Your E-mail and the FBI

by Sandra Parshall

I guess I’m jaded, because the prurient details of the Petraeus-Broadwell-Kelley-Allen kerfuffle don’t interest me. The computer stuff grabbed my attention. I don’t meet a lot of generals, but I am tethered to my computer like some poor dog chained in a junkyard.

First item of interest: The FBI doesn’t need a warrant signed by a judge to dig around in a citizen’s personal e-mail. I must have known this at some level, but I never gave it any thought before. Then I learned that even the e-mail account of the Central Intelligence Agency director becomes an open book to the FBI if they obtain a subpoena from a federal prosecutor. They don’t have to serve a warrant on the owner of the account. With a subpoena, they can compel the service provider to give them access.

Second item of interest: Apparently Petraeus and Broadwell could communicate in “private” (ha!) by leaving messages in the drafts section of his e-mail account. This is a tidbit to make note of for future use in a book.

Third item of interest: Jill Kelley, the Petraeus friend who ignited the scandal by complaining to the FBI about harassing e-mails from Broadwell, turned out to be “linked” (as they say; supply your own definition) to General John Allen, Petraeus’s successor as commander of U.S. operations in Afghanistan. She had 30,000 pages of e-mail from Allen on her computer. I don’t care about the affair, but I’d love to know more about those 30,000 pages of e-mail. What’s in them? And where, oh where, did he find the time for all that e-mailing? I don’t want to believe that a general on active duty spent vast amounts of his time composing personal e-mails to a Florida socialite. Maybe he was sending her the entire text of books that he thought she might enjoy. The complete works of both Dickens and Joyce Carol Oates, perhaps.

The Senate Judiciary Committee will meet soon to consider legislation that would make a warrant for all internet communications mandatory. The bill might not pass, because law enforcement officials are against this restriction. The ACLU is strongly in favor of it. Chris Soghoian, a senior policy analyst for the watchdog group, says, "These are invasive powers that need to have a check against overuse and abuse. And that check should be a judge."

Meanwhile, if the FBI decided to take a look-see at your e-mail account, what would they find? Oh, you don’t think they’ll ever be interested in you? Read the long and appallingly generic list of words they search for in social networking communications (yes, they’re monitoring Facebook), and you might wonder why they haven’t shown up at your door yet.

Almost all crime fiction writers do research online, and we have a list of experts such as Dr. Doug Lyle and former cop Lee Lofland who generously answer our questions. We also post questions to various e-mail listservs. One day I might be asking where to find a dealer in illegal guns, and the next I might be asking which accelerant will most quickly burn a house to the ground. I may want detailed information about undetectable poisons.

The real mother lode is on the hard disk of my computer. I have files on every sort of crime, unusual murder methods, guns, lock-picking, the kinds of trace evidence that a smart killer will avoid leaving at a crime scene (do you want your darling cat’s hair to lead the police to you?). On the whole, my information collection doesn’t make a good impression.

On the plus side is the total absence of e-mails from highly-placed people involved in national security.

How about you? Have you ever written an e-mail you wouldn’t want to become public knowledge? Do you worry that somebody has a copy of it either on a server or a hard drive? Do you save all your e-mail, even stuff you should probably delete?

And do you worry that what you delete isn’t really gone, that somebody with sophisticated recovery software could find it and expect you to explain it?

Dangerous Instincts

by Sandra Parshall

So you think you’re a pretty good judge of character. You think you’d recognize a scam artist or somebody with a violent streak if you met them. And you believe strangers are the biggest threat, not the people you allow into your everyday life.

You’re probably wrong, especially on the last count, according to longtime FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole. I met Dr. O’Toole last winter when we appeared together on a panel arranged by Kathy Harig of Mystery Loves Company for mystery-reading members of the Washington (DC) Academy of Sciences. She was delightful to chat with (we talked about our cats, among other things), and I was fascinated by what she said about the average person’s inability to accurately judge others. I brought home a copy of her book, Dangerous Instincts: How Gut Feelings Betray Us, written with Alisa Bowman.

