CHAPTER 13: A SPOOK IN MY EAR

For decades, Mark lived and worked inside what people casually call “the black world”—that shadowy space where projects don’t show up on org charts and answers are never straightforward. I knew him for years, yet I never really knew what he did.

I tried to figure it out, of course. Anyone would. He got his start at Los Alamos, which naturally sent my imagination racing in very specific directions. Department of Energy? National Nuclear Security Administration? Those guesses felt reasonable at the time. Logical, even. As it turns out, every one of my theories was wrong.

Mark never told me outright who he worked for. In fact, he was careful not to. What he did say was more interesting than any agency name. He hinted that it wasn’t a formal government organization at all—nothing with a clean paper trail or budget lines you could follow if you knew where to look. No congressional oversight. No neat funding attachments. Whatever it was, it operated outside the usual structures.

What he did make clear was its reach. Worldwide didn’t even begin to cover it.

He’d show up with small, strange souvenirs from places he’d never officially mentioned visiting. Sand from Afghanistan. A patch. A pin from some obscure, almost anonymous military unit that didn’t seem to exist anywhere online. Trinkets, technically—but each one carried the quiet weight of places and missions I knew I wasn’t supposed to ask about.

The oddest part wasn’t where he went. It was how he appeared.

I was never quite sure how Mark found me when he did. He would just pop up—call or text at random times, often after long stretches of silence. Every single time, it was from a different phone number. If I tried to call back, there was nothing. No ring. No voicemail. Just dead air.

It was as if those numbers existed for one purpose only: to reach me, once.

Looking back, what stands out isn’t the mystery itself but how normal it all felt at the time. Mark never acted dramatic or secretive. He didn’t posture. He didn’t brag. He just existed on the edges of things—passing through, leaving behind hints instead of explanations.

And maybe that was the point.

Some worlds aren’t meant to be mapped. Some careers don’t come with titles. And some people, no matter how close you are to them, remain deliberately untraceable—by design, by necessity, or by choice.

Mark belonged to that world. And for a while, I was close enough to see its outline, even if I never saw the whole shape.

There were places I expected Mark to appear—and almost always, he did.

Airshows were one of those places. I’d be out on the flight line, camera in hand, shooting photos, and sooner or later I’d feel it before I saw it. I’d glance to my right, and there he’d be. Always on my right. Always shooting photos too. And always with exceptionally nice, very expensive gear.

We never acknowledged each other immediately. There was a protocol.

At some point, one of us would peel off from the crowd and drift toward a static display aircraft—usually a C-5. With hundreds of people flowing through those cavernous planes, it was the perfect place to disappear in plain sight. Inside that massive fuselage, surrounded by strangers, we could have a quick conversation without anyone being the wiser.

After that, we’d adjourn to a nearby Mexican restaurant. Always Mexican. And always obscure—the more forgettable, the better. We’d sit in a corner booth, music blaring just loud enough to drown us out, and talk in low voices. Nothing dramatic. Just shooting the shit.

Usually by the end of the meal—and a couple of beers in—Mark would do what Mark always did. He’d drop a nugget.

He never outright told me a secret. Instead, he nudged me. He’d suggest I be in a certain place, at a certain time, and bring my monitoring gear. He trusted my ability to figure things out. Sometimes it felt like a puzzle, and it might take a while, but eventually the pieces would lock together.

One time—during Gulf War II—he gave me a phone number.

“Call this guy,” he said. “His name’s David Bendsat. Former Mossad.”

That alone was enough to make me pause.

When I called, David introduced himself very casually as a radio hobbyist living in Israel. Nothing dramatic. No spy-movie theatrics. He explained that he was monitoring some Russian-language chatter on shortwave radio and wondered if I could monitor it too. The transmissions were supposedly originating out of Iran.

Anyone who’s spent time on HF knows propagation is everything. As the Earth rotates, conditions shift. When it was dark on David’s side of the world, reception was good for him and bad for me. When night fell on my side, the situation reversed.

So we split the work.

He recorded during his daylight hours. I recorded at night. My job was simple: make recordings of what I intercepted, put the tapes into a rented P.O. box, and leave them there. No notes. No labels. Just the tapes.

Each time I dropped one off, the previous tape was gone.

There had to be a courier involved—someone I never saw, never met, and was never meant to know about.

At one point, the whole thing started to get under my skin. I asked Mark directly whether what I was doing amounted to spying. He didn’t hesitate.

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

He told me both the U.S. and Israel were benefiting. That was all the reassurance I was going to get—and, apparently, all I needed.

Then, one day, the radio conversations stopped.

And just like that, the tapes stopped too.

