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customary Persian tea break with Sarshar and his buddy Amin, who had just returned from Afghanistan, two Arabic translators walked in. One of them excitedly recounted the episode and asked what we all thought. I didn’t respond; Amin and Sarshar mumbled something. One of the Arabic translators said, “After all, it is about Israel … He is an Israeli spy. Why do you think he keeps going back there? Sarshar, you know that; he’s been to Israel at least three times in the last year or so.”
    With Amin’s help, Sarshar tried to change the topic. Neither one wanted to get into the middle of an Arab-Israeli war. I remembered what Saccher had warned me about and kept my mouth shut.
    What I couldn’t understand is why, if we were all supposed to keep our sensitive and top-secret files inside the unit’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) and not in our file cabinets, I hadn’t yet seen anyone doing so.
    “Because they’re lazy,” Amin responded. “That would mean, if observed, that every time you go to the bathroom, every day when you come in and leave, the supervisor has to handle those documents for you—in and out of the SCIF. With this many translators, that would mean a lot of walking in and out of the SCIF; too much hassle for the supervisors.”
    The more I thought about the problem—sabotage and stealing top-secret documents—the more troubled I became. Not only does it put our national security and intelligence at risk, it also jeopardizes the target countries’ intelligence and secrets. What if terrorists got hold of these? What if those acting as middlemen got this information and sold it to whoever was willing to pay? What if one or more of these translators, with this extraordinary, unchecked access, became that middleman? What if some of these translators were in fact moles?
    In addition to sabotage and stolen documents, laptops disappeared with alarming frequency, many of them loaded with sensitive case data related to open counterterrorism and criminal investigations. Once every few weeks we would receive e-mails from the supervisors alerting us to missing laptops and asking us for help to establish chain of custody in the event that they were recovered.
    These laptops were supposed to be kept in a secured and locked facility. No translator should have been able to access them without first going through supervisors, and then being accompanied by the special agents who were allowed to carry and use these computers during travel assignments or court hearings. Detailed procedures, such as who possessed the key and access to the facility, how to sign the laptop checkout sheet in the presence of a witness, and how and where to maintain these laptops during use, apparently existed only in writing. The supervisors and those in charge evidently didn’t bother to keep the facility locked. The e-mail alerts continued.
    I worked for the bureau twenty-five hours a week on average; school took a lot of time and energy. I tried hard to spend every working minute on top priority and urgent tasks and assignments. If I got an urgent call from an agent begging me to get something done, I would stay late until I could complete that project.
    One day in early October, I received such a call from a New Jersey field agent. I could hear his desperation. He suggested that to save time I should have the results faxed to him over an FBI-secured fax line immediately after I was finished. (Ordinarily, completed assignments from field offices had to be sent to HQ in hard copy; the administrators then would send it via secure mail to the requesting field agents. That slowed everything. Our Language unit could not or would not send anything electronically.)
    I worked quickly until I finished the agent’s documents. Since I was not familiar with the secure fax, I went to Feghali’s office and asked him for instructions. He asked me to sit down. Feghali had something to tell me.
    “I see you are working very