Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

41 IN A PAST LIFE

Phil Adams hoped that the Iranian hadn’t spotted him. If he had, then he might as well as pull the plug on the day’s surveillance.

Phil was fortunate to still be in the loop. Most of his contemporaries disappeared into anonymous and mundane civilian life after their assignments ended and their clearances lapsed. But Phil had made the transition from active-duty military intelligence (MI) into intel contracting almost effortlessly, thanks to the longevity of Task Group Tall Oak, an ongoing DIA (and later DCS) program with proven success. Their specialty was industrial counterintelligence, but to some extent they were capable of “all source” intelligence gathering and analysis.

Phil was a contract case officer specializing in offensive counterintelligence based in the smallest of the five Task Group Tall Oak offices on the West Coast, Tall Oak–Washington. When he mentioned his role to his sister, she said, “Wow, that sounds glamorous.” He quickly explained to her that it was actually a lot of hard work, and much of it involved boring report writing. As was typical in the counterintelligence world, it took hundreds of hours of work to generate a lead, and only a few leads panned out to be solid cases to follow. Their victories were few and infrequent, but each one was relished. Catching a foreign agent red-handed felt very rewarding, but since they were usually operating in the U.S. under diplomatic cover, their immunity protected them from prosecution. They would simply be declared persona non grata, and told that it was time for them to go home. Getting a foreign agent declared persona non grata (PNG or “Ping,” in CI slang) was considered a feather in the cap of any CI agent.

The man Phil was observing now was with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). For days, they had been trying to catch him in the act of visiting a dead-drop microcache location. The MOIS, also known as VEVAK (Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar), had agents who were some of the CIA’s most challenging opponents. The VEVAK was an outgrowth of the Shah Pahlavi–era SAVAK, and it was widely known that SAVAK got their training from the CIA and the Israeli Mossad during the 1960s. So the tradecraft employed by the Iranian MOIS was excellent.

The MOIS agent stepped into his car with diplomatic plates, and then spent several minutes combing his hair, trimming his fingernails, and checking for specks of food between his teeth using the car’s rearview mirror. Finally, he popped a breath mint in his mouth before starting the car’s engine.

Phil chuckled. This was not the behavior of a man who was afraid of being followed. No, this was the behavior of a man headed to a date. Phil started the engine of his own car and pulled out to follow. He trailed ten car lengths back. Using his hands-free microphone, he radioed in on the DCS Task Group Tall Oak secure network: “Subject in view, and rolling west on East Denny Way. Now crossing Twenty-fifth Avenue. No worries.”

A minute later, Phil heard a tone on his earpiece, indicating that someone had joined the secure “chat.”

Clarence Tang gave his usual “Hul-low there, guys” intro and then said, “I’ve got a situation. Mr. Lo, my former subject and now suspect at the Chinese consulate, just got a so-called secure e-mail asking for a meeting at ‘the usual place’ at noon. Based on his previous movements, I think that means the Main Post Office. Can any of you be there with your badges and credentials before noon?”

Phil chimed in, “I can definitely be there. Let’s say we meet on the roof of the Republic parking garage—the Cobb Garage—on Union Street, at 1140 hours. I think it’s the closest one to the post office.”

“Sounds good. I’ll brief you and show you photos of my two subjects.”

Clarence was there waiting, as expected, sitting in his silver “High-Speed Pursuit” Honda Hybrid, which was often the butt of jokes at the office.

Phil parked nearby and walked over to the Honda. As he slipped into the passenger seat, he could immediately see that Clarence was agitated.

“This could be it, Phil. A face-to-face between Mr. Lo and his corporate mole with Boeing, an engineer named Robert Chan.”

He flipped open his laptop, keyed in a passphrase, and navigated to a file designated “T.O. Case 121—UCAS Follow-On.”

Clarence continued. “What the Chinese are after is some stealth technology from a UAV that is under development by Boeing.” He deftly clicked the computer’s track pad and opened two street-surveillance photos, side-by-side. Pointing, he said, “This is the inscrutable Mr. Lo, and this is Bob Chan. If we catch them passing data, we can arrest Chan, but Lo is beyond our reach since he has diplomatic immunity.”

