EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

UCMJ. If I had known about it, I would have counseled him and responded appropriately.”

Nguyen nodded.

“Thanks for clarifying. Once the formal investigation begins, it will be out of our hands.”

Brett and Nguyen looked at each other before Brett turned to me. “In light of this, we will assume that Captain Chen was under Chinese control, and that the operation is now over.”

“Of course,” I said with a racing heart, still processing the fact that I had just lied to an FBI special agent who was investigating an espionage case.

“We were intrigued to hear about the Chinese using the polygraph to protect their cyber program,” Nguyen said. “This will make it more difficult to penetrate their organization, which is why we were so pleased to catch a break.”

I endured a painful silence, not sure whether I should reveal any optimism.

Finally, to my relief, Brett smirked and gestured for us to follow.

He opened the door as Nguyen led the way into the elevator. Every instinct pleaded with me to ask about the break, but I opted to play along and allow the suspense to build.

The bowels of the FBI Washington Field Office had a polished concrete floor and banks of buzzing florescent lights. We passed a break room where the cleaning staff was joking and laughing during a coffee break, showing a respectful pause as our wooden heels announced the arrival of the suits. Wage-grade employees were unloading boxes at a loading dock. Finally, we entered a vast room where teams of FBI employees were sifting through mounds of garbage.

“Don’t worry,” Nguyen said, “you’ll get used to the smell.”

Brett smirked and led us into an interview room with a box on the table.

“We took advantage of the information you provided about Li’s credit card incident to dedicate more surveillance resources,” he said, opening the lid and gesturing for us to sit.

“As you know,” Nguyen said, “our surveillance of Li has revealed no suspicious activity. In fact, you’re the only person he’s met outside of the Chinese Embassy, so we focused our resources on his wife.”

Brett now took up the story.

“The surveillance team observed Mrs. Li check the mail one morning after Mr. Li drove to work,” Brett said. “After reading the mail, she sneaked out the back door and was seen throwing some papers into the neighbor’s trash.” He reached into the box and set a batch of credit card statements on the table. “As it turns out,” he continued, “she’s been running up credit card bills for clothes, jewelry, and spas since they arrived.”

Now things were all making sense. “Hence, the credit card problems at the gift shop. It’s odd that she thought she could hide these charges by throwing away the statements.”

Brett shrugged. “Who knows? Our surveillance team followed Li to a pawnshop in Chinatown during his lunch. He sold or pawned a few valuables and spoke with a loan shark from Chinese organized crime, so he seems desperate.”

“Corruption is rampant in the Chinese Communist Party,” Nguyen explained. “He would be recalled and his career would end on a bad note if it were discovered that he was taking a loan from organized crime.”

“How much is the bill?” I asked.

“All told, about $120,000,” Brett said, with a mock-sorrowful shake of his head.

“He’s likely getting desperate to pay it off,” Nguyen said.

This was all music to my ears. They looked at me, waiting for me to say something. I leaned forward, hoping I wasn’t misreading them.

“I thought you guys didn’t like coercion? Are you suggesting we blackmail him?” I inquired, barely able to believe what I was hearing.

Nguyen shook his head.

“We didn’t lure him into this, and we won’t threaten to expose him.”

I shrugged and raised my hands in a show of disbelief. Hello—the exact same logic that had motivated me to coerce Captain Chen! “Sure, but the threat is implicit.”

Brett offered a stoic smirk, slowly nodding.

“He might see it that way. We like the risk-gain analysis in this particular case,” he replied.

The “risk-gain analysis” comment implied a coolly rational thought process, but it really meant intuition motivated by hope. “Count me in,” I said, still stunned.

Nguyen handed me the credit card statements.

“You can offer him 120K to pay off the credit card debts and one million if he agrees to work for us, but only if he gives us specific details about his next planned cyberattack.”

FOURTEEN

HUMINT should be a long game, but the bureaucracy often demands digestible pie charts on PowerPoint slides—e.g., how many reports were written last week—rather than asking how many seeds were planted to bear fruit in the future. Intelligence Officers were measured against weekly numbers only when leadership didn’t understand the business.

Many political failures could be traced back to our two-year election cycles, with no incentives to imagine the next generation. Likewise, many intelligence failures could be traced back to our propensity to trade the long game for instant gratification, sacrificing the most important for the urgent.

Intelligence Officers cultivate new sources and write intelligence reports to get promoted, the government version of “publish or perish,” so there was a suboptimal tendency toward harvesting low quality sources—low-hanging fruit—and dishing up low-quality reports.

Faced with the challenge of pursuing someone like Lieutenant Colonel Li or bagging a corrupt official in a Third World country, the latter often got the nod, with a promotion duly being doled out to conjure the illusion of success—wash, rinse, repeat.

Brett and I had taken our shot with Li ten years ago in Islamabad, but that was a classic case of running out of time. I had cultivated other sources along the way to keep my career on track, but needless to say, I’d always regretted not making more progress with Li.

One of the most rewarding experiences of being an Intelligence Officer was watching the world grow small. The average American couldn’t list half the countries on a globe, let alone estimate their populations or discuss their political economy. People who have lived in foreign countries, on the other hand, begin