After decades of working on some of the most notorious criminal cases of our time – major abductions, serial killings, mass murders, school shootings – O’Toole knows how easily we can find ourselves at the mercy of dangerous people. Maybe you’ll never encounter a serial killer, but you might hire household helpers who will steal from you or a nanny who will abuse your children when you’re not around. You might put your child in the care of a respected coach or camp counselor who is a secret pedophile. You might hire an investment broker who will rob you of every cent you’ve got. And you might let love blind you to the truth about The Perfect Man or The Ideal Woman.
 
O’Toole warns against making decisions based on emotion – your gut feelings about other people. Instead, she advises using your brain, in an analytical process she calls SMART: Sound Method of Assessing and Recognizing Trouble.

The book is rich with advice that I don’t have space to repeat here, but what it boils down to is this: practice reading people, observe patterns of behavior while also recognizing that an “out of character” negative action probably warns of a buried trait, and give up the fantasy that you’ll be able to change someone else’s bad tendencies. Be careful not to put too much emphasis on superficial indicators of normalcy – he dresses well, he has good manners and a nice smile (a description that fits Ted Bundy perfectly) – while ignoring other telling details that warn of hidden flaws.

O’Toole lists the behaviors (below) that profilers look for and that the rest of us can learn to spot in the people we deal with. Some are more obvious and dangerous than others, but they should all make you think twice about getting involved with someone. (Note to writers: This list is also useful in creating fictional characters.)

Impulsivity with little regard for consequences

Inappropriate or out-of-control anger

Narcissism – self-centered, arrogant, grandiose behavior with no concern for others

Lack of empathy or compassion for the feelings and misfortunes of others

Injustice collecting and responding to perceived injustices in a disproportionate way

Objectification of others – treating them as nonhuman or as possessions

Blaming others for failures and problems

Paranoia

Rule breaking

Violent behavior

Thoughts and fantasies of violence

Drug and/or alcohol abuse

Hatred of others because of their beliefs

Thrill-seeking

O’Toole analyzes all these tendencies to help you recognize them and assess the relative danger they pose to you. She also looks at some common myths: people can be normal one second and “snap” the next, turning violent; psychopaths don’t know right from wrong; psychopaths look and act dangerous, and you can identify one on first sight; all psychopaths were abused as children and enjoyed torturing animals; most psychopaths are violent; all mothers have the instinct to protect their children. None of these beliefs is true.

My favorite part of the book is the section on secret profiler tricks. She describes six different situations that might be used in a TV show to allow a fictional profiler to form a quick opinion about a person – then points out all the reasons why that hasty assessment would be wrong. Scenario number five: A man doesn’t make eye contact when speaking. The TV profiler might see this as a “tell” and conclude that the man is lying. O’Toole wouldn’t be so hasty. “We assume that people who look down, away, or who seem shifty-eyed are either lying or hiding something. This might be the case. But it could also be true that the person is just shy and his or her interpersonal skills are lacking.” Psychopaths, on the other hand, will have no trouble looking you in the eye and lying.

Mary Ellen O’Toole often appears on TV news shows, discussing crimes in the news, such as the recent mass murder in a Colorado movie theater. On her website http://www.maryellenotoole.com you can find links to her interviews as well as more information about her book and her FBI career as a behavioral analyst.

SPY STORIES

by Sheila Connolly

If you live in or near one of several metropolitan areas, for the past few weeks it has been hard to avoid news of the arrests of ten Russian spies.

To those of us who grew up cutting our teeth on James Bond and John le Carre novels, the news reports sound like deja vu all over again. Haven't we heard all of this before–like, forty years ago? The carefully (or maybe not so carefully) crafted false identities, the spy paraphernalia (invisible ink, for heaven's sake!), the scheduled info drops–it all sounds very familiar, not to mention dated. I mean, Ian Fleming's Russia is not today's Russia. A lot of things have happened in that country, and a lot of things about American-Russian relations have also changed.

