Operation “Hard R”

Quantico, VA: FBI Headquarters, January, 2019.

Special Agent Collins approached the conference room with uncharacteristic trepidation. He’d been summoned by his superior, Agent Sullivan, as he had so many times before, but being called to the conference room was different. Usually they met in Sullivans cramped and out of date office, stacks of papers and files going back at least until the 80’s hemming him in at the formica desk he’d refused or neglected to have replaced. Sullivan always preferred to meet in private, where they could speak freely about what needed to be done on the next mission, what was really important, and even joke about their peers or make lewd remarks about the women they worked with. To meet in the conference room worried Collins. His instincts had been honed over the years to know when a threat loomed, when something was out of place, before his mind was able to put it into words.

He turned the corner to the vestibule outside the conference room, which appeared through the doorway like a cavern, whispered talk coming from a distant corner. He went in to see rows of blank tables and empty chairs all the way to the front, where at a podium stood Sullivan and a woman he’d never seen before. They were speaking quietly, looking down at something on the podium obscured from Collins’ view. He drew near, and Sullivan looked up, though he withheld his customary smile.

“Agent Collins,” he said. “Have a seat.” Sullivan nodded his head to the nearest table, and Collins turned the swivel chair around to face the two agents and a huge white projector screen. He’d watched many an in-service here with his compatriots, from ridiculous federally mandated videos on sexual harassment, age discrimination, and inclusivity, to briefings on Islamic terror tactics, organized crime, and Russian and Chinese hacking. What Sullivan could have in store for him alone on the big screen was impossible for him to imagine. He crossed his leg and couched his chin between his thumb and forefinger pensively. The hushed words continued.

“Yes. Yes. That’s the one” the woman said gravely. Sullivan maintained a somber visage, nodded, and said quietly “ok.” Then he looked up and stepped forward, one hand out to Collins and the other in a vague half gesture towards the woman. 

“Agent Collins. Thank you for joining us.” Collins stood up and took his hand while Sullivan looked back at the woman, who’d taken his place behind the podium and continued working on whatever they had there. “This is agent Jubiec, Department of Homeland Security.” The woman looked up halfway, nodded once, and looked back down. Her dirty blonde hair hung thick and stiff, her eyes staring blankly as the blue screen of the projector shone on her face. “Here, sit.” Collins sat while Sullivan crossed his arms and leaned back against the table, his body facing the big projector.

“We’re preparing a presentation for our next operation, Collins, and the topic is so sensitive, we’re going to leave some things out.” He paused for effect and looked down at Collins. “We wanted you to see what we’re really dealing with. What we really need you for.” Silence hung between them a moment, and when Collins looked from Sullivan to Jubiec, he saw that she’d looked up from her screen and was also staring at him. He looked back to Sullivan.

“What is it?”

“Online radicals Collins. Proselytizing to the public, creating more and more of themselves everyday with their preaching and hateful rhetoric, creating God-knows how many cells all over the country and the internet for their nefarious ends.” Sullivan had turned his head back to the screen and narrowed his eyes. Collins still didn’t understand.

“Like ISIS sir? Or Russian bots?” Sullivan snapped his head around to Collins and his eyes widened. Collins became worried. “Conspiracy Theorists?”

“No, Collins, nothing like that. This is something new. This is something worse.” He executed another dramatic pause. “White Supremacists,” he said, a fire burning in his eyes,  barely perceptible spittle escaping his lower lip. He held Collins with his intense gaze and Collins’ brow furrowed. Slowly he looked back to Jubiec, who still stared at him, and then to Sullivan once more. He began to think he understood what they wanted of him and nodded his head as he replied.

“Ah, yes…yes the Aryan Brotherhood.” He relaxed a bit, his shoulders slackening, an audible sigh escaping his lips. “So they’ve gone online.” Sullivan pulled the nearest seat out and sat facing Collins, still glaring at him.

“No Collins. Not the Aryan Brotherhood. Not the Neo-Nazis. Not the Klan. Not anyone we’ve ever seen before. This is something…different.” Sullivan adopted a far off look before snapping back. “You ever heard of Gamergate, Collins? 4chan?” Collins stiffened again.

“Yeah…yeah I think I remember that. Weren’t they part of the 2016 Russian bot thing? They were on 4chan with all the others.”

