TIMOSHEV 2.0
It was just over ten years previous that FBI Special Agent Stan Beeman had attended the 'going to war' meeting, the post-Reagan inauguration, re-tooling of the FBI. A re-tooling to deal with the 'Soviet menace', that Republicans always claimed now former-President Jimmy Carter had ignored.
Not any more.
This time in 1992 under George H.W. Bush, it had not been the, then, newly minted Republican Deputy Attorney General briefing FBI Counterintelligence. Back in 1981, it had been the DAG who had brought to the FBI Reagan's top secret executive order 2579. That was supposed to coincide with a briefing by Soviet KGB defector, Nikolai Timoshev - but he had been a no show. Timoshev was supposed to have been the star guest.
Today in 1992, it was not that. Back in 1981, not only had Timoshev 'disappeared' mysteriously before he could brief the FBI's Counterintelligence group - Timoshev had actually been involved in the Soviet Directorate S, illegals program. He'd been an 'illegals' trainer since the early 1960s with the KGB, and in the 1980s he had decided to come to the West, to be offered truckloads of money by Uncle Sam for this unique, inside intelligence.
This time in 1992 it was the New York FBI Field Office's, Special Agent Nancy Floyd who was briefing the Washington office. She was the east coast's intelligence expert on all things Islamic. She even had a working knowledge of Arabic, a few phrases from which was how she started her Washington D.C., top-secret briefing. After being 'read-in', all the capital region's FBI Counterintelligence people were in attendance…
…... including Stan Beeman. After all Beeman had been through, after the 1987 'Operation Harvest' debacle, let's just say…. by 1992, he was just so damned exhausted.
As Beeman listened, he noted that now in 1992, Nancy Floyd was doing what used to be done by Deputy Attorneys General! And a woman was doing it, in the FBI! Hoover's FBI was changing, with formerly unimaginable staffing changes…. women and minorities.
When they got back to their Counterintelligence office at the Hoover Building, they were prevented from going to their desks, so they just stood there in the office, watching. There were 'technical upgrades' delaying things that day. Even Special Agent, former Counterintel Division-head Dennis Aderholt was halted. He turned to his colleague, Stan Beeman, and said, "what do you make of this retooling within the Bureau?"
Stan Beeman, he just took in a long breath, then let it out as a weak sigh, fluttering his lips as it puttered out.
The upgrades? He didn't like them, but no one had asked him. Add to it all, was Beeman's chronic fatigue. He noted that Floyd's briefing had not mentioned Russians once. That meant that Beeman now was now even farther away from 'closure' than ever, whatever that was. But being FBI, he did not dwell on his internal psychological conflict. Special Agents of his vintage, they left 'feelings' off site.
He said, "Dennis, you know me, I'm an old Cold Warrior. The USSR may be gone, but Oleg Burov is still in super-max, and the Jennings are now eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in Red Square."
"Look at you, Stan!" Aderholt quipped, knowing full well that it was a bottomless well to talk with his friend about those days. "Look at you, mentioning the Jennings! I'm proud of you, Stan, I really am. That took a while." Dennis paused for a second, "you're not going to start up with the obsession again?"
Had Beeman ever not obsessed about his now long gone, old pal, Philip Jennings?
"Take a look at our desks, Dennis. We've got techies half our age underneath them, attaching wires to computers. A 'personal computer', one on each desk. I don't even know what they do. It's supposed to help us. If you ask me, all computers do is allow you to screw up faster!"
Dennis paused, knowing that it was going to be another ten minutes before they could get back to work. Indeed, even the Vault was closed this week for computer installations within. Stan and Dennis, they literally had no place to go except stand in the exact spot they were in.
Especially if they were going to get around to comparing notes about what Special Agent Floyd had just read them in on. All of that was top secret, not to be discussed outside of the office.
"You know what I found out, Dennis?" Not waiting for a reply, Beeman continued, "Henry - Henry Jennings, he told me something a while ago, something I'd not known about his parents. My god, that boy is still beating himself up about Mr & Mrs Jennings." Letting out another heavy sigh ending with the same lip-flutter, Beeman continued, "it reminded me of something… so you know what I did? I went down to evidence-archives to pull a box about Operation Harvest….."
