by Eric O'neill
I knew from my days on the street that ghost teams following Hanssen would groan and delight in equal measure. The Gray Day case could make a career, but Hanssen’s suspicious nature would make the ghosts earn every success. Ghosts are not infallible. Sometimes targets take that single turn that a ghost can’t follow. Sometimes a traffic accident on a lonely street stymies the pack’s pursuit. Sometimes a black cat crosses your path as you walk under a ladder, beneath a full moon through a circle of mushrooms, and the target disappears. Sometimes catching a spy requires an act of God.
* * *
On an early October evening in 1998, I stood outside the Dulles International Airport in Virginia and watched people stream out of the airport doors toward ground transportation. The sunny autumn day had turned gray, but cold couldn’t penetrate the nervous energy that shifted my feet and spun my head like a roving security camera. Our surveillance had fallen apart around us, and a flow of negative statements assaulted my right ear. I adjusted the volume of my field radio and kept searching.
I’d met my team hours before in a Circuit City parking lot around the corner from a shopping mall. Our team leader, code-named “Rugby,” handed out grainy photographs of a nondescript middle-aged man in his late forties. Slightly overweight and doughy, with hair turned partly gray, our target stared back with the barest of smiles. I flipped the picture over. A carefully printed label read: DAVID SHELDON BOONE.
“This photo looks old,” I said.
“Best we have, Werewolf,” said my team leader. “Keep your eyes open and you’ll do fine.”
I pocketed the photo and checked the battery level of my field radio and earpiece while Rugby handed out assignments. Boone had boarded a flight from Munich, Germany, that arrived in a few hours. We would identify him at the airport and ghost him to his hotel. Another team would relieve us around midnight.
I frowned at my position. If our operation were an NFL game, my role was free safety. I’d wait out at ground transportation to sweep up the spy if he managed to get past an entire team of veteran ghosts. I readied myself for six hours of boredom.
“Who is this guy?” one of the ghosts asked, tucking her radio in her handbag and adjusting the wires.
“David Sheldon Boone.” Rugby peered through his glasses at a briefing folder. “Former army sergeant that sold out to the Soviets in 1988 while he was with the NSA. He’s been living in Germany since then. Even married a German woman. We tricked him into coming back here so the shooters can arrest him.” By “shooters” he meant the FBI agents. Most ghosts are unarmed.
Rugby dropped the file on the hood of his car and took off his reading glasses. “Our job is to keep him in pocket until they do.”
No one would call David Boone a master spy. Indeed, Boone’s erratic decisions and collapsing personal life should have led to an early investigation and arrest. In 1988, while finishing his tour of duty as a cryptanalyst with the NSA, Boone walked into the Soviet embassy on Sixteenth Street in Washington, DC. He handed his Ft. Meade and army identification badges to an embassy employee and then waited anxiously until three Soviet intelligence officers came to interview him. He established his bona fides by handing over a classified NSA document based on foreign communications that the NSA had intercepted and decrypted. The Soviets paid Boone $300, gave him a wig and mustache to wear to their second meeting, and bundled him into the back of a van so surveillance wouldn’t see him leave the embassy.
Boone put on his disguise and met with his Soviet handlers a second time. They led him down to the tunnels beneath the embassy and interrogated him for hours. The spy proved his value again by handing over additional documents that he had smuggled out of the NSA by folding dozens of pages at a time under the half liner of his army windbreaker. When later asked why he spied for the Soviets, Boone said, “I needed money. Plus, well, plus I was extremely angry.”
When he walked into the Russian embassy the first time, Boone’s life had fallen apart. In the three years he worked for the NSA, Boone’s wife divorced him and won custody of his two children. He lost most of his finances to court fees, and the court garnished the rest to support his former family. The army would deposit Boone’s monthly paycheck into his ex-wife’s account. She would then pay him $250, barely enough to keep him in beer. Boone’s anger made him an easy mark for the KGB.
In late 1988, the army reassigned Boone to a cryptanalyst role in the US Army Field Station in Augsburg, Germany. He left his family behind and met a German woman. Six months later, he moved in with her, but he didn’t report his foreign relationship until June 1990, during his security-clearance background reinvestigation. One of Boone’s army supervisors told Defense Investigative Services investigators that Boone’s finances had fallen so sharply that he owed money to creditors, and that Boone’s estranged ex-wife had complained to his commander that Boone’s paychecks had stopped coming. Boone would later tell investigators that he had deliberately allowed his debts to accumulate so creditors would garnish his military pay, leaving none for his ex.
While Boone courted his second wife, fended off his creditors, and responded to his background reinvestigation, he secretly continued to spy. In June 1990, Boone lost access to classified information because his financial woes demonstrated a lack of personal and professional responsibility. The army reassigned him to sergeant of the guard in an Augsburg military hospital. From late 1988 until he retired in 1991, Boone met with his Russian handler, “Igor,” four times a year in shady spots along the Rhine River. At each meeting, Boone gave Igor classified documents in exchange for money, and the two would then set up the next meeting. On one occasion, Boone left documents at a drop site for Igor to pick up later. Often, Igor would task Boone to steal specific documents. One such top-secret document was titled United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 514. It detailed the targeting of US nuclear weapons against Soviet targets.
