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  Then there was Duardo, or more specifically, Duardo’s son. Duardo was a close friend of Julio, and he was helping me with frequent no-ID registrations at the Yonkers DMV. He would sometimes bring his son, who must have been seven or eight. We adults don’t really know how kids see us, but I knew I was a familiar face to the boy. Then one day he showed me the skateboard on which he’d embossed my alias’s initials: “AP.” That really touched me. Late that afternoon, as I drove off, I had some real misgivings. Sooner or later, the boy’s father was going to be arrested, along with his Tío Julio, both as a direct result of their friendship with me, Tío Alex. When we arrested Duardo that dramatic morning less than a year later, I thought about that skateboard. Memo to Marc: Avoid emotional ties with subjects.

  No, I didn’t twist their arms to break the law, I definitely did not entrap them in any way; their fraudulent documents were a good business long before I showed up. But I resolved almost then and there that with new subjects in all future ops, it would be all business. The excessive friendship didn’t threaten the ops, but eventually it took a toll on me. Henceforth, I engaged in only as much socializing as needed to gain the subjects’ confidence, and that’s not much. The subjects in most cases didn’t really care if I was the friendly sort. They just wanted me to be competent and dependable in my crookedness. My new attitude: We’ve got friends already, who needs more; let’s just make money.

  And finally, on this subject, there was a major public corruption op, not long after the BLUE SCORE success in Mount Vermon in Westchester County. This time we were in Dutchess County, due north of Westchester. This was late 1997, about a year before I headed south to FBIHQ. William Paroli, the de facto boss of Poughkeepsie, and a number of other top county officials were suspected of pervasive extortion, massive shakedowns. In the course of the investigation, I had developed a valuable relationship with Basil “Bill” Raucci, Poughkeepsie Town Property Assessor, a senior official who had accepted a number of bribes (from me) on behalf of my father-in-law’s construction company. Phony father-in-law, of course, but a real construction company upstate whose actual CEO was exceedingly tired of being hit up for bribes as a cost-of-doing-business and set this investigation rolling. Originally, this CEO agreed to wear a wire, but second thoughts arose as the date approached, and he backed out. He was willing, however, to send a trusted subordinate (i.e., an undercover agent) to manage his Dutchess County projects. In order to account for my lack of expertise in the construction field, I suggested the role of son-in-law (nepotism being a practice these subjects should understand). After two days at the CEO’s office, I had acquired sufficient vocabulary to get by and come across as, well, a pampered (and underqualified) son-in-law.

  With this branch of the investigation well in hand, Craig Dotlo, once again my excellent supervisory agent, and Jim O’Connor, the case agent, decided to flip Bill Raucci and bring him in as a confidential witness. Wait a minute, Craig. Why risk the guy saying “Fuck you,” accepting the prospect of prison, then tipping off all of the other targets? What would be the benefit of that? The guy was already working for us unwittingly. Big argument with Craig—the second one ever, and we went back and forth for a couple of weeks. His point was that as a CW, Raucci could be given specific instructions and closely managed. Such a full debrief would provide valuable intel on all the players, the main one (William Paroli) in particular. But I was the one who had been meeting with him, and I was better placed to evaluate his character. In my judgment, flipping Raucci was a long shot.

  I lost that debate. After my next UC meet with Raucci at the Fishkill Holiday Inn, Craig and Jim walked into the hotel room as I walked out. I glanced back. I still remember his startled look. They gave him until Monday to sign on, or be arrested.

  Over the weekend, October 4, 1997, the man decided on a third course of action: After carefully placing his wallet, keys, and jewelry on a dresser at home, he walked into the Hudson River. I was upset, really upset. Bill Raucci died as a consequence of his interaction with me. So I felt at the time. If I’d had my way, he would have been arrested at the same time as the other targets, and they would all have gone down together. I was convinced this would have worked against any suicidal impulse. And he would have had plenty of company. Along with Paroli, who was convicted in February 2000, a half-dozen others were caught in the net, with charges ranging from conspiracy to commit extortion to murder.

  I had a hard time caring about the case’s success, frankly, even though my anger over the suicide was not the result of having gotten too close to Bill Raucci “operationally.” I had not done that, so this was not a situation where … If I’d kept my distance from him, I would not have cared so much. It was just another by-product, an unintended consequence, of working the dark side, where all manner of dire consequences are always possible, barely discernible in the shadows. Where emotions will often be near the surface—or, worse, buried … It’s not coincidental that within a year I was on my way out the door of the Ramada in New Rochelle and posted to the Safeguard Unit at the covert site in the D.C. suburbs. It was not coincidental that I needed Safeguard.

  10

  Never the Same, Never Again

  By noon on September 11, 2001, I knew—everyone knew—that the FBI would never be the same. For the foreseeable future, it would have, if not quite a new mission, a totally recommitted one. On Monday morning, I was in the office. From this perch at the epicenter, as a Headquarters supervisor plugged into the Bureau’s nerve center (even though my physical base was Safeguard’s covert off-site), I would have a firsthand view. Within days, I was assigned to supervise a team of support personnel at the Victim Assistance Center on one of the Hudson River piers. This surprised me. I was an undercover agent (and, now, for the time being, supervisor). What were the chiefs thinking? Not much, really. The assignment resulted from a bureaucratic anomaly. On the Bureau’s organizational chart, the Victim’s Unit happened to be in the same section as Safeguard, and the assistance center near the World Trade Center needed bodies.