It was Dennis's turn to become uncomfortable. He had been demoted because of the debacle Operation Harvest had become. He had told his wife, Janine, that he'd been lucky to avoid being drummed out of the Bureau all together, much less perhaps facing criminal charges himself.
All he said, though, was, "okay, touché, Stan, touché. I actually no do not want to know what you found in that box."
Stan smiled, "both you and me, Dennis. Both you and me." Stan paused, then added, "it wasn't there. The box was gone. None of them were there. I asked the archivist what had happened to them, that I needed them. You know what he said?"
Not waiting for Aderholt to reply, he simply pointed to the technicians below their desks, installing computers and generally inhibiting them from doing any actual work.
"He said he didn't know where they were," Beeman said. "He said he didn't know. I mean, this is 'evidence' we're talking about. Evidence. From only five years ago! Said they probably had gone to a secure facility in either Maryland or Virginia as part of the Department's commitment to computerization of all our data."
Beeman paused, then said, "I asked him what that did to the chain-of-possession of evidence, if something in those boxes ever made it to court. All he did was shrug his shoulders."
"You know what, Dennis? Operation Harvest, it now officially doesn't exist. Without those records, it never did. Hey, maybe you can now get your old job back!"
SPECIAL AGENT NANCY FLOYD'S INTEL, A DAY AT THE OFFICE
This is what Aderholt and Beeman heard at the top secret, 'Timoshev 2.0', Islamic terrorist briefing.
In New York, she had been 'running' a former Egyptian army officer, someone who had distinguished himself in 1973's Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel - where he'd held 17 Israeli commandos prisoner, but had ordered his men to comply with their POW, Geneva Convention rights.
This Egyptian had since emigrated to America, settling in New York and becoming a private security officer. Now, in 1992, with the FBI's help, he had penetrated a local cell of Islamic terrorists, who had the goal of blowing up some high value, Manhattan target.
The man was now head of hotel security at some unnamed hotel in Manhattan. Floyd herself had helped him supply the Islamic cell with 'phony powder', to be used as a pseudo-active ingredient for the bomb itself. The FBI, she said, would neither confirm nor deny that the powder had not been 'phony', or that she might have supplied the man with actual urea-nitrate hydrogen gas, which would have provided 'quite a punch' to any explosive device.
It would be big enough to take out even the largest of New York's landmarks. Which, as history was to record, it nearly did.
At the end of her top secret briefing, she shifted gears to overseas. Special Agent Floyd remarked about a Saudi national, now in the Sudan. Seven feet tall, richer than stink, and requiring bi-weekly kidney dialysis. The most radical of an otherwise well embedded and quite large Saudi family, the bin Ladens.
But even with that reputation, strangely he was a hard man to find.
From that ultra-wealthy, Saudi bin Laden family, he had garnered a reputation among jihadists for funding the push of the old Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.
This 'bin Laden guy', as she called him, was in 1992 seen as a hero to the United States. Floyd disagreed. She said he needed to be on every intelligence agencies' watch list. She'd said, "whatever it is we're uncovering from our New York field office about home-grown terrorism, what's happening right now in the Middle East, it's paramount that we watch that!"
FALLS CHURCH
On his way back to Falls Church for dinner, a football game in TV and then bed, Stan Beeman mused about that day at the office.
As he turned into the road to his calm, lazy and placid Falls Church neighbourhood, he heard himself saying out loud, "Jesus Christ, the Cold War really is over. If I wanted to reopen anything from even five years ago, the record is not even there any more! And these goddamned computers, they're taking over. Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned hunches, and gum-shoe, shoe-leather investigations?"
As he pulled into his driveway, he did something he'd not done in four years. He parked outside his garage, but this time he faced the empty lot across his placid, lazy suburban street. He'd not parked like that since 1987. He'd not been able to look across the street, not since Christmas of that year.