“But we can Ping him right out of the country.”

“Right!” Tang replied excitedly. “And I brought two body cams to nail their assets.”

“Perfect.”

Phil was wearing black jeans, a polo shirt, and a tan windbreaker. He put the camera recorder in the jacket’s inside pocket. The camera’s tiny lens and microphone head were then pinned directly through the jacket to the recorder lead. The four needle-sharp pins on the back of the camera head served to both hold the camera firmly in place and pass the video and audio signals to the recorder leads. The lens and microphone head were built into a small enameled Ecology pin, effectively camouflaging it to casual observers.

Clarence did the same with an identical camera through his gray Aéropostale hoodie jacket. He glanced at his wristwatch nervously, and said, “Showtime.”

After stuffing his laptop into a rucksack and locking the car, they headed to the stairs in a trot. Two minutes later, they entered the Seattle Main Post Office (also known as the Midtown Post Office) through separate entrances. After scanning the lobby and the queue at the service counter, Phil took on the role of “indecisive shopper” at the rack of postal service shipping boxes, tote bags, and collectibles. Meanwhile, Clarence got in the long noon-hour line of customers approaching the service counter.

Two minutes later, at 11:57, Mr. Lo arrived. He was wearing polished shoes, dark pants, and a black raincoat. He pulled some junk mail out of a trash receptacle and pretended to study mail-order catalogues.

At exactly noon, Robert Chan walked into the crowded lobby. He walked over to the tall table where Mr. Lo was standing and began picking through the clear acrylic rack of postal forms, eventually grabbing a green-and-white customs declaration form. Meanwhile, Mr. Lo pulled a fat envelope from his pocket and laid it on the table. Chan palmed the envelope and slid it into his oversize iPad man purse. Getting a subtle high sign from Phil, Clarence left the line and walked toward the table in time to see Bob Chan reach into his pocket and pull out a wrapped stick of chewing gum. He laid it on the counter. As soon as Mr. Lo’s hand touched the gum stick, Clarence shouted, “Federal agents—you’re under arrest!” Both he and Phil quickly rushed the two suspects, putting them both in armlocks and shoving their chests into the table. In the scuffle, the stick of gum was flicked to the floor.

After both men were handcuffed, Phil snatched the wrapped piece of gum from the floor. On camera, he unwrapped it, revealing that it contained a miniature SIM card, resting in a rectangular notch cut out of the gum stick.

“Gotcha,” he exclaimed triumphantly.

Lo protested, “I am a member of the People’s Republic of China consular staff. I have a diplomatic passport. You cannot detain me.”

Again on camera, Phil searched Lo’s pockets, stopping when he found his passport. He slowly passed each page of it in front of his body cam. Then he said, “With apologies for the inconvenience from the United States government, you are free to go, Mr. Lo.”

As Phil keyed Lo’s handcuffs open, Clarence added, “But you, Mr. Chan, have an appointment with a federal magistrate.”

Lo made a hasty retreat out the door. Robert Chan whimpered and started to cry.

The bulging envelope contained fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills—a figure that was confirmed in three separate supervised counts at the FBI office, where they took Chan for his initial processing. Phil had no reluctance handing the cash over to the FBI, but then their agents wanted to copy the data from the SIM card. Phil put his foot down, citing Title 10, and said forthrightly that this was a DOD investigation, a DOD arrest, and that because the arrest had been made on federal property (the post office), technically there wasn’t even any need for the FBI to be involved. It didn’t take long for the feebees to relent. They settled for photographs of the SIM card, the partial stick of gum, and the wrappers. But there was still chain-of-custody paperwork to fill out—and it was unusual that the SIM card (with gum wrappers) and cash had different destinations. That, too, caused a little confusion. With the FBI, “following protocol” was an art form, and unusual situations like these ruffled their feathers.

Very few of the subjects of Tall Oak CI investigations were in the nonofficial cover (NOC) category or clandestine agents. But with sufficient evidence, the Americans whom the foreign agents had used as assets could be prosecuted, or more often than not, turned. Turning an asset into a double agent was difficult, complicated, and stressful, particularly for the assets. As a handler, Phil spent much of his time trying to distinguish fact from fiction. A lot of his work required him to develop a level of trust with “assets” who had already proven themselves to be entirely untrustworthy to the other side.

