3185304876—3184690284—4007986133—4013337810—4042991331—4041179553—4192578423—5567208212—6501740917—6500415280—7298472436—7297786130
I know the Department of Defense is a law-abiding and ethical institution. I appreciate your attention to these matters.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Not surprisingly, the letter was unsigned. The envelope carried a Salt Lake City postmark and the same Courier twelve-point font. No return address.
Four thick lines of classification were stamped across the top of the letter:
TOP SECRET/SCI/ PLASMA/76G
NOFORN/NOCON
DISTRIBUTION BY DCI ONLY
And just in case the message hadn’t gotten through: PRINCIPALS ONLY.
Shafer read the letter through twice. He was examining it a third time when Lucy Joyner, the CIA inspector general, reached across the table. “Time’s up,” she said.
Joyner was a tall, round Texan whose curly hair was dyed a striking platinum blond. She investigated internal allegations of wrongdoing at the agency, a job that made her as popular at Langley as a police officer at a pro-hemp rally. She couldn’t fit in, so she’d taken the opposite route. Her hair was defiance in a Clairol bottle. We’re here, we’re the IG’s office, get used to it.
“I’m a slow reader,” Shafer said.
She waggled her fingers at him, and he handed it over. They were in a conference room in Joyner’s office suite, on the sixth floor of the Old Headquarters Building. A framed map of Texas hung on one wall, beside a photo of Lyndon Baines Johnson wearing a cowboy hat and holding his dog, Little Beagle Jr.
“Can I see the original?” Shafer said.
Joyner had shown him a high-resolution copy of the letter, which was locked in her safe. “Nothing on it,” Joyner said. “No fingerprints or DNA. Whoever sent them was awful careful.” Joyner hadn’t lived in Texas in twenty-five years, but she sounded like she’d just gotten off a plane from Amarillo. Shafer wondered if she practiced at home. Bar-be-cue. Fixin’s. Largemouth bass.
“What about the other letters?” Shafer said. “To Gates and Duto and Whitby?”
“Destroyed. I asked Duto about it; he told me his office gets all kinds of crazy mail. Can’t check everything. Yeah, well, my office gets nutjob letters, too, but we know when one’s real. And so do they.”
“Except when they’d rather not.”
“This conversation shouldn’t be happening,” Joyner said. “Lucky for me, you have that super-fancy clearance.”
“They keep forgetting to take it away.”
“So, I don’t need permission to show you this. And I remember how they treated you after nine-eleven, Ellis. Which is to say I think we’re on the same side. But most of what you want to know, I can’t tell you. You have to go to the source for that.”
“A couple of questions.”
“Just a couple.”
“Murphy told me you’d cleared him.”
“Did he, now.”
“I’m guessing that isn’t exactly accurate.”
“It is and it isn’t.”
“How far did you get?” Shafer asked.
“He came in for a prelim—”
“A prelim?”
“A preliminary interview. No lie detector, no lawyers. It’s optional, but most folks agree to ’em, because if we can get our questions answered then, nothing gets into your file, nothing for the boards”—the promotion boards—“to see. Anyways, he came in. I showed him the letter, asked him if he could tell me anything. He said he couldn’t. I asked him whether 673’s records would exonerate him. He said it didn’t matter, because they were DD-and-above clearance”—that only deputy directors and Duto himself could see them. “I asked him about the torture. He told me that he was administrative, didn’t run interrogations. Then I asked him about receipts and he laughed. Literally. Laughed out loud. Asshole. That was it. He left. I figured I’d better check it out. But before I got anywhere, Duto called.”
“When, exactly?”
“Maybe two days after I spoke to Brant. He told me to find something else to do, that he was invoking the NSE”—the national security exemption, which allowed the director to overrule the inspector general and stop internal investigations if they were likely to damage vital national interests.
“Duto didn’t tell you what was behind the NSE.”
“He did not.”
“And that was it?”
“I’m not like you, Ellis. I get a direct order from the director, I listen. I called Murphy, told him not to worry. A couple of days later, his lawyer called, told me that wasn’t good enough, that Murphy wanted all records of the investigation destroyed.”
“Smart.”
“Yes. Too bad for him, I was able to tell him that wouldn’t be possible, that I had to hold the letter because of the allegations of torture, et cetera. So the lawyer asked me to certify that I had cleared Murphy of any wrongdoing related to 673. As an insurance policy, he said.”
“Without specifying what the wrongdoing actually was.”
“Correct, Ellis.” She paused. “So, I wrote it. Murphy had Duto on his side, and I figured it was more important to make sure this”—she looked at the letter—“survived. Then I locked that letter up and forgot about it. Though not entirely. I knew somebody would call. Sooner or later. Stuff like this doesn’t stay down forever.”
“You heard what’s happened with 673,” Shafer said. “The murders.”
“The day after Fisher and Wyly got killed, Duto called me to his office. I knew something was up, because normally he prefers to stay as far from me as possible. Anyway, he told me. Said there was an investigation starting up.”
“So, the FBI has the letter.”
Joyner shook her big blonde head. “Not exactly. Duto asked me whether I’d talked to the bureau. I said, how could I have done that when you just told me there was an investigation going. Then he told me that he was not authorizing distribution of the letter to anyone outside the agency.”
“Including the bureau.”
“Correct. Nobody had the clearance, he said. I had the distinct impression he wanted me to destroy the letter, but he didn’t come out and say so.”
“Did he ask you to purge it from your memory? Eternal sunshine, et cetera?”
“Not yet. That’s probably next.”
“He tell you his logic for hiding evidence in a criminal investigation?”
“He did not. If I’d asked, no doubt he would have pulled out the ol’ national security exemption, but I did not ask.”
“And he didn’t explicitly tell you to destroy it.”
“You know Vinny Duto better than that, Ellis. That would have needed to be in writing, and he wasn’t interested in having this in writing. And then, to my not quite surprise, you called.” She paused. “Wish I could be more helpful, but that’s pretty much all I have.”
“Do you think there’s a connection between the torture allegations and the theft?”
She tilted her head and clucked—chk-chk. “Aside from the fact that the same person’s making them? No. I mean, Murphy was worried about the money. Less so about the torture. You’d expect it would be the other way around.”
“It’s a strange letter,” Shafer said.
“Very strange. It reads like the writer didn’t grow up speaking English. The bolding, the capitalized words. But I think all that’s fake. It feels like it’s from somebody inside the squad. I can’t think how else anyone would have the specifics, the prisoner numbers.”
“If you worked for a foreign intelligence agency.”
“Maybe the Brits,” Joyner said. “But probably not even. Now do me a favor, figure this out, since I’m not allowed to.”