The Dead Drop (30 page)

With his white shirt, briefcase, and careworn expression, Loomis Trench looked like any other middle-aged government employee walking down the street after work. He had a government job with a security clearance, a nice house in a nice neighborhood, a pretty wife, and two grown children attending reputable colleges. Only one detail of his appearance was slightly unusual: he wore a bow tie with his suit instead of a necktie. Loomis liked the notion that wearing bow ties would lead his colleagues to conclude that he adhered to quaint, formal traditions whereas the truth was that he broke the rules as often as possible.

If you observed him very closely (something his coworkers rarely did), you might notice a few tiny clues that he lived a lie: his eyes looked wary behind his rectangular, rimless glasses, and he stared and held his arms rigidly at his sides when he spoke to people, almost as if he wanted to avoid betraying himself with sudden gestures.

Later, when it was all over, his wife would remember odd details: the way he bragged about his children when other adults were around, but then ignored them entirely whenever they had a problem or failed at some pursuit; his delight in knowing obscure facts that nobody else in the office knew (and his willingness to argue for hours if contradicted); his penchant for reading everything he could find about Abraham Lincoln. “Lincoln was actually very misunderstood and unpopular during his own time,” he would often repeat, as if striving to link his own existence with that of a great president.

Still, on the outside, he looked and acted pretty much like everyone else. Nobody suspected that on the inside, he was actually a criminal and a traitor.

During the 1980s, Loomis was a young reports officer working a CIA desk job when he became what the Soviets called a “walk-in”—a man or woman who literally walks into the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C., with an offer to sell classified information. Trench’s motivation was primarily financial: he needed to keep up with his friends by purchasing a big house in a nice neighborhood and a private-school education for his two young children. He had watched younger colleagues receive promotions and raises that eluded him. As his resentment grew, a solution formed in his mind: he would simply sell classified CIA information to the Soviet Union. As long as he ignored the fact that people could actually get killed as a result of his actions, selling American intelligence simply seemed like an easy way to leverage his opportunities to get ahead financially.
No risk, no reward
, he told himself.

“Besides,” he wrote in a journal entry turned over to investigators, “if I can get away with it, it
proves
that I’m smarter than they are. If they had promoted me, I wouldn’t be doing this. The agency deserves whatever happens.”

Gradually, Loomis realized that it was not so much the money, but the
risk itself
that attracted him—the excitement of keeping a very dangerous secret from everyone in his life. When a feeling of malaise descended as he waited in line at Starbucks or sat in his office under fluorescent lights, he could instantly inject a rush of adrenaline into his workday by printing classified information, saving it in a secret pocket of his briefcase, and taking it with him when he left work.

Among his colleagues, Loomis Trench was regarded as a capable but argumentative man who was prone to complaining about coworkers and supervisors. “Loomis always had to be right,” one of his colleagues commented. “If you disagreed with him, the friendship was basically over.” Still, none of Trench’s coworkers viewed him as the type of person who would actually smuggle secrets from the CIA and sell them to a foreign government.

Secretly, Trench knew he was very different from the person his colleagues knew at work. For one thing, none of them guessed at the deep loneliness that kept him looking forward to reading the letters that accompanied thousands of dollars in payment from his secret Russian contacts. “Sometimes I think it’s really these notes more than the money that keep me going,” he wrote. His journals depict the faceless KGB officers with whom he communicated through dead drops as “friends”—pen pals who appreciated him in a way none of his friends, acquaintances, or even family ever could. For Loomis, it was an ideal friendship—a friendship free of conflict, competition, and demands. His Soviet contacts were now his “true friends” and his coworkers at the CIA were the enemies who might discover his secret.

Loomis’s feelings of alienation from the CIA increased toward the end of the Cold War, when a young American case officer named Pete Biebow, who was undercover as a translator and academic, began to receive enthusiastic praise from Loomis’s colleagues in the agency. Based in Moscow and occasionally joking with colleagues that he was independently running his own CIA operation code-named “project Romeo”—a reference to his penchant for accessing information by seducing Soviet women affiliated with the KGB—Biebow managed to cultivate a special relationship with the young, lonely girlfriend of a senior KGB officer—a woman named Svetlana (CIA code name “The Girlfriend”). Secretly in love with the American spy who listened to her, who gave her money, and who tempted her with the possibility of a visa to America and a new life, Svetlana disclosed essentially everything she could find out through her KGB boyfriend about the inner workings and intentions of the Soviet government, often using surveillance equipment obtained from her boyfriend to get photographs of secret documents. She became one of the best assets the CIA had.

Jealous of the CIA’s praise for Biebow and deeply resentful of his amorous adventures, Loomis blew his colleague’s cover to his Soviet contacts:

As a direct result of Trench’s note, Pete Biebow endured harsh interrogation by the KGB, after which he was expelled from the U.S.S.R. By now, Biebow may well have suspected the workings of a mole within the CIA, but upon his return to the relative safety of the United States, the intelligence officer met with a decidedly ironic death. Struck by a Metro bus while crossing a street near Dupont Circle, Biebow was fatally injured. Whatever suspicions he harbored were silenced, and for the time being, Trench’s secret was safe.

