Field Notes: The Ghost in the Hallway
A boy nobody could place kept showing up at a church youth group, circling closer to a teenage girl. Her parents tried to figure out who he was, but every lead went nowhere. That’s when they called me.
Field Notes: The Human Side of Intel
In training, the Bureau dropped me in a non-descript compound in Virginia and taught me how to run human sources like it was the real thing. What stuck was not the tradecraft, but the people.
Field Notes: One Man’s Trash
Sometimes the breakthrough comes in the least glamorous way possible. For me, it was 3:30 in the morning, rain pouring down, digging through a trunk full of garbage outside a fire station. Not exactly Hollywood. But that soggy mess gave me the evidence I needed to crack a child exploitation case wide open.
Field Notes: The Art of Waiting
Surveillance is not glamorous. It is long hours of waiting, watching, and doing nothing, until suddenly you need to act. In one of my first counterintelligence cases in New York, patience and a cardboard mailing tube taught me the real art of surveillance.
Field Notes: When You’re the One Being Watched
Working with a source on a Russian arms procurement case, I suddenly found myself dealing with an unexpected twist: my source believed they were being followed. We set up counter-surveillance and discovered it was not who we thought at all.