Phil worked at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. The nearest town was DuPont, a small bedroom community. More than half of its residents were Fort Lewis officers and NCOs who lived off-post. Phil’s apartment was in DuPont, not because he particularly liked the town, but because he disliked long commutes in traffic. The four-apartment building had two floors, and his modest two-bedroom apartment was on the second floor.

The DIA’s counterintelligence (CI) agents could do some things inside the United States that the CIA couldn’t. Under the National Security Acts of 1947 and 1949 the CIA was barred from domestic intelligence gathering. Ironically, the Tall Oak intelligence reports went “up the pipe” to the CIA just as if they had been produced by CIA agents. Phil didn’t mind being a surrogate for the CIA, especially if he was a well-paid surrogate. And his work didn’t pose any ethical dilemmas. The subjects of his investigations were nearly all foreign nationals who were trying to steal American secrets—most often industrial secrets.

In 2012, a reorganization within the DIA created the Defense Clandestine Service (DCS). To the Tall Oak staff, the change mostly meant a change of business cards and stationery. Tall Oak shifted from a DIA “Project” to a DCS “Task Group.” (Tall Oak was never a separate compartment, but now its name could be spoken outside DIA circles.)

The DCS had an emphasis on languages and gave hiring preference to agents with language proficiency. They sought people who spoke Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, Dari, Hindi, Turkish, Tajik, Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, but it was an open secret that the main emphasis of the DCS was watching China and Iran.

Phil’s officemates were Brian Norton (an electronics wizard), Clarence Tang (a Chinese linguist), and Scott Paulsen (a Russian linguist). The section chief was Hal Jensen, a crusty old vet who had been with the DIA’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) for eight years before it was rolled into DCS. With no path to career advancement unless he moved, he described himself as “a GG-13 for life.” At sixty-three, he had long been eligible to collect his twenty-year military pension and could have already collected a DOD civilian pension as well. But he was waiting to turn sixty-five, so that he could “triple dip” and collect Social Security, too. (He had also accumulated forty-plus quarters in the Social Security system.) For his planned retirement, he had a cabin waiting for him near St. Maries, Idaho. Jensen was fond of saying, “I’m delaying my retirement just to keep you contractors honest, and of course for the great coffee.”

Even though they spoke different languages, Clarence and Scott were buddies, since they were both prior service 98G MOS Army Intelligence linguist NCOs. They had both attended the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California, at the same time, and they had both transitioned to the DCS when they were E6s. The 98Gs (or “Golfs,” as they called themselves) tended to be clannish and were some of the Army’s most highly educated NCOs. A surprising number of them had master’s degrees in foreign languages before joining the army. And until recruiting policies changed in 2011, a few of them were age-waivered to be able to enlist after their thirty-fifth birthday.

Phil and Hal became friends quickly, even though they had been born thirty years apart. Their bond was rooted in the fact that they both got their start in tactical SIGINT (officer specialty code thirty-five career-tracked) and had eventually migrated into the CI/HUMINT field.

The offices for DCS Task Group Tall Oak–Washington were inside one of the three Stryker Brigade headquarters at Fort Lewis. Three of the U.S. Army’s seven Stryker Brigades were based at JBLM. The brigade headquarters building was the ideal place for the Tall Oak Section to hide its SCIF (spoken “skiff”) in plain sight. It was already classified as a “U.S.-Controlled Facility,” so that made SCIF accreditation easier. The Tall Oak staff could walk in and out of the building at any hour of the day or night in civilian clothes without arousing any suspicion.

The Tall Oak–Washington outer office measured only ten feet by ten feet and had just one small desk, a coat rack, a wall-mounted set of horizontal cubby shelves, and a pistol-clearing tube. Its main purpose was to shield the SCIF inner door from the view of casual passersby in the hall. The outer door was solid core oak and had a cipher lock. The outer office was their nondiscussion area, where classified discussions were not authorized because it lacked adequate sound attenuation.

