The House Special Subcommittee's Findings at CTU

by Marc Cerasini

  Maureen’s faith was restored. Unfortunately, her boss’s faith wasn’t so easily recovered, and she has yet to find another broadcast job. Now that all this has come to light. I think Fox News should find a suitable position for her on one of its nightly reports. What do you think, Mr. O?

  Three little words for you: Hire Maureen Kinglsey.

  9:00 A.M.-10:00 A.M.

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: Agent Bauer, before continuing with your testimony for this hour, let’s review a few of your actions between 8 A.M. and 9 A.M.

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: Yes, sir, what would you like to know?

  FULBRIGHT: According to your written chronology, you were taken into custody by the Secret Service at about 8:00 A.M. And you escaped their custody at around 8:10 A.M. Is that correct?

  BAUER: (Pause, papers shuffling) Yes, sir, that’s the correct chronology.

  REP. ROY SCHNEIDER, (R) TEX.: Good Lord, that’s faster than Houdini!

  FULBRIGHT: (After muffled laughter from other committee members) What happened next, Agent Bauer?

  BAUER: I ran out of the power plant and onto the highway. I hijacked a car, demanding that the woman driving it, a waitress named Lauren Proctor, take me to a deserted construction site nearby, where from about 8:15 A.M. to almost 9:00 A.M. I took cover in a trailer and phoned—

  REP. PAULINE P. DRISCOLL, (D) CONN.: (INTERRUPTING) YOU TOOK A WOMAN HOSTAGE?

  BAUER: Ma’am, I assure you, I never intended to harm Ms. Proctor, and I fully intended to turn myself in when my family was safe and I had found the people determined to assassinate Palmer.

  FULBRIGHT: Just a moment, please…. (Mumbling) Sam, do we have a statement from Ms. Proctor? (Papers shuffling) … All right, let’s see … Ms. Proctor says for the record that Jack Bauer did not harm her in any way, and he was, quote, “for the most part quite polite,” end quote. She also says, quote, “Jack even spoke to the police to help clear up the reason for my absence in court that day, which I appreciated,” end quote. Do you know what that means, Agent Bauer?

  BAUER: (Soft laughter) Yes. It means the DA dropped the DUI charge against her.

  FULBRIGHT: Oh, I see. Well … apparently, after Ms. Proctor learned of your part in saving David Palmer’s life, she told the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office that she was, quote, “happy and proud to help Jack Bauer in any way possible,” end quote. Apparently Ms. Proctor saw no reason that you should be charged with anything criminal, Agent Bauer. All right, that’s that. Go on with your testimony. What did you do while you were hiding at the construction site?

  BAUER: I contacted Nina Myers. At the time, I was relieved to hear Nina’s voice—to know she was all right after I’d shot her. Tony Almeida was nearby when I called, and he expressed concern for my situation. They both agreed to help me. Nina had a car with a briefcase of technical equipment sent over for me. While I waited for it to arrive, I worked myself free of my handcuffs.

  I got into the car just before 9:00 A.M. and for most of the next hour did my best to elude the Secret Service and LAPD. I used the cell phone Nina sent over with the car and called CTU. I was even able to talk to my wife, who had stolen a cell phone from one of her guards.

  Although Milo narrowed Teri’s location down, it was still too expansive an area to pinpoint the exact spot, and the phone’s battery died before we could find them. Before the signal vanished, though, I heard the guard brutalizing my wife and daughter…. I wanted to kill him.

  FULBRIGHT: (After a pause) Agent Bauer, let’s move on. Tell us about Ted Cofell.

  BAUER: Ted Cofell … (Papers shuffling) … Ted Cofell was the only major lead I had after I’d escaped from Secret Service custody. Tony Almeida found an e-mail on Jamey’s computer. The only thing not encrypted was the name Ted Cofell. Milo Pressman worked on decrypting the rest of it and eventually found information regarding a one-million-dollar wire transfer to Gaines from a Swiss bank account at 2:10 A.M.—

  SCHNEIDER: (Interrupting) Any significance to that time that you know of?

  BAUER: Yes. Let me just check my notes. (Papers shuffling) … Here it is. After Gaines received the one-million-dollar payment, he transferred it by wire out of his personal account and into another account. Then, within an hour, that exact same amount was transferred right back into his account. Our CTU analysts decoded and reviewed the encrypted log kept by Gaines—

  DRISCOLL: Why would Gaines have kept a log?

