The One That Got Away, Part 2

A true story

Jackson, interview: "They were constantly testing me," the guys he bought from.  "They would accuse me of being FBI all the time.  When you have a man with a gun in his hand saying, If you're FBI I'm going to shoot you, that's a pretty uncomfortable scene."

Three full time NCIS guys: REDACTED.  Two full time and one part time FBI guys: the two Bills, REDACTED and REDACTED Funding came from the FBI.

They taped about 400 conversations.

Jackson in conversation afterwards with me: "He [tetrick] would have made a great high school teacher."

"For ten months, I had no life other than living with them."  Why did he do it?  "Because it’s right."  He seemed to be unmoved by the whole thing.  I asked him: no bad dreams.  "I wouldn't use the word 'fun' at all."  "I was their friend for two months.  You have an attachment.  To put the man in prison is hard."  "With Crawford it was not so hard because of the fact that he brought his son to the drop off of the SUV."  Tetrich: "Do I miss him?  I think about him occasionally.  I spent ten months with him, and went through some hairy times.  You form a bond.  Would I want to see him in jail?  I don't know."  "I had more attachment to Moerbe."

REDACTED, Crawford’s daughter: 757 XXX-XXXX She can tell me who’s got Patrick.

The first time she saw Craw. after the bust: ‘he was just mainly trying to explain what all this was going on.  he was crying and everything else.  the stuff was horrible the conditions in LeJeune brig.’

‘he doesn’t have that many hang-out buddies.  he is a little odd, he’s not insane, but he does live in his own little world.

‘this is a guy who who got to captain in the marine corps without a high school diploma.’

REDACTED -- Call at 5, speak to her husband

              VII

               Doug Tetrick’s apparent conversion to Christ had more profound implications than anyone realized; the Sergeant, it turned out, had one big confession left in him, and this one he’d kept from his Captain.  In the summer of 1996 he’d decided he had to come clean about his past — the thefts, the sales, the political extremism.  He consulted with a Presbyterian minister, and the minister sent him to a Marine Corps lawyer, a Major named Jeffrey Meeks              .

               Tetrick wanted to suffer for his sins; there was more than a bit of the martyr about him.  In fact he believed that he had been chosen by God to demonstrate the consequences of true faith.  Meeks wanted to protect his client as far as the law allowed, but the law didn’t matter very much to Tetrick: he wanted to rid himself of guilt, whatever the legal consequences.  They went back and forth, through weeks of agonizing, casuistry and prayer for guidance, always sticking on two points: Would Tetrick allow himself to be legally protected from prosecution?  And would he tell, not just what he had done, but what others had done in his presence?  Was that Jesus’ way, or Judas’? Tetrick the Penitent insisted that he didn’t want a deal.  Tetrick the Preacher once, in all seriousness, said to Meeks, a devout Mormon “I really appreciate the help you’re giving me; and I just want you to know I’m really sorry you’re going to hell.”  Tetrick the Joker used to leave messages for Meeks under the name Joe the Smith, Joseph Smith being the founder of the Mormon Church.

               At last he decided that his Christian commitment to confessing his sins over-rode his sense of fealty to his friends; and at the same time that he owed it to his family that he not spend the rest of his life in jail.  So he agreed to go to NCIS with a grant of immunity, and there, on August 8th, 1996, he finally spilled the whole story.  He went and he told everything, about everybody.

               The average confession is a relatively terse bit of business: I did this, I did that, you got me, let’s get this over with.  But Tetrick told it all: names, dates, locations, goods delivered. He started talking and didn’t stop for three days.  In the end the deposition ran to 200 pages, and the result is an extraordinary document, detailing, as it does, scores of misdeeds involving dozens of Marines and civilians.  At times the litany of thieved weapons begins to seem slightly unreal, as acronym follows upon acronym: Mini-14, M-9, AR-15, AT-4, M-60, PPK, HEI.  But it was, after all, real, and NCIS took Tetrick’s confession and ran with it.

