Twisted Triangle Read online

  On her first day as an instructor, Margo remembered how she’d only recently been through the sixteen grueling weeks of training herself.

  John Burke, who was still a special agent at the time, had greeted her class of trainees by distributing copies of the book Dress for Success, telling them that looking the part of an FBI agent was half of getting the job done.

  She remembered how she and her classmates had worked hard to excel physically as well as academically, walking tall and with purpose through the halls of the academy, where agents and trainees alike seemed to share the feeling that they were doing something important with their lives.

  Trainees were tested at the end of each block of training and had to score a minimum of 85 percent to pass. The pressure was excruciating because those who failed more than two tests were dismissed from the academy.

  The fast-paced classroom curriculum was challenging for Margo, but the blocks of defensive tactics, strength, endurance, and firearms training were even tougher, testing not only her physical fitness but her emotional fortitude as well.

  Margo initially failed to do the requisite number of push-ups, which was twenty-one for women. She also struggled as she learned how to use a shotgun, her eyes welling up with tears of frustration.

  “I wasn’t seating it right on my shoulder, and as a result, the recoil was bumping up and hitting me in the cheek, bouncing down on my shoulder,” she said later.

  But Margo buckled down and did what needed to be done. She did not let herself cry, nor did she let any of the exams get the best of her. And after fulfilling all the training requirements, Margo vowed never to do another push-up again.

  When Ed Tully met Margo in person for the first time, he noticed that she was slight in size, yet she carried herself with confidence.

  “She was a little slip of a girl, but she had a certain quality I was very impressed with,” he said later.

  He was also impressed by the way she looked at him. “It was just a determination in her eyes,” he said. “She was very clean, neat, and professional. . . . As it turned out, she was one of the best instructors I ever brought to Quantico. Everyone respected her, treated her like a lady. She was always one of my favorites.”

  Appearances aside, Margo could put on a hard edge when she needed to. While she was working at her first job at the West Georgia College’s campus police department in 1975, Margo soon earned the name of the Blonde Bitch, the meter maid who wouldn’t give anyone any slack. It was only in her personal relationships that she wasn’t so good at standing up for herself.

  When she’d entered college, Margo had intended to become a doctor, thinking that she could make a difference in the world by helping people and at the same time maintain some financial stability in her own life. She soon realized, however, that organic chemistry and, therefore, a career in medicine were beyond her abilities. After mastering a criminology course, she followed her girlfriend, Donna, to the campus department, where she went from parking enforcement officer to dispatcher and eventually to police officer. Margo found that walking with a gun on her hip made her feel strong, as if she were wearing armor, and helped counterbalance her low self-confidence.

  As Margo continued her graduate studies in educational psychology, she saw a nexus between counseling and police work. Once she realized that she could also help people as a police officer, she decided on a career in law enforcement. That said, she knew she wanted more for herself than to drive a patrol car her entire life. Once she was accepted into the elite ranks of the FBI, she knew she’d made the right choice.

  Even after she’d become a full-fledged agent, she still liked the feeling of carrying a weapon on the belt of her skirt.

  The ten instructors in Margo’s unit worked in an office that was divided into two rows of cubicles, dubbed the Prairie Dog Unit, because if someone yelled out a name, that person’s head would pop up like a prairie dog, obediently answering the call. It was also known as the Ant Farm because the instructors felt as if they were working on top of each other, milling around like ants in the mazelike arrangement of desks.

  Ed assigned Margo to pair up with John Hess, who taught Interviewing and Interrogation, a duty his colleagues considered akin to purgatory. Margo, however, took to it immediately, and John, in turn, took immediately to her.

  “She was the first one who came and showed any interest,” John said later.

  For the next few weeks, Margo sat in on John’s classes, taking copious notes. John knew the material so well that he was able to teach off the top of his head. When Margo learned they were going to work together as a team, she told him she couldn’t do it without a lesson plan, so her detailed notes of his lectures became their organizational backbone.

  Margo thought John seemed like a very quiet and serious sort of guy, with a soft voice and an intensity about him. At first, she felt intimidated by all his experience—twenty-eight years in the bureau, fifteen of it in the field.

  “He had instant credibility with me,” she said later. “I literally was soaking up his every word. He wanted to share what he knew with me. He wanted to make sure I did a good job.”

  In the coming months and years, the two developed a special friendship, becoming as close as brother and sister. They often joked that if one were to walk out of the classroom midsentence, the other could come in and pick up where the first left off. They were the perfect team.

  “We couldn’t have been more compatible,” John recalled.

  Ed Tully saw their relationship as even deeper than that. “They would die for each other,” he said later. “John Hess thought she was a queen.”

  Margo started teaching her own Interviewing and Interrogation course about a month in. Despite her initial feelings of nervousness, insecurity, and inexperience, she got some of the best student evaluations Ed had ever seen for a new teacher since he’d joined the unit in the early 1970s.

