early myself, hoping she’d clue me in on whether they’d found something. The edge to her voice worried me. She told me to meet her on our usual corner. She’d drive me to school, and we’d find some coffee on the way.
“I told the team that I authorized the search,” Kate said. We’d found a quiet table in the back of a deserted Così coffeehouse around the corner from GW Law. Two large coffees steamed on the table between us.
“You covered for me?”
“That’s part of my job. Your job is to make sure I don’t have to.”
I was all out of apologies. “I’m tired of being a Boy Scout.”
Kate rolled her eyes. “What does that even mean?”
“Something Hanssen told me.”
She tapped the table with a finger. The sound echoed like a fist punched through a snare drum. “Try not to take advice from spies.”
I sipped my coffee, then cut to the chase. “What did you find? Tell me you found something.”
Kate couldn’t hide her grin. “Oh, we found something, all right.” She handed me a sheet of paper. “This letter was drafted around March 14 of last year. We got it off the Versa card you found in his briefcase.”
My eyes scanned the page and then widened. I said a silent prayer of thanks for my seat. I doubt my legs would have held me.
I have come about as close as I ever want to come to sacrificing myself to help you, and I get silence. I hate silence….
Conclusion: One might propose that I am either insanely brave or quite insane. I’d answer neither. I’d say, insanely loyal. Take your pick. There is insanity in all the answers.
I have, however, come as close to the edge as I can without being truly insane. My security concerns have proven reality-based. I’d say, pin your hopes on “insanely loyal” and go for it. Only I can lose.
I decided on this course when I was 14 years old. I’d read Philby’s book. Now that is insane, eh! My only hesitations were my security concerns under uncertainty. I hate uncertainty. So far I have judged the edge correctly. Give me credit for that.
Set the signal at my site any Tuesday evening. I will read your answer. Please, at least say goodbye. It’s been a long time my dear friends, a long and lonely time.
The letter was signed “Ramon Garcia.”
Kate bubbled with excitement. I looked up and she nodded. “I know, right? It gets better.” She handed me a second sheet of paper. “This one is from a month later. We think June 8, 2000.”
I read the letter addressed to Hanssen’s Dear Friends twice. The words gave me more satisfaction than every Director’s Award I’d ever won as a ghost. In it he enclosed a rudimentary cipher algorithm that would protect the dates and times of their meets in subsequent drops. He cautioned the Russians to rein in the GRU and mentioned a Russian diplomat named Gusev that I remembered from my SSG days.
Two paragraphs raised my eyebrows. The first referred to his favorite piece of technology:
One of the commercial products currently available is the Palm VII organizer. I have a Palm III, which is actually a fairly capable computer. The VII version comes with wire
less internet capability built in. It can allow the rapid transmission of encrypted messages, which if used on an infrequent basis, could be quite effective in preventing confusions if the existance of the accounts could be appropriately hidden as well as the existance of the devices themselves. Such a device might even serve for rapid transmittal of substantial material in digital form.
The second blasted the United States in a way that sounded all too much like Hanssen:
The U.S. can be errantly likened to a powerfully built but retarded child, potentially dangerous, but young, immature and easily manipulated. But don’t be fooled by that appearance. It is also one which can turn ingenius quickly, like an idiot savant, once convinced of a goal. The purple pissing Japanese (to quote General Patten once again) learned this to their dismay.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“You betcha.” Kate left the letter on the table between us. “What do you see?”
I slurped my coffee and tried to keep my voice from cracking. “First off,” I said, skimming the rest of the letter, “he misspells all sorts of words. ‘Algorythm’ should be ‘algorithm.’ ‘Existance’ instead of ‘existence.’ He even misspells ‘ingenious’ and ‘laundering.’ ” I shook my head. “I misspelled a word once on a memo to GD. He circled it five times in red.”
“We think it’s a cover. Ramon makes spelling mistakes. Hanssen doesn’t.”
I tapped the name Gusev, remembering the case. The FBI had arrested Russian diplomat Stanislav Borisovich Gusev in December 1999 for espionage. The Russians had somehow gotten a bug into a seventh-floor secure meeting room right outside Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s offices. They’d listened into dozens of high-level conferences before we captured Gusev and disabled the bug.
“My ghost team caught this guy,” I said. “We followed him to the State Department and caught him acting weird. When he wasn’t walking around the street, he was trying to park his car just right.” I picked up my messenger bag and put it on an empty chair next to me. “Gusev would make weekly visits to the park outside and would put his bag on the bench beside him while he ate his lunch.” I took the bag off the chair and put it back on the floor beside me. “When he left, he’d pick up the bag.”
Kate smiled over her coffee cup. “You kept your eye on the bag.”
“Bingo,” I said. “We saw that when he put his bag down, the wooden bench flexed.” I joined my fingers together in front of me and then bent them downward. “When he picked up the bag, the bench sprang back.” I leveled my hands.
“That bag was heavy.”
“You’d have made a great ghost, Kate.” I dropped my hands. “Way too heavy for that little bag. He had a recording device in it. Every week he’d sit and eat his lunch and capture the feed from the bug in the conference room.”
“How did they get the bug in the conference room?”
I grinned. “That’s classified.”
Kate scoffed. “Anything else tickle you about the letter, Sherlock?”
I squirmed in my chair. “He signs it Ramon….”
“Obvious.”
“I told you the Palm Pilot was important.”
“You also just broke the case.”
Now was not the time for a smug grin. Instead I let the gravity of these letters sober my enthusiasm. “It’s really him, isn’t it?”
“It’s him. Hanssen is Ramon. We could arrest him today.”