They wanted Tetrick to go back out on the gun show circuit, this time wearing a wire, collecting evidence to be used against the others. There was more agony, more prayer, more consultation with his minister, and finally Tetrick agreed.  The result was Operation Longfuse, a ten month long undercover operation which brought Tetrick together with agents from NCIS and the ATF, under the direction of the FBI’s office in Charlotte.  Jackson — Tetrick’s partner — wasn’t an arms dealer, after all.  He was an undercover NCIS agent, who’d agreed to live out the ten months of Longfuse under an assumed name, in a strange apartment, with new clothes, new habits, a new vocation.  When the whole thing was over he went back to his desk.

               As for Doug Tetrick, he had one last Br’er Rabbit move left.  On the night of the arrests, he disappeared into the Witness Protection Program, taking with him his wife and children, and a last minute $80,000 reward from the Government.  He hasn't spoken to Tom Crawford since that day.

My escort from PAO, re: the whole thing:  "It’s a disgrace to the Corps."

FBI guys sitting in a row in back row in court.  they crack up twice:  (1) Jackson, Crawford, on tape talking for some reason about Martha Stewart, and what a great gal she is, and on and on, how her father (in-law?)  worked for Raytheon.  Jackson says, "Yeah, I used to do a girl who worked for Raytheon.”  Then again (2) when they’re playing tape in court, Jackson and Tet. and Craw. sitting around drinking beers, Jackson, wearing wire, gets up, goes into the bathroom and takes a long piss.  whole court sitting there listening to him piss for about ten minutes.

Moerbe, I asked Why is talking to me? telling me everything. He looks a little startled at the question.  "Cause my lawyer told me to."

_______

Questions:

How big is Jackson?  6’1”  225

Who is RA?

What happened to REDACTED (crazy militia guy)?  Did nothing illegal.

What happened to REDACTED, prostitution, underage pornography guy implicated by Moerbe in his original statement?  Been the subject of many investigations: never caught.

Lt. Colonel REDACTED -- StaffJudgeAdvocate -- 910 XXX-XXXX

I been in the marine close to 15 years, I am one of these guys been a lawyer the entire time.  I been doing mil justice my entire career.  I have heard many many stories of this kind of thing.  it didn’t surprise.  I’d say that it’s fairly limited to some communities.  nothing surprises me any more.

integrity’s the most important.  but enlisted say the most important thing is loyalty.

t had diabetes.

Crawford’s mom: REDACTED -  (740) XXX-XXXX

    VIII

                Go back over Longfuse, read the transcripts of the tapes, talk to the principals, and you can’t help but be struck by a string of contradictions almost too pure to be believed. To begin with, there stands Tetrick, rolling over on his best friends and co-operating with a government he hated, all because it was what he thought God wanted him to do.  As a matter of religious conscience, Tetrick believed his confession had to be complete, and that included telling the Feds.  As a matter of political conviction, he still hated and mistrusted the government, and he didn’t mind showing it. The whole operation was founded on an improbable alliance between the cobra and the mongoose.

               Moreover, Tetrick insisted — over and against T.J.’s objections — on carrying a pistol for his own protection: he was certain he was going to get killed, either by the Feds or by the arms dealers, but he wanted at least a chance to defend himself when the time came. That debate quickly reached a stalemate, with each side refusing to go ahead with Longfuse unless they got their way.  Finally, when the last appeal had been exhausted, and it looked as if the operation was going to end before it had began, the FBI capitulated: Tetrick got to wear his gun.  By then, T.J. had formed his own opinion of his new partner: "I thought he was a fucking militia nut-head," he says. 

               Then there was the question of cover.  As a Christian, Tetrick felt he couldn't lie, not even to save his own life, or for that matter T.J.’s.  But then, what was an undercover operation if not a long-standing lie?  Again Tetrick consulted his minister, and together they came up with a way out. Tetrick would provide suggestions about T.J.'s supposed underworld connections, without ever stating them; if someone were to draw the conclusion that T.J. was a gangster, well, that was their call.  Tetrick himself could walk away with a free conscience.  And if someone pointed a gun at them and insisted on proof that they weren’t working for law enforcement — as, during the course of the operation, several men did — Tetrick would simply say, "How can you ask me that? How can you even think that?"

