Twisted Triangle (6 page)

Margo initially failed to do the requisite number of push-ups, which was twenty-one for women. She also struggled as she learned how to use a shotgun, her eyes welling up with tears of frustration. “I wasn’t seating it right on my shoulder, and as a result, the re-coil was bumping up and hitting me in the cheek, bouncing down

on my shoulder,” she said later.

But Margo buckled down and did what needed to be done. She did not let herself cry, nor did she let any of the exams get the best of her. And after fulfi all the training requirements, Margo vowed never to do another push-up again.

When Ed Tully met Margo in person for the first time, he noticed that she was slight in size, yet she carried herself with confi

“She was a little slip of a girl, but she had a certain quality I was very impressed with,” he said later.

He was also impressed by the way she looked at him. “It was just a determination in her eyes,” he said. “She was very clean, neat, and professional. . . . As it turned out, she was one of the best instructors I ever brought to Quantico. Everyone respected her, treated her like a lady. She was always one of my favorites.”

Appearances aside, Margo could put on a hard edge when she needed to. While she was working at her fi job at the West Georgia College’s campus police department in 1975, Margo soon earned the name of the Blonde Bitch, the meter maid who wouldn’t give

anyone any slack. It was only in her personal relationships that she wasn’t so good at standing up for herself.

When she’d entered college, Margo had intended to become a doctor, thinking that she could make a difference in the world by helping people and at the same time maintain some financial stability in her own life. She soon realized, however, that or-ganic chemistry and, therefore, a career in medicine were beyond her abilities. After mastering a criminology course, she followed her girlfriend, Donna, to the campus department, where she went from parking enforcement offi to dispatcher and eventually to police offi . Margo found that walking with a gun on her hip made her feel strong, as if she were wearing armor, and helped counterbalance her low self-confi

As Margo continued her graduate studies in educational psychology, she saw a nexus between counseling and police work. Once she realized that she could also help people as a police of-fi , she decided on a career in law enforcement. That said, she knew she wanted more for herself than to drive a patrol car her entire life. Once she was accepted into the elite ranks of the FBI, she knew she’d made the right choice.

Even after she’d become a full-fl agent, she still liked the feeling of carrying a weapon on the belt of her skirt.

The ten instructors in Margo’s unit worked in an offi that was divided into two rows of cubicles, dubbed the Prairie Dog Unit, because if someone yelled out a name, that person’s head would pop up like a prairie dog, obediently answering the call. It was also known as the Ant Farm because the instructors felt as if they were working on top of each other, milling around like ants in the mazelike arrangement of desks.

Ed assigned Margo to pair up with John Hess, who taught Interviewing and Interrogation, a duty his colleagues considered akin to purgatory. Margo, however, took to it immediately, and John, in turn, took immediately to her.

“She was the fi one who came and showed any interest,” John said later.

For the next few weeks, Margo sat in on John’s classes, taking copious notes. John knew the material so well that he was able to teach off the top of his head. When Margo learned they were going to work together as a team, she told him she couldn’t do it without a lesson plan, so her detailed notes of his lectures became their organizational backbone.

Margo thought John seemed like a very quiet and serious sort of guy, with a soft voice and an intensity about him. At fi she felt intimidated by all his experience— twenty-eight years in the bureau, fifteen of it in the field.

“He had instant credibility with me,” she said later. “I literally was soaking up his every word. He wanted to share what he knew with me. He wanted to make sure I did a good job.”

In the coming months and years, the two developed a special friendship, becoming as close as brother and sister. They often joked that if one were to walk out of the classroom midsentence, the other could come in and pick up where the fi left off. They were the perfect team.

“We couldn’t have been more compatible,” John recalled.

Ed Tully saw their relationship as even deeper than that. “They would die for each other,” he said later. “John Hess thought she was a queen.”

Margo started teaching her own Interviewing and Interrogation course about a month in. Despite her initial feelings of nervousness, insecurity, and inexperience, she got some of the best student evaluations Ed had ever seen for a new teacher since he’d joined the unit in the early 1970s.

“She had a depth of knowledge and experience,” he said later. “She was believable, she liked her students, and understood non-verbal cues like maintaining good eye contact. She was well prepared and treated her students with respect.”

Margo felt that she had reached nirvana.

“I loved being at Quantico,” she recalled. “I loved the academic environment. Everybody who was there wanted to be there, so the dedication and commitment to be involved in training were very high.”

At the time, the academy offered courses to new agent trainees; in-service seminars to special agents; and a prestigious eleven-week program to qualifi law enforcement offi called the National Academy. These courses ran the gamut from death investigations to white-collar crime, undercover operations, hostage negotiations, public corruption, interviewing, and profi

As many as fi students could sit in one classroom, ascend-ing in tiered, curved rows of desks that were arranged almost like theater seating.