The whole thing was finally put in perspective by an article in last week's Boston Globe that actually had me giggling (Brian MacQuarrie's piece titled "Light on plot, spy story still intrigues"). What makes it delightful is that MacQuarrie interviewed a clutch of "spy novelists" for their assessment of this real-world story. And the general response from them was, huh?

One said, "why now?" Basically the embedded Russians were leading very ordinary lives and had little access to anything resembling a state secret or even sensitive information. They didn't do anything any one of us couldn't do.

Another asked, "what was the hurry?" They'd been in place for years. One possibility is that US counter-espionage thought that maybe the Russians were about to pack up and go home. Because they were bored? Or someone had finally realized they were useless? If they had left, or had been called back by spy-masters tired of trivial results, they would have been of no use to the US, so why arrest them now? One theory holds that we were saving them for a special occasion: we wanted to swap them for someone valuable to us.

It turns out that US agencies had been aware of them and watching them for quite a while (thank goodness we don't look like total bumbling idiots). We'd had cameras trained on at least one household for years. Don't you wonder where all those recordings go, and who actually looks at them?

Another author that MacQuarrie interviewed suggested it might make a better story if the spies we knew about were only decoys, masking something much more nefarious. Now that we've gotten rid of them, we can be careless and complacent again, and the "real" spies will take advantage of that.

It really makes you wonder. We grew up with the concept of the Evil Empire (thank you, Ronald Reagan), the Iron Curtain. For years the Russians were the designated bad guys. I had friends in grade school who were seriously traumatized by the idea that the Russians were ready to drop a bomb on us at any minute, and actually lost sleep over it. Remember air raid drills? Like hiding under a wooden desk would protect us from nuclear attack. But watching Nikita Khrushchev pound his shoe on a table did not make us feel any more confident in the rationality of our so-called enemy. At the same time we competed with them for space in space, for bigger and more weapons. Looking back, it was kind of nice to have only one bogeyman to focus on, rather than trying to deal with vague threats on several fronts at once. It was a simpler era.

Maybe that's why this story has such legs. First, it taps into all those fears we internalized as children. Second, we have trouble believing that our former arch-enemies could be so bumbling, so there must be more to the whole thing. Or maybe we have trouble rationalizing our fears in the face of a less-than-brilliant opponent.

Thrillers are a popular genre, which suggests that readers actually like to be frightened, at least within a controlled environment (and a medium they can put down and walk away from at will). Maybe we're disappointed when the real-world scenario is so much less convincing than the fictional ones.

If you were writing this spy story, couldn't you do it better?

NB. One of the damning pieces of evidence found at the residence of a spy family was a Coke can with a false bottom. I have a deodorant can with a false bottom; it was a gift, and was intended to hide jewelry while traveling. Does that make me a spy? I could probably cobble together some invisible ink, if I tried. And I have one of those cute little Minox cameras (it was my grandmother's–was she a spy too?). Perhaps I'm not who I seem to be...

Interesting Things I Learned While Researching Other Things

by Julia Buckley

The Internet is an amazing place. It reminds me of those stores you can wander into, looking for one item, and then become distracted by endless other items which fascinate for various reasons. And of course you spend more money than you intended to spend.

As I wandered through the amazing information store that is the Internet, doing research for a recent project, I ended up learning some interesting things and taking them away with me (but at least these tidbits were free).

1. On the CIA Website, students interested in a career in the CIA can find ways to become involved early, with internships available to "the best and brightest." I was also pleased to note that the CIA tells students up front that they need excellent writing and communication skills (foreign language is even better), and that they have to be free of drug or alcohol habits.

I'm glad that young people who might think the CIA seems glamorous as a career choice might also realize that agents are held to rigorous standards.

2. The FBI Website offers up the ol' "Ten Most Wanted" list, and Osama bin Laden (they spell it "Usama") is in the SECOND position. Ahead of him is Eduardo Ravello, a notorious drug trafficker. Interesting that one would precede the other.