  “She had a depth of knowledge and experience,” he said later. “She was believable, she liked her students, and understood non-verbal cues like maintaining good eye contact. She was well prepared and treated her students with respect.”

  Margo felt that she had reached nirvana.

  “I loved being at Quantico,” she recalled. “I loved the academic environment. Everybody who was there wanted to be there, so the dedication and commitment to be involved in training were very high.”

  At the time, the academy offered courses to new agent trainees; in-service seminars to special agents; and a prestigious eleven-week program to qualified law enforcement officials, called the National Academy. These courses ran the gamut from death investigations to white-collar crime, undercover operations, hostage negotiations, public corruption, interviewing, and profiling.

  As many as fifty students could sit in one classroom, ascending in tiered, curved rows of desks that were arranged almost like theater seating.

  An average day for Margo would start at eight in the morning and go until five, with an hour for lunch in the Board Room, which was a cafeteria by day and a bar by night. Her days would generally consist of teaching two to four hours, sometimes six; going over lesson plans; writing professional articles with a colleague; and developing new course material.

  John and Margo’s class became so popular that they eventually had to teach three sections in the National Academy. Margo and John each taught one and split the third.

  One afternoon that fall, Margo was typing up some lesson plans. Her hands were sweaty, and one of her rings, which Gene had given her for Christmas in 1985, was slipping around on her finger. It was top-heavy, made out of a gold Mexican coin, and had about twenty tiny diamonds around the circumference, just enough to glitter. Gene told her he’d gotten it at an estate sale.

  “To be honest, I didn’t particularly like it,” she said later. “It was too ostentatious.”

  As she often did when she was typing, Margo took it off and put it into a zipperless pouch in her purse.

  When she got to work
the next day, she felt in her purse for the ring, but it wasn’t there. That night, she looked on her dresser, in the pockets of the suit she’d worn the day before, on the closet floor, and again in her purse.

  “Gene,” she said. “I can’t find my ring. Have you seen it?”

  “What ring are you talking about?”

  “The coin ring.”

  “When did you last have it?”

  Margo was hesitant to tell him because she was worried he was going to get mad and accuse her of being careless. But when she explained what had happened, he acted very caring about it. He even helped her look, but they still had no luck.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll call the insurance company and see what they say.”

  The next day, Gene said the insurance company told him they needed to file a police report, so she talked to the police staff at Quantico, and an officer took a loss report from her, which they submitted to State Farm.

  “It was more reasonable to think I had knocked it out of my purse and it was just lost, which could have happened anywhere between my office and the car,” she later recalled.

  The insurance company sent the Bennetts a $12,000 check.

  That Christmas, Gene gave Margo a ring that looked exactly like the one that had gone missing. At first, she couldn’t believe it.

  “My ring!” she said.

  “You don’t know how much trouble it was to find one like yours,” Gene said. Then, with amusement in his eyes, he added, “Try to hold on to it this time.”

  As Margo turned the ring in her fingers, she recognized that it had the same little scratches as her old one. How many other rings could have this unique design? She’d certainly never seen another one like it.

  She’d already lost a tremendous amount of respect for Gene because of the house relocation scam, but this hit home in a different way. She couldn’t believe her husband would do such a thing to her, but she felt in her gut that he had. After they were first married, he’d snooped around in her briefcase and found a letter she’d written to a fellow agent, complaining about her marital difficulties. Since then, she’d come to believe that Gene routinely went through her belongings. Now he was lying to her.

  “This was perhaps the worst because he stole from me,” she said later. “He went into my purse and got it, so this was personal. On top of that, he was laughing at it.”

  But Margo didn’t let herself get angry at Gene. She put her disappointment into a box and stuck it in the back of her mind, reverting to the coping mechanism of denial she’d learned growing up.

  “I didn’t want to deal with it,” she recalled.

  In late 1987, Gene finally got out of the desk job he’d hated so much and was moved to the Soviet KGB Counter-Intelligence Squad. His new assignment was to try to “penetrate” KGB officers in the DC area, their missions, and the Soviet embassy. He didn’t talk much about his work to Margo, except that he was excited to have landed a new undercover operation called Operation Bootstrap, which lasted until early 1989.

  But Bootstrap wasn’t enough. It didn’t take long before he was antsy again for more of the autonomy and the flashy undercover excitement he’d experienced in his Nickelride days.

  Chapter Four

  Uncomfortably Numb

  Two months after Margo and Gene were married, he surprised her by suggesting that they take their sexual practices in a direction she didn’t want to go.

  “Would you be willing to do a threesome?” he asked. “Wouldn’t you find that exciting?”

  Stunned, Margo didn’t say anything for a minute. “No, I don’t think so,” she said, carefully.

  Margo didn’t want to touch that subject with Gene. She wanted to leave her past behind her; she also didn’t see a ménage à trois as a healthy step for their marriage.

  Within a couple months, Gene started incorporating porno movies into their sex life. His favorites were those with lesbian scenes.

