by Eric O'neill
“ ‘Have you ever known Eric to injure or torture small animals or seek their death?’ ”
We both had a chuckle at that one. The next question was about my relationship with money. Was I frugal or a spendthrift? Did I have a gambling problem, or take risks with money, or seem to go through large amounts of it?
No worries there either.
“The third question though…” He paused. “ ‘Has he ever been known to drink excessively, or have a problem with alcohol, or drink more than a few alcoholic drinks in any one day?’ ”
I pressed my palms into my eyes and pushed away the lingering headache from the party the night before.
“What did you say?”
He grinned and shrugged. Probably the same expressions he’d used with the agent. “No more than anyone else I know.”
In that moment, I thought my best friend had doomed me to never make it into the FBI. I’d flunk my security clearance, get a form letter thanking me for my interest, and have to go find a desk job at some consulting firm that would suck away at my soul, hour by hour.
Instead, I passed. It probably helped that I’m an Eagle Scout, have never touched an illegal drug in my life, and come from a line of upstanding attorneys and military officers. Whatever the case, I finally found myself in a polygraph examination, the last step before securing the clearance that would start my new career, again doubting I’d pass.
“Stop whatever it is you’re doing,” the examiner said. “You’re doing something with your breathing that will get you an inconclusive. I can’t pass you with an inconclusive. I don’t pass you, you don’t get into the FBI.”
I focused on my breath. I’d studied martial arts for the majority of my life, which meant I’d learned to control my breathing to reduce stress and promote calmness. But for the polygraph to work, the examiner needed to create stress to establish my normal patterns. I had to unlearn years of study, stat.
I also had to lie. The tester needed to catch me in an easy falsehood so that he could establish a baseline when he got to the questions that actually mattered to him. The problem for both of us was that I didn’t have much to lie about. When it came to the kinds of youthful indiscretions polygraph examiners tend to ask about—stealing candy bars, smoking pot, cheating on tests—I was clean as a whistle.
Then he asked me if I’d ever lied to someone who loves me. He prefaced the question by making it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if I had, he would fail me. I pictured my mother. Over the past five years, Parkinson’s disease had drawn her ready smile into a perpetual frown. A few days earlier, she’d asked me how she looked, and I’d said, “Perfect.” It was the first lie I’d ever told her.
The polygraph examiner scrutinized me. “No,” I answered. The needle raced across the page, the first rapid movement since the examination began. The examiner had his baseline. His next question was whether a foreign national had ever approached me to request anything, or to ask about my application to the FBI. I relaxed and answered “no.” The needle ceased its furious scribbling and found the center of the page. I passed.
* * *
The intelligence community initiates new members into a tyranny of secrets. It is within this mind-set that spies and counterintelligence operatives—those who hunt the spies before they can steal, disrupt, or spread disinformation—operate. The two most important rules for a spy: don’t get caught; and if compromised, lie. A counterintelligence operative follows a similar but far more difficult mandate: say nothing about your secrets. But just as in the biblical story of Adam and Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge can have unintended consequences, and a secret can corrode from within.
Some scholars claim that Tsar Ivan IV Vasilyevich, also known as Ivan the Terrible, established Russia’s first spy services in the sixteenth century. But it was during the Cold War that the Soviet Union turned espionage into an art form. Russian spymasters launched massive collection campaigns to recruit American moles from within the FBI, CIA, and NSA. At the same time, they were pioneering desinformatsiya practices that spread disinformation and disruption in order to shape American political decisions. These active-measure (aktivinyye meropriatia) disinformation campaigns included media manipulation; use of front organizations (like the US affiliate of the World Peace Council, a secret Soviet affiliate) to sway public opinion; kidnappings; and provision of funds, training, and support to terrorist organizations, to name a few. In 1980, the CIA estimated that the Soviets spent a conservative $3 billion per year pursuing active measures. In his February 6, 1980, congressional testimony, John McMahon, the CIA deputy director for operations, stated that the Soviets’ active-measures network was “second to none in comparison to the major world powers in its size and effectiveness.”
The 1980s saw a number of audacious—and highly successful—disinformation campaigns. One involved spreading rumors of CIA and FBI involvement in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Another seeded foreign newspapers with articles—purportedly written by American scientists—claiming that AIDS was the result of the Pentagon’s experiments to develop biological weapons. During the 1984 Summer Olympics in Moscow, KGB spies in Washington, DC, sent fake letters from the KKK threatening athletes from African countries, an active measure many believe was a response to President Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games.
Yet for all its successes abroad, the Soviet Union was suffering from serious internal tensions. In the late 1980s, massive independence protests swept across the Caucasus and the Baltic states, and soon the USSR’s constituent republics began to secede. On August 18, 1991, military and government hardliners staged a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. The coup collapsed within days, but the match continued to burn. In December 1991, Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union and his resignation as president. Television audiences across the former USSR watched as Boris Yeltsin lowered the hammer-and-sickle flag from atop the Kremlin for the last time and raised the tricolor flag as president of a newly independent Russian state.