Between the outer office and the SCIF itself was a six-by-six-foot security vestibule. This vestibule was monitored with a closed-circuit television camera and was controlled by an electronic latch release with a loud buzzer during the day, and by a second cipher lock with a distinct combination after hours. Then came the heavy steel vault door itself.

Behind the proverbial “Green Door,” the SCIF was a drab, windowless space that felt claustrophobic despite the high ceiling. The only large adornments were two large maps—a world map and a map of the Pacific Northwest—mounted on foam-core backings. There were two OPSEC reminder posters, a DCS core values poster, and a DCS mission statement poster. The office’s only decorative ficus tree with plastic leaves looked comically out of place. Years before Phil arrived, some wag had taped a sign reading, DO NOT OVER-WATER onto its trunk.

The SCIF was permeated with the smell of coffee but also had a faint smell of tobacco, which came from Hal Jensen’s clothes. (He still grumbled about being forced to smoke outdoors.) The SCIF was not a quiet place. There was the constant hum of the fluorescent light fixture ballasts and the whir of more than a dozen muffin fans, which were cooling the many computers. The other noise source in the SCIF was the constant soft rushing sound of the DIAM-mandated white-noise generators, made by a company called Florida Sound Masking. This system was designed to foil any potential eavesdropping.

The SCIF’s Comm Center was dominated by a three-sided ring of eight-foot tables. Atop these tables were six computer monitors, two large tabletop printers, a document scanner, a Defense Red Switch Network (DRSN) telephone, and a STU-III secure telephone with an attached speakerphone. The six prominently labeled monitors each had a specific communications and data retrieval function: JWICS, DCS WAN, SIPRNet, Tall Oak LAN/Operations Net, READOUT Multi-Net, and NSANet. Because Tall Oak was a “multiple INTs” shop, it had better connectivity than many U.S. Army command headquarters.

Emanations security was an obsession in the American intelligence community in part because they had exploited emanations so thoroughly in East Germany in the 1960s. Recognizing their own vulnerability, TEMPEST teams did regular sweeps of all SCIFs, using a strange-looking assortment of spectrum analyzers with specialized antennas.

Adjoining the Comm Center was a 230-square-foot conference room containing a long oak table topped by a large triskelion-shaped Polycom speakerphone. A twenty-four-inch flat-panel monitor with integral camera was mounted on the partition wall that divided the conference room from the Comm Center. This recent addition was an encrypted video system that could be linked directly to the other Tall Oak offices or to a Defense Intelligence Operations Coordination Center (DIOCC) Workroom in the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center (DIAC) at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling (JBAB) in Washington, D.C.

The other four Tall Oak offices on the West Coast covered San Diego, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, and Portland. The largest of these was in Sunnyvale, California, and had been nicknamed the Beehive, both because it had a staff of thirty-five people and a constant stream of visitors flying in from DIAC, and for its large number of agents who had been raised in Mormon families.

Unlike the smaller Washington office, the Sunnyvale Tall Oak office was considered a Continuous Operation, with a SCIF operated twenty-four hours a day. It was located in a large, nondescript one-story office building with a sign vaguely identifying it as Williams Design Group. The front lobby had the familiar “California Corporate” look, but just to the right of the front desk was a heavy door that led to a Honeywell Man Trap entrance. Beyond that was a three-way hall intersection that led to the nonsecure offices on the right and left, and to the SCIF, directly ahead. The core of the Sunnyvale building was a forty-five-hundred-square-foot windowless SCIF, which included an open-storage workroom.

Silicon Valley was a major target for foreign industrial espionage. The Beehive was located just a mile from Apple Computer’s recently completed main headquarters building, “The One Ring.” The Sunnyvale staff enjoyed warm weather and blue skies but also suffered a lot of traffic snarls. Their FBI counterparts were located nine miles away in Campbell, California. Nine miles was considered a just barely comfortable distance. The Beehive wanted to keep relations between their respective operations “courteous but distinct and geographically detached.” Privately, they considered the FBI’s CI agents a posse of bumbling buffoons.

