Perspectives, An Intriguing Tale of an American Born Terrorist

Copyright © 2010 by Jeffrey Mark Shapiro All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

2003
How I Found Trouble and Trouble Found Me

2004
Redeeming Joshua

2005
How I Found More Trouble and More Trouble Found Me

2006
Aaron's Ride

I would like to thank
John Kerr and Mike Suldo for their technical guidance and Judy Champney and Stanley Solomon for their expert editing.

This book is dedicated to Mary, Allison and Bradley
who are my purpose in life.

Jonathan sat in his office on the 15th floor at the Federal Administration Building in Arlington, Virginia sharing a liverwurst sandwich with his seven year old daughter Carly and studying an email that his agents had intercepted on Yahoo from a user called
Heliracer
99
. The text of the email was embedded in a picture, a sophisticated technique used by terrorists to send messages. His large corner office sat on the northeast side of the building, giving him a beautiful view of the Potomac River. Papers were scattered across his mahogany desk and a single picture of the Blue Angels aerobatic team flying over the twin towers in New York City hung on his wall. The picture was signed by all of his former teammates, thanking him for 4 years of great leadership. Jonathan missed flying with the Blue Angels, but after 4 years at the Naval Academy and 4 years with the Blue Angels his obligation was complete and he had had to make a choice. He opted for civilian life.

Carly sat at the small circular conference table in the corner of Jonathan’s office eating half his sandwich and drinking from a 20 oz. bottle of Pepsi. Carly was tiny for her age, much smaller than the other kids in her second grade class. She was very quiet and shy, which Jonathan attributed to intimidation by the giant world that surrounded her. But what she lacked in size, she made up for in sweetness and intelligence, never angry, always at the very top of her class. She was every bit a daddy’s girl. Carly was reading a book to her favorite teddy bear Bruiser who sat faithfully beside her. Jonathan smiled when he saw the bear knowing that Bruiser was never cruel, never bored and always willing to play any game that Carly wanted to play with him. Carly was completely lost in the bliss of her imaginary world. There were sirens and other commotion on the street below, so Jonathan stood up and looked out the window to see 2 police cars and an ambulance at the scene of an accident on Bell Street where it appeared a pedestrian had been hit by a black Suburban. A large crowd circled around the scene to catch a morbid glimpse of the victim. Jonathan retrieved a pair of binoculars from his desk drawer and peered down at the action. Carly, startled by the noise and feeling the tension in her daddy, asked, “What are you looking at down there?”

“Nothing sweetie just a car accident.”

She got up and walked over to the window, grabbed his leg and squinted, trying to see anything she could through the window that was taller than her nose. Next she looked up to see her dad staring through the binoculars. Her little body, just over 40 pounds and barely 4 feet tall, came only to his waist.

“Can I look?” she asked.

He shook his head no and then reached down and rubbed his hand through her long, reddish orange hair and said, “Someone has gotten hurt pretty badly, but the ambulance is there. It’s okay honey, go play.”

“Will the person die?” she asked.

“I don’t know, I hope not.”

She was frightened by his words but trusted her daddy and went back to her safe world at the table. He glanced over and caught her saying a prayer with her eyes open. She caught his glance and said, “Mommy says that when someone is hurt, you should always say a prayer.”

Carly’s words touched her father, but at the same time confused him, knowing that his wife was of a different faith and they had not yet decided how they were going to raise their 2 children.

Jonathan stared through the binoculars and watched the paramedics feverishly working on a man who was unconscious and bleeding profusely from the head. “Not going to make it,” he thought. He studied the scene further and noticed that the victim looked just like Bob Runyan, his good friend. Worried, he picked up his phone and called Bob’s office which was on the opposite corner of the building. Bob worked for a special department of the secret service located one floor below. He was responsible for coordinating all of the air support from the armed forces necessary to protect the President at major summits and campaigns. Jonathan had to laugh every time he thought of Bob being in charge of a secret service detail, because Bob had always been one of the most “messed up” people he ever knew. He was also one of the funniest. One of Bob’s favorite sayings was, “The only way I made it out of high school was that the building caught on fire!” “And it was probably set by him,” thought Jonathan. These sayings, like most of Bob’s stories, were anomalies, because Bob was quite brilliant and had graduated from MIT with a PhD in bio-chemistry.

Bob was a good looking guy, a few years younger than Jonathan, over 6 feet tall with a thick head of blondish hair that he combed straight back. A middle aged bulge had taken over his mid-section, but Bob was always stylish, well groomed, and every bit a ladies’ man; in fact they had been his weakness. He had been married three times before he turned forty and had a gaggle of kids, 2 young ones with his current wife, Melissa. He claimed that marriage counseling had failed in his previous marriages because he started having sex with the counselor in her office, on her couch! “That’s when I knew that I was one sick dude!” he would say. Jonathan had heard his stories so many times that he knew every one of them by heart.

Bob was responsible for every bad male stereotype. He was a hard drinking, gambling, foul mouthed womanizer who somehow had made it to the top of an organization that was responsible for protecting the President of the United States. “Most of the stories are probably just bullshit, anyway,” thought Jonathan.