               So there was Tetrick, born-again, gun-toting, government-hating, and pathologically-honest.  And there were the targets of Longfuse: gun nuts, militia members, larcenous Marines, and backwoods arms dealers. In the middle stood T.J., trying to negotiate between the two, and still report back to his bosses. 

There were some tough moments.  Once, for example, T.J. was stopped by local police in West Virginia, who found him carrying $50,000 in cash and a cache of weapons — obviously government property — concealed under a blanket in the back seat.  They arrested him and took him to the local jail.  It took a few phone calls to the FBI to get that one straightened out.

On another occasion, T.J. says, he set up a buy from yet another arms dealer, a man in Charlotte who was selling a few blocks of C-4 which he’d come to possess.  "Let me show you," the dealer said at the start of the meeting. "This is the real thing."  He tore off a little piece of the plastic explosive, stuck it to the bumper of his truck, and lit it with a match, to prove that it would burn, as C-4 will.  Now, on the whole C-4 is pretty stable stuff; in order to set it off you need a special blasting cap.  — Unless it's burning, in which case a little pressure will make it blow.  The dealer was ignorant of the latter qualification, so when he raised his foot to stamp out the chunk burning on his bumper, Special Agent Bob Bratton, who had been conducting secondary surveillance from a distance, put his fingers to his ears.  If T.J. hadn’t caught the dealer quickly and pulled him back, he would have blown his bumper off his truck and, most probably, his foot off his leg.

                For brutal irony, consider, again, the fact that every meet, every buy, every phone call, every social visit between Tetrick and Crawford was caught on tape.  Inevitably, you get moments like these: Crawford praising Tetrick to T.J. "Loyalty is something that I've seen with him,” says the Captain.  “Even the guys that stabbed him in the back, he could have turned over....and sold people down the river.  Did he do it?  No."

    Here is Crawford again, displaying an arrogance that would boomerang back on him when the tapes were played in court: “I thumb my nose at 'em....NCIS: I go, poof, kiss my ass.  They're idiots,” he says at one point.  And at another: “These inept turds.  — I’m sitting there going, God, where did they get their investigative skills? It’s mind boggling and I give them too much credit.”

               There was another occasion when Tetrick and T.J., visiting Crawford in Millis, brought him a bottle of Dom Perignon as a wedding gift.  Tetrick knew that as soon as the Operation was over and his perfidy was revealed the champagne would lose its taste, so for weeks afterwards he encouraged Crawford and his wife to pop the cork.  ‘Have you opened that champagne yet?’ he would ask when he called.  ‘We’re saving it for a special occasion,’ Crawford would answer.  ‘Oh,’ Tetrick would say, ‘I think you should drink it now.’ But as far as he knows, they never did.

               Tetrick wanted everything, it seems: to be Crawford’s friend, and the Feds’ best witness, to be the Jester, and to be the Saint, to know everything, to be important, to be the man pulling the strings, and also to be pure in heart.  It’s a strange combination of narcissism and piety, and to some degree it’s simply unfathomable.  Going through Tetrick’s actions during Longfuse is like watching a man at a poker table, watching him bluff, pull four aces out of his boot, raise the stakes, wink, — and then fold his hand before anyone else can see what he’s got.

REDACTED: “I have real problems believing his [tetrick’s] sincerity.  I think he took advantage of a situation to get himself out from under and make some money doing it.  If Doug Tetrick told me the sun was shining I’d go outside to check it and make sure.”

May 27, 1997 -    Tetrick in a car with Moerbe, talking about building pipe bombs.  Then his kids call on the telephone and he's all lovey-dovey: "I love you, REDACTED.  Do you miss me?"  Then he consoles his wife because the kid said some mean things to her.