3. All of the people on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list are men.

4. Of the 500 "historical" most wanted, twelve are women.

5. Of their "Most Wanted Terrorists," all are men of Middle Eastern descent, except for Daniel Andreas San Diego, who is from Berkeley, California.

6. Information about the Most Wanted fugitives is available in many languages.

7. On the NSA Website, I learned that the NSA was named Employer of the Year by BWI Business Partnership, "an association that focuses on economic development and transportation issues in the Baltimore-Washington corridor."

8. The first part of the NSA's strategic plan is "to dominate global cryptology."

9. The NSA provides explanations of common terms and acronyms. So, for my last note, I'll ask if you know what some of them stand for!

10. Can you identify these NSA acronyms?

COMINT
NSC
NSCID
SIGINT
SSCI

How did you do? I knew none of them. I'll post the answers at 5:00 Central Time today!

WHAT DOES THE FBI KNOW ABOUT ME?

by Sheila Connolly

I have led an exemplary life, legally speaking. Well, there were a few youthful indiscretions back in the seventies, but that was in California and everybody was doing it, and nobody cared much. And there was that one party I threw where the cops came, but nothing came of it. Those were the days.

But for the official record, I have always been squeaky-clean. I've never had a moving violation. I've garnered a total of two parking tickets in decades of driving, and paid them both promptly. I have never stolen anything (we won't talk about that box of paper clips, will we?) or inflicted grievous bodily harm on a fellow human being or an animal. I pay my taxes and give to charity. I am a model citizen.

So why do I wonder if the FBI has a file on me?

Because I have been associated with two multi-million-dollar thefts. And if that wasn't bad enough, in my forthcoming Museum Mystery series I'm writing about one.

The first theft occurred when I was in graduate school. A quartet of thieves broke into the museum building where my graduate classes were held, and made off with five thousand Greek coins valued then at $5,000,000. At the time it was said to be the largest known art theft (the total would be a lot higher now, no doubt). The event took place in December 1973, and, yes, I was enrolled at the time and lived only a few blocks away. And I sure could have used the money. I didn't do it.

Of course, that theft was trumped a few years later by the heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Luckily I was living in California at that time, but I had gone to school with a former director, and even lived in the same building as she did for a time, so I could have had inside information, right? I didn't do it. (Are you paying attention, FBI? Do you see me living the life of luxury with my ill-gotten gains here?)

In November 1997, I was working for The Historical Society of Pennsylvania when yet another multi-million-dollar theft was discovered, and that was the inspiration for my coming book. This was a very public event. There was much news coverage ("Live at Five!"). The FBI's Art Theft group was called in. Happily this theft was solved: a disgruntled employee who we all knew and liked had been spiriting articles out of the building for years, mainly to prove that he could. He sold what he took for pennies on the dollar, to a local collector (who, as it turned out, lived about two miles from my house), and much of it was recovered. But I was there. I didn't do it.

I have to admit that I'm curious. Nobody ever interviewed me or otherwise contacted me with regard to any of these thefts. But wouldn't you hope that my name cropping up on a list of people with clear opportunity during the investigation of two major events would send up some red flags? I'd like to think so, if the investigators are doing their job. It's kind of a big coincidence, isn't it?

The immediate question is: do I try to find out? On the surface, it would appear that the FBI would be happy to provide that information, as long as you ask nicely: send them a letter formally requesting "copies of all information maintained by your agency that pertain to myself," under the provisions of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts, 5 USC 552, nicely notarized.

Checking the official FBI File Fact Sheet, one finds:–The FBI does not keep a file on every citizen of the United States (can you imagine the paperwork?)–FBI files generally contain reports of FBI investigations of a wide range of matters, including...white-collar crime." Yup, that's where I'd fit.–The Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (aka FOIPA) "...provides responsive documents to requesters seeking 'reasonably described information.'"

So apparently, if I ask politely, they will send me whatever they have. It's a little unclear where I should direct my request. My current local office? The two local offices where the incidents occurred?