Back then, a house had stood there. Not any more. It once was like his own house, his own home when Sandra and Matthew had been together. Both were homes meant for young families, meant for back-yard BBQ's, two storeys, a garage, basement laundry, with its occupants maintaining a green lawn, and making sure their picket fence was painted, a bright white.
Keeping up with the Joneses, as they used to say.
In 1988, The FBI had stripped that house to its wires and studs, leaving nothing but a crater. The debris had been trucked to an abandoned Maryland airplane hangar, sifted through like fine soil meant for a garden. The grounds around the house had been scoped with ground penetrating radar.
Backhoes had eventually leveled the place, and had dropped ground level four or five feet.
Since, the City of Falls Church, it had not renewed any building permits there. While technically not a park, eventually the city maintained it as if it was one. Long time neighbours, though, they avoided the place.
As Beeman sat in his car and looked, the ache in his stomach returned, it became too much. He felt like he was going to vomit. The paralyzing anger returned, as if it had been yesterday. It was now 4 1/2 years since that that house had been demolished brick by brick, but the feeling which returned was as fresh now as they had been then.
Acidly fresh. He felt it on his grip on the steering wheel.
Now? Now, his world was officially out of date. His hatred of all things Soviet was now being eclipsed by America's growing Islamophobia. Even the records of those days of warfare with communists, even they were being snowed under, with so-called 'modernization' and computerization. So much for the little Russian he had learned, the lingua franca for the FBI was fast becoming Arabic.
Beeman burned so fiercely he did something he'd not yet done. Not when Sandra had left him, not when Burov had pulled a gun on him in a lonesome D.C. alleyway, not even since his second wife, Rene, had mysteriously left him.
He cried. He wept anger-fueled tears alone in the car. Through this rage, Beeman changed gears by sobbing bitterly and loudly, right there squeezing his sterring wheel, on his own driveway in otherwise placid Falls Church.
"Jesus fucking Christ," Beeman cursed to no one in particular. "I'm really losing it. What the fuck am I doing hanging on in Counterintel? No one wants to hear my hunches, not anymore. Even Aderholt, he thinks I'm a fossil."
At that his front door opened, and he saw the figure in his rearview mirror. It was Henry Jennings.
"Hey, Stan, don't just sit there. The game's on inside. I've made dinner!"
Before he could answer, Stan heard himself say, "I am so fucking exhausted."
PIKE'S PLACE FARMER'S MARKET
Elizabeth: There you are. I thought you'd be late. Thought you'd be checking out that Starbucks place across the street. It's so American. Watch my words, it'll grow like a weed. You're a natural.
Philip: - sitting with his fish lunch - Elizabeth, is this what I'm going to be bombarded with? You sound like Claudia. What are you going to do, have me waterboarded, like last time?
Elizabeth: - annoyed - I'm just saying, Philip. You're the American. Eat your lunch.
Philip: I just wanted to say that we're okay with the bank. We can now go shopping for office space, for a travel agency. Today was the big test, neither you nor I need to head for SeaTac airport, we don't need to flee to Shanghai. This time next year, we'll be embedded.
Elizabeth: Yeah, as long as no one from D.C. comes to the fish market here in Seattle. Are Americans so stupid not to notice that Boris and Natasha, that we're back? - pause, then quietly - When do you think we can approach either Pige or Henry?
Philip: -sigh - First things first, dear. I told you, it's holding. That's what needs to happen first. You can suspend your disbelief. If we're clear with the bank, we're clear.
- Elizabeth stiffened, purposely looked only straight ahead -
Philip: - knowing the cue, as his on-the-ground instincts were quickly returning, he said softly - What?
Elizabeth: We're 'clear'? Don't turn around, but about a dozen tables down the concourse…. Rene Beeman.
Philip: Don't screw around, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: I'm not. - pause - How many minutes is it by taxi from here to SeaTac?
In 1992, it was not like the last time they'd embedded themselves back in 1965. Back then they'd mostly been scared.
Now? They felt so goddamned exhausted.