Three Minutes to Doomsday 1 "SUBJECT RAMSAY WAS NAKED . " August 23, 1988 I''m thirty-five now, and I''ve been working for the FBI most of my adult life, since I was twenty-three years old. My recruiter told me back when I joined up that I was the second youngest person ever offered a position with the Bureau. I don''t know about that, but strangely enough--since I can never play football competitively again--the sport is what landed me on the FBI radar screen, at least in a roundabout way. While I lay in that hospital in Miami, watching my senior high-school year drift away, thirty-one of my thirty-two athletic scholarship offers disappeared. A single one survived, from Brigham Young University. LaVell Edwards, BYU''s coach, called one afternoon to say that he still liked me, that I was big and fast. Why not give it a try? I did just that, for three days, by which time the arm I''d nearly lost a few months earlier was swollen to three times normal size and the docs were talking blood clots and possible nerve damage.

That was the official dead end of my dreams of gridiron glory, but I stayed on at BYU, supporting myself with a mix of scholarship money, loans, and odd jobs, including one as a campus policeman, at the suggestion of my criminology professor. And thus when the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI came recruiting at BYU, as they always do in abundance at Mormon-dominated schools, my background seemed particularly apt: campus cop, graduate of the Utah Police Academy, a devout anti-Communist in general and a Cuban émigré stridently opposed to Fidel Castro in particular, and ardently in love with America. Maybe I really was the second-youngest recruit. What better combination of traits could the Bureau have been looking for? As for me, I was so desperate for paying work that I said yes on the spot, really without giving it another thought. * * * ONE THING I SOON learned: There are no normal hours in the FBI. Contractually, I work ten and a half hours per day, but I''m constantly being asked to do more and more with less and less. It''s not just my own cases that eat away time. There''s always some new shortage, always "the needs of the Bureau"--a term that pecks at me every time I think I''m going to have a weekend off and instead have to cancel family time once again.

While I''m stationed in Puerto Rico, they need SWAT operators to work on terrorism cases, so I get volunteered by my supervisor--"volunteered" as in one day I see my name on a list to attend Basic-SWAT for four weeks and that''s that. Not that I mind all that much. The training is fun, and really, who doesn''t want to have an MP-5 Heckler & Koch suppressed submachine gun in the trunk of his car? But suddenly, every few weeks, on top of my regular work, there are the SWAT operations, and some of those last days. They can involve anything from an airplane hijacking to a takedown of the Machetero terrorist group (macheteros means "machete wielders," but these guys were good with guns, rifles, and bombs, too). But what really eats up my spare time is the flying. In researching my background, the Bureau learns that I received my pilot''s license in high school. Once I come on board, it isn''t long before I start getting calls to help with aerial surveillance. Do I complain? Not really.

Going from the bare-bones Cessna 150 I''d trained in to a Cessna 182 with retractable gears and air-conditioning is a huge step up, and this time I''m being paid to fly, not the other way around. But the hours are killers. Often, I work a regular shift, then pilot 6 p.m. till midnight--a great time to fly because the air is generally calm at night--but add it all together and I''m putting in way too many sixteen-hour days. When my family does see me, I''m so tired I sometimes doze off standing on my feet in line at the supermarket. Ultimately, the flying and the SWAT operations take a mental backseat to what I really enjoy--counterintelligence work or "CI." The thing about CI work is that it connects you to the world.

It makes you pay attention to what''s happening in faraway places. Any country can tolerate bank robberies, carjackings, rapes, even riots, but espionage is the only crime a nation can potentially not survive. With the right kind of intelligence, you can render another nation inert or change the course of history. That''s why I love CI--because it really matters. I start just about every work morning with the daily intelligence brief that comes clacking in over our teletype machine a little after sunrise. Today''s no different. Last night I was up almost to midnight, flying lazy circles over Tampa Bay, helping out another squad short on surveillance agents. This morning, I''m touring the world''s hot spots, searching for anything in the overnight synopsis that might find its way back to Central Florida.