The phone rang several times before Bob’s secretary, Nancy, picked up the phone. “Hello,” she gasped sounding out of breath as if she had run to the phone.

“Hi Nancy, did Bob go out to lunch?” asked Jonathan nervously.

“Nope, he just stepped around the corner, probably to the restroom. Do you want me to go get him for you?”

“No, did you see the accident on 32nd Street? That guy looks just like Bob.”

She hesitated and then answered, “Well it’s not him. He’s here. Why is it that blood and guts always draws a crowd?” she asked.

“I don’t know, pretty sad, isn’t it?”

“I’ll have him call you when he gets back.”

“Thanks Nancy.”

In a couple of minutes, Jonathan’s phone rang. It was Bob.

“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.

“I was worried about you, man. There’s a dude down on 32nd who’s been pulverized by a car and he looks just like you.”

“Calm down, I’m fine. Hey where are you?”

“I’m in my office.”

“What are you doing there? I thought Carly and Matt had a doctor’s appointment?”

“How did you know about that?”

“Shit, the secret service keeps track of everything.”

“Nope, cancelled, rescheduled for 3 p.m.”

There was a long silence.

“You still there?” asked Jonathan.

“Jonathan, I need you to do something for me right now, okay….this is important.”

“Sure, what do you need?”

“You need to grab Carly and go get Matt and meet me downstairs. I’ll be waiting for you in my car, okay. You need to go right now.”

“Bob, can’t do it now, I’ve got a hot lunch date.” He flipped through his daytimer. “I’m free at 1 p.m.”

Carly smiled when she heard her father call her his date.

“Come on, grab Matt, I have something I need to talk to you about. I’ll take you all out for an ice cream afterwards.”

“Too much work. Matt’s down in day-care and it takes an act of congress to get them out during the middle of the day. You playing basketball tonight?” asked Jonathan.

There was silence.

“You still there?” asked Jonathan

“Holy, fuck, Jonathan you got to get out of that building.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Trust me, get the kids and leave, you need to do it now!”

“Okay….give me a minute to wrap things up. I’ll give you a call when I’m through.” He hung up the phone before Bob could answer.

Jonathan went back to his sandwich and the
Heliracer
email. He whispered it out loud. His agents had pulled the message from behind a JPEG file of a picture of two little girls. To the average person the message was completely hidden behind the picture and undetectable. The technique of hiding messages this way was called Steganography and had been used for centuries in different ways. Digital media and the advent of email made it a useful tool with terrorists who were located all over the world.

How best to work, but through their children? They will not understand, nor leave us alone until their seed is gone. Virginia, 12:30:200:1941.

It probably had no meaning, like the other hundreds of thousands of emails that his covert operation code named
Blue Heron
read every year, but it was worth tracing. Each day he personally screened the stack of the most probable emails provided by his agents to see if there was further action required. Jonathan was the Deputy Director of a covert team of 52 of the finest CIA agents, sequestered among 1200 other government bureaucrats who provided the cover for their operation in Arlington, Virginia. His people were specialists in finding and preventing terror before it found its way to the American people. The CIA, through the Hart-Langley Act initiated by the President and in cooperation with the Homeland Security Department, had unlimited authority to review America’s internet traffic. Jonathan and his team were experts in tracking internet traffic through servers, past aliases and to their originators. They caught currents like a surfer catching a giant wave and rode them until they could carry them no further.

Jonathan took a long drink from his Diet Coke and then initiated a series of Unix job control languages that allowed him entrance into a portal of the massive Yahoo servers. From there he retrieved the past 2 weeks of
Heliracer
’s messages, looking for more attached pictures. If necessary he could access the vaults of back-up tapes that would take him back several months.
Heliracer
99
was registered to Ron Gladnick, a former professional football player with the Cleveland Browns and the small business owner of a helicopter accessory company located in Oceanside, California. He appeared legitimate and was not on any of the CIA’s terror hit-lists. The messages, all hidden behind pictures of his 2 little girls, were written in lyrical prose and sent to the same 7 people, all with public addresses on Yahoo, AOL or Earthlink. Before reading and trying to de-code each of these messages. Jonathan reviewed the email addresses of the recipients to see if any were registered to people listed on his watch list and as usual the first five recipients were negative. The sixth was registered to John Smith, another unknown, but when he cross referenced the physical address to his data base of suspected operatives, he found that John Smith lived at the same address as Abdul Omar. Bingo! Abdul Omar was a medical doctor in Los Angeles and a suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer, probably using the alias of John Smith to avoid detection. He also found something else that was very interesting during his cross reference. The seventh email address
Eye2Eye
traced back to his own city, to his development in Occaquan Forest, Virginia, and to a very familiar address in his neighborhood. The email address was registered to him! This seemed unusual, because if this was a diversion, or in any way connected with a terror cell, it meant that the terrorists had knowledge that he was in the CIA and perhaps involved in this operation. In any event he would have to report this to internal affairs.