Compromised

Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump

Peter Strzok

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780358645511
• eBook ISBN: 9780358237532
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The "compelling" New York Times bestseller by the FBI counterintelligence agent who opened the investigation into Russian election meddling ( The Washington Post).
From "the FBI agent who started it all" (David Martin, CBS Sunday Morning), this is an epic, behind-the-scenes account of the biggest counterintelligence story of our time: Russia's war on American democracy, and the effort to hold Putin's collaborators to account.
When he opened the FBI investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Peter Strzok had spent over two decades defending the United States against foreign threats. His long career in counterintelligence ended shortly thereafter when he was forced out of the Bureau for privately voicing his political opinions about Donald Trump. But by that time, Strzok had seen more than enough to believe that the country's new commander in chief had fallen under the sway of America's adversary in the Kremlin.
Now, with a new afterword about the aftermath of Trump's presidency, Compromised draws on lessons from Strzok's long career—from his role in the Russian illegals case that inspired the TV series The Americans to his service as lead FBI agent on the Mueller investigation—to construct a devastating account of foreign influence at the highest levels of our government and to reveal the lingering implications for our national security.
"This is the book I have been waiting for." —Rachel Maddow
"Peter Strzok stands for an FBI that, whatever its faults, serves the nation rather than a political master. G-men have become the Henry Fondas, the Jimmy Stewarts, of the present day—the true believers in an archaic code." — The Atlantic

Part I

1

Ghost Stories

From the driver’s seat of my white Dodge Intrepid, I could see the loading dock and the back door of a local bank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On a frosty Tuesday night in January 2001, I sat crammed in the sedan with four other agents, parked in a narrow alley that emptied into Harvard Square, headlights off and engine running. Our battery chargers glowed softly orange in the dark as we topped off power to our phones and cameras and radios, juicing them up one by one using the single cigarette lighter. We wore “soft clothes”—nondescript street clothes, jeans, jackets with lots of pockets, and low boots—so we wouldn’t stand out on the street. Backpacks and black Pelican cases containing delicate equipment filled the trunk, our laps, and every other available space in the car. As we waited, I fiddled with the heat, trying to find the sweet spot that would ward off the cold without fogging the windows.

We had carefully chosen the timing of the operation. During the day, tourists and students and buskers packed Harvard Square. We had cased the bank, driving and walking by at all hours, noting when the students emptied out of the bars and restaurants and the foot traffic to the nearby apartments was light. After weeks of spot surveillance, we chose a Tuesday night as the time when our five-member crew was least likely to be seen on its mission to sneak into this bank branch and crack a safety deposit box deep inside an underground vault, which we suspected contained evidence in the biggest spy case of the new century.

The minutes ticked by. I periodically glanced in the rearview mirror. As expected, the alley was quiet and still.

Sometime before midnight, the cleaning crew filed out of the back of the bank, loaded their vacuum, mops, and buckets into a truck, and drove away. We waited a few minutes longer, to make sure they didn’t return for a forgotten item. Then we gave the signal to one of the bank’s managers, who had been sitting in a car in front of us.

This was the first time I had broken into a bank, so it helped that it was an inside job. A few weeks earlier, my partner, Carl, had approached the manager with a highly sensitive search warrant giving us authority for what we were about to do. A few wary conversations and a meeting with the bank’s attorneys confirmed the legality of what we were doing. It helped that Carl was a gruff New Englander from Foxborough who had cut his teeth on Soviet counterintelligence work in New York. His terse and direct manner, along with a carefully groomed white beard and hair, evoked a South Boston Ernest Hemingway. The manager became a reluctant participant, harboring a mix of curiosity and a commonsense desire to have nothing to do with it. Tonight he sat listening to his car radio as he waited with us for the cleaners to leave. Behind us, a locksmith’s truck made up the third vehicle in our convoy, carrying a quintessential older Boston Irishman who still had a noticeable brogue.

The manager got out of his car and walked to the loading dock. We knew from scouting the inside of the bank on prior surveillances that the safety deposit boxes were in a vault at the bank’s left rear, down a half flight of stairs. The sightlines weren’t in our favor—the bank’s wide front windows looked out on Massachusetts Avenue, with a clear view back toward the stairwell. But a small alcove beside the vault door was large enough to get everyone and our equipment down onto the lower landing and out of sight of the Harvard Square traffic.

From the car we watched the manager unlock the bank’s back door, disappear inside to make sure the alarms and cameras had been deactivated, and come back out. We looked up and down the quiet back street: no pedestrians. We climbed out of the sedan into the cold January air, distributed all the equipment cases and backpacks among the five of us, and walked quickly up the loading dock and through the back door, with the manager leading the way.

