The Reluctant Spy (15 page)

Pete had headed for the car as I headed down the aisle, and he had it fired up and ready at the church door when Chris and I burst through. We piled in, just as JoAnne ran out, her face a mask of sheer terror. “Go, just go,” I shouted at Pete, and we took off, heading back to New Castle on a crazy-quilt route of back roads I had plotted.

Chris was no longer struggling, but he was upset and breathing quickly. “Honey, I have to explain to you what I just did,” I said. “Your mother was keeping you from me illegally. You're supposed to be with me for this part of the summer, and she wouldn't let me have you. And I came to pick up you and Costa.” It came out in a rush. “Chris, why did you scream at me like that? And why wouldn't you wave at me when I waved at you? What's wrong?”

He said he thought I was a ghost. He said that his mother had told both boys that their father had been killed in a car accident. He thought I was a ghost.

Chris had calmed down; I was boiling inside, as livid in that moment as I had been when this same child had stared up at me while
I was shaving more than a year earlier and recounted his admonition to his mother about “Uncle Stelios.”
What could she have been thinking? It was absolutely nuts. What would she do? Move back to Greece? Go to southern Virginia where her brother lived? Did she really think she could have a life with the children without my being a part of their lives?

My angry and puzzled reverie was broken by the ringing of my cell phone. “John, this is Chief Mandopoulos of the Warren Police Department. I want you to return that child immediately.”

“How dare you call me? I came to you yesterday, and yesterday your people told me no crime had been committed. Well, now I'm telling you no crime has been committed. This is my half of the summer. The children belong with me, not her. If you want anybody returning anybody, you tell her to return Costa to me.”

“Now, I want you to turn around before this gets completely out of hand,” Mandopoulos said. “You know, we're talking about some possible charges here.”

“Forget it, Chief, forget it. You're the chief of police, you know the law. No crime's been committed here. There's no divorce decree, no separation agreement.”

My former mother-in-law filed charges against me the next day—a class D felony for “aggravated menacing.” Really, the statute is on Ohio's books, with conviction punishable by up to five years in prison. She alleged in her sworn statement that I had walked up the center aisle of the church, turned to face the congregation, and shouted, “I'm from the CIA and if anybody tries to stop me, it's going to be a bloodbath in here.”

It was a family affair because JoAnne also got into the act on Monday, June 11, 2001, by filing a request for an emergency hearing on summer custody of the kids. My lawyer promptly filed one on my behalf. A hearing was ordered, to be held in a few days. Mary Jane, my lawyer, called me with some carefully chosen words of guidance: “John, as an officer of the court, I am not permitted to tell
you not to show up at a hearing. What I am permitted to tell you is you don't have to show up at the hearing. And I'm also permitted to tell you that a court clerk called me and said that there's an ambush set for you and that as soon as you walk into the courthouse, they're going to arrest you and charge you with that felony.”

I skipped the hearing. But word got around that there would be quite a show at the courthouse, and more than fifty people showed up. I paid twenty dollars to have the whole thing videotaped, which is a service the courts offer in Ohio, so my attorney had a visual record of the proceedings. Good thing, too: When my attorney announced that I wasn't going to show up for the hearing, a Greek woman slapped Mary Jane right in the face.

The judge verbally clobbered both sides for letting things go this far. Then he lit into JoAnne because it was plain to one and all that we had agreed to my having the kids for half the summer. She said she was deeply upset by my snatching of Chris. Could she have the children for one more day? The judge said yes, but one day only. “Then you turn them over to your husband.” And with that, he dismissed the felony charge against me.

When my parents brought the boys to me forty-eight hours later, Costa rushed into my arms and cried, “Why didn't you take me, too?”

I was tearing up, too. “Honey, I looked so hard and I couldn't find you. But that's why I brought my big friend, because we wanted to take both of you.”

We never did get to Disney World. Instead, my folks and the kids all came down to Washington with me and stayed for a while. I went back to work a couple of weeks later.

I'd been in a funk for more than a year, ever since “Uncle Stelios,” the baker, and my informal probation—my time in the penalty box. Even rejoining the game at work hadn't snapped me out of it.

What did was the entire tragicomedy in Warren, a clarifying episode that made me focus, finally, on what really mattered: ending
a marriage whose only true blessings were two children so precious to me that I would fight in any court and in any divorce proceeding, if that's what it took, to ensure that their lives and my own remained as one.

This was the spring and early summer of 2001, months before the day that would remind all of us how fragile family ties can be and would change all our lives as far out as our shocked minds could imagine.

THE CIA OCCASIONALLY
hosted visiting intelligence services from friendly foreign countries; the idea was to give them a tour of the Operations Center, get acquainted, exchange gifts, meet the director and some other top people if schedules permitted, and take some pictures. We wanted to make them feel welcome and important, and it wasn't a public relations stunt: They
were
important to us because they could be additional eyes and ears in places where our own access was limited by suspicion of the United States, language barriers, and a paucity of our own assets on the ground.

On July 6, 2001, we were hosting a group from a small Middle Eastern state; these were people I'd been training. The group included some relatively low-level military men—a colonel and a couple of majors—but I asked Cofer Black, the director of counterterrorism, if he'd stop by for a meet and greet. These guests were below Cofer's pay grade, but to my pleasant surprise, he agreed to my request. “This is a really big deal,” I told my charges. “He's the head of counterterrorism for the entire world, which makes him a crucial guy in our shop.”

