The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  Many agents who thought they had joined the FBI to put people in jail scratched their heads.

  “There was a communication problem,” Cummings says. Agents would say, “I’ve been working terrorism almost my entire career. What does the boss think we’ve been doing except preventing attacks?”

  The difference, Cummings says, is that when the FBI arrested Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing, the FBI thought that was the end of the matter and did not take extra steps to develop leads that could uncover future plots.

  “Pre-9/11, the first consideration was, I got an indictment in my pocket,” Cummings says. “The CIA would have run the other way, rightfully so. They didn’t want anything to do with testifying in a court of law. And we ran on the assumption that if you had an indictment, you used the indictment. Slap it down on the table, pick the guy up, you throw him on an airplane. You bring him home, you put him in jail, and you go, ‘Okay, I’ve done a great job today.’ ”

  If that were to happen today, Cummings says, “I would have told my agents they basically just put Americans more in jeopardy rather than less in jeopardy. It’s a completely different approach and bears little resemblance to the previous one.”

  Confirming that point, as an agent for twenty-eight years assigned to counterterrorism and counterintelligence, Nick Abaid remembers, “It was often difficult to get into the heads of administrators and agents that intelligence is a long and often tedious process, but it is the most effective way of gathering the information needed. Misguided deadlines to obtain FISA orders, impatient supervision of the recruitment process, and insistence on arrests and convictions were part of the mentality which controlled the bureau since I could remember. Much of that was attributed to the need for generating statistics so that when we testify before Congress, we could brag about the wonderful things we have done.”

  Replacing that short-range thinking with the new intelligence mind-set entails risk. In deciding how to handle a suspect, Cummings had to balance the need to gain more intelligence against the need to make sure a terrorist did not strike while under FBI surveillance.

  “You make a mistake, there are dead people,” Cummings says.

  20

  THE CENTER

  THE ENTRANCE TO THE FBI’S ENGINEERING RESEARCH facility looks a lot like a Roman gladiator’s helmet, with square eye holes staring fiercely at all comers. This sleek, two-story reception structure on the grounds of the FBI Academy in Quantico gives access to two taller sections of glass and brick, equally forbidding. Visitors must undergo a background check to enter here.

  On the second floor is the heart of the Tactical Operations Section. But the most secret part of the operation—the Tactical Operations Center, which deploys covert entry teams—is at a top-secret, off-site location in Virginia. Agents simply call it “the Center.”

  Besides building bugging and tracking devices, the Engineering Research Facility develops ways to defeat locks, alarms, and surveillance systems. As one example, the facility has spent a million dollars to defeat Israel’s high-security Mul-T-Lock line, which is advertised as pick-resistant and drill-resistant.

  To keep up with the latest developments by alarm companies, TacOps agents go undercover to attend schools offered by commercial alarm companies. If they identified themselves as FBI agents, the companies would reject them. They may also go to elevator school and truck-driving school. Besides hiding in office buildings and riding on top of elevators before a covert entry, agents learn to program elevators to prevent them from stopping on a floor where they are busy planting bugs.

  In addition to conducting covert entries for the FBI, TacOps carries them out for other agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Agency and NSA when they need help penetrating the communications of foreign embassies or bugging suspects in drug cases. In some cases, with the consent of a foreign country, TacOps breaks into locations overseas when the FBI is going after targets of mutual interest—Russian organized crime, for example.

  Occasionally, members of Congress or administration officials with top-secret clearances ask to be briefed on TacOps. The FBI puts them off or, if it must, briefs them but gives few details, as it did with Peter Orszag, President Obama’s director of the Office of Management and Budget. But with the approval of the FBI director, executive assistant director Louis Grever arranged interviews for this book with those now in charge of the operation: J. Clay Price, chief of the Tactical Operations Section, and the agent who is assistant section chief in charge of the Tactical Operations Support Center. Because he works undercover, he is referred to here as Jimmy Ramirez, a fictitious name.

  One interview took place in a conference room on the second floor of the west wing of the Engineering Research Facility, where bugging devices are built and systems to defeat alarms and computer security systems are developed. The newer east wing focuses on interception of communications and emails and on defeating telecommunications encryption. In contrast to the stern exterior of the building, the inside is airy, light, and spacious.

  In his fourteen years on TacOps, Ramirez says he conducted more than five thousand covert entries. Now that he heads the operation, he occasionally participates in especially challenging ones.

  “I would so much rather be out there doing entries,” Ramirez says.

  Going up against foreign intelligence agencies is the biggest challenge because they set traps to detect entries. When a hostile intelligence officer was visiting the United States, the FBI wanted to copy the hard drive of his laptop, which agents believed he kept in his hotel room. While intelligence officers should not retrieve or save anything sensitive on an unprotected computer, they are human and sometimes slip up. Or they may delete sensitive material before entering the country. In that case, the FBI can reconstruct it.

  In targeting the hostile intelligence officer, the FBI rented another room in the hotel. Ramirez got the word from the surveillance team that the target was away from his room attending a conference in the hotel, and he gave the green light to go in.