  Mayor Rudy Giuliani had set up this complex, and every government agency with any excuse whatsoever—local, state, and federal—set up a presence somewhere in the vicinity of the Towers that fall. As the War on Terror geared up, with almost unimaginable funding and corresponding chest-pounding, no agency could afford to be left behind. That’s not a cynical statement, not at all. It just states a truth about institutional behavior—that is, human behavior. And don’t forget: every agency, every individual wanted so much to help, to do something.

  The telltale odor from Ground Zero lingered for months. It was a surreal environment, as everyone who was in the city knows. Mark Mason, a friend and fellow agent based in New York, was my host for my first tour of Ground Zero. Despite having seen the devastation endlessly repeated on cable news, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Words failed me then, and they wouldn’t be any better now. Despite my thoroughly cosmopolitan background and life, I can be an old-fashioned patriot, and what I saw was a battlefield—a terrible defeat in a real war on American soil. The attack had claimed the life of John O’Neill, whom I’d known in the course of one of my temporary duty assignments to the U.S. Embassy in Paris a few years earlier. In the late nineties, John was chief of the Bureau’s counterterrorism operation. After he retired—and less than three weeks before the attacks—he had assumed his duties as chief of security at the WTC. For everyone who knew him, the irony was brutal.

  My new assignment was not a chore. I did not resent the time away from the UC world. Like everyone, I wanted to do something. I didn’t want to be on the sidelines. And here I was, one of the soldiers. My assignment, in theory, was to oversee the FBI’s team of victim-assistance specialists in the Victim Assistance Center, but as it turned out, I didn’t do much actual supervising. Each family wanted to speak to an FBI agent, and I was the only actual agent on hand. I served as their repository for nightmare scenarios come true—one after the other, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, u
ntil further notice. (Those were everyone’s hours.) I listened as family after family described the details that precipitated the death of their father … mother … brother … sister … child … only child. I still see—often—the dignified, aging black man whose son had gone to the World Trade Towers that day for a job interview. For some reason, his grief in its quiet, infinite magnitude, struck a unique cord … But, truly, every story was heart-wrenching.

  The anthrax scare added another layer of fear and uncertainty and affected my work in an unforeseeable way. Official bulletins warned that the most significant threat came from airborne dissemination of the deadly virus. Given this danger, the NYPD director of security for the pier and myself decided that no aerosol bottles would be allowed into the tightly packed, enclosed area. Well, we two men had no idea how many women carry some form of spray bottle or other spritz in their purses. A comic counterpoint to the oppressive and pervasive gloom, our precautionary prohibition caused a near riot. For women with nerves already approaching threshold breakdown levels (which was also the case for many if not most New Yorkers), this was an intolerable imposition. The repercussions reached the Police Commissioner’s Office and the deputy mayor. In true bureaucratic save-one’s-own-backside form, my NYPD colleague, a senior official, told his bosses that he had been ordered to impose this security measure by the FBI, in the form of one Marc Ruskin, Special Agent. And against this official’s advice and better judgment, of course. While absurd on its face—NYPD Inspectors are not known for meekly taking orders from the Feds—the accusation was sufficient to win me a (by this time welcome) ticket back to Headquarters, where I would be available for an operational assignment, my forte and better suited to my temperament. The weeks in ravaged Manhattan had served as a good education, an eyewitness introduction to the horrors, physical and emotional, wrought by cruel, implacable enemy forces—forces with which the Bureau had been at war for more than a decade, at last taken seriously by the public at large, and by politicians and talking heads as well.

  The Bureau, and every law enforcement entity anywhere, no matter how remotely connected to the attacks, was flooded with leads and tips and hunches and rumors and allegations about suspected terrorists but woefully short of verifiably good sources. I knew one reason why.

  Three years earlier, I had signed up an informant to help in a public corruption Group I op targeting administrative law judges in New York City who were accepting bribes funneled their way by equally indiscriminate lawyers. For this sting, we had used the fictitious law office developed for a previous investigation. But the targeted judges would not nibble at the bait proffered by this new face, alias Mark S. H. Ruskin. Lesson learned from COMMCORR, Craig and I reasoned that posing as a crooked attorney in New York, I ran a pretty good chance of running into an acquaintance. For my alias, besides the minor changes to my name, I obtained a fictitious Social Security number, based on a new date of birth, along with the usual credit cards, driver’s license, and wallet filler. The one catch: I could not obtain backstopping for my credentials as an attorney licensed to practice in New York. The responsible authorities in the courts, in the bar associations, refused to cooperate. They protect their own. Cagey subjects, these. Not ordinary. This was perhaps the only case in which I failed to penetrate the criminal network and gain the confidence of the subjects.

