James Rawles - Liberators

Unlike the smaller Washington office, the Sunnyvale Tall Oak office was considered a Continuous Operation, with a SCIF operated twenty-four hours a day. It was located in a large, nondescript one-story office building with a sign vaguely identifying it as Williams Design Group. The front lobby had the familiar “California Corporate” look, but just to the right of the front desk was a heavy door that led to a Honeywell Man Trap entrance. Beyond that was a three-way hall intersection that led to the nonsecure offices on the right and left, and to the SCIF, directly ahead. The core of the Sunnyvale building was a forty-five-hundred-square-foot windowless SCIF, which included an open-storage workroom.

Silicon Valley was a major target for foreign industrial espionage. The Beehive was located just a mile from Apple Computer’s recently completed main headquarters building, “The One Ring.” The Sunnyvale staff enjoyed warm weather and blue skies but also suffered a lot of traffic snarls. Their FBI counterparts were located nine miles away in Campbell, California. Nine miles was considered a just barely comfortable distance. The Beehive wanted to keep relations between their respective operations “courteous but distinct and geographically detached.” Privately, they considered the FBI’s CI agents a posse of bumbling buffoons.

Similarly, the Tall Oak–Washington staff at JBLM was happy to have the nearest FBI office thirty-eight miles away, on Third Avenue in downtown Seattle. Ironically, the Tall Oakers actually had much more cooperative working relationships with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in Burnaby, British Columbia. As Phil put it, “At least the Canadians know how to keep their mouths shut.” On many occasions, they had proven themselves worthy of mutual respect.

Tall Oakers worked in plainclothes and investigated national security crimes and violations of the UCMJ, within U.S. military CI jurisdiction. But unlike their active-duty army “Strat” CI counterparts, the Tall Oakers had more of a focus on industrial espionage. Their “cover” story at JBLM was that they exclusively did purely preventive work like SAEDA briefings. But in actuality, their lives were a bit more exciting, but only occasionally dangerous.

The acronym CI/HUMINT was often spoken in the same breath, but the two roles were actually distinct. The old saying in the Army intelligence community was, “If you want to try to do some Agent 007 stuff, then go HUMINT. But if you want to try to catch people who are trying to do 007 stuff, then go CI.” The rule was that a HUMINTer couldn’t do investigations and a CI special agent couldn’t do interrogations. With Task Group Tall Oak, Washington, that distinction was blurred, since some of their taskings were HUMINT (rather than CI), and the Tall Oakers did indeed interrogate turned assets.

The leeway in Tall Oak’s mission came by virtue of both their specific taskings and the fact that they were contractors , selectively operating under either Title 50 or Title 10, as needed. (Title 50 was the portion of the U.S. Code that governed the legal authority of the CIA, NSA, and NRO, whereas Title 10 governed and authorized the Armed Forces.) It also helped that their chain of command jumped directly to DIA headquarters at JBAB in Washington, D.C., rather than being under the control of a regional Army command.

The Tall Oak staff was supplemented by nine part-time contractors. The part-timers all held at least secret-level clearances but only two of them had top secret clearance and SCI access. These “ad hocs” were used primarily for stakeout surveillance and maintenance of stakeout video cameras. Most of them had prior service as NCOs in the Military Intelligence or Civil Affairs branches. Just one of them was a former MP who had only a few months of CID experience, but he was recruited because he had a lot of combat experience in Afghanistan, and because he spoke some Arabic and Pashto without the benefit of any formal training.

The ad hocs lived in a tenuous netherworld. In some weeks they might not work at all, but in others they could work as many as seventy hours. They were paid well (on an hourly basis, at forty dollars per hour), but the job carried no benefits, and it had a few risks. One of the reasons that the ad hocs were at risk was that they were not allowed to carry badges and credentials. In a few instances, this led to some dangerous unintended confrontations with local law enforcement and, on one occasion, with FBI agents.

While they were careful to schedule most of their arrests in conjunction with the FBI, the majority of their “street” time was entirely under Tall Oak tasking, with no coordination with the FBI, and only minimal supervision from DIA headquarters. They had hardly any contact with the CIA, save for a few instances where “handoff” was required when tracking the movement of suspects into Canada. This also meant liaison with the Canadian CSIS, whom the Tall Oakers referred to as “The Burnaby Boys.”

They even had a bit of interplay with local police departments—most notably the DuPont, Washington, Police Department. The liaison with police departments was mainly to coordinate arrest and search warrants, which were normally exercised by the FBI.

The agents all carried compact SIG P228 pistols, designated the M11 by the military. But they used Winchester Ranger STX 9mm hollowpoint ammunition. Even after the DCS transition, their office still bought commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) ammo. Once, that nearly cost them an inspection “gig” when an inspector thought that he knew a regulation that didn’t exist.

For his personal use Phil bought a used, mechanically identical pistol at a gun show. Other than being made of stainless steel and having tritium night sights, it was almost identical to his issued SIG. He also bought four twenty-round factory SIG magazines to carry for his backup magazines, at his own expense. (For his quarterly shooting “quals,” he used only the standard-issue thirteen-round magazines.)

Phil’s position at Tall Oak was a sure means of escape from the endless merry-go-round of deployments to Southwest Asia. Although still officially in a U.S. Army Reserve Control Group, his “position in the national security interest” with Tall Oak meant that he could not be recalled to active duty for anything short of World War III.

The second week after Malorie arrived at the McGregor ranch, they had another raid drill. The first one had been called during breakfast, and it was both comical and slow, since they had to make two sets of tableware disappear. But this drill, which was held at 11:00 A.M., was a lightning-fast and well-orchestrated success. Malorie, Phil, the intel cardboard boxes, and the guns were closed up in the closet very quickly.

Just after Phil had emplaced the wedges “by Braille,” Malorie reached out and took his hand in the darkness. A few moments later they were silently holding both of each other’s hands. Then they were kissing.

Ray spoke toward the bookcase in a loud voice. “Okay, all clear. We set a new record: forty-three seconds. You can pull the wedges.”

There was no response.

Ray repeated, now shouting, “I said , you can pull the wedges now!”

Malorie shouted, “Give us a minute. We’re busy kissing.”

Ray shook his head and muttered, “Well, I guess the best man won.”