   IX

               Longfuse was an enormous operation, covering hundreds of square miles and targeting dozens of Marines and civilians; six Marines were arrested on October 16th, along with seven civilians.  Several more have yet to be indicted, and some of them probably never will be.  But Tetrick, T.J., and Crawford formed the core of the Operation, and they’re the ones who enact its central agon of hubris and betrayal. Tetrick lies at the very center, but with his membership in the Witness Protection Program, he is the missing man, and he leaves in his wake a long string of strong opinions about him, and the many hours of audiotape that he recorded.

               “He's intelligent, deceptive, manipulative,” says Tim Witham. “He's capable of emotionally wrecking a person.  Believe me, you haven't heard the last of Doug Tetrick.”

"Tetrick has an aura about him that some people can see,” says T.J. Jackson.  “He'd make a good preacher."

                On the surveillance tapes Tetrick has the voice of a drive-time disk-jockey.  He calls everyone ‘Dude’. “Nobody’s afraid of Doug Tetrick,” says Ron Moerbe.  “He’s happy-go-lucky.”  So he seems; if he feels any stress about dropping a dime on his friend it doesn’t show.  Of course, he’s undercover, and yet, one can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking.

               He watched his buddy hang himself, bit by bit, and never said a word.  There was some part of him — the trickster part — that allowed him to be natural, cheerful and jokey with Crawford, without ever dropping his mask.  There was another part of him — the same part, perhaps, that made him a Christian — that found the moral ambiguities almost too much to bear.  After each meet he would hook up with NCIS agents, usually in a hotel room; on a few occasions he broke down and wept before he could be debriefed.  "Crawford was his friend,” says T.J..  “He would say, "How can I do this to someone I've been in combat with, someone I was so close to?"  But only once can you hear him actually crack on tape, and then the recipient of his anxiety is his wife.  He’s on his way to a gun show with Moerbe; they’ve stopped for lunch and she’s called him on his cell phone.  He leaves the table to talk to her privately, but his recorder is still rolling.  It’s a slightly creepy moment.

               ‘Listen to me closely,’ he says.  ‘Please don't make me yell at you.  Now, listen.  This thing has been going on for a while and it's going to go on for little while longer.  There are certain things which neither one of us are going to like about it.  Don't think I'm out here smiling from ear to ear, you know, having a good time.  I need you to be stable.  If I'm out here and I'm worried about you, I'm going to slip up and say something I ain't supposed to.  Do you want that on you? You want to feel responsible for that? If I screw up it's your fault.  You want that on you? Then knock it off.  Love you."

               The US Marshals commissioned a study of Tetrick before letting him into the Witness Protection Program, and yet another picture of the man emerges — not the last word, but the official one:  “The candidate is an angry, argumentative individual who is resentful of any demands being placed on him,” the report says.  “He is excessively demanding of attention, affection, and sympathy…. He tends to exaggerate his own contributions and self-worth.....He sees himself as more sensitive than other people and is concerned about what others think about him. ....The candidate is extremely resentful of rules and regulations….He is hostile to authority figures....difficult to interact with personally or socially....seems to blame others for his difficulties and minimizes his role in a given situation.”  The report ends with the suggestion that Tetrick will have trouble obeying the rules of the Program, and that he should be monitored closely.

Call USMC in DC for any changes in procedure since Longfuse.

Missing Lost Stolen [ordnance] Reports, from Lane Ford at 202 433 9089.  Or call ATF, they may have records.

-----------

MISSING ORDNANCE

Cap. Steven Murray -- Office Special Investigations --

Airforce  202 767 4728

Paul Boyce - Army - Criminal Investigations Division - 703 806 0372

Ken Miller - 703 806 0376 -  Department of the Army 703 697 2564 ask for someone on installation and evironmental team.

Moerbe: I ask him if he felt bad about what he did.  He regrets it, anyway.  "I had a fiancée before I came in here."  Was it fun?  "We had fun, we had the best of the best when we travelling around to these gun shows: the best hotels, lobster, wine.  Witham and me.  Crawford used to say: All we're doing is recycling government trash.  It just would have been blown up, otherwise."