During all this upheaval, former KGB spymasters—now out of a job—were raiding the agency’s file cabinets. The documents they stole would serve as insurance policies for better lives elsewhere. For many, that meant the United States, which offered Levi’s jeans, Diet Cokes—and what often amounted to millions of dollars in exchange for the slim files they gave to the FBI. The United States gobbled up their secrets, and the United Kingdom and other friendly intelligence services caught what we missed. The FBI and MI6 pooled the information they’d obtained, which led to a series of arrests of Russian assets within the United States. The biggest catch was Aldrich Ames, a CIA analyst turned KGB mole, whose disclosures had led to the death of many CIA and FBI assets overseas. When asked how he’d passed CIA polygraph tests during his spy career, Ames had laughed: “Confidence and a friendly rapport with the examiner.” But as damaging as Ames was, his espionage couldn’t account for all of the US intelligence operations that had failed without warning. Someone was continuing to corrupt the intelligence community. Someone even worse than Ames.
The intelligence community had long sought a Russian mole code-named “Gray Suit.” Every ghost on the street hoped that the spy they were following might turn out to be him. He was our Billy the Kid, our Blackbeard. And so far, he’d eluded the FBI’s best spy catchers. That didn’t stop us from hunting.
In the meantime, FBI counterintelligence units had mountains of leads to follow thanks to the former KGB defectors. My commission as an FBI investigative specialist had come just as the agency was sorting through those leads, and months before the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, had an open bunk in its National Security School. Without proper training, I couldn’t be set loose in the field to hunt spies and terrorists. But the FBI could assign me to a squad of agents as part of an active espionage investigation—which is how, a little over a year after graduating from college, I ended up part of the mission
to capture Earl Edwin Pitts, Russian spy and former FBI agent.
In 1995, the FBI’s Washington Field Office commanded the top floors of a federal office building on the banks of the Anacostia River. The spectacularly ugly building, aptly located at Buzzard Point in Southwest Washington, DC, almost made me regret joining the FBI. But the team of agents, led by legendary spy hunter Mike Donner, quickly won me over.
A thirteen-year FBI veteran, Pitts had spied for the Soviet Union from 1987 until 1992. He first volunteered his services to the Soviet Union in July 1987 by sending a letter to a member of the Soviet Mission assigned to the United Nations in New York City. Pitts’s new contact soon introduced him to Alexsandr Vasilyevich Karpov, the Soviet Line KR chief for New York, at a clandestine meet at the New York Public Library. Line KR, the counterintelligence unit of the KGB, was responsible for recruiting spies from foreign nations. The FBI learned of Pitts’s treachery in 1995, when his original Soviet contact defected to the United States and became a confidential witness against him.
The accusations against Pitts created a problem for the Justice Department, which was tasked with prosecuting the case. In general, securing an espionage conviction requires the government to prove that the spy willfully handed information that was classified or related to national defense over to a foreign nation or other party seeking to harm the United States, and that he or she did so with reason to believe the information would harm the United States or help a foreign nation. It’s easier to prove conspiracy to commit espionage, which requires only that the spy intended to provide classified information to a foreign power, and that he or she committed some act to further the espionage.
But when it came to the Pitts case, even making out the conspiracy charge was going to be a challenge. While the confidential witness had pointed an unshaking finger at Pitts, a first-year law student could see that the government’s case against him was flimsy: it relied entirely on circumstantial information handed over by a defector in return for money and a new life in America. The confidential witness would disappear into Witness Protection and never testify to the evidence on the stand. A good defense attorney could easily raise enough questions about the witness’s motives to secure a “not guilty” verdict. The FBI needed Pitts to confess.
In order to make that happen, the bureau created a compartmentalized squad of agents to run what’s known as a “false flag” operation. In August 1995, the FBI used the confidential witness, alongside a team of FBI agents led by Donner and posing as Russian intelligence officers, to fool Pitts into believing that Russia wanted to reactivate him as a spy. The false flag operation lasted sixteen months. During that time, Pitts made twenty-two drops of classified and unclassified FBI information and documents, held two face-to-face meetings and nine phone conversations with his pretend Russian handlers, and accepted payment of $65,000 for his attempted espionage. Donner’s squad had measured out plenty of rope for Pitts to hang himself.
I joined Donner’s squad in the final few months of that investigation, probably because Donner heard I knew how to turn on a computer. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d joined the FBI to hunt spies and make a difference. Now, here I was, assigned to the FBI’s biggest and most secretive case. I felt like a high school baseball player asked to warm up in the Oriole bullpen with a promise that the team might give me a shot at the big show. The first time I walked into the squad room, I could barely croak out a hello.
Of course, the FBI doesn’t throw a twenty-two-year-old future investigator into the path of a spy. My role was to shadow the agents, learn counterintelligence from them, and organize the evidence they collected against Pitts into a computer database. But before I could even consider pressing my thumb against the biometric scanner that sheltered the Pitts squad from the rest of the FBI, I required further initiation into the tyranny of secrets.
