29 My Commander Projected My Face On A Screen And Called Me A Traitor — He Didn't Know The Original Recording Still Had My Father's Voice On It

The trap was set by Anne Cho.

It was set in a way that Marcus Webb would not see until it was already too late.

Cho had a problem. Her case against Webb was strong. The voice analysis had come back from Quantico in four weeks. The analysis confirmed that the voice on Rafael Vega's USB drive, the voice on the altered recording from the auditorium, and the voice on the wiretap transcript from the confidential informant were all the same voice. It was the voice of Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Webb.

But Cho could not arrest him yet.

She could not arrest him because she did not know what he would do when he was arrested. She did not know whether he had destroyed the evidence in his home and his office. She did not know whether he had hidden money in other accounts. She did not know whether he had created a fallback plan with Karim Saleh.

So Cho built a trap.

She did not build the trap by herself. She built it with the FBI, with the Department of Defense Office of General Counsel, and with the U.S. Attorney's office in Tucson.

The trap was this.

On a Friday afternoon in late August, Patricia Yee called Marcus Webb's office at Fort Belvoir. She told his executive assistant that she needed to speak with him about a routine personnel matter. She told the assistant that she could be reached at any time on a phone number that Patricia Yee had set up specifically for the call.

The phone number was not a Department of Defense line. It was a line that had been set up by the FBI. It was a line that recorded every call that came into it. And the phone that Marcus Webb used to return the call was a phone that the FBI had been monitoring for eight months.

Webb called the number at 15:14.

Patricia Yee answered.

"Colonel Webb," she said. "Thank you for calling me back."

"General Counsel Yee," Webb said. "I am always happy to speak with you. What can I do for you?"

"Colonel, I want to tell you that I have received a request from a congressional office. The request is for documents related to the March 2019 mission in Kunar Province. The request comes from a staffer who has been looking at the case for some time. And I want to tell you about it before someone else tells you about it."

"Thank you, General Counsel. What is the nature of the request?"

"The staffer has asked for the original recording of the intercept from March 2019. She has asked for the analysis that you signed. She has asked for the routing slip that sent the recording forward. And she has asked for any subsequent alterations to the recording."

There was a long pause on the line.

"Alterations," Webb said.

"Alterations."

"General Counsel, I am not sure what you mean."

"Colonel, I am not sure either. But I am going to tell you something that I think you already know. The original recording that the Army has in its archive is not the same recording that was provided to CID in this case. The original recording has a translator's voice on it. The recording that CID received does not. That is an alteration. And I am going to tell you that the Department of Defense is going to look into it."

A longer pause.

"General Counsel Yee," Webb said, "I want to thank you for calling me. I want to assure you that I have done nothing wrong. And I want to tell you that I am going to cooperate fully with whatever investigation you are referring to. I have nothing to hide."

"Thank you, Colonel. That is all I wanted to hear. Have a good afternoon."

The line went dead.

Cho called Patricia Yee four minutes later.

"Ms. Yee," she said, "was he spooked?"

"He was spooked. He tried to sound calm. He did not sound calm."

"Then we have about twenty-four hours before he does something stupid. I need my agents in place. I need the search warrant executed at his home and his office at 05:00 tomorrow. And I need the arrest warrant in my hand tonight."

"You will have it."

"Do I need to tell you what is going to happen if we miss him?"

"No, Special Agent. I know what is going to happen. We will lose him. And we will lose the case. And we will lose the eleven people in Deh Bala. And I am not going to let that happen."

—

The arrest happened at 05:00 the next morning.

It did not go the way it does in the movies. There was no chase. There was no shouted warning. There was no dramatic confrontation on a sidewalk.

There was a knock on a door in Alexandria, Virginia. There was the sound of a man in a bathrobe opening the door. There was the sight of six FBI agents in raid jackets standing on his porch with a search warrant and an arrest warrant in their hands.

There was the sound of a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army saying, quietly, "I understand."

There was the sound of handcuffs clicking shut.

Marcus Webb was arrested at 05:04 on a Saturday morning in September. He was taken to the Alexandria City Jail. He was arraigned before a federal magistrate the following Monday. He was charged with espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, obstruction of justice, and eleven counts of felony murder.

His trial began eight months later.

It lasted eleven days.

He was convicted on all counts.

He was sentenced to life in federal prison without the possibility of parole. He was ordered to forfeit all pay and allowances. He was dismissed from the Army. He was ordered to pay restitution to the families of the eleven people who had died in Deh Bala in the amount of 4.4 million dollars.

He is currently serving his sentence at a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. He will not be eligible for parole. He will die in prison.

Karim Saleh was arrested in Dubai in the following year. He was extradited to the United States. He was tried in federal court in Washington, D.C. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and of eleven counts of felony murder. He was sentenced to life in federal prison. He is currently serving his sentence at a federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois.

Derek Halloran — the Army civilian analyst who had helped Marcus Webb alter the recording — was charged with obstruction of justice and with conspiracy to alter evidence. He pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison. He is currently serving his sentence at a federal penitentiary in West Virginia.

The eleven people who died in Deh Bala — including the six children — are remembered in a small memorial in the village. It was dedicated in 2023. The memorial was paid for by a charity that was founded by a woman named Anne Cho. The charity is called the Deh Bala Fund. It pays for the education of the surviving children of the village. It has been in operation for eleven years. It has sent forty-one children to school.

Anne Cho has never visited the memorial. She has never had the courage. She has told her colleagues that she will visit it when she is old and when she has stopped having nightmares about the wiretap transcript. She is fifty-two now. She is still having nightmares. She expects that she will always have nightmares. But she has told her colleagues that when she is seventy, she will go to Deh Bala and she will stand at the memorial and she will say a prayer for the children. She has told her colleagues that she is not sure what she will say. She has told them that she will figure it out when she gets there.