Cofer showed up and shook hands all around, the model of diplomacy in such circumstances. When everyone was seated in a conference room, he formally welcomed them to the CIA and said how much we valued their friendship. Given his schedule, I didn't expect him to hang in for very long with these folks. He'd take a few questions, perhaps, then he'd be out of here.

But Cofer Black, who had a flair for the dramatic in his descriptive
language, was concerned with more than diplomatic niceties that day. He came prepared and delivered a full and detailed briefing on topic A in his universe. The subject was al-Qaeda.

“We know something terrible is going to happen,” he said after some preliminaries about the growing terrorist threat. “We don't know when and we don't know where. We do know it's going to be against U.S. interests and it's going to be big, perhaps bigger than anything we've seen before.” Al-Qaeda, of course, had already hit American targets, including our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing hundreds, and the USS
Cole
at port in Yemen, killing seventeen U.S. Navy seamen and severely damaging the ship. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, had declared war on the United States. Now, the head of counterterrorism was saying there were more attacks coming. The room went dead silent. Cofer had the full attention of our guests.

“The mood in the al-Qaeda training camps is one of jubilation,” he went on. “We've never seen them as excited and as happy as they are now.” Cofer said that the chatter we were picking up was filled with code words and phrases that our analysts regarded as frightening. “There's going to be a great wedding.” “There's going to be a great soccer game.” “The salesman is coming with great quantities of honey.”

“These are all code for a terrorist attack,” Cofer maintained. “We're sure it's going to happen, we just don't know where.”

Then he appealed for their help and cooperation: “If you have any sources inside al-Qaeda, please work them now because whatever it is, we have to do everything we can to stop it.”

The briefing lasted for thirty minutes or so and clearly rattled our visitors. Frankly, it shook me up, too. This was new to me. I hadn't been focused on al-Qaeda prior to this. Cofer invited questions, but no one responded. Finally, the senior member of the group stood up and said he would convey the substance of Cofer's remarks to his intelligence service; they would do everything in their power, he added, to help us.

The guys from the Middle East told me they were so shocked by the power of the briefing that they couldn't even think of any questions. But later on, I had a question for Cofer when I thanked him for his time: “Did you just make that up or embellish the state of play for their benefit, or were you serious in that briefing?”

“Very serious,” he said. He'd been to the White House and he'd talked with Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser to President Bush. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism coordinator in the White House, was also raising the roof, Cofer said, but no one was really paying much attention.

ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
, I put on my best suit and drove to CIA headquarters, arriving at 8 a.m. or thereabouts. It was supposed to be a big day for me: Cofer Black and I were scheduled to go to the White House to talk to Condi Rice on an issue related to my current work—Greek terrorism. The U.S. Government Printing Office was about to publish a volume of cables between the U.S. Embassy in Athens and the State Department in Washington, covering the years 1948 to 1969. Most of the cables were innocuous enough, but CTC's position was that a few of them shouldn't be released because lives might be in danger.

I stopped by Cofer's office to tell him I was ready when he was; he asked that I check with his assistant out front to see where the car and driver assigned to us would be. It could be at any one of a half-dozen different entrances. She had the television on as I approached her desk, the screen lit up with an office tower on fire.

“What's happening?”

“Oh, an airplane flew into the World Trade Center a few minutes ago,” she said matter-of-factly. It was the tone millions of Americans, watching early morning television that Tuesday, used when their regular programming was first interrupted that morning. Most everyone thought it was an accident, likely some amateur pilot who lost control or got way off course, or both. “Oh, you know, that
happened in the 1940s, a bomber flew into the Empire State Building,” I said, making small talk. “Funny, though, it's such a clear day, I wonder how that could have happened.”

She and I were standing there, watching the television at 9:03 a.m. when United Airlines Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center's South Tower, seventeen minutes after American Airlines Flight 11 had slammed into the WTC's North Tower. Neither of us reacted at first. Then she turned and said, “Did you see that?” This time, the emotion in her voice was unmistakable. We both knew this was no accident.

I ran back to my office and alerted our team, then headed back to Cofer's area, where everyone was gathered in front of TVs. There must have been a hundred of us there, including deputy directors of intelligence, operations, and military affairs, and we were all transfixed by the images on the screens. Then, at 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. Finally, someone said what everyone was thinking: “It's al-Qaeda.” And then someone shouted: “Will somebody please lead?”

It was like a slap in the face, and Cofer Black took charge, barking orders to senior and junior people alike and urging everyone else to get out of the building and go home. “Just get out,” he said emphatically. There were still planes in the air, and everyone knew the CIA had to be on al-Qaeda's target list. A key bin Laden aide, Mohammed Atef, one of the planners of the African embassy bombings, had said back in 1993 that he wanted to fly a plane into agency headquarters. (A strike by U.S. forces killed Atef in Afghanistan in November 2001.)

I returned to my office and called Katherine, a CIA analyst who was my new girlfriend and soon to be my fiancée. We'd met in 1997, when she was working on Iraq and I was transferring to the Counterterrorist Center. I didn't see her again until October 2000, when I ran into her at a meeting, reintroduced myself, and invited her for coffee. We wound up talking about my marriage; she let me vent,
proving to be a great listener and offering some gentle advice. I wasn't over JoAnne, but Katherine was patient. We dated on and off for eight months. Then, after the fiasco in Warren, she stopped by my office to ask about the Disney World vacation that never was. When I told her the whole story, she gave me a hug and a big kiss on the cheek. This could be serious, I thought, and I was right: It was.