  BAUER: Gaines may have had petty criminals on his payroll, ma’am, but he ran the operation like a military mission. I’m sure the Drazens expected some sort of after-action report from him once the operation was complete.

  DRISCOLL: And what possible purpose would that serve?

  BAUER: An after-action report documents what worked and what didn’t. Who on the team did a good job. Who would be used again. And who may have hampered or jeopardized the operation. Remember, this wasn’t the first operation the Drazens had overseen, and it wasn’t expected to be their last. I’m sure they wanted the intel for their files.

  DRISCOLL: I see. Please go on. What was the reason Gaines made that million-dollar transfer?

  BAUER: Our analysts believe one of Gaines’s accomplices made a demand for more money. The woman he’d used to crash Plight 221—the assassin whose known aliases are “Miranda Stapleton” and “Mandy”—had an associate named “Bridgit” who apparently demanded the extra pay.

  The CTU analysts write that they were unable to determine from the log notation exactly what transpired between Games, Mandy, and Bridgit during that time at the desert house, but they suspect that Gaines pretended to pay the extra million to Bridgit, then killed her.

  FULBRIGHT: All right, so payoffs were being made, and Cofell was a part of that. He was essentially one of the Drazens’ moneymen, correct?

  BAUER: Yes, that’s correct. Cofell had a front as a legitimate investment banker in Burbank. When the Drazens needed to make a payoff, they would wire the money from the Balkans to Cofell so it couldn’t be traced back to the Drazens. Nina Myers got me the background information on Cofell, as well as an office address, 21500 Riverside Drive.

  From the car, I called the man’s office and pretended to be an old college friend wanting to see him. His assistant told me that wasn’t possible because Cofell was in a meeting and would be leaving the office for a business trip at 10:00 A.M.

  I drove to Cofell’s office and just missed him going down in an elevator. I pulled the fire alarm to delay his descent. Then I took the stairs to the parking garage in the basement. In the garage, I approached Cofell’s driver, showed him my badge, and he backed off. I got behind the wheel of the limo, and when Cofell got into the back, he mistook me for his regular driver, Mark.

  I pulled out of the garage and into traffic….

  The real Theodore Cofell, SS# ZZX-XX-XXXX, was born at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The only child of Tabitha Cofell, a single mother, Theodore Cofell died before his second birthday, the victim of sudden infant death syndrome. Six months later, twenty-four-year-old Tabitha Cofell overdosed on Valium in her South Philadelphia apartment, an apparent suicide.

  The identity of Theodore Cofell next appears in 1982 in Pair lawn, Hew Jersey. Supposedly graduating from Pair lawn Regional High School, he is accepted by Colgate on the strength of a 4.0 GPA and a score of 1572 on his SATs. Graduating from Colgate, he goes on to UCLA and a stellar career in investment banking.

  But the “Ted Cofell” who appeared on the Colgate campus for freshman year in 1982—according to secret KGB files recently obtained by Western intelligence services—was a young Serb named Borvo Sobrinna. Born in Vojvodina, he was recruited as a teenager by the league of Communist Yugoslavia after his parents were murdered by ethnic Albanians. He agreed to be trained by the First Directorate of the KGB to become a deep-cover mole within the U.S. financial community.

  In the United States, he was placed with a family of Communist sympathizers willing to hide his true id
entity. After earning a B.S. at Colgate, he entered an M.B.A. program at UCLA. Graduating in time for the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sobrinna shifted his allegiance to the nationalistic Serbian 1389 Movement founded by Victor Drazen. Since then, Cofell has helped to fund the cause of Serb nationalism through his own personal wealth, his firm, and several dummy corporations that funnel money to pro-Serb groups.

  10:00 A.M.-11:00 A.M.

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: At this point I was still wanted for the attempted assassination of then Senator Palmer. Alberta Green was appointed acting director and took over my office and my staff.

  She began to turn up the heat on Tony Almeida as well as Nina Myers, a woman Green had once worked under but quickly surpassed in rank within the agency. Alberta presumed that Nina and Tony were in contact with me. She repeatedly asked them to give up my location. Of course, Nina had her own motivation for remaining silent. But I know Tony believed that compromising me would jeopardize the life of David Palmer, so he, too, remained silent.