  Agents began by searching the man’s luggage. As one way to detect an intrusion, intelligence officers may tie a rope around their luggage and knot it in a certain way. Or they may leave a zipper partially open. The agents had to make sure everything was put back exactly as they had found it.

  “We have a team of guys, the ‘flaps and seals’ guys, who will photograph the item first,” Ramirez says. “They will look for hairs and fibers—traps we would call it, tradecraft—on that specific item. Before we move the computer, we’ve got to make sure we can put it back the same way. He could have placed his glasses against it in a certain way. The method doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It just needs to be effective.”

  Agents were taking photographs when Ramirez heard a noise at the hotel room door.

  “I walk over to the door, look out the peephole, and there’s a person fitting the description of the target,” he says.

  Ramirez asked the case agent to take a look.

  “That’s my f—— guy,” the agent said, meaning the man was the target.

  “Impossible,” Ramirez said. “I’m hearing on my earpiece right now that surveillance has him on a train.”

  The surveillance team had somehow missed him. In FBI lingo, surveillance teams are called “keyholder teams.” They are supposed to keep keyholders “in pocket.” If the team loses them, agents say they are “out of pocket.” In this case, the target was definitely out of pocket.

  “Either they got him mixed up with someone else at the conference and legitimately thought they still had him, or they didn’t want to tell anybody that they lost him,” Ramirez says. “They may have thought that at any moment they would pick him up, and on an operation like this, they didn’t want to admit on the radio that they had lost him. I tell them that it’s okay to lose him, but we need to know. Please do not hold that back on us. Because now he’s going to be in my room.”

  The intelligence officer contin
ued to try his key in the lock, but Ramirez had placed a device developed by the Engineering Research Facility on the door so it could not be opened. Meanwhile, Ramirez radioed to a Hispanic agent who was in the hotel. He told him to pretend to be a hotel maintenance man who happened to see the intelligence officer having difficulty. He said he should speak mainly in Spanish to further confuse the intelligence officer.

  “In broken English, the agent told him the hotel was having trouble with that set of locks,” Ramirez says. “He asked him to please not contact management or he would lose his job. He apologized and offered to buy him a cup of coffee. That’s the kind of guys that we have on our team. He got him away long enough to let us evacuate.”

  To gain entry, agents may introduce loud static on the target’s phone line from a telephone pole or an underground vault. When the target calls to report the problem to the telephone repair service, agents see this on a pen register, which displays numbers dialed. Agents then answer the call themselves, pretending to be telephone company personnel. They promise that a repair team will be dispatched immediately. When the bogus repairmen arrive wearing telephone company uniforms, they install a bugging device in the phone in question or in a nearby telephone line box.

  In a Mafia case in Brooklyn, Ramirez and Price, who had done two hundred entries, were trying to figure out how they could get access to the apartment of the target. The man lived on the second floor of a three-story brownstone. Three days before Christmas, they noticed that he began making trips to the basement to retrieve Christmas ornaments. They timed his movements and installed microphones when he was making one of his forays to the basement. But the microphone they installed on his phone was causing interference on the man’s telephone line.

  “We’re picking this up because he’d get on the phone and start bitching and cursing, saying his phone’s not working,” says Price, who is forty-nine.

  The Mafia figure called the telephone company, and the FBI was glad to help out.

  “When he called, we intercepted the call, and he was speaking to us,” Price says.

  “Yes, sir, can I help you?” an agent asked.

  “Yeah, my goddamn phone doesn’t work,” the Mafioso said.

  “We’ll be right out there,” the agent replied.

  “We go in our fabricated telephone company uniforms in our fabricated telephone company truck,” Price says. “This guy’s standing right there next to us. We say we’ll take it apart. So we took it out, put a new mic in, fixed his phone.”

  “Youse guys are the best,” the man said.

  When the FBI later arrested the Mafia figure, “he immediately cops an attitude,” Price says. “ ‘You’ve got nothin,’ screw you.’ ”

  The agents played him snippets of his recorded conversations.

  “He ends up confessing and cooperating,” Price says.

  Before deciding how to handle a dog, agents test it. Dogs that are not police or military dogs may bite, but not as ferociously as dogs that are trained to bite. If the dog is ferocious, the FBI will tranquilize it.

  “When I’m doing the assessment, I’ve got to be very accurate on the weight of the dog,” Ramirez says. “Because if I give him too much drug, you’re going to have to try to resuscitate him during the entry. If I don’t give him enough, some of these dogs go into a rage and become even more aggressive. Of course, he’s just doing his job, protecting his family.”

  Rather than drug them, agents prefer befriending dogs or training fire extinguishers on them. They don’t want to harm them. A dog that has been drugged may experience side effects, such as diarrhea, and agents don’t want to give targets any reason to be suspicious.

  When assessing the home of an organized crime figure in Las Vegas, agents reported that he had a thirty-five-pound schnauzer. But when Ramirez went out to do his own assessment, he found the man had a seventy-five-pound Bouvier des Flandres, which looks like a giant schnauzer. When testing the dog in Las Vegas and setting up sensors around the house, Ramirez fed him a Burger King Whopper.