But the real question is, do I want to ask? If I make this innocent request, based solely on my lingering curiosity, will it trigger greater interest in my history? Will they take a harder look at me, particularly when my book, describing a completely fictional white-collar crime (really! I made it all up!), comes out in the fall?

What would you do?

Alex Kava's Life of Crime

Interviewed by Sandra Parshall

Bestselling thriller writer Alex Kava grew up in rural Nebraska, the daughter of hardworking parents who believed reading was frivolous unless required for school. She secretly nurtured her love of reading and writing throughout childhood. After college she held a number of jobs, mostly in marketing and advertising, and eventually became director of public relations at her alma mater, the College of Saint Mary in Omaha. When she decided in 1996 to write fiction and try to get published, she quit her PR job, resurrected her small graphic design firm to earn money, maxed out her credit cards, and took on a newspaper delivery route. Her first thriller, A Perfect Evil, was a quick success, and she’s been on bestseller lists ever since. She still lives in Omaha, with her dogs Molly and Scout.

Your new book is a departure from your Maggie O’Dell series. Will this become a second series?

Whitewash is not intended to be series, but I never say never. I do love the characters, especially two of the secondary ones: Miss Sadie, the eighty-one-year-old neighbor who keeps cash in the freezer and drives a 1948 Studebaker, and Leon, the hitman who has his own "standards." It'd be fun to bring them back in another novel down the road.

Was it difficult or energizing to work with a new lead character? What were you able to do with Sabrina that might not fit well with Maggie?

I actually find it very energizing. I did another stand alone, One False Move, several years ago. The novel was loosely based on a real life manhunt I found myself caught in the middle of. It was a story I needed and wanted to write but it wasn't necessarily a Maggie O'Dell novel. Same thing with Whitewash. I had a story to tell but I needed someone like Sabrina, not Maggie. Sabrina is a brilliant scientist and professor but a bit naive when it comes to street smarts. The story works because Sabrina hasn't ever had to deal with corporate corruption and political scandal let alone murder. It ratchets up the suspense.

You’ve said that you grew up in a home with few books and that your parents considered reading a waste of time unless it was done for school. Where do you think your love of books and the urge to write came from? Were you encouraged by any adult mentors?

Reading was always a wonderful escape whether I was following around Harriet the Spy or experiencing the high seas with Mutiny on the Bounty. Perhaps it was even more a treat because it was sort of forbidden.

As for adult mentors, I do fondly remember my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Powers, reading to us every day after lunch and how much we all looked forward to it. And I still get chills at the memory of my eighth grade teacher, Mr. Meyers, reading Poe's The Telltale Heart.

As a child, you wrote stories on the backs of calendars and hid them under your bed. What did you write about, and do you still have any of those stories?

I asked my mom for the old Co-op Grain calendars. They were weeklies, spiral bond and about six inches by nine inches in size, so I had fifty-two blank sheets that I could do whatever I wanted to and no one would miss them or be interested. I wrote stories. I can't remember if any of them were finished. I can't even remember what they were about. And no, unfortunately I don't have them. I think they got tossed for the same reason I thought they were so perfect to use -- no one cared what was written on an out-of-date calendar.

What drew you to writing thrillers? What can you accomplish in a thriller that you can’t in a traditional mystery?

I actually didn't choose to write thrillers. My first novel, A Perfect Evil, was loosely based on a couple of crimes that happened in Nebraska while I worked for a small town newspaper. I didn't know I had written a thriller or a mystery novel. I was concerned about the characters more than the plot. I wanted to focus on what happens to people when something horrific like the murder of two little boys happens in a community, especially a community that sometimes didn't lock its doors in the middle of the afternoon. It was the relationships and transformations of characters and the loss of innocence of a community that I was interested in capturing.

Shortly after A Perfect Evil was published a reviewer called me "the newest serial killer lady." Readers all over the world seemed to connect with Maggie O'Dell (who, by the way, doesn't enter the novel until chapter seven) and suddenly my publisher wanted a series of thrillers with Maggie O'Dell. At that time I couldn't even tell you what a thriller was and I certainly didn't know the first thing about writing a series. Even now I don't necessarily concern myself with whether the novel is a thriller or a mystery as much as how I want to tell the story and who -- which set of characters -- will tell their version.