  Over the next two years, Gene’s interest in watching these movies increased. Then, while they were making love one day in late 1987, he asked her to do something new once again.

  “Tell me what it would be like to be with a woman,” he said.

  When Margo didn’t answer, he continued asking questions. “What does a woman feel like? Taste like?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, trying to sound as if she didn’t even want to imagine that scenario. She’d never told him that she’d been with a woman, and she didn’t intend to talk about it now.

  “I felt it was dangerous territory. Something was telling me, ‘Don’t expose that part of you to him,’ ” she later recalled.

  But because he was so insistent and she wanted to please him, she went along with his request and described “fantasies” for him based on her memories with Donna. She assumed that he had no idea that she was speaking from experience, because when he asked, she denied it.

  “Have you ever wanted to make love with a woman?” Gene asked.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  She was relieved when he finally let it go, but she later wondered whether he’d picked up that she’d been lying.

  Amid Margo’s deepening discontent with Gene, Allison provided a bright spot for her, especially when the toddler uttered her first expressive phrase right around the age of two. She was not so pleased, however, with Allison’s word choice.

  Allison was sitting in her high chair in the kitchen, holding a two-handed sippy cup full of milk. She took a long slug, then set it down with a sigh of pleasure.

  “Ah, shit,” she muttered.

  Margo took one look at Gene and said sarcastically, “Some things have got to change around here.”

  Gene just laughed. Whenever he talked on the phone, particularly with Jerry, it was “fuck this” and “fuck that sumbitch,” so Margo decided she’d better start taking the child out of the room when Gene was on the phone.

  Around spring 1988, Linda and Leon Blakeney, a married FBI couple the Bennetts had worked with in Atlanta, came to the area on bureau business and stopped by the house for a barbecue.

  As the two couples were catching up, the Bennetts explained that they’d purchased the land in Manassas, about two hundred acres of farmland in Kentucky, two four-wheelers—one for the Nokesville house and one for the Kentucky farm—and a giant truck that was parked in the driveway when the Blakeneys pulled up. Margo was wearing about $25,000 in gold jewelry and diamonds; she and Gene also had on their Rolex watches.

  After dinner, Margo and Linda were cleaning up after their steak dinner.

  “Where are y’all getting all this money?” Linda asked. “I mean I know what you make. I just don’t understand.”

  Margo shrugged and said they’d been saving for years. They never took extravagant vacations. They just worked and hung out with Allison.

  “Gene handles all the finances,” she told Linda.

  But to herself, Margo acknowledged that Linda had a point.

  “I really hadn’t thought about what it looked like,” she later recalled.

  Margo and Gene started trying to get pregnant again in March, and by May they were successful. Their second daughter, whom they named Lindsey, was born on January 17, 1989.

  On Margo’s second day in the hospital, the doctor said he thought Lindsey had a heart murmur.

  “They heard a swooshing sound,” Margo said later. “Gene used to say it sounded like a sump pump.”

  The doctor referred them to Children’s Hospital, where they did an echocardiogram and discovered that Lindsey had two holes in her heart, one in the ventricular wall and the other in the atrial wall. While they were examining her, they also discovered she had pneumonia, so they admitted her. She stayed there for ten days, with Margo at her side, sleeping in a cot next to the bed.

  Every day, Gene would bring Allison to visit, and Margo would play with her for a little while in the waiting area.

  Margo was worried because the doctors were saying Lindsey might need surge
ry. “This was my baby, and she was sick,” she recalled.

  Lindsey’s heart defect wasn’t fatal, but Margo was worried that her daughter would grow up with a disability that would limit her life. At the end of the ten days, however, she felt somewhat reassured. The doctors said the holes often closed up by the age of two, so surgery might not be necessary.

  For the next two months, Margo took Lindsey to the pediatrician once a week for a checkup, and for the next two years, she took her to the cardiologist once a month. Margo had to quit breast-feeding so that they could put Lindsey on a high-calorie formula. They also gave the baby medication to help regulate her heartbeat and a diuretic to keep fluid out of her lungs.

  “She was a mess, but she was a happy baby,” Margo said.

  By the time Lindsey was two years old, one of the holes had closed up and the other had shrunken enough to stave off the need for surgery. The doctor suggested that they continue to monitor Lindsey’s heart on an annual basis, but Margo was relieved they were over the hump, at least for the time being.

  In July 1990, Gene and Margo decided they needed to set up some financial and legal protections to provide for their children and each other, so they wrote up a will and set up a trust for the girls. They also took out separate $1 million life insurance policies, naming each other as the beneficiary, and signed power of attorney documents for each other.

  “This was all done with the understanding that if anything happened to either one of us, the remaining person would be able to make financial transactions,” Margo said later.

  As Gene grew disillusioned with his assignment with the Soviet squad, he began looking for a new position. When he learned that a spot had opened up in the Management Science Unit at Quantico, a sister unit to Margo’s, where they taught leadership, management techniques, and agent supervision, he asked Margo what the job would be like and whether he should apply for it.