“Oh, better than that. Mary helped handle the investigation.”
“Tell me about that.”
“She was the one who discovered that some of the betrayals attributed to Ames couldn’t have been done by him.”
“How’d she uncover that?”
“By correlating the events and assumed disclosures against where Ames was at the time, what he had access to. She realized he couldn’t possibly have done all the damage being blamed on him.”
“And that meant… what? Another mole?”
He nodded. “So the Agency put her in charge of a small, very sensitive compartment to find the other mole. It had to be handled quietly, because people on the Hill were so angry about Ames that they were actually talking about disbanding the CIA. The Agency was scared.”
“The CIA’s general counsel intimated you had knowledge of her activities. Did you?”
“Of course. She was my wife, and I was cleared to know everything she was doing.”
“So you knew about her efforts to find the mole?”
“Actually, I was part of those efforts.”
My headache lurched toward a ten on the Richter scale. I drew a deep breath and said, “Please describe that.”
“It started with filters to see how many employees had access to the knowledge that had been betrayed. That turned up a large group, hundreds of people. So Mary came up with the idea to try a few entrapments: We laid bait for the mole. We designed a few operations and distributed some classified assessments to see if any were leaked to the other side. And I was the guy pushing the bait through the system.”
“And then what happened?”
“Causes and effects were built into each entrapment. We watched for the effects, but we never saw any.”
“And what came next?”
“After several years, they decided to move Mary. She’d had her chance and come up short, so they moved someone else in.”
I shook my head while he waited for the next question. Frankly, I already had enough to think about. He and his wife had lain in bed at night talking about how to catch the mole the government now believed was him. His increasingly important positions gave him access to the most sensitive secrets imaginable, and because he was an Army officer, he hadn’t been subjected to the lie-detector tests CIA people take on a regular basis.
As much as CIA people hate them, the truth is that years of passing those tests bends the benefit of doubt in their direction. To the best I could see, my client had no counterweights to sway the benefit of doubt even remotely in his direction.
I got up and began packing my papers in my briefcase. I said, “One last question.”
“What’s that?”
“At Golden’s press conference this morning, he added a charge that confused me. Adultery. What can you tell me about that?”
In the Uniform Code of Military Justice, adultery’s still considered a crime. It’s rarely prosecuted unless the act occurs between two members of the same unit, in which case it affects the general climate of order and discipline, which is one reason why it’s on the books. Or for when a general officer sleeps with a subordinate, in which case it’s viewed as an abuse of power. Or when somebody’s being court-martialed for other crimes, and you add it to the list of charges as a way to say “screw you.”
He finally said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
“You’re sure? I’d hate to get broadsided by some nasty little disclosure here.”
He paused to think a moment, then said, “I had a secretary once who claimed I’d had an affair with her. It was horseshit. The whole thing was thoroughly investigated. There was no substantiation. She was lying.”
“And you think they’re just rehashing some old garbage to add to your charges?”
“It’s the only thing I can imagine. It happened five or six years ago. I was vindicated.”
I nodded and said, “Fine.” Then I leaned across the desk. For obvious reasons, I’d been saving this confrontation for the end. “Last point. If you ever involve me in anything that compromises Mary again, you’ll be looking for a new attorney.”
His head reared back. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When you sent me to ask Mary about Arbatov, you knew damn well the position that put her in. If you weren’t my client I’d knock your ass through that wall.”
He didn’t look at all embarrassed or chagrined. But neither did he try to make any excuses or defend himself. He simply nodded as I walked out.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My late flight back to Washington arrived at eleven. I rushed straight home, climbed into bed, and stared at the ceiling for two hours.
The reason, in a word, was Eddie. I finally had an inkling of his strategy, and it frightened the hell out of me. He was working diligently to make his six-month advantage decisive. He had the momentum and virtually a one-way street on knowledge. Even in the hands of a perfectly average attorney those would be almost insurmountable advantages. Eddie, however, was the Babe Ruth of Army law.
If I didn’t find a line of defense, and damn quick, I’d be trapped in a fog of ignorance when Eddie called with his deal. Even if Morrison did everything they claimed, I obviously couldn’t admit that to Eddie. I needed something plausible-not necessarily persuasive, just… plausible. So what did I have?
Morrison claimed he was framed, and no matter how overused that line was, or how suspect, it still represented a usable alibi. The problem was, it was a possibility that cut two ways. Framed by someone on our side? Or by someone on Russia’s side? And why? Because Morrison knew something and needed to be taken out? A plain and simple grudge? For sport? No small details, these.
It was even possible that this was a particularly excruciating instance of mistaken identity. The government knew it had a mole; it just pinned the tail on the wrong donkey. How do you prove that?
The last possibility was that Morrison had done some sloppy things that were being blown extravagantly out of proportion. Give or take a little, that’s exactly what happened to Wen Ho Lee. Depending on how incriminating those things were, it could still be a catastrophic problem. Did he just forget to close and lock his safe a few times when he left the office at night? Or did he accidentally leave a bundle of Top Secret documents lying on Boris Yeltsin’s desk?
There could be other possibilities, but these were the three that passed the stink test, which, as a wise old law professor of mine defined it, simply meant they stank less than other theories. When operating on conjecture and instinct, this is what legal theology boils down to.
Katrina was in the office when I arrived the next morning, and pacing in the corner was the inimitable Imelda, blowing bubbles with her lips and inspecting the boxes cluttered all over our office. Imelda is very protective of her domain and, like most career Army sergeants, has a tendency to be maniacally prickly about neatness.
She stopped pacing and flapped her arms, threateningly. “Who made this friggin’ mess?”
“Eddie. He’s got a couple of hundred lawyers and investigators cramming every piece of paper they can get into boxes. We’ve gotten three truckloads already. We expect more.”
She kicked a box. “Asshole.”
Exactly. I then led her and Katrina into the office, where I briefed them on what our client told me the day before. I articulated the possibilities I’d pondered, and both nodded frequently, interrupted occasionally, and shook their heads dismally when I was done.
Imelda said, “And you got no notion what’s in them boxes?”
Katrina said, “I’ve been going through them for two days.”
“Findin’ what?” Imelda asked.
“They were tapping Morrison’s phones and had bugs in his office. Thousands of hours of recording transcripts are in these boxes. The few I surveyed confused the hell out of me. I don’t know shit about embassies or attache duties.”
This wasn’t good news. “Anything else?” I asked.