“Yes. The dregs and the denizens of the Dark Web. Well…” Sullivan began, animated, more his usual self, chattering away. Whenever he got the scent of a new operation he learned everything there was to know about his subjects, their methods and their ends, and he loved pouring this out to Collins as an introduction to his coming undercover work. Still, why were they in the conference room? With someone from DHS? Collins tuned in to what Sullivan was saying in the middle of a thought.

“...and they’ve all gone either to twitter or to 8chan now, though we’re hoping to have that down by the end of the year. Mostly they’re getting up to the usual stuff but, Collins, we need to get a handle on this before 2020. We can't be caught with our pants down a second time. Last time you couldn't have gotten the Bureau to pay attention to online video game kids if you threatened to cut all our funding for a year, but now? Nothing is too trivial. These guys scatter all over the place, almost impossible to track down through code and ip alone. Cybersecurity is on the case, but they can only do so much. Anything coming in from Russia, they’ll see it, they’ll tell us who to watch on that end. But domestics…they can pop up from anywhere and we cant be playing whack a mole, going after accounts after they’ve already done something. We need to identify the big players, identify the respawners, and track their movements over time so that nothing surprises us when the next election comes around. We need a guy inside, in their milieu, someone who knows their lingo, knows their ways and how they think, someone who they can trust to let in on their schemes.” Sullivans gaze had been drifting from Collins’ eyes as he got lost in his thought, but he brought it back now and locked in. “Someone in their group chats.” 

“Group chats, sir?” 

“Here” Jubiec said from the front. Collins turned to her and saw an image flash on the screen. There was a heading at the top above a row of images on the left hand side next to lines of text with titles above them.

“These are twitter group chats” she continued. “Each one of them contains any number of twitter users who can chat with each other in private conversations, unmoderated and unmonitored by Twitters rule enforcement department. Unless someone *inside* the chat reports the chat, twitter doesn’t take notice of any of the ip addresses in there. This severely limits the exposure of any terms of use violations.”

“Ok” Collins said to her. “I see. You want someone to infiltrate these group chats and monitor them for suspicious activity, let you guys know who we should be paying attention to.”

“Precisely” Jubiec responded. 

“Huh” Collins said, relaxing again. Somewhat under his breath he said “never done online work. This could get interesting.”

“Don’t think that because its online it’ll be easy,” Sullivan Warned. “These people are hardcore, and they dont let just anyone into their circles. You’ve done superior infiltration work before, and we know you’re the guy for this. But we need to let you know what you’d be up against. The stakes here are high, Collins. These guys don't play ball with just anyone, and they’re going to display a higher level of suspicion against newcomers than the people you're typically used to dealing with.”

“All right,” Collins responded. “I think i can do this, it's gotta be easier to passively observe these guys than a drug cartel or something.” Sullivans jaw tensed and he seemed to chew something with his rear teeth. He hung his head for a moment. Collins grew uncomfortable. “What am I missing?” he asked.

Sullivan slowly, again for effect, looked up to meet Collins' eyes.

“Say ‘nigger.’” 

Collins didn’t know what to do. He sat stark still for a long time while Sullivan’s glare bore into him. He was shocked, but he refused to be the first to look away. Sullivan continued to stare at him, so Colins decided this was a test of wills. A will to do what exactly, say it or not say it, he didn’t know, but he did know that looking away first made you the loser. They both became more severe in their glares, more hardened in their resolve, as time went on. Finally Sullivan, seemingly agitated, broke the silence.

“Say it” he spat.
“No” Collins retorted.

Sullivan deflated. He wiped his face with his hand and looked to Jubiec. She nodded and he relaxed further. Collins witnessed this exchange of looks and change of mood and was unsure what to think beyond suspecting the two of them had had this planned ahead of time.

“Why would I say that?” he asked. 

“Agent Collins, do you have any idea how one would get into one of these online right wing groups?” Agent Jubiec asked. “It’s not like infiltrating a gang, or a financial scam op, or a human trafficking ring -”

“All things you’ve done” Sullivan cut in.

“So I’m told,” Jubiec responded. “Failure to do so in one of those missions threatened harsh blowback from the target, perhaps even death of the agent and compromise of the mission. Nevertheless, no matter what happened on the first infiltration attempts, agencies would always have a new face or a new name to target for a future way in. But here, if you fail to enter these group chats, we will still never know exactly who to target. Some of these accounts, some of the worst ones, save all their seditious comments for the chats.” Collins mulled this over.

“So that’s where you think the hardcore attacks are planned. Makes sense, not to talk openly.” 