A common misconception, even within the intelligence community, is that there are multiple levels of clearance above top secret. In reality, the top clearance is top secret/special compartmentalized intelligence, or TS/SCI. This phrase may seem cryptic, but those familiar with best practices for securing information will recognize its meaning. The idea is to section off critical information—the kind of information that could jeopardize an investigation or harm national security if it fell into the wrong hands—into “compartments,” each accessible only to those who need to know that specific information in order to do their jobs. To join the squad investigating Earl Pitts, I needed to attend additional security briefings so that the FBI could grant me access to two additional compartments: Special Intelligence (SI) and Talent Keyhole (TK) intelligence. SI covers communication intercepts, such as listening in to and analyzing and decoding foreign military radio-traffic, and TK protects signals intelligence (or SIGINT), which might include target data spotted by a reconnaissance satellite. Because I would potentially have access to information derived from these compartments during the Earl Pitts investigation, the FBI had to initiate me into the relevant circles of trust.
If this sounds like a lot to handle, it is. Every investigation involves different intelligence compartments and different lists of personnel with a “need to know” the information contained in that compartment. Covert operatives quickly learn to section off secrets in their own mind in order to avoid discussing a case with someone who has an equally high security clearance but who may not have access to the particular compartments implicated in that case, or even compartmentalized information within those compartments! The result is like a Mute button on conversation. If you can’t be certain that your squad mate is “read into” the case you are working on, it’s always best to just say nothing.
Working with Donner’s squad taught me the opposite side of the investigations I would later work as a field operative. I collected and distilled data from the field, heard about how the ghost team following Pitts each day pursued the investigation, and saw in real time how the FBI agents frowned or cheered as surveillance logs came across the wire. I discovered the camaraderie to be found among a handpicked team of agents, each working toward a common goal, and I listened carefully to Donner’s frequent warnings to say nothing about the case once we left the secret squad room in Buzzard Point. Over time, I became used to carrying secrets—though I was never fully comfortable. When friends asked me about my new job, I repelled any interest by saying the Department of Justice had hired me as a geopolitical analyst. Nobody felt the need to ask follow-up questions. It made it hard to capture the interest of a date, but it kept FBI-learned information safe.
On December 18, 1996, after I’d spent a few months on the investigation, we arrested Earl Pitts at the FBI Academy, where he worked at what was then called the Behavioral Science Unit—the unit tasked with applying behavioral and social sciences to investigative techniques, including profiling serial killers, countering violent extremism, and understanding psychopathology. In June 1997, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, Earl Pitts was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. I had long since left Donner’s squad to finally attend the FBI Academy at Quantico, so I wasn’t around for Pitts’s lengthy debrief, when he mentioned that another FBI agent made him suspicious. Pitts suspected that agent might also be a spy. At the time, the FBI dismissed Pitts’s concerns and chose not to follow up with the agent he’d named: an obscure computer expert named Robert Hanssen.
CHAPTER 3
LAY DOWN YOUR SWORD
Gene’s blue Crown Victoria prowled away toward Pennsylvania Avenue and FBI headquarters. I watched him turn the corner and then stood for a few minutes in the cold. I had agreed to take a unique case based on very little information, and I still wasn’t sure whether I had volunteered or been coerced. In a case where every scrap of knowledge was kept in a locked box inside other locked boxes, it seemed I had very few keys. Gene made sure I hadn’t heard of Robert Hanssen, told me the FBI would investigate him for possible espionage,
and got me to agree to share an office with him. I looked at my watch. It had taken Gene less than ten minutes to recruit me.
I would begin this case mostly blind, but after five years in the field as a ghost, I understood Gene’s reasoning. Hanssen was a veteran agent, schooled in the tyranny of secrets. I was a pawn. And the less I knew about the case, the fewer details I could accidently reveal.
Stomach tight and throat dry, I turned back toward my apartment. I’d come a long way since the Pitts case, I told myself. I had hunted spies and terrorists through parks and alleyways, offices and restaurants, shopping malls and nightclubs. I could manage an investigation at FBI headquarters.
I closed the door softly behind me. Before I could shrug off my coat, Juliana pressed a cup of coffee into my hands. The steaming mug warmed life into my frozen fingers. I sipped deeply, gathering my words.
Five years after my first polygraph test, I stood in front of my wife of less than a year and lied again. This would be the first lie I ever told her. It would also be far from the last.
“What did Gene want?” The slightest hint of a European accent rounded Juliana’s question, made it beautiful.
“I just got promoted to a computer job at headquarters.” The words came much too easily. I controlled my breath until the polygraph in my mind’s eye stilled to only a straight blue line. “He said it will help me get to law school classes on time.”
She brightened. “That’s great! We should celebrate.”
I tucked the Hanssen investigation away into a back part of my mind and compartmentalized. “Maybe my parents will have us over?”
* * *
That evening, Juliana and I were in our green Jeep Cherokee on the way to Kensington, Maryland. I tensed and bit my lip as she merged through the number four lane on the Capital Beltway to exit onto Connecticut Avenue. “Seriously, Eric!” She looked at me and rolled her eyes.