How do people who have known you all your life react to your choice of subject matter? Has anyone ever tried to talk you into writing about more pleasant subjects?

My mom, who is a good Catholic mother, reads all my novels but we never discuss them. By now most of my friends are almost as fascinated by my research as I am. Although I'm not sure if that says more about their acceptance of me or their own dark interests.

What aspects of your writing have you consciously worked to improve? What aspects give you the most satisfaction?

I'm constantly working to improve every aspect -- to write tighter, to use more concise description, to make the dialogue sound real, to flesh out even the secondary characters and include research that enhances, not bores, the reader.

It seems to be the oddest of things that give me the most satisfaction. But mostly it's when something I've written really touches a reader. For At the Stroke of Madness I gave one of my characters Alzheimer's Disease as sort of a personality quirk until I started doing my research and realized what a horribly sad disease it is. Luc Racine became an important character in the plot and so did his loss of memory. Recently a reader, whose own father suffers from Alzheimer's Disease, wrote to me and thanked me for portraying the disease in such a realistic manner right down to Luc Racine finding his TV remote control in his refrigerator.

Does anyone read and comment on your work before you turn it in to your editor?

Yes, my friend and business manager, Deb Carlin, reads it. Oftentimes she takes my longhand and keys it in for me, too. She's also the only person I sit and brainstorm with to figure out the twists and turns.

How do you divide your time among research, promotion, and writing? Do you attend any mystery conferences?

It's tough because a writer could literally spend all year doing research, promotion and going to conferences and not writing. For example in 2006 I spent five weeks on the road doing an 18-city national tour for A Necessary Evil. Then because One False Move was chosen for One Book One Nebraska I decided to do a six-week, 35-city library tour across the state. For 17 days it was three women and five dogs in a rented RV. We jokingly called it "The Insanity Tour." Also in 2006 I attended three national conferences, BEA, and four book festivals.

I know some writers who can write anywhere, but I find it impossible to write in airports, hotels and RVs. Yet all of it is important, so you find a way to juggle it.

What do you read for pleasure? What thriller writers do you admire, and what newcomers to the field have caught your attention?

I just finished reading Daniel Silva's The Secret Servant. Now I'm reading Kathy Reichs. I love Carl Hiaasen and Thomas Perry. I've been a judge and the Awards Chair for International Thriller Writers so I've had the honor of meeting quite a few authors in the last two years, and now I'm enjoying reading many of their works: Joseph Finder, P.J. Parrish, Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, Christopher Riech, Steve Berry, Jeffery Deaver, James Rollins . . . so many books and so little time.

There are too many thriller authors I admire to mention. For newcomers, I just finished George D. Shuman's second thriller, Last Breath, which was terrific.The character of Sherry Moore that he created in his debut, 18 Seconds is a fascinating character. And for me that's still what makes a good thriller -- just as in any great fiction -- it's the characters.

You’ve had an extraordinary degree of cooperation from the FBI, while some other writers have said they were rebuffed when they asked for help. Why do you think the Bureau has been willing to assist you?

All of my resource connections in law enforcement, including the FBI, have come about through friends and/or readers helping me make those connections. Several of my sources have come to me at national book signing events and offered their assistance with a private phone number and/or email address. I've never had to cold-call anyone. I've been very fortunate.

But once I make those connections I think the sources are willing to talk to me because they know how much I respect what they do and they can trust me. There have been several times that I've had sources sit down and talk to me about open cases, including evidence that hasn't been made public, and they know they can count on me to not divulge anything sensitive. People resources are the absolute best for any research and what they share gives my novels a level of credibility and authenticity that I couldn't get anywhere else.

What are you working on now?

I'm working on the next Maggie O'Dell, called Exposed.

Visit the author’s web site at www.alexkava.com.