  CHAIRMAN FULBRIGHT: Are you aware, Agent Bauer, that Ms. Green submitted a written statement to the subcommittee?

  BAUER: I’m not surprised.

  FULBRIGHT: We didn’t ask for it, actually, but she insisted after learning about this hearing. And I must say, her review of your actions is much, much harsher than that of any of your other colleagues, including even George Mason.

  BAUER: Is that right?

  FULBRIGHT: She claims she wanted to suspend Tony Almeida for helping you, but she could not find enough “actionable” evidence.

  BAUER: Ms. Green does things very much by the book.

  REP. ROY SCHNEIDER, (R) TEX.: (Chuckling) And you don’t, Agent Bauer, that’s pretty clear. You want to maybe give us some insight into that?

  BAUER: In my experience, most by-the-book people haven’t clocked a lot of hours out in the field. They’ve clocked a lot behind desks, though—in offices and classrooms. So books give them a nice warm, comfortable feeling inside, most especially rule books.

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying rules and guidelines aren’t important. They are. But the bad guys don’t use them. In my business you measure your success at the end of the day by whether or not you got the job done. And rules don’t always get the job done. My job was to make sure an important presidential candidate remained safe and alive. If the rule book can’t help me do that, what the hell good is it?

  SCHNEIDER: Green is a good bureaucrat and a bad hands-on intelligence director, is that your evaluation?

  BAUER: It is, Congressman. But then that’s just one man’s opinion.

  FULBRIGHT: More than one, Agent Bauer. You might be interested to know that Agent Tony Almeida agrees with you, and so does your regional director, Ryan Chappelle. In fact, when Mr. Chappelle approached Agent Tony Almeida and asked him for his criticisms of you at one point during this twenty-four-hour period, Almeida said … where is that… (Long pause. Papers shuffling) Here it is. And I quote: “I’m not the biggest fan of Jack Bauer … but since midnight tonight, you won’t get me to disapprove of a single action he took,” end quote. That’s according to a formal statement Mr. Chappelle submitted to this committee.

  BAUER: (After a pause) I appreciate your letting me know that, Mr. Chairman.

  FULBRIGHT: You’re entirely welcome. Now, let’s get back to the events during this hour. You were driving around with Cofell during this time, correct?

  BAUER: That’s right. Ted Cofell was the only real lead I had. When he realized that his regular driver was not behind the wheel, he reached for his cell phone. I locked the doors, pulled over, and drew my weapon. Cofell feigned innocence for a time, claiming not to know about either Gaines or my family. So I asked Nina to put together an interrogation file on him—

  REP. PAULINE P. DRISCOLL, (D) CONN.: (INTERRUPTING) A WHAT?

  SCHNEIDER: It’s personal background information, Pauline, meant to help the interrogator get the interogatee to divulge information. Am I right, Agent Bauer?

  BAUER: You’re right, Congressman. The trouble was that what Nina read to me over the phone was a profile of Cofell that Cofell himself had worked years to fabricate. He wanted the world to think of him as a high-achieving control freak on whom, as Nina put it, “the threat of pain could be more effective than pain itself.”

  Now that I look back on Nina’s words, it seems to me she knew Cofell’s true identity and was trying to keep me from really torturing him. Maybe she was afraid he’d talk if I did. Anyway, the truth about Cofell was that he’d been planted here in the United States as a teenager. He was KGB trained, the son of murdered parents who had a vendetta and political goals in line with Victor Drazen’s.

  SCHNEIDER: So your interrogation didn’t work?

  BAUER: No. The man made a good show of being an “ordinary businessman” whom I was terrorizing, but he wasn’t the least bit threatened by me. First chance he got he pulled a knife—one he’d hidden in the backseat.

  SCHNEIDER: And that proved something to you, Agent Bauer? It seems to me that lots of ordinary men carry knives.

  BAUER: It was a Microtech HALO knife, sir.

  SCHNEIDER: Oh! (Chuckling) Yes, I see what you mean!

  DRISCOLL: Excuse me, but I don’t.

  FULBRIGHT: Neither do I.

  BAUER: The Microtech HALO is a professional’s weapon. It’s not something an “ordinary guy” would carry. The general public is not even permitted to purchase one. By law, the HALO—like all automatic knives—can only be sold to authorized gun dealers, police officers, and military personnel.