Similarly, the Tall Oak–Washington staff at JBLM was happy to have the nearest FBI office thirty-eight miles away, on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. Ironically, the Tall Oakers actually had much more cooperative working relationships with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in Burnaby, British Columbia. As Phil put it, “At least the Canadians know how to keep their mouths shut.” On many occasions, they had proven themselves worthy of mutual respect.

Tall Oakers worked in plainclothes and investigated national security crimes and violations of the UCMJ, within U.S. military CI jurisdiction. But unlike their active-duty army “Strat” CI counterparts, the Tall Oakers had more of a focus on industrial espionage. Their “cover” story at JBLM was that they exclusively did purely preventive work like SAEDA briefings. But in actuality, their lives were a bit more exciting, but only occasionally dangerous.

The acronym CI/HUMINT was often spoken in the same breath, but the two roles were actually distinct. The old saying in the Army intelligence community was, “If you want to try to do some Agent 007 stuff, then go HUMINT. But if you want to try to catch people who are trying to do 007 stuff, then go CI.” The rule was that a HUMINTer couldn’t do investigations and a CI special agent couldn’t do interrogations. With Task Group Tall Oak, Washington, that distinction was blurred, since some of their taskings were HUMINT (rather than CI), and the Tall Oakers did indeed interrogate turned assets.

The leeway in Tall Oak’s mission came by virtue of both their specific taskings and the fact that they were contractors, selectively operating under either Title 50 or Title 10, as needed. (Title 50 was the portion of the U.S. Code that governed the legal authority of the CIA, NSA, and NRO, whereas Title 10 governed and authorized the Armed Forces.) It also helped that their chain of command jumped directly to DIA headquarters at JBAB in Washington, D.C., rather than being under the control of a regional Army command.

The Tall Oak staff was supplemented by nine part-time contractors. The part-timers all held at least secret-level clearances but only two of them had top secret clearance and SCI access. These “ad hocs” were used primarily for stakeout surveillance and maintenance of stakeout video cameras. Most of them had prior service as NCOs in the Military Intelligence or Civil Affairs branches. Just one of them was a former MP who had only a few months of CID experience, but he was recruited because he had a lot of combat experience in Afghanistan, and because he spoke some Arabic and Pashto without the benefit of any formal training.

The ad hocs lived in a tenuous netherworld. In some weeks they might not work at all, but in others they could work as many as seventy hours. They were paid well (on an hourly basis, at forty dollars per hour), but the job carried no benefits, and it had a few risks. One of the reasons that the ad hocs were at risk was that they were not allowed to carry badges and credentials. In a few instances, this led to some dangerous unintended confrontations with local law enforcement and, on one occasion, with FBI agents.

While they were careful to schedule most of their arrests in conjunction with the FBI, the majority of their “street” time was entirely under Tall Oak tasking, with no coordination with the FBI, and only minimal supervision from DIA headquarters. They had hardly any contact with the CIA, save for a few instances where “handoff” was required when tracking the movement of suspects into Canada. This also meant liaison with the Canadian CSIS, whom the Tall Oakers referred to as “The Burnaby Boys.”

They even had a bit of interplay with local police departments—most notably the DuPont, Washington, Police Department. The liaison with police departments was mainly to coordinate arrest and search warrants, which were normally exercised by the FBI.

The agents all carried compact SIG P228 pistols, designated the M11 by the military. But they used Winchester Ranger STX 9mm hollowpoint ammunition. Even after the DCS transition, their office still bought commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ammo. Once, that nearly cost them an inspection “gig” when an inspector thought that he knew a regulation that didn’t exist.

For his personal use Phil bought a used, mechanically identical pistol at a gun show. Other than being made of stainless steel and having tritium night sights, it was almost identical to his issued SIG. He also bought four twenty-round factory SIG magazines to carry for his backup magazines, at his own expense. (For his quarterly shooting “quals,” he used only the standard-issue thirteen-round magazines.)

Phil’s position at Tall Oak was a sure means of escape from the endless merry-go-round of deployments to Southwest Asia. Although still officially in a U.S. Army Reserve Control Group, his “position in the national security interest” with Tall Oak meant that he could not be recalled to active duty for anything short of World War III.