The bank was quiet and still. The branch kept the lights on all night for security, and the overhead glare added to a sense of exposure. We slipped past empty administrative offices toward the front, edging close to the high-ceilinged lobby area, mindful of the short but nakedly open gap between us and the stairs descending to the vault. With a glance to the street, we crossed the open area and took the stairs down to the alcove and its unobserved safety.

Outside the vault, a file cabinet held the safety deposit box access cards, which cataloged who went into the vault to view their boxes and when. We were looking for a box rented by Don Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley. A middle-aged Canadian couple, they lived on Leonard Avenue in mid-Cambridge, and Don attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. They had rented the box shortly after their arrival in Cambridge, and Ann had accessed the box a few times. While we worked at the bank, the couple was at home under observation, FBI personnel from the Special Surveillance Group, or SSG, unobtrusively watching from cars parked along every exit path from their apartment building.

The manager let us into the vault, where row upon row of multisized machined metal boxes showed the paint colors and solid craftsmanship of a bygone era. Each safety deposit box required two keys to open. The bank held one key, which we had. To ensure privacy, the customer held the second key, which we didn’t have. Our locksmith searched through his collection of uncut keys (called “blanks”) for a match, found one, and began to do his painstaking magic, slowly filing down the contours of the blank to match the tumblers inside the cylinder.

While we waited for the locksmith, a member of the team named George leaned over to me. Remember, don’t touch anything—I mean anything—unless you ask me and get my permission, he said sternly. George was a kind, extraordinarily fit agent who controlled his workspace while out on operations like a drill sergeant. He and another member of the team, PJ, were from a group within the FBI laboratory known as “Flaps and Seals,” an old name that stuck through numerous official changes. The name derived from their mission: opening a sealed envelope, cracking open a shipping container, bypassing the alarm system in a locked home, all without leaving a trace. Complicating their job, their adversaries in espionage were trained in detecting intrusion in ways large and small, from memorizing precise placement of papers on a desk to placing a nearly invisible hair on the lip of an unopened dresser drawer, from which the hair would fall when the drawer was opened. I didn’t fully appreciate their work until I watched one of them on a later search, long, slender tweezers in hand, fastidiously replacing dust bunnies at the rear of a computer that we had just searched. A careless motion, a misstep, an inattentive nudge of an object, could ruin an entire mission.

Some people find it easiest just to keep their hands in their pockets, George said.

Our Irish locksmith finished cutting the blank. After he swept up the fine metal shavings from the floor and lip of the box ledge, we turned both keys and eased open the outer door. With the gentleness of a parent moving a sleeping infant from a crib, George gingerly slid the long, slim box from its metal drawer. Then he turned and lowered the box softly onto a lint-free pad he had put on the floor. After a few more minutes of delicate work, he smoothly lifted the front of the hinged top of the box. We peered inside.

At first the contents seemed disappointing. Flaps and Seals photographed the box’s interior and carefully lifted out what was inside. There was a certified copy of Don’s Canadian birth certificate, some other family records, and a wad of cash. And then, at the very bottom, we found a small stack of 35mm black-and-white photo negative strips, about 20 frames or so. Holding them up to the light, we saw something we hardly expected: demure images of a young woman posing in a forest.

In our age of digital photography, many younger people may never have seen or held a film negative. If you have, you know it’s not easy seeing detail in the thumbnail of the frame, because it’s small and the lighting is reversed—what appears light is dark, and what’s dark is light. We didn’t have the luxury of time in the bank, so we photographed the negatives to investigate later. Then Flaps and Seals delicately placed everything back inside the box exactly as before. They returned the box to its drawer and began the process of erasing our presence in the vault. We retraced our steps out into the frigid air of Harvard Square.

Back at our offices in downtown Boston, we studied the photos for a “tell” about their true history. Perhaps the woman in the photos wasn’t Ann—it was hard to tell, as her face was artfully obscured. But why else would Don and Ann have kept the negatives unless it was her? We scoured the background for something that might have been overlooked, an object left in the camera frame or a building in the distance. We studied the trees and their leaves, their bark, anything that would give away something about the location where these photos had been taken, but to no avail.

And then we found what we were looking for. The clue wasn’t the features of the subject or her surroundings but the negative itself. When I examined the images, I noticed something strange. Every strip of film negative had notches snipped out at regular intervals along the bottom. That is, all except one. That one showed a perfectly preserved 20-something woman at the beginning of a life left behind. In that photograph, the notch would have destroyed the edge of that perfect photograph, and so the border had been left untouched to preserve the photo intact.