An average day for Margo would start at eight in the morning and go until fi with an hour for lunch in the Board Room, which was a cafeteria by day and a bar by night. Her days would generally consist of teaching two to four hours, sometimes six; go-ing over lesson plans; writing professional articles with a colleague; and developing new course material.

John and Margo’s class became so popular that they eventually had to teach three sections in the National Academy. Margo and John each taught one and split the third.

One afternoon that fall, Margo was typing up some lesson plans. Her hands were sweaty, and one of her rings, which Gene had given her for Christmas in 1985, was slipping around on her fi . It was top-heavy, made out of a gold Mexican coin, and had about twenty tiny diamonds around the circumference, just enough to glitter. Gene told her he’d gotten it at an estate sale.

“To be honest, I didn’t particularly like it,” she said later. “It was too ostentatious.”

As she often did when she was typing, Margo took it off and put it into a zipperless pouch in her purse.

When she got to work the next day, she felt in her purse for the ring, but it wasn’t there. That night, she looked on her dresser,

in the pockets of the suit she’d worn the day before, on the closet fl , and again in her purse.

“Gene,” she said. “I can’t fi my ring. Have you seen it?” “What ring are you talking about?”

“The coin ring.”

“When did you last have it?”

Margo was hesitant to tell him because she was worried he was going to get mad and accuse her of being careless. But when she explained what had happened, he acted very caring about it. He even helped her look, but they still had no luck.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll call the insurance company and see what they say.”

The next day, Gene said the insurance company told him they needed to fi a police report, so she talked to the police staff at Quantico, and an offi took a loss report from her, which they submitted to State Farm.

“It was more reasonable to think I had knocked it out of my purse and it was just lost, which could have happened anywhere between my offi and the car,” she later recalled.

The insurance company sent the Bennetts a $12,000 check.

That Christmas, Gene gave Margo a ring that looked exactly like the one that had gone missing. At first, she couldn’t believe it.

“My ring!” she said.

“You don’t know how much trouble it was to find one like yours,” Gene said. Then, with amusement in his eyes, he added, “Try to hold on to it this time.”

As Margo turned the ring in her fingers, she recognized that it had the same little scratches as her old one. How many other rings could have this unique design? She’d certainly never seen another one like it.

She’d already lost a tremendous amount of respect for Gene because of the house relocation scam, but this hit home in a different way. She couldn’t believe her husband would do such a thing to her, but she felt in her gut that he had. After they were fi married, he’d snooped around in her briefcase and found a letter

she’d written to a fellow agent, complaining about her marital diffi Since then, she’d come to believe that Gene routinely went through her belongings. Now he was lying to her.

“This was perhaps the worst because he stole from me,” she said later. “He went into my purse and got it, so this was personal. On top of that, he was laughing at it.”

But Margo didn’t let herself get angry at Gene. She put her disappointment into a box and stuck it in the back of her mind, reverting to the coping mechanism of denial she’d learned growing up.

“I didn’t want to deal with it,” she recalled.

In late 1987, Gene fi got out of the desk job he’d hated so much and was moved to the Soviet KGB CounterIntelligence Squad. His new assignment was to try to “penetrate” KGB offi cers in the DC area, their missions, and the Soviet embassy. He didn’t talk much about his work to Margo, except that he was excited to have landed a new undercover operation called Operation Bootstrap, which lasted until early 1989.

But Bootstrap wasn’t enough. It didn’t take long before he was antsy again for more of the autonomy and the flashy undercover excitement he’d experienced in his Nickelride days.

Chapter Four

Uncomfortably Numb

Two months after Margo and Gene were married, he surprised her by suggesting that they take their sexual practices in a direction she didn’t want to go.

“Would you be willing to do a threesome?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you find that exciting?”

Stunned, Margo didn’t say anything for a minute. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, carefully.

Margo didn’t want to touch that subject with Gene. She wanted to leave her past behind her; she also didn’t see a me´nage a` trois as a healthy step for their marriage.

Within a couple months, Gene started incorporating porno movies into their sex life. His favorites were those with lesbian scenes.

Over the next two years, Gene’s interest in watching these movies increased. Then, while they were making love one day in late 1987, he asked her to do something new once again.

“Tell me what it would be like to be witha woman,” he said. When Margo didn’t answer, he continued asking questions.

“What does a woman feel like? Taste like?”

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to sound as if she didn’t even want to imagine that scenario. She’d never told him that she’d been with a woman, and she didn’t intend to talk about it now.

“I felt it was dangerous territory. Something was telling me, ‘Don’t expose that part of you to him,’ ” she later recalled.

But because he was so insistent and she wanted to please him, she went along with his request and described “fantasies” for

him based on her memories with Donna. She assumed that he had no idea that she was speaking from experience, because when he asked, she denied it.

“Have you ever wanted to make love with a woman?” Gene asked.

“No,” she said fi .

She was relieved when he finally let it go, but she later wondered whether he’d picked up that she’d been lying.