Example: Police in Lima, Peru, yesterday raided the plant that prints the newspaper El Diario, thought to be the voice of the Maoist guerilla group Sendero Luminoso, aka Shining Path. Sounds like a stretch, I admit, but when Maoist guerillas in South America get upset, I take notice because Cuba''s Americas Department funds extremism in the region, and the Marxist ex-guerilla in Havana can sometimes get a little itchy himself. Some things I can pretty much take a pass on. I''m sorry that hundreds died and thousands were injured in an earthquake that rocked northern India and Nepal, but there''s not much I can do about plate tectonics that far away. The state of national emergency just declared in Pakistan is another matter. A few days ago President Zia and ten of his top generals disappeared in a midair explosion. Now Zia''s successor, Ishaq Khan, is telling reporters that "the enemy has penetrated the inner defense of the country." Does "enemy" mean India? Probably, but unrest on or near the Subcontinent can easily spill over borders, and Tampa has been home since 1983 to the United States Central Command, whose responsibilities include Central Asia.

Part of my job is to watch CentCom''s back. The Pakistan-India conflict is also a proxy tug-of-war between China and the USSR--this could get ugly overnight. As always, the Middle East is thick with violence and intrigue. In Haifa, a hand grenade tossed into a crowded sidewalk café has wounded twenty-five, including seven members of a single family that had been admiring the window display at a toy store. Another dog-bites-man story: The IRA has struck again in Northern Ireland--eight dead and twenty-eight wounded this time when a bomb explodes aboard a civilian bus carrying British soldiers. The bomb, which the IRA said was fashioned from two hundred pounds of Czech-made Semtex, left a crater six feet deep. This story is also less distant than you might think. We have IRA financial supporters in Tampa who probably woke up cheering this very morning.

Counterintelligence is inevitably biased toward the biggest gorilla in the room, and that''s the Soviet Union. They have the most spies, the most money, and they get most of my attention, but the Warsaw Pact countries are nothing to snicker at. East Germany is far smaller than the USSR, but its intelligence service, run by the legendary Markus Wolf, is even tougher to crack than the KGB. Not just tougher. Better--in a very scary way. In Poland, I read, seventy-five thousand coal miners are out on strike, demanding that Solidarity, the outlawed trade union, be legalized. Moscow can''t be happy with this. The KGB would love nothing better than to get rid of Pope John Paul II and his influence over his fellow Poles.

In fact, the Soviets via the Bulgarians have already made one assassination attempt. Now Moscow is witnessing what it sought to erase: influence over power. The Pope is making the KGB quake. Yet another hot spot: In Czechoslovakia, source of the Semtex that blew the British police to smithereens in Northern Ireland, a small group gathered two days ago in Prague''s Wenceslas Square to sing the Czech national anthem on the twentieth anniversary of the day two hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops and five thousand tanks rolled into the country to crush the so-called Prague Spring. By itself, none of this Soviet stuff is particularly alarming: Even seventy-five thousand angry miners pose no serious threat to the world''s Other Superpower--the USSR has crushed the yearning of people to be free before and they''ll do it again. But put it all together, and something is happening. Courage is breaking out behind the Iron Curtain, or maybe just the multiple failures of the Soviet system at all levels--economic, political, moral--are finally becoming impossible to ignore and cover up. Either way, it might be a little early to start celebrating the Soviets'' decline.

The KGB has both the power to quash and suppress, and the incentive. I remember talking to a Soviet KGB defector once. "We can never afford to let go," he told me. "We''ve all seen how the crowds hung Mussolini''s body when his government fell. That''s what will happen to us, especially in Eastern Europe--they hate us there." I''m thinking there''s nothing more dangerous than a wounded Russian bear when Jay Koerner, my supervisor, approaches my desk. The time is 7:57 a.m.

The date: Tuesday, August 23, 1988, and while I have no way of knowing, the next decade of my life has just been spoken for. "Yours," he says, handing me a teletype from FBIHQ. "Now." "Mine?" I''ve got a.