Call the FBI Bomb Data Center to see if and when C-4 has been used illegally in this country.  If not them then the ATF: 202 927 8244 - Gail Davis

From web site: about 3000 bombings a year.  About a quarter of them mailboxes.   About 35 people killed per year. 1996: 1457 bombings -- last year for statistics. 1996 C-4 there was one. For 5 year total it was eleven.

1,000,000 pounds C-4 legally possessed in the US outside military: police, states, manufacturers.

     X

                Operation Longfuse was the biggest recovery of armaments stolen from the military in recent years, but it wasn’t the only one.  You hear stories, here and there: this guy who got caught stealing C-4, jumped bail, and was picked up at his mother’s house in California; that guy who pilfered some pistols and was arrested trying to sell them in town; some neo-Nazi servicemen passing Claymore mines and grenades to their buddies in the civilian world.  It happens: the services would rather you didn’t know how often.

               In the wake of Longfuse the Secretary of the Defense and the Secretary of the Navy have jointly handed down a list of changes to be made in Marine Corps procedure around weaponry.  In its final form it runs to two and half pages, single-spaced — a whole host of new regulations to beef up restrictions and record-keeping. But in the end it all depends on the Marines Corps tradition of honor and integrity. The great majority of Marines take it very, very seriously.

               Still, the military is a huge organization, with a huge inventory of ordnance, and it’s built on a chain of command that, by necessity, places great trust in the integrity of its officers, and gives them considerable leeway in their actions.  So it only takes a tiny percentage of criminals, a few bad men, to create a problem; and nobody can tell how many of them there may be.  According to Sergeant Moerbe, “There's no way, no 100%, foolproof way to keep things from disappearing.  You know, for every guy they picked up, there are ten guys waiting to take their place.  Once the big tidal wave passes, all these arrests and the publicity, and the sea calms down again, people will be stealing again."

               He was speaking, it should be noted, from behind the bars of his cell in the maximum security wing of the brig on Camp LeJeune, where he’ll be living for the next twelve years. Tom Crawford is his blockmate, and so is Sergeant Witham, and a third Sergeant named Hill who also got five years.  Nowadays the joke around the base is that EOD stands for Everyone’s Dishonest.

                Crawford is brought out of the brig for interviews, wearing an orange jumpsuit, and shackles on his wrists and ankles.  It’s hard to keep him focussed: he smiles a lot, he speaks very rapidly, and his answers tend to wander.  You get the impression that he hardly knows you’re there at all, that you could suddenly start, say, drooling, or playing cat’s cradle with your shoelaces, and he’d keep right on talking and smiling — trying to explain his actions as the altruism of a man who trusted his friend, and defending his record, outside Longfuse, as a Marine: "I made a hell of a mistake," he says.  "But whatever my gross ignorance, they can't take away what I did.”  Still, the disgrace that surrounds him is almost palpable; other Marines, those not involved in Longfuse, visibly flinch when Crawford and his crimes are broached.  And the man who put him in such pariahdom is nowhere to be found.

               When the subject of Tetrick comes up, Crawford slows down and stays on topic.  His smile, now perfunctory, co-exists with a look of pain and perplexity.  "There's no camaraderie where I worked,” he says. “ — Women have friends.  But I was closer to Doug Tetrick than I was to anyone else; when he found out that his wife was pregnant, I was the first one he called.”  He continues: "Doug Tetrick knew things about me that no one else knew.  He was like a brother. I don't know what to believe.  I would like to see him point blank.  I hate him sometimes, I feel sorry for him, then I say I don't know.  I hate him for what he's done to my family."

               Asked what he would say were he given a chance to speak with Tetrick, he balks.  “I’d have to talk to him face to face,” he says.  “I want to look in his eyes.  I want to hear it from him, that our friendship was just a lie."

Frank Skroski

Chief of the Witness Security Division

Suite 1170

United States Marshals

600 Army/Navy Drive

Arlington, VA  22202

Phone: 202 307 9600

Fax 703 603 0354

They didn’t want me talking to him.