  “He loved Whoppers,” Ramirez says. “At first, he would bite the chain-link fence and actually pull it back with his teeth. But he’d much rather have a Whopper. After two days of Whoppers, he came to the fence to see me and didn’t bark anymore.”

  When Ramirez and Grever finally broke into the house, the dog was expecting a Whopper, and Ramirez gave him one. Instead of attacking Ramirez, the dog began licking his face. After that, fellow TacOps team members called Ramirez “Dog Man.”

  Ramirez was doing a job in the Washington apartment of a foreign intelligence officer when a cat greeted him.

  “This cat looks at me and realizes I’m not the owner,” Ramirez says. “Something’s not right here. He takes off for the back door. The back door is a six-foot-long sliding door. He runs smack into that glass door, to the point where he’s lying knocked out on the carpet.”

  Ramirez was trying to figure out how to resuscitate the cat so as not to tip off the target to an intrusion.

  “Finally, the cat gets his act together,” Ramirez says. “I guess it just stunned him. He gets up and looks back at me and takes off for the bedroom. We never saw the cat again during the entire entry.”

  When entering the home of a Russian organized crime figure, Ramirez listened for an alarm system to go off. Before it could alert the alarm monitoring service, he would suppress it electronically. But nothing was happening, making him think that the alarm had not been set because someone was still in the house.

  “Now we want to make sure there’s no one there,” Ramirez says. “So we ease through the house wearing night vision gear and we hear, ‘Hello?’ ”

  The agents froze and looked at each other, their guns drawn. Just then, the parrot that had said hello began talking some more. The bird was in a solarium and had the run of the house.

  “He spoke better than our lock guys,” Ramirez jokes.

  To make sure nothing goes wrong, Ramirez will clue in a police officer who is on a joint task force with the FBI. Agents rarely inform the police chief. The police department or individual officers may be the actual target of an investigation.

  In one case in Washington, everyone in a home was away. But a little girl who lived across the street was sleeping over at a friend’s house in the neighborhood. She apparently got into a fight with her friend, so at two in the morning she decided to walk home with her dog, who had gone with her to the sleepover.

  “We have two lock guys and myself at the back door of this house,” Ramirez says. “We felt like we could stay there all night long. And this young lady comes by, and her little dog probably smelled us from when we had walked into the back gate. He kind of nudges her. She gets a glimpse of two of our guys, and now we hear on the radio that there’s a pedestrian walking toward the house across the street.”

  Having spotted the two suspicious men on the grounds of the house, the girl wisely continued to walk down the street into her house, where she woke up her father and told him people were breaking in across the street.

  “He calls the police, and we pick up the dispatch on our scanner,” Ramirez says. “But instead of the officer coming out, we have our task force officer come out. He checks out the place, goes over and sits down and pretends to interview this young girl,” Ramirez says. “We backed off that target for several months.”

  In this case, the task force officer working with the FBI was able to cancel the dispatch. In the event officers are dispatched, agents will show their credentials and say they are “working.” That is enough.

  Agents sometimes dress as police officers, but that can be risky.

  “You’ve got to be careful with your ruses, because if I’m trying to fool another police officer, he knows everybody on that shift, and you’re not fooling anybody at that point,” Ramirez says. Agents never enlist the aid of a police officer who is a neighbor because he could be a friend of the target or even could have been corrupted by him.

  In one case, a n
eighbor in an apartment across a courtyard saw something suspicious during an entry and called 911. The man told the dispatcher he had a gun and could go over and confront the burglars.

  “Of course, the police department doesn’t want you to do that,” Ramirez says. “The dispatcher gave good advice to sit tight, and thank God for everybody concerned, he took that advice.” By the time the police showed up, “our guys had bailed out.”

  In carrying out its mission, TacOps shares techniques with the intelligence services of Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. In terrorism cases, agents work closely with Great Britain’s MI5.

  “They’re much more risk-averse than we are,” Ramirez says. “We do in two weeks or three weeks what they would take months or years sometimes to plan.”

  Each field office has technical agents who may work with the TacOps Center on specific entries. In rare cases, after assessing the risks and intelligence on a target, TacOps may give a local field office the go-ahead to perform an entry on its own.

  Special agents in charge of field offices sometimes demand that TacOps perform an entry immediately without the necessary surveillance.

  “We’ll get these calls on Friday night, and they’ll make up all these reasons why you got to come out this weekend to do it,” Ramirez says. “We know nothing about the target. And that’s the scariest.”

  TacOps evaluates the risk versus the reward of the operation. If the target is a terrorist who may be on the verge of detonating a bomb or deploying a chemical weapon, TacOps will comply, bringing in more agents for surveillance if necessary. In such a case, “we’re going to do whatever we have to do. We’ll take whatever necessary risks to get you in there,” Ramirez says.

  If there is no imminent danger, TacOps agents may gently suggest that if a problem were to arise, the SAC’s career could be in jeopardy. The SAC quickly backs off.