“So let’s go get him.”
Kate shook her head. “Arrest him now and we have a clear case for conspiracy. Arrest him after he makes a drop at a known drop site to the Russians and the best lawyer in the world can’t save him.”
Kate’s phone rang. She held up a finger for silence, and her smile evaporated. After a few moments of tense silence, she hung up and looked at her watch.
“It’s 5:37 p.m. Hanssen just drove past the Foxstone Park sign real slow.”
My skin pebbled. The Foxstone Park sign was the signal spot for drop site Ellis. Hanssen would check for a signal from his Russian paymasters to let him know they were ready to receive a drop. I’d later learn that he checked the same sign three times that night. “I think someone just walked across my grave.”
“You and me both,” Kate said. She looked at me. “It’s happening soon.”
I pointed out the third paragraph of the letter that definitively tied Hanssen to Ramon. “We need to get that Palm Pilot away from him. If he’s using it to exchange information…”
Kate picked up her coffee cup and finished my thought. “That’s where we’ll find the jackpot.”
We knocked cups in a silent toast. I took a sip and set mine back on the table. My coffee had gone cold.
CHAPTER 22
THE WORST OFFENSE IS DEFENSE
February 9, 2001—Friday
The information I’d found on the memory card had offered solid evidence of the connection between Hanssen and Ramon in a case that so often seemed to be all questions and no answers. The Gray Day task force didn’t start popping the Champagne, but confident smiles replaced perplexed frowns, and a full day’s work on Hanssen suddenly meant more than it ever had before.
I wasn’t ready to join the revelry. Spies are slippery. The world of espionage thrives on excuses, alibis, cover stories, and manipulation of the truth. Hanssen had made spying an art form by actively leapfrogging his pursuers. We had plenty of evidence, but we needed more.
The spy who named himself “B” and Ramon had blown wide holes in the US counterintelligence infrastructure. Hanssen handed over nearly two decades’ worth of critical information that undermined our spies and shattered top-secret operations to collect intelligence from our Russian adversaries. He damaged the FBI and CIA so deeply that neither agency understood how far the cracks ran. Catching him wasn’t enough. We needed to enlist him to tell us where he’d hidden all the bodies.
I played my role. Equally Watson to his Sherlock and Robin to his Batman. I listened and took notes as Hanssen covered the dry-erase board in marker while describing his thoughts on security theory. I nodded at his soul-searching soliloquies about his place in the world and what we leave behind when we go. The upcoming drop—that secret that we both knew but would never share—had turned him excitable. When he stepped out of his office, I never knew whether he would lecture me about the death of religion in the United States or the new technology that might solve one of the FBI’s many security problems.
We continued to dance, or play chess, or whatever relationship best suits two men who are never certain which is the spy and which is the hunter. But one thing had given me the slightest upper hand. Hanssen didn’t know that I knew that he would soon make a drop to the Russians. I had the winning cards in my hand. But I’d still have to call his bluff.
* * *
The morning after Hanssen shined a flashlight at the Foxstone Park sign, he appeared at my desk. For a tall guy who walked with a slight limp, he could move with preternatural quiet when he wanted to. Hanssen would have made a good ghost.
“Get your coat,” he said. “We have a meeting this afternoon.”
I floundered and pulled a shiny new Palm Pilot from the breast pocket of my suit jacket. My hands fumbled with the stylus as I opened the calendar. “What meeting? I didn’t know we had a—”
“I am capable of setting up my own meetings.” Hanssen nodded toward the Palm. “When did you get that?”
“They came in today.” I opened my desk drawer and presented a neatly boxed Palm V to the boss.
He looked at the device with disdain and fished out his beefier model. “I’ve written the encryption on this myself,” Hanssen said. “Those idiots in FBI IT couldn’t crack it if their lives depended on it.” He brushed the Palm V away—“You can take that one back”—and handed me a business card.
The name on the front read Victor Sheymov, Invicta Networks. Shey
mov was the founder of Invicta, which provided encryption services to the government and private companies. I’d later learn that Sheymov was a former Russian spy.
The KGB recruited Sheymov in 1971 at age twenty-five to serve in its communications division. His knowledge of systems soon saw him promoted to senior manager and troubleshooter, an important role that provided him a breadth of knowledge about the KGB’s structure and operations. One of his job duties included ensuring the security of encrypted KGB communications throughout the world. His role was so critical that the KGB assigned a minder to watch Sheymov, protect him if necessary, and, most important, eliminate him if he sought to defect.
As Sheymov rose in power and gained access to the Kremlin’s secrets, he grew disillusioned with communism and the corruption of the Russian elite. Many KGB activities hastened the unease Sheymov felt, including a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II and an intelligence penetration of the Russian Orthodox Church. While on assignment in Warsaw, Sheymov hatched a plan to evade his KGB minder and make contact with the CIA. According to Sheymov’s memoir, Tower of Secrets, in 1980 he combined his knowledge of the inner workings of the KGB with a heroic effort by the CIA to help him escape with his wife and daughter across two closely guarded borders into Austria. Hanssen would later tell me that the CIA faked Sheymov’s death and ultimately extracted his family through Finland, and that Hanssen personally conducted Sheymov’s debrief when he arrived in the United States.
Sheymov was one of those rare, somehow untouchable defectors, most likely because the KGB bought the story that he and his family had perished. They wouldn’t learn the truth until ten years later, likely when he wrote a memoir that exposed the KGB’s structure and espionage practices. By then, Sheymov had already spent his secrets in debriefs to the US intelligence services, and any further action against him by the FSB would risk sparking an international incident in exchange for petty revenge.