Printed in tiny letters on the uncut border of that single frame, we saw a word we didn’t recognize: TACMA. It was the spot on the border where in the U.S. you would see the word Kodak, identifying the make of the film. None of us had heard of Tacma. Research didn’t turn up anything either.

Then one of us realized that in Cyrillic, a C transliterates as an S, rendering the word TASMA.

Tasma was one of the oldest camera film companies in the former Soviet Union.

After millions of rubles of training and years spent carefully infiltrating the U.S., there on the negative, sitting in a subterranean vault just miles from where the United States was born, Don and Ann had left us the very thing we had broken into the bank to find: evidence linking them to their secret motherland, Russia.

The Long Game

My counterintelligence career began with Russians, and it ended with Russians. The uncloaking of Donald H. Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley, two Russian intelligence officers who presented themselves to the world and their own children as an unassuming Canadian scholar married to a real estate agent, was but one of the many times in my service at the Bureau that I helped to uncover Russian intelligence operations within the United States. What we did in this case, later known as Ghost Stories, represents the kind of solid counterintelligence work that is a core part of the FBI’s national security responsibilities. It was a memorable case, to be sure, but only a microchapter in a long and storied geopolitical struggle between these two world powers, the United States and Russia.

A brief background discussion of intelligence and counterintelligence is necessary to understand the context of this book. While the wary dance between our two nations plays out in the open and in the headlines, it also unfolds out of sight and under cover. In this century-old game of cat and mouse, each nation attempts to tap the secrets of the other while at the same time trying to foil the efforts of the other. Counterintelligence work against countries like Russia and, more recently, China never finishes; it endures without beginning or end. In this clandestine twilight of intelligence and espionage, no allegiances are above suspicion, no information is ever completely certain. Identities shift and change. What appears obvious from one perspective shatters and falls away when viewed from a different angle. Everything is built on sand. Intelligence officers change and special agents come and go, but the game goes on.

For the most part, intelligence work remains out of sight. Unknown to the public, counterintelligence investigations are going on around them in scores of cities across America each and every day—until that silence is broken with news of a spy being arrested or with the exposure of a ring of foreign agents. Or, more recently, when a hostile nation engages in a multipronged attack on our presidential elections, thrusting discussion of the ins and outs of the hidden world of counterintelligence into the public’s imagination.

Understanding the FBI’s work in counterintelligence—known as “CI” within the U.S. intelligence community—means understanding intelligence. Intelligence is tricky to define. Ask a hundred professionals to explain it and you’ll get a different answer from each person. My definition of intelligence is this: clandestine activities conducted by or on behalf of a country to convey a strategic advantage to its nation.

Counterintelligence is the effort to thwart an adversary’s secret intelligence work. It has proactive aspects, such as protecting the targets of an intelligence service before they come under attack. It also has reactive elements, such as blocking or neutralizing what foreign intelligence services and their domestic assets are already doing. (Counterespionage—related but different—is catching U.S. spies who provide information to a foreign nation, usually, but not always, with the goal of trying to prosecute them.)

There is a tension between gathering counterintelligence information and stopping the harm being done by hostile intelligence activity. Similarly, prosecuting a case in court is almost always at odds with protecting sensitive intelligence sources and methods. The rules of evidence and adversarial defense work simply do not lend themselves to keeping secrets secret.

But criminal prosecution is only one of many tools for combating an intelligence threat. Pure counterintelligence work doesn’t require agents to gather proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime took place; it just requires them to countervail the hostile intelligence activity, quietly and hopefully unnoticed. Rather than prosecuting those involved in the hostile activity, counterintelligence agents can try to turn defense into offense. We can introduce false information to lure an enemy into believing something that isn’t true. Or we might confront our U.S. subjects, finding a way to get them to come clean and doubling them back against their handlers—the foreign intelligence officers who were running them—to learn more about the foreign intelligence service, what it wants, and the tradecraft it is using to handle its sources.

At the end of the day, though, what separates an FBI counterintelligence agent from most of the U.S. intelligence community is the possibility of his or her work leading to prosecution of suspected wrongdoers in U.S. courts. The evidence developed during our counterintelligence investigations may form the basis of a legal action in which it must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has taken place. And the evidentiary rules of a U.S. court must be followed in establishing that laws were broken. Unlike the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which conducts intelligence activity but has no direct law enforcement role, the FBI is a Janus-like entity, with both intelligence and law enforcement roles.