Svetlana was found dead with a very unusual gun in her hand—a gold-plated “lipstick pistol” that she acquired from the KGB. Her death was reported in Moscow as a suicide, but the CIA speculated that she was more likely murdered by the KGB.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Trench stopped selling secrets—at least for the time being. For one thing, the KGB was being absorbed into the new Russian government, and for another, Loomis had less need for excitement ever since he had been promoted to working with an exciting project in the CIA called Project STARGATE—a top-secret program to develop psychic spying techniques.

Colleagues speculate that Trench hoped to develop psychic skills for his own personal benefit, thinking that this would be a huge source of power. “He would have loved to perceive exactly what others were thinking before they spoke and to know if anyone had learned about his secret criminal activity,” speculated Jasper Clarke, a retired CIA intelligence officer who previously worked with Loomis Trench.

But Trench’s attempts to develop his own psychic skills failed miserably. As a result, he found himself clashing with the program’s emphasis on routine, protocol, and the idea that “anybody can learn the technique” with the right basic aptitude and training and through diligent practice.

Relegated to the role of supervising and recording the observations of other “remote viewers,” Trench argued that the CIA needed to get some “real” psychics into the program, such as renowned psychic Balthazar Frobenius. “There are people that I believe have special genetic mutations that allow them to perceive information differently,” he wrote in a memo to his supervisors. “If we study people such as Balthazar Frobenius, who has assisted in solving many state and federal crimes nationwide, we may eventually be able to develop a top secret military psychic pill or injection that would enable more ordinary intelligence officers to acquire the brain capability for psychic knowledge.”

From Trench’s perspective, the fact that the program was eventually exposed and even publicly ridiculed was a direct result of the failure of the CIA to take his advice and bring Balthazar Frobenius on board sooner. The official program folded, but Trench argued that he should be allowed to continue his work on psychic spying in secret.

Eventually, Trench received some limited funding to hire a handful of psychics, and he wasted no time in bringing Balthazar Frobenius on board. But it was clear that nobody who had aspirations for career growth in the CIA wanted to be connected with the program. The findings Trench put forward in memos identifying specific overseas targets were viewed with the utmost skepticism, regardless of their accuracy.

Infuriated and humiliated once again, Trench found himself strolling past the Russian Embassy on Wisconsin Avenue more frequently. His wife later remembered how he had compared America to a former friend who had betrayed and humiliated him, and who therefore deserved “some kind of payback.” His journals describe feelings of nostalgia when he walked past his old signal sites—as if he were walking down memory lane, revisiting the favorite haunts of his youth. So far, he had gotten away with his activities as a CIA mole, but he couldn’t resist a compulsion to sell secrets once again.

One day, a Russian diplomat approached Trench at a local park while he watched his teenage children playing soccer.

“I know who you are,” she told him. She handed him a business card. The message was clear: either resume sending us some information or be prepared to have your past activities exposed. Be prepared to go to jail.

“But you don’t understand,” Trench protested. “The program I’m involved in now is different.”

“What program?” The woman handed Trench a paperback book entitled
Surviving the Teen Years: A Parent’s Guide
. He opened the cover and saw that the inner pages had been cut out, creating a little hole that contained money—a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. “We are interested to know whatever you work on.” Her smile was warm. She touched his hand, pressing the book into his palm.

“Something about her smile made me take the money,” Trench wrote. “I miss feeling like someone believes I know something of value.”

Trench agreed to leave copies of “remote viewing” reports in a secret location in Oak Hill Cemetery.“The Cold War may be over,” Trench wrote, “but they’re still just as eager to pay for my information.” He made a point of choosing a location near a tomb where Abraham Lincoln’s son was buried during the nineteenth century.

On a hot July afternoon, Trench parked his car illegally on Wisconsin Avenue, slung his suit jacket over his shoulder to reveal armpit sweat stains and a body that was somewhat pear-shaped due to lack of exercise, then headed toward his signal site—the Alley of the Russian Poets next to Guy Mason Park.

He had chosen the Alley of the Russian Poets for the simple reason that it was convenient—a short walk for his secret contacts at the Russian Embassy. His handlers could easily incorporate checking for his dead-drop signals as part of a casual outing—a stroll with a baby or a short walk on the way to a nearby restaurant.

An added benefit of this signal site was the flattery he received from his Russian contacts for his totally unintended tribute to Russian literature:

 

 

Often, Trench’s messages were encoded within poems or historical letters. The codes were childishly simple, but the literary references were slightly obscure—designed to impress his handlers. The Russian spies had been quick to notice how a few words of praise seemed to double the amount of valuable classified information Loomis provided, so they made sure they piled on the accolades in every correspondence. This flattery was very effective because Trench liked to think of himself as a literary person—someone who might one day write the Great American Novel during his retirement.

Little did Trench know that the letter encoded within an Anna Akhmatova poem would be his last communication with his Russian contacts. He apparently had some inkling that he was “being investigated,” but he misjudged the urgency of the situation.

The CIA had received a tip from two undisclosed sources leading them directly to Oak Hill Cemetery, where Trench made his last information drop and was caught in the act. The authorities were there to meet him.

“We can’t disclose the names of the individuals who led us to Oak Hill Cemetery,” commented a CIA press agent, “but we have a
couple people outside the agency
to thank for helping us wrap up the case.”