  Our informant in the case with the judges, David Almasi, had extricated himself from a legal situation (violation of a city ordinance) with such a bribe to one of the judges. He then doubled down on his jeopardy by recklessly mentioning the incident to an acquaintance. Who happened to be an FBI source. Bad break. Aware of the Bu’s interest in public corruption, that source had relayed the information to his contact agent, which led to an interview of Almasi—a nonconfrontational interview. The agent was interested in the bigger fish, the men and women behind the bench who accepted bribes. He introduced me to David Almasi, and I formally “opened” him as a CI.

  Almasi was forthcoming from the start, and without any subtle threats of prosecution he agreed to work with the Bu. Short on cash, however, he would not refuse a little spending money. The bad break was suddenly a good break! A native of Tehran, in his midforties, with steel-wool hair and bushy mustache, Almasi struck me as particularly well suited for counterterrorism work (CT, as it is referred to in the profession). This trustworthiness vis-à-vis the jihadis gained further credence from the fact that Almasi was Jewish, having arrived in the United States following a few years in Israel after leaving Iran.

  Yes, he was willing to infiltrate Hezbollah cells in the United States, or at least try to. Here was the dream CI for the War on Terror, a once-in-a-lifetime find. I was certain of this. In any event, I felt that the least the Bureau should do was to find out for sure. But, maddeningly, I could not find a counterterrorism agent to work him. I was able to set up a few interviews between agents and Almasi—Marc, this guy’s great, we’ll get back to you—but the expressed excitement was always followed by … nothing. This was a couple of years before 9/11, and the lackadaisical attitude I encountered in the matter of David Almasi was not unusual in the nineties, despite the wake-up call from the Blind Sheik in the first WTC bombing.

  Now recall John Sultan, the contractor originally from Bangladesh who was so instrumental as a cooperating witness in RUN-DMV and numerous other operations. John had a list of Bureau-botched opportunities for the development of good CT cases. In one instance, he had insinuated himself to the point that he worked “Security” at an Islamic (read jihadist) conference. Assigned by CT agents to gather intel, John attended services and meetings at mosques in New York and Newark, identifying radical Imam guest speakers and reporting back on the vitriolic and violent content of the sermons. “Death to the Great Satan” was a popular and already well-worn theme before the planes struck the Towers. But not much happened within law enforcement and CT circles. John’s value was woefully underappreciated and undervalued until 9/11, when the counterterrorism scene became, overnight, barely controlled chaos. Now frantic calls from CT management poured in.

  Marc, your Jewish Iranian guy, would he still be willing to work for us? No luck. David Almasi was nowhere to be found. After a couple of years’ good service, he had dropped off the radar and moved on. As for John Sultan, he now had a lucrative career and young family, and his past experiences had left a sour taste. He would not be coming back. A significant loss to the CT cause, I believe, but at least the FBI and everyone else now understood the gravity of the jihadi threat and the necessity of inside information. As I wrote in the Introduction, this is especially true at a time when terrorists and criminals are becoming ever less likely to trust any kind of recordable or traceable medium. As noted earlier, the bad guys’ expectation of privacy is already approaching zero (and ours isn’t much higher). The National Security Agency could announce that it is unilaterally shutting down its entire electronic surveillance operation, or the debate over the constitutional legality of such snooping could be settled in favor of privacy (a political impossibility, at the time of this writing), and the bad guys would still scoff. They know which way the wind’s blowing—and they also know how to employ the newest, commercially available encryption technology. As the effectiveness of the traditional methods of electronic investigation decreases, the importance of UC work necessarily increases. Even if the NSA does collect every single communication generated in every corner of the globe, where’s the value without a basis for evaluation and corroboration?

  One reason legal cases against terrorists are so hard to prosecute is the difficulty of planting undercover agents in those environments. The ill-fated Detroit Sleeper Cell case, coming right on the heels, literally weeks, after the destruction of the WTC, confirmed the need for undercovers. Informants may not be trustworthy; their information has to be corroborated. The bottom line: in the era of electronic surveillance, undercover work is not passé. It is not obsolete. Just the opposite, in fact. It enforces accountability. It prevents mistakes.<
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  That said, there’s no doubt that CIs have a critical place in counterterrorism cases, but they have to be handled with extreme caution and care. The infamous Whitey Bulger episode in Boston was as bad as it gets, but the opportunities for out-of-control CIs in CT investigations are almost self-evident. High-caliber CIs and CWs such as John Sultan and David Almasi being few and far between, institutional pressures for positive results immediately after the Al-Qaeda attack led to a lowering of the bar in the CI recruitment process. With dubious results. In the case of the Newburgh Four, for example, an informant had apparently offered the targets of a CT case huge quantities of cash, a late-model sports sedan, and a barber shop in exchange for firing a Stinger missile at an air force plane and bombing synagogues. Yet Federal Judge Colleen McMahon, who presided at the trial of these four men, complained, “The government did not act to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot; there was no plot to foil…” In other words, these guys in Newburgh were more aspirational than operational, a distinction the Bureau itself has drawn. The judge lamented: “I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition…” Nevertheless, she felt obliged to uphold the jury’s guilty verdict and imposed the mandatory minimum sentences required by federal law: twenty-five years hard time.