“Not only that,” Jubiec added, “it allows us to widen the net, to find other accounts who don’t use this language in public but do so in private, with their comrades.” Collins nodded, and rubbed his palms on his legs.

“Still, there’s gotta be a better way. Can't we just hack into the chats, or request the information from Twitter? Do we really need to put an agent in there?” Jubiec opened her mouth to respond, but Sullivan interjected, leaning in closer to Collins.

“Don’t need an agent in there?” He sat back and crossed his arms. “Never thought I’d hear you say that, Collins.” Collins looked around, as if for an ally.

“Well…It’s just…I mean….this is different sir. These guys aren’t moving drugs or kids or… committing financial crimes or anything like that. Are they? Before the risks were high but the payload was huge. But this” he waved his hand at the screen. “These are just kids bickering about video games and making fun of girls.” 

Sullivan sat there with his arms crossed and tilted his head. Collins held his own under the glare, as he’d done before. This is the sort of thing he was trained for, and he could keep his composure for as long as he needed to. It would take a lot for these people to convince him this operation was worth his time. And at the moment, he wasn’t even sure there *was* an operation. Something was off here. Was this woman even from DHS? Was she an HR lady posing as homeland security to see if he’d break some human resources diversity and inclusion rule? Is that what this was? Had he fucked up somewhere and they were finally coming for him?

“What is this?” He looked back and forth between the two. “What is this?” Sullivan was the first to speak up.

“It’s your chance for promotion, Collins. You’ve grinded away almost seventeen years here. You’re one of our best agents, and your best days are still ahead of you. The threats to America are ever changing, and every single time the Bureau needed you to step up, change your tactics, and even put your life on the line, you did it. This is no different.

“Now I know this seems strange, it did to me at first. This is a new world, and this is a new breed of criminal. But don’t for one second think this isn’t a big payload, if we can pull this off it may be the very biggest payload this Bureau has ever received.

“Well what's the payload?” Collins asked. Sullivan leaned in, putting his elbows on his knees and making a diamond with his fingers between his legs.

“Democracy itself, agent Collins. Democracy, and the future of the United States of America.”

“I know these seem like kids, Agent Collins,” Jubiec said. “But these people subverted, with the help of Russia, the election of 2016, and put the country in the hands of a complete madman. Their tactics are new, nothing like anything we’ve seen anywhere in the world, and if we put a guy in there that doesn’t know them well, he’ll be sniffed out immediately.” Suddenly, an image appeared on the screen.

“And ‘Nigger’” both Collins and Sullivan winced, “with a ‘hard R,’ is their favorite word.” Collins stared at the image in stunned disbelief. This had suddenly gotten much stranger, and he was the most disoriented he’d been in a long time. He wanted to laugh, because this must’ve been a joke, but he still couldn’t be sure if they were testing him. His face still on the screen, his eyes migrated to the sides of their sockets, towards Sullivan.

“Whats the first thing you think when you see this, Agent Collins?” He asked.

“Well sir.” He paused. “The N word.”

“True. Ok, whats the second thing?”

“I don’t know sir. Just the N word, really.” Sullivan let out an overly loud sigh.

“Its cute, Collins. It’s funny. Its bizarre. They’re trying to draw young and apolitical people in to their sick worldview and pass it off as silly. Normalize it.”

“That’s how they infiltrate the voting population, ” Jubiec said. She flashed another image onto the screen.

“They get eyes on them, they make people laugh, then they indoctrinate them into the real hardocre stuff.” The image changed again.

“Next thing you know, you have a Trump supporter.”

Collins didn’t know what to think. HE was a Trump supporter! And he’d never seen any of this stuff in his life. This has to be a test, he was utterly convinced now. But he had no idea what they wanted from him. He just knew, that no matter where this conversation went, he couldn’t say the word. 

Sullivan was reading his mind. Sullivan was always reading his mind. Thats why no matter how intense a mission got, Sullivan was always able to get him to take another one. He knew exactly what Collins was thinking, and exactly what he wanted to hear.

“Say the word, Collins. Say ‘hard R’ and all your dreams will come true. Everything you’ve ever wanted out of this career will be yours when this operation is over. After the election, you’ll get your promotion, you get your pick of operations, you’ll have a whole team under you. But you have to say the word. You have to say ‘Nigger.”

