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Markopolos: That’s another regret of mine. I hold myself responsible for that. Spitzer was
the guy. I should’ve just called him. Maybe I would’ve gotten through, maybe I wouldn’t
have, but I think I would have.
MG: You had standing. You were—
Markopolos: President of the Security Analysts.…If the past president or current president…
calls the boss and says, “I have the biggest scheme ever. It’s right in your backyard,” I
think I would’ve gotten in.
MG: Why don’t you think you did that?
Markopolos: Woulda, coulda, shouldas. Regrets, you know. There’s no perfect investigation
and I made my share of mistakes, too. I should have.
Markopolos sees his mistake now, with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight. But in the
midst of things, the same brilliant mind that was capable of unraveling Madoff’s deceptions was
incapable of getting people in positions of responsibility to take him seriously. That’s the
consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have
meaningful social encounters.
As Levine writes:
Being deceived once in a while is not going to prevent us from passing on our genes or
seriously threaten the survival of the species. Efficient communication, on the other hand, has
huge implications for our survival. The trade-off just isn’t much of a trade-off.
Markopolos’s communication at the library was, to put it mildly, not efficient. The woman he
gave the envelope to, by the way? She wasn’t one of Spitzer’s aides. She worked for the JFK
Library. She had no more special access to Spitzer than he did. And even if she had, she
would’ve almost certainly seen it as her responsibility to protect a public figure like Spitzer from
mysterious men in double-size overcoats clutching plain brown envelopes.
5.
After his failures with the SEC, Markopolos began carrying a Smith & Wesson handgun. He
went to see the local police chief in the small Massachusetts town where he lived. Markopolos
told him of his work against Madoff. His life was in danger, he said, but he begged him not to
put that fact in the precinct log. The chief asked him if he wanted to wear body armor.
Markopolos declined. He had spent seventeen years in the Army Reserves and knew something
about lethal tactics. His assassins, he reasoned, would be professionals. They would give him
two shots to the back of the head. Body armor wouldn’t matter. Markopolos installed a high-tech
alarm system in his house. He replaced the locks. He made sure to take a different route home
every night. He checked his rearview mirror.
When Madoff turned himself in, Markopolos thought—for a moment—that he might finally
be safe. But then he realized that he had only replaced one threat with another. Wouldn’t the SEC
now be after his files? After all, he had years of meticulously documented evidence of, at the
least, their incompetence and, at the most, their criminal complicity. If they came for him, he
concluded, his only hope would be to hold them off as long as possible, until he could get help.
He loaded up a twelve-gauge shotgun and added six more rounds to the stock. He hung a
bandolier of twenty extra rounds on his gun cabinet. Then he dug out his gas mask from his army
days. What if they came in using tear gas? He sat at home, guns at the ready—while the rest of
us calmly went about our business.
1
But wait. Don’t we want counterintelligence officers to be Holy Fools? Isn’t this just the profession where having
someone who suspects everyone makes sense? Not at all. One of Scott Carmichael’s notorious predecessors was James
Angleton, who ran the counterintelligence operations of the CIA during the last decades of the Cold War. Angleton became
convinced there was a Soviet mole high inside the agency. He launched an investigation that eventually covered 120 CIA
officials. He couldn’t find the spy. In frustration, Angleton ordered many in the Soviet division to pack their bags.
Hundreds of people—Russian specialists with enormous knowledge and experience of America’s chief adversary—were
shipped elsewhere. Morale plummeted. Case officers stopped recruiting new agents.
Ultimately, one of Angleton’s senior staffers looked at the crippling costs of more than a decade of paranoia and jumped to the
final, paranoid conclusion: if you were the Soviet Union and you wanted to cripple the CIA, the most efficient way to do
that would be to have your mole lead a lengthy, damaging, exhaustive hunt for a mole. Which meant the mole must be
Angleton.
The final casualty of James Angleton’s witch hunt? James Angleton. He was pushed out of the CIA in 1974, after thirty-one
years. Had Scott Carmichael behaved like James Angleton and suspected everyone of being a spy, the DIA would have
collapsed in a cloud of paranoia and mistrust like the CIA’s Soviet division.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Case Study: The Boy
in the Shower
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