Held Hostage: Video 
Behind the Lines: Podcast 
The Sting
More FBI follies! Instead of rooting out corruption at NASA, Operation Lightning Strike exposed little more than the bureau’s ruthlessness.
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But to give Lightning Strike real cachet, the FBI needed to snare an astronaut. Francis targeted two of them, one of whom turned out to be a friend and neighbor of Dale Brown’s. David Wolf, 36, was an expert on ultrasonic equipment and one of the inventors of a bioreactor that regenerates human tissue in three dimensions. More to the point, he worked directly with Life Sciences director Carolyn Huntoon. When Wolf learned of the miniature lithotripter from Dale Brown, he eagerly agreed to review it, and a dinner was planned with John Clifford and his partner, Joe Carson. The dinner developed into a drunken night on the town. In the company of Jackson and Brown, Clifford and Carson picked up the astronaut at his home in Clear Lake in a limousine. Drinks were poured on the way to the Rainbow Lodge in River Oaks. At dinner many bottles of champagne were consumed and a tab accumulated in the hundreds of dollars. Clifford waved off Wolf’s attempt to pay his part, but the astronaut persisted and left some money on the table. The second half of the evening evolved at Rick’s Cabaret, Houston’s premier topless club, where Clifford hired two dancers to put on a private show for his group. Long after the others were ready to leave, the undercover agent was still ordering drinks and paying the dancers.
They never got around to discussing the lithotripter. A few days later, on Clifford’s orders, Brown left a copy of the lithotripter proposal in Wolf’s mailbox. Brown should have known that the proposal was a proprietary document—a trade secret—and that any unauthorized person caught with it was committing a crime. Wolf said later that he threw it in the trash. Had he brought it to Carolyn Huntoon’s attention—as Clifford hoped—the act would have ended Wolf’s career as an astronaut and probably put him in jail. The undercover agent did not give up, however. On at least a dozen occasions in the months that followed, he tempted Wolf with offers of trips to the Florida Keys and other enticements. Each time, Wolf turned him down.
The FBI had deep pockets and Hal Francis knew how to use them. At the Space Expo Symposium at the South Shore Harbour Hotel in League City in October, giant corporations like IBM, Martin Marietta, and GE Government Services set up hospitality suites. So did little Space, Inc. With plenty of food, liquor, and sexy hostesses, Space, Inc.’s suite was perhaps the most popular at the symposium, attracting among others former astronaut Buzz Aldren. At Christmas Karen planned a wine-and-cheese open house at the office, but Clifford decided instead to splurge for a black-tie affair at South Shore Harbour Country Club and invited the presidents and CEOs of all the top aerospace corporations. To speak to this group, the undercover agent hired former NASA administrator Jim Beggs, who chose a topic of interest to everyone, “NASA and the Clinton Era.” A month earlier Bill Clinton had been elected president. Many in the industry saw the 1992 election as a battle for the future of the Johnson Space Center, and Clinton’s victory almost assured that the center would endure. David Proctor recalled that his boss, Carolyn Huntoon, had boasted to her staff that if Clinton won, she’d be the new director of the space center. And so she was.
By the end of 1992, Karen was nearly out of the picture. Her baby, a third son the Jacksons named Colin, had been delivered by emergency cesarean section in September. Complications followed. In December the child almost died from a general seizure and spent two weeks at Hermann Hospital suffering from a rare neurological disorder. Clifford sent flowers and a card. Because the Jacksons had changed insurance companies after the child’s birth, the illness was determined to be “pre-existing” and hospital bills soon climbed above $100,000. On top of everything else, business was nonexistent. As the Jacksons became increasingly vulnerable, the FBI made its move. In October Clifford and Joe Carson told the Jacksons that the monthly payments of $10,000 would stop in November. In the future Neal would be paid according to the number of contacts he introduced. Neal didn’t understand what was happening, but Karen did: John Clifford was breaching their contract. She wanted to take the matter to their lawyer, but Neal persuaded her to wait. He still believed that by his baby’s first birthday, Clifford would come across with a million bucks.
The Trap
EARLY IN JANUARY 1993, the jacksons got a break, or so they thought. An executive for a Houston robotics manufacturing company, Automaker, called Neal about an item she had noticed in Commerce Business Daily. The Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania was taking bids on an assembly robot. Perhaps her company and Neal’s company could bid it jointly: Automaker as the prime contractor, Space, Inc., as the subcontractor. At a meeting with the Automaker executive, Clifford boasted that he had a friend who had a friend at the Pentagon who could help land the Tobyhanna contract. Put off by his sleazy suggestion, the executive remarked that Automaker didn’t do business that way. “If you don’t bid it,” Clifford said casually, “we will.”