When Boone’s spying came to light in 1998, the FBI decided to launch a false-flag operation against him. An FBI asset posing as a Russian intelligence officer called Boone, still living in Germany, and asked him to come to London for a meeting. During the meeting, an FBI asset introduced himself as Igor’s successor with the new Russian intelligence service and paid Boone $9,000. Over a four-hour breakfast in September 1998, Boone told the undercover FBI asset all about his previous adventures in espionage, from wearing wigs and mustaches to smuggling top-secret documents and lying to his background examiners. The FBI asset noted that Boone carried a black canvas laptop bag slung over his shoulder.
The FBI now had everything they needed to arrest Boone, but first they needed to get him on US soil. The fake Russian intelligence operative set up a second meeting with Boone at the Marriott Hotel on Airport Road, a short drive from Dulles Airport in Virginia. Boone promised to board a plane heading from Munich to Dulles, and the FBI drafted an affidavit of arrest. FBI agents had staged an arrest plan for Boone’s hotel, a quieter and more controlled location than the crowded airport mezzanine. But before they could knock on his door and read him his rights, my ghost team needed to tuck him into bed.
I rolled my head to ease the tension in my shoulders and watched sidelong through sunglasses at each person who left the bustling doors to Dulles Airport’s baggage claim. This was before 9/11, so anyone could walk through the entire airport and right to a gate. We should have spotted Boone lumbering off the plane, but the two ghosts stationed there had missed him.
No one spotted Boone along the hallway to the shuttles that transport tired travelers from their flights to the main terminal. We also missed him at the shuttle docking points and at Customs. One of America’s more inept spies had just dodged an entire ghost team without even trying. Bad luck.
Rugby spoke in my ear. “Werewolf, do you have anything?”
I pushed past a guy in a three-piece suit dragging a rolling bag and dodged a mother pushing her crying three-year-old in
a battered stroller. “Werewolf, negative,” I said. I didn’t have to pull out the picture to refresh my recollection. Stress had burned it into my mind. No one matching that description had come past me.
The rest of the team was spinning anxiously. Ghosts were dashing across the breadth of the airport, looking for places he might have gone. The radio clicked and chirped. Had Boone ducked into a coffee shop or stopped for an early dinner? Did you check all the bathrooms? Could he have missed the flight? No, Rugby had already called Munich. The team there had put him on the flight.
We were rapidly losing our grace under pressure.
“Excuse me,” a quiet voice asked. “Do you know where the Hertz Gold bus stops?”
I froze. The slight European accent struck me like a lightning bolt. I chased the surprise from my face and answered, consciously turning my right ear out of his sightline. The man who had approached me wore a thin smile and dark clothes. His hair looked grayer and he’d put on more weight, but face-to-face, I couldn’t argue the resemblance to the photo in my pocket. He’d changed his clothes somewhere en route, defying the description the Munich team had handed over. But the black canvas laptop case on his shoulder gave him away.
Hello, Mr. Boone.
I pretended to stretch and turned down the volume on the field radio hidden in my coat. The tiny earpiece doesn’t make much sound, but worried chatter was coming across in angry bursts and Boone stood very close. European close. “Turns out I’m heading there too,” I said with my most cordial smile. “We can wait together.”
“I appreciate that.” He followed me down the ground transportation concourse to the Hertz sign, chatting all the way.
“Long flight?” I asked.
“From Germany,” he said. “You?”
Bingo. “Not so far as that.” I thought fast. “New York. I’m in for the weekend to visit my brother.”
“That’s nice,” he said.
As we shared a congenially banal conversation, I furiously mashed the Talk button on my radio, sending static and clicks to my team. After a moment, Rugby’s voice silenced everyone else. “Team check in,” he commanded before calling out our code names. When he reached mine, I clicked twice.
“Do you have the target?” Rugby asked.
One click. YES.
“Can you talk?”
Two clicks. NO.
“Is the target outside the airport?”
One click.
Relief flooded Rugby’s voice, but his answer stayed professional. “Werewolf, keep the target in pocket until you can give us a twenty. The rest of you mount up. Once Wolf gives us that location we’ll need to scramble.”
“You have no bags?” Boone surprised me.
Crap. I thought fast. “Hertz Gold,” I said. “You can have your bags checked through to the car.” I shrugged. “Probably not for international flights, though.”
“Ah, good to know,” he said in a way that sought to disengage from the conversation. I was saved from answering by the golden Hertz bus that lurched to a stop.
“Enjoy your visit,” I said.
He nodded. “Thank you for the help.”
I let him climb aboard first. He took a seat near the driver and I made my way directly to the back. Once there I called out to my team sotto voce to let them know to come to the Hertz Gold car-rental lot.
I exited the van, watched Boone rent a car, and then called out the make, model, color, and license plate once he drove off. In seconds, one of my teammates was on the road after him. I jumped in the backseat of another car and knew my day was over. I couldn’t approach Boone again, or even get close to him. In operational terms, I was burned. That didn’t matter to me in the least. Ghosts rarely come out of the shadows to share the light with the spies they hunt. I was happy to disappear into the background again.