Then: 7:00 on a warm Tuesday, me just back from the gym, out of the shower and getting ready to go out.  no caller id.

Is Jim Lewis there?  You might want to start your tape recorder.  My name is Doug Tetrick….

Asks I not release tape.  Worried about people knowing the sound of his voice.

‘What I have thought about more than anything else, is I would like to write a book.  There are theological issues that I want to treat and put forth.

I think there are many things about him [crawford] that society would look at him and say This is a terrorist.  Fundementally, he’s a good man.

I went into this and I thought, and everyone I knew told me, They are going to kill me.’

No regrets at all, his conscience is clean.

When I said the whole thing was like a Greek tragedy, he laughed.

                 XI

                You would have thought it would end there, with Crawford’s bewilderment unresolved, his questions unanswered.  I shake his hand and thank him for his time, I leave the base, I come home to New York.  And then, a few days later, Tetrick calls from Nowhere; it’s a slightly eerie experience. It’s impossible, for example, to know what time it is, wherever he may be.  At first it’s hard to tell why he called at all, given the instability of his position.

               He’s cautious, of course, but he’s also amiable and articulate and garrulous.  And some fragment of his old, trickster style still remains: his voice is slightly pompous, slightly teasing, insistent, but somehow likeable.  He wants to establish his devotion, right at the outset; he wants to convince his enemies that he did what he did because he thought it was the Christian thing to do.  He seems perfectly sincere about all this, and it soon becomes clear that the descriptions in the Marshall’s psychiatric evaluation are neither accurate nor inaccurate: they’re simply irrelevant.  Tetrick doesn’t traffic in concepts like mental health or maladjustment; he lives in a world defined by wickedness and redemption, faith and love, righteousness and evil.  He is not dealing with issues, he’s beset by sin.  Talk to him for a little while, and you get the feeling the sin he’s most susceptible to is vanity.  He’s called because he wants to defend himself, to explain, to rebut charges that he’s the villain of Longfuse.  He’s called because he’s convinced he did right, and he doesn’t want people to think he did wrong.

               “I’d had the loyalty thing drummed in my head in the Marine Corps,” he says.  “But that view of loyalty was somewhat skewed.”  So what, then, does he have to say to Crawford, who has twenty years to pay for Tetrick’s change of heart?  “You know I don’t know,” he replies, “other than to tell him, No, the friendship was not false; it pained my greatly to go through what I went though.  People may say that’s incongruous, for me to say, ‘Oh, it hurt me so much to deliver my friend up to the authorities’.  That’s not true at all: he delivered himself up to the authorities.  Still, I owe him the right to say whatever he wants to say to me.  How do you talk to a guy who you took away their freedom?” 

“I made the choice to participate on my own,” he continues.  “I take full responsibility for it.  I believe it was the right thing to do.” He pauses. “You know,” he says.  “I love Tom Crawford.  I love his son Patrick.  I really do.  I know that sounds ridiculous.”

               Tetrick calls in a number of times after that, wanting to clarify, to explain himself some more; sometimes it seems like he’s getting a little lonely in his new life, and just wants to speak with someone who knows something about his old one.  He answers every question with disarming honesty: “By today’s society’s standards I stopped being a racist about three years ago,” he says once.  He tells stories about Crawford, about T.J., about Witham; he tells stories about himself before his conversion, his womanizing, his bragging, his sense of being untouchable.  The old life was ambivalent, at best; but the new one is deeply uncertain.  At least, that's the way it seems: Tetrick demurs.  His old friends are in jail, and they and their supporters speak of him with open hatred; there’s a good chance that somebody, somewhere, — a gun runner, a Carolina militia member, a felonious Marine who somehow escaped indictment —  wants to kill him.  He has cut himself off from everything he knew; even his parents don’t know where he is. He has had to explain to his children why daddy had to change their name.  He’ll live every day with what he did, and what it meant.  “My life now is wonderful,” he says.  “But it was wonderful before, because of the common denominator, which is Jesus Christ, and the fact that he’s the Lord of my life.  I have seen the tangible blessings of God.”