  FULBRIGHT: Thank you, Agent Bauer, please continue.

  BAUER: He pulled the knife, and I fractured his wrist. The shock and pain of it finally broke his cover. Cofell began cursing at me in Serbian, calling me “scum” and “bastard” and telling me to “rot in hell.”

  Hearing the Serbian language alarmed me. I flashed back on my mission two years before in Kosovo. I continued to press him for information, and he said, “You deserve everything that’s happening to you,” and, “You will pay.” I knew then that this wasn’t just about Palmer. This was about me. I began connecting the dots between a Serbian-speaking man and a plot to destroy my life and realized that only one thing made sense: blowback.*

  FULBRIGHT: (Interrupting) Agent Bauer, I’ve heard that term associated with covert operations, but I’d like you to define it for the record.

  BAUER: Blowback is when some action set in motion during a previous covert mission comes back to haunt you … to hurt you. The sins of the fathers visited on the children—or in my case, my wife and daughter.

  I knew now that something I had done on a mission in Belgrade or Kosovo had come back to blow up right in my face. And if all this mayhem was Serb related, I knew it had to be Operation Nightfall.

  I tried to get more out of Cofell, but he refused to talk. He had a heart condition, and the physical struggle aggravated it. Although I tried to get medicine into him, he refused to swallow it, and he expired in the backseat of the limousine. I tried administering CPR, but he was gone.

  I nearly went to pieces. My only lead to finding my family had just died, and I didn’t know what to do next. I called Nina and told her about my blowback theory. I asked her to look for a link between my field assignment files and Cofell’s background, specifically looking at Operation Nightfall, where I was in Belgrade and then Kosovo—

  FULBRIGHT: Excuse me, Agent Bauer, but I thought we had your full dossier. (Papers shuffling, mumbling) Sam, I don’t see anything in here about Agent Bauer’s field assignment files—

  BAUER: Sir, you must have my CTU dossier. My Delta files are classified.

  FULBRIGHT: Oh, I see. Well, we’ll want to review them before we make our final report. (Mumbling) Sam, make a note to call Tucker.

  FULBRIGHT: Agent Bauer, go on with your testimony.

  BAUER: By this time I was parked in an underground garage where Cofell had agreed to a last-minute meeting with a man he claimed
was one of his clients, supposedly a machine tool salesman. I prayed the man who was about to show up would know something—anything:—about the whereabouts of Teri and Kim.

  1 propped up Cofell’s corpse in the backseat, opened the passenger door, raised the bulletproof glass between the driver and passenger areas, and waited behind the wheel, watching through the car’s mirrors.

  When the man arrived, I felt as though I’d hit the lottery. It was the same scumbag who’d abducted Teri—Kevin Carroll—the man who claimed to be Janet York’s father, Alan York.

  Since I am under oath, I must truthfully admit to you that it got personal in those moments after Carroll shut the door and I locked it up tight. This man had abducted my wife and daughter, put them in harm’s way, and put me through hell. For a few minutes I honestly remember thinking only one thing: time for some payback.

  11:00 A.M.-12:00 NOON

  SPECIAL AGENT JACK BAUER: The moment he saw me in the driver’s seat of Cofell’s limo, Kevin Carroll drew his gun and repeatedly fired at the bulletproof glass between us. As soon as Carroll had emptied his gun, I secured my seat belt and took off in the empty garage, driving recklessly to toss Carroll around in the backseat with Cofell’s corpse until he was adequately softened up. Although I wanted to shoot the man where he sat, I knew Carroll was the only chance I had of getting to my wife and daughter. I couldn’t kill him, but I had to break him—

  REP. PAULINE P. DRISCOLL, (D) CONN.: Excuse me, Agent Bauer, but did you ever discover why Kevin Carroll showed up in that garage in the first place? You said Cofell claimed he was a “client,” but what was his true connection to Cofell?

  BAUER: As I’ve explained, Cofell handled money for the Drazens. He was the launderer, the middle man who made sure no one could trace a payoff directly to the Drazens. Kevin Carroll wasn’t very smart. He was Gaines’s muscle, and I believe Gaines sent Carroll to Cofell to coerce a final payment out of him before Cofell left town.