The Jacksons were flabbergasted. The notion of Space, Inc., as the prime contractor was ludicrous. But Clifford had it covered. Eastern Tech would buy existing hardware, modify it to Tobyhanna’s specifications, then step aside and allow Space, Inc., to be the prime contractor, thus giving the small company instant credibility. Clifford told Neal to write a proposal using numbers that Clifford would supply from “an inside source.” He reminded Neal that this was his final chance, that Space, Inc.’s future depended on getting the Tobyhanna contract.
After eleven months of frustration, the FBI was finally ready to spring its trap. In February Clifford brought news that the chief of procurement at Tobyhanna, Joe Umbriak (who had been recruited to go along with the sting), was coming to Houston and told Neal to take him out and “throw a couple of titty dancers in his lap.” A fax arrived from Umbriak informing Space, Inc., that the price it submitted was a little high, and Neal and Dale Brown suggested lowering it by $5,000. But Clifford vetoed that idea. “We’re basically buying the contract,” he said. “We don’t have to lower the price.” Later, he told Neal that his friend had slipped $5,000 to his man in the Pentagon. In private Clifford told Brown, “This is Neal’s last chance. If this does not come off . . . Joe [Carson] will cut Neal off at the knees.”
Clifford remained mysteriously out of town during the stroking of the procurement chief but nevertheless directed it with frequent telephone calls. On March 4 Clifford called Neal allegedly from Tallahassee, Florida, and told him that plans had changed. Umbriak wouldn’t be coming to Houston after all but wanted them instead to deliver some “entertainment money” to a gay friend of his who would be staying at the Hobby Hilton. In return, the friend would give them the bid price needed to win the contract. Neal was instructed to get together $400 or $500 in unmarked bills, seal them in an envelope, and deliver the envelope to the hotel room. After the conversation, Neal sat in his office for nearly half an hour, trying to sort out the mess he was in: payoffs at the Pentagon, insider information on a government contract, and now bribes to a homosexual. Neal made no secret of his homophobia. Handing over money to a homosexual was a sacrifice he could not make. Leaning on their longtime friendship, he got Brown to make the delivery.
A few days later, Clifford all but vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared a year earlier. Then, on August 2, Clifford phoned Neal unexpectedly and asked him to meet him at the warehouse. Driving north on I-45, Neal thought of the day he and Karen were returning home with $10,000 cash and the prickly feeling that they were being followed.
The warehouse was somehow different than Neal remembered. Walking into the foyer, he was met by a man he had not seen before, escorted to a small room, and told to wait. Neal saw giant blowups of photographs propped against a wall. One was a blowup of the cover sheet of the unsolicited proposal for the lithotripter. Another was the shot of Neal kissing the dolphin fish. There were other candid shots of Neal, all of them seemingly innocent and yet somehow sinister in this setting. A video machine with a TV monitor caught his attention and he realized he was watching a film of himself and Karen signing the contract with Clifford—there he was, dancing around the room like a fool, waving a fistful of cash at a camera he didn’t know was there, saying, “If the tapes are rolling, we’ll have to live with it!” Stacked nearby were boxes of audio and videotapes with his name on them. He lost track of how much time passed, then the door opened and four or five men with hard faces entered the room, some carrying pistols. Among them was John Clifford.
“My real name is Hal Francis,” he said, flashing his badge. “I’m a special agent for the FBI, and you’re in a whole lot of trouble.”
The Tally
DOZENS OF AEROSPACE PROFESSIONALS FELL FOR HAL FRANCIS’ well-crafted performance, and those who fell hard enough ended up at the warehouse. Of all the bells and whistles that adorned Operation Lightning Strike, the warehouse treatment was the most exotic and diabolical, a brilliant exercise in coercive persuasion in which victims were systematically reduced to jelly. Although the traps were sprung over a number of weeks, all the defendants recalled a common experience. Once Agent Francis had introduced himself, other agents unveiled large white boards on which were printed in heavy black scrawl the “crimes” committed by the subject at hand. To one side was written the corresponding number of years in prison and fines. For example, Dale Brown had 21 felony charges against him totaling sixty years and $1.25 million. Another agent explained the options. The subject could leave, in which case he would be arrested in a manner calculated to best embarrass his family. Or he could stay and help himself. None of the Lightning Strike defendants had ever been arrested or ever imagined himself in such a predicament. Everyone elected to stay. Then they learned the ground rules. They could not contact an attorney, otherwise all deals were off. They couldn’t speak of what happened to anyone except their wives and ministers. Before their day was over, all except one had confessed to crimes so vague that they weren’t sure they were even involved. All of them had “flipped”—that is to say, they agreed to go undercover for the FBI and trap friends and associates. As a final act of submission, they were handed a telephone and instructed to call the next victim and lure him to this theater of hell. While the warehouse treatment may strike an average citizen as constitutionally dubious—uncomfortably similar to the North Korean method popularized in The Manchurian Candidate—the technique has been used for years by the FBI. Apparently it is as successful in this country as it is in North Korea.
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