No explanation. No wrap-up. No final call.

That’s how it always worked with Mark. Things would begin quietly, operate in the background for a while, and then vanish without ceremony—leaving behind only fragments, questions, and the uneasy sense that you’d brushed up against something much larger than you were ever meant to see.

Mark spelled out the rules for our continued—what he called “collaboration.” I was never allowed to ask how he knew what he knew, about the sources of his information, or who he worked for. I was not supposed to follow him or press him with pointed questions about his work. In return, Mark would quietly steer me toward subjects we both found compelling, leaving it up to me to deduce what it all meant. The topics were usually centered on radio monitoring, but nothing was truly off the table. We drifted freely into politics, quantum physics—which fascinated us both—covert military projects, space travel, and every form of radio communications interception imaginable, along with discussions about the best equipment to accomplish it.

In return, if I ever published anything that drew on information he had provided, I was required to claim it as my own. He trusted me—he said he had deliberately targeted me—because, as he put it, “You have an uncanny ability to think in terms of the big picture that most people lack.” He told me I had natural deductive powers that few possessed. At the same time, he warned me to be careful, saying I had eyes on me. Strangely enough, none of this bothered or frightened me.

I often wondered whether I was what intelligence circles sometimes call a “useful idiot,” and I asked him directly. He replied, “Bob Lazar was a useful idiot. You are not—because you question everything and decide for yourself what is truth and what is fiction.” I hoped he wasn’t simply flattering me or inflating my ego to keep me as his link to the white world. But after a few years, it became clear that beneath all the cloak-and-dagger theatrics, he genuinely trusted me and regarded me as a kindred spirit.

On a bitterly cold winter morning in 2003, I received a sudden call from Mark. He actually reached my wife first. She answered the phone, and he said, “Hello, this is Mark. Can you put Steve on the phone as quickly as humanly possible?”

She handed me the phone, but I was still in bed, exhausted from a bad night’s sleep. Wanting nothing more than to sleep in, I muttered, “Whoever it is, tell him I’ll call him back,” and rolled over. She was about to relay the message when Mark cut her off.

“Tell him to get his lazy ass up and take the phone,” he said. “Tell him it’s Mark. It’s urgent.”

She repeated his words verbatim. I jumped out of bed and grabbed the phone, instantly wide awake.

“Mark, what’s up?” I asked.

He didn’t hesitate. “The space shuttle Columbia is coming apart over Texas. You should be able to see it from Amarillo. Grab your camera."





I didn’t hesitate. Clad only in boxer shorts, I bolted to the south-facing balcony of the apartment we were living in at the time. I was instantly slapped in the face by the bitter cold. Whatever parts of me were still half-asleep vanished—the freezing air and Mark’s words, “Columbia is coming apart,” chased away the last vestiges of sleep.

I looked up and saw it: an ugly white line stretched across the deep blue winter morning sky, etched like a crack in glass. That was the Space Shuttle Columbia, and it was indeed coming apart. Instinctively, I raised my camera and began shooting.

Only then did the weight of it hit me—what I was photographing was not just a tragedy, not just a dark entry in history, but a man I knew. Rick Husband, someone I had gone to junior high with, was dying along with his crew, in full view of the city he loved.

Decades later I HAD honor and privilege of having lunch and an interview with Evelyn Husband/Thompson—Rick's former wife and told her about how I knew Rick back in the day.

What a great lunch with an inspirational woman. I shared stories about my school days with Rick and how, whenever he flew in, we’d have lunch at Old English Fieldhouse, an eatery at the airport that now bears his name. 

We both grew a bit teary-eyed remembering those times. She was grtaeful to hear stories about Rick in his youth that she had never known about. I felt compelled to talk about that day in 2003. I also confessed that I always felt bad about taking those photos of Columbia's demise and it bothered me that I made money, selling them to the news wire services.

She drew me close and said, "You were only doing your job, Like Rick did. He and I both understand that. 

I couldn't help but well up. She gave me a big hug. 

An interesting sidebar: while Rick was attending the USAF Test Pilot School, he once flew in the back seat with Chuck Yeager. As they crossed the Nellis Range, Rick noticed they were flying very close to “The Box,” better known as Area 51. He pointed it out to Chuck, mentioning just how close they were. Chuck simply replied, “You want to see it?”

Chuck radioed Area 51, identified himself, then did a wing-over and a quick touch-and-go at Dreamland.

Rick later told Evelyn that the experience was more frightening than flying the shuttle.

UP NEXT: CHAPTER 14: MORE SECRETS AND THE BEGINNING OF THE UNRAVELING OF  ROSWELL