* * *
We were lucky to catch Boone that day. But as Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Diligence is the mother of good luck.” There are two kinds of lucky people: those for whom luck strikes like lightning in a storm—buying the winning lottery ticket or walking away from a six-car pileup—and there are those who make their own luck by placing themselves in the optimal position to succeed. It was fortune that made Boone approach me in that parking lot, but without my years of FBI training, I’d never have been able to talk him back into our net of surveillance. If I wanted to break the Hanssen case, I needed to get to work. It was time to take advantage of my time alone in the neophyte Information Assurance Section. Talking had worked with Boone. It wouldn’t be enough to snare Hanssen.
I thought back to the mission Kate had given me: steal Hanssen’s keys. I assumed that the agents wanted to get into his car or home, and this was the easiest way for them to get in and out quickly, undetected. Maybe the Right to Life March was my lucky break.
I slipped into Hanssen’s office, leaving the door open so that a long rectangle of light cut through the darkness. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I tiptoed through the silent room with my hands shoved into my pockets. Hanssen didn’t need his keys to get back into the office; his SACS badge was his golden ticket to headquarters. He didn’t need his keys to drive to the march, either; it began right around the corner. Hoping against hope that Hanssen had left his key ring behind, I eyed the space. A small team was waiting three floors down. In the unlikely event that I found my quarry and snuck it away, the crew would need to copy the stack of keys before Hanssen returned and realized they were gone.
I scanned Hanssen’s bookshelf. No keys. The lone credenza in the far corner of the office was shut tight. My eyes traveled to the floor; the blue shoulder bag he kept by his desk was gone. And on his desk, the green ledger books he usually left open were shut. No keys anywhere. I traced a ledger with a finger, anxious to see what was inside, but ultimately left it alone. My training didn’t extend to forensic searches. Hanssen might have left the books out in the open just to catch me rifling through them. I couldn’t trust the convenient invitation. With nothing left to do, I retreated to my desk.
Hanssen returned from the Right to Life March with the lumpy wad of keys in his pants pocket. He hadn’t found his wife and had spent the last few hours stomping around the march looking for her. He asked what I’d accomplished during his time away, and I made up a research project by stringing together technical jargon. It was good enough, and boring enough, to ward off further questioning, and Hanssen retreated into his office.
Later that afternoon I escaped down to the FBI weight room, which resembled the kind of old gym you’d find tucked away in a corner of the Bronx. The worn leather weight benches dated from the J. Edgar Hoover era. Few FBI agents worked the old iron at that hour, and I was glad. I needed the quiet. I hadn’t been able to get Hanssen’s keys; I didn’t know what I was doing, or even what I was trying to dig up. I picked up a barbell, screaming in my head the same way a person might scream at the bottom of a pool. I thought about something Henry Rollins, the former Black Flag front man and now all-around Renaissance man, had written: “The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal.”
I stacked too much weight on the bar and punished myself with each lift. I may have been spending my days lying to Hanssen and my nights deceiving my wife, but at least the iron always told the truth.
CHAPTER 9
TRUTH IS A SPLENDID WILD STALLION
January 19, 2001—Friday
When I agreed to meet with Kate over lunch, I didn’t expect her to point her car south over the Fourteenth Street Bridge. We drove into Virginia and parked in an underground lot beneath a Crystal City office building that looked as stark and lonely as all its neighbors. Kate grinned as an elevator took us to the top floor. “It’s worth it,” she said.
Broad windows displayed Washington, DC, in all it
s glory sprawled along the banks of the Potomac River. I gawked for a moment before Kate nudged me. We joined what seemed like all the contractors and office workers in Crystal City in the small, noisy eatery.
Kate wouldn’t let me pay after we made our way through the busy line. We took our trays to an isolated corner table.
“Told ya,” she said. I followed her gaze and spotted the Washington and Jefferson Memorials under a crystal January sky.
“You weren’t kidding.” I made a mental note to take Juliana here when I had a few moments between Hanssen and law classes and debriefings and office searches with Kate and her team.
Usually Kate and I met in her car, or halfway down an unused HQ stairwell or some empty office. In my experience, when routine bent for the unusual, bad things happened.
“Is this your usual lunch spot?” I picked at my salad.
“More like my favorite,” Kate said. “The food is inexpensive, place is loud enough to have a quiet conversation, and you can’t beat the view.”
I realized I didn’t know much about Kate. But we sat in a tiny cafeteria overlooking the National Harbor, ghosts had Hanssen in pocket and didn’t expect him back anytime soon, and Kate hadn’t said anything yet—perfect time to dig.
“What other cases have you worked?”
Kate raised an eyebrow. “That’s a baited question. Which ones can I tell you about?”
We both chuckled and shrugged. The tyranny of secrets iced my icebreaker.
“We have one thing in common, though.” Kate waved a fork imperiously. “Sprichst du Deutsch?”
My eyebrows shot up and I racked my brain for the tiny bit of German Juliana had hammered into my head. “Ich spreche nur ein bisschen Deutsch.” I held up a hand to forestall her response. “That’s about all I know other than ‘Hol mir ein Bier, bitte.’ ”