Collins had to conscientiously control his breathing. He had to keep from clenching his fists. He couldn’t show weakness or they’d get him to say it. He’d never said that word in his life, he’d hardly ever even heard it, and now two of his superiors had said it several times. They’d made him read it. They’d made him think it. But he could stop them from making him say it. If this was a test, he'd passed, and if there really was a promotion, it wasn’t worth it. He looked at Sullivan, steeled his gaze, and said:
“No.”

That was too much for Sullivan. He slammed his palm on the table, jumped up, and began pointing his finger wildly at Collins.

“You stood by while the cartels shot an innocent man in Arizona!” he screamed. “You got in a shootout with the biker gangs in Texas and probably killed someone! You had sex with an underage prostitute to bring down the New Mexico pedophile ring! You smoked meth with Mexicans in Colorado! And it worked! It WORKED Collins!” he slapped the table again. “And this is no different! You get these guys, you’ll save democracy forever, you wont be saving one or two petty lives like everything before, you’ll save the life of your COUNTRY Goddammit! Now say the word!” Silence. “Say it!” Silence again. Sullivan was screaming now. “Say Nigger!”

Collins stood up. So this is why they had to do this here. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, removed his badge, and dropped it on the table. Pointing at it, he said

“I’m gonna leave this here, sir. I’m not saying the word, and if that means more to you than the last seventeen years of my service, you keep this, and you find somebody else.” He looked at Jubiec. “I made a line in the sand when I started this career, and I’ve crossed it over and over again to get the job done. Hell I’ve gone so far I didnt even believe there was a line anymore. But you just showed me exactly where it is.

“Some of the best agents at this Bureau are black, and one of them saved my life.” He looked at Sullivan. “I’ve even heard back in the days of the crack wars one of them saved your life too, Sullivan. So if you can’t understand my position, keep my badge. But if anyone in this Bureau,” back to Jubiec. “Hell if anyone in the entire federal government has any standards anymore, you’ll know there's a step too far and you're about to take it. When you realize that, I’ll take my badge back. Otherwise,” he paused, took a deep breath, and concluded. “If not, I’ll go back to police work. At least that's honest.” He turned and started walking out. The image hung on the screen.

Rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand, Sullivan reached with his other and took up Collins’ badge. Slowly, he stood and held the badge out. Just as Collins approached the threshold, Sullivan Called his name.

“Collins!” Collins stopped. Much quieter Sullivan repeated himself. “Collins.” Collins turned, saw the out held badge, and slowly started walking back. As he returned, Jubiec began gathering her things and picked up a suitcase. Collins got to Sullivan and as he took the badge he heard the suitcase snap shut. He looked to Jubiec and Sullivan hung his head in resignation. Jubiec started to walk out, but she stopped and looked back to Collins.

“You came highly recommended, Agent Collins. So I can’t leave here without telling you the truth. You weren’t the first person we asked to do this operation. You were the last. We’ve been trying to find someone since our last agent, a woman, had a nervous breakdown and ended up committed to an institution after a year in these circles. We asked all around Homeland Security, the NSA, we even tried to use an old informant who’s in federal prison now. All refused. This is a step too far for everyone.” She made a thoughtful pause and looked off. “It’s almost as if our training is *too* good.” She looked back to Collins.

“This was supposed to be an easy job, for a novice, but once we realized what we were dealing with, we understood we needed a seasoned veteran. But these people are so malicious, so…mentally ill, I’m going to suggest we shitcan this whole operation and move on to plan B.” They stood in silence a moment until Collins couldn’t take it.

“What’s plan B?”

“We hope by the end of the year,” Jubiec responded, “we can get these maniacs designated as the number one domestic terror threat, hold some senate hearings, and nuke the entire fucking internet.” She turned on her heal and walked out, her shoes making a dull thud on the thin carpet. She disappeared out the door and Collins stood with Sullivan in silence, who still hung his head.

“Is this for real? This is the next fucking Islamic State Sully?”

“I don’t know” Sullivan whispered. “I don’t anymore Col. The world is changing so much. It used to just be bad guys you know? You could track them, and chase them. None of this even seems real. And just when you think you’ve seen the bottom of the barrel man, you get this. The fuckin N word.”

“With a hard R.”

“Yeah. Real hard.” He sighed and smacked the sides of his legs. “Well, I don’t know what they’re gonna do Col, but I know I need a beer. I need to wash my mouth out from this awful taste.”

“Yeah. Yeah,” Collins replied, “let’s do that. I’m buying,” and they walked out together.