In short, we want to stop spies like Don and Ann, but we also might have to bring them to a judge in handcuffs or prove to a jury that they violated United States law. That requires detailing with precision, in an open way consistent with our system of justice, what we know and why we know it, subject to the rigors of adversarial defense questioning. In many ways it’s the antithesis of the clandestine nature of most intelligence work. Regardless of what we do, it must accord with U.S. law, a requirement absent from much of the intelligence community’s work overseas.

The FBI has the lead role in conducting counterintelligence within the U.S., although it is not the only federal agency that does this important work. While all member agencies of the intelligence community have critical counterintelligence functions, the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) play an outsized role alongside the FBI in performing the bulk of the nation’s counterintelligence work. All three of these agencies have an especially important role to play in counterintelligence, and often do it hand in hand. But we sometimes have different goals. For example, at its core the CIA collects intelligence; as an organization, information is the coin of the realm. While the FBI and CIA might both be aware of a spy in our midst, the CIA has always been interested in identifying everything we can about the operation: who the spy met; where the spy met his or her handlers; how they communicated; what the spy was tasked to provide. All those pieces of information provide a unique window into the hidden world of a foreign nation’s needs and vulnerabilities.

The FBI collects intelligence too, but the Bureau places a comparative priority on mitigating foreign intelligence efforts. So while watching a spy might be giving us a tremendous window into the clandestine world of a foreign adversary, the spy also likely will be hurting U.S. interests on a regular basis, which we are tasked with stopping. This isn’t to say that the agencies don’t understand each side of the equation, or that one side is more valid than the other—it’s just that there is sometimes a divergence of goals, a disagreement in which the CIA tends to fall on the side of continued intelligence collection or quiet neutralization while the FBI wants not just to stop the bleeding but to arrest and support the prosecution of a spy.

The FBI and CIA also use different terms, which adds to the confusion. First, the word agent. In the FBI, agent generally refers to an FBI special agent, whereas individuals we recruit to work with us are “confidential human sources”—CHSes—or simply “sources.” The CIA and most intelligence services use agent to refer to a human source, not an FBI agent. The CIA complements to FBI special agents are case officers, which the agency refers to as “intelligence officers,” or just “officers” for short.

FBI agents and CIA intelligence officers make up a small component of the people involved in gathering human intelligence. The bulk of actual collection is done—using the FBI’s terms—by sources recruited by agents. Sources fulfill a variety of roles. What popularly comes to mind in public imagination when thinking of a source is a spy, a fully recruited source within the intelligence community, aware of his or her recruitment, responsive to tasking, and handled professionally by an intelligence service. In our time, that’s someone like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen—arguably the most damaging, but also the most rare. But there are a slew of other types, like spotters, who identify others who might be sympathetic to working for us; access agents, who serve to invite us to places or introduce us to others; and agents of influence, who advance a line of thought helpful to us. Their roles are as diverse and arcane as the practice of intelligence itself. One bond unites them: the secrecy of their work for us.

FBI agents and intelligence officers around the world approach people in the same way: what value could this person provide, and what motivations or vulnerabilities does he have that we can use to get him to work with us? FBI sources are motivated by a variety of reasons, ranging from altruistic to cooperative to coercive. Rarely is there one simple motive. I ran sources who worked with us because they were patriotic Americans. Others needed the money we paid them. For still others, our work made them feel valuable, that not only were they making a difference to America but they were doing something exciting and interesting that made them exciting and interesting. I’ve spoken with foreign officials who wanted their children to attend American universities. Others wanted to escape scrutiny and repression from their intrusive government back home.

The FBI has enormous counterintelligence capacity, but there’s a limit to how much we can do, and adapting nimbly to ever-changing threats and priorities is central to our mission. Traditional counterintelligence against so-called symmetric threat activity—symmetric because Russia and its client states, our Cold War adversaries, were similar in structure and operations to ours—includes ferreting out and watching the intelligence officers assigned to the various embassies and consulates throughout the U.S., monitoring visitors with intelligence affiliations, and from that, learning their sources and methods and what they’re trying to collect. Much of this activity is conducted with an eye toward going on the offense, such as recruiting the very intelligence officers we’re investigating or launching a CI operation, like sending in false volunteers or re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Author’s Note
• Introduction
• Part I
• Ghost Stories
• Cake and Handcuffs
• Sea Change
• Part II
• Midyear Exam
• Pandora’s In-Box
• Crossfire Hurricane
• Among Friends
• Constantly Awake
• The Laptop
• Preserve, Protect, and Defend
• The Situation Room
• Part III
• Sentinel
• The Decision
• The Special Counsel
• The Storm
• “That is who we are as the FBI”
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH