House Divided (10 page)

“So what’s the significance of all this?” Dillon asked.

“I think the significance is fairly obvious,” Claire said. Was Dillon playing devil’s advocate and being deliberately obtuse? “Those men in the Third Infantry are the kind of zealots you’d recruit if you wanted to pull off some kind of wet black op in the United States. They’d tell those soldiers that Russo was a terrorist and for the sake of God and Country he had to go, and those boys would do it. Then, after the hit, they moved them so far from civilization that they wouldn’t have to worry about them talking to anyone. They’ve basically put ’em on ice until they need them again.”

“But who’s they
,
Claire?”

“Well, obviously I don’t know yet, Dillon,” she said, making no attempt to hide her irritation. “But whoever
they
is, they have major clout. We’re talking about people with heavy pull at the Pentagon to be able to get those soldiers transferred the way they did.”

“But you don’t know for sure that the soldiers who were transferred were involved with Russo’s death.”

“No, I don’t. But it feels right.”

Dillon said, “Hmm,” which Claire knew meant: Maybe, but data would be nice.

“So, is that all?” Dillon asked.

“Is that all! I’d say that’s quite a bit.”

“I apologize if I implied otherwise. I’m just asking if you have any more facts.”

“No.”

“Then could you summarize, please.”

Claire just stared at him for a moment—she didn’t have time to repeat herself—but she took a breath and complied. “We have a man who was one of the last people to see General Martin Breed alive. He was killed by some person or organization using encrypted military com gear, and the killers may have come from the Third Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Myer. We also have an FBI agent who is on the take and appears to be trying to cover up how Russo was killed. And, last, the person who controls Hopper, based on the cell phone he’s using, may have some connection to Fort Myer.”

“But who was Messenger, Claire? You haven’t discussed him—or her—at all.”

“I don’t know. I’m still looking at accidental deaths and homicides that occurred around the time Russo died. So far, nobody who’s died looks right.”

“Did you read the funnies this morning?” Dillon said.

The funnies was Dillon’s term for The Washington Post because they got the facts wrong so often.

“Yes,” she said. And then Dillon watched her blue eyes focus on the wall behind him as she tried to recall what she’d read.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “I’m so used to looking at data we’ve pinched that it didn’t even occur to me to consider the
Post
as a legitimate source. God, I’m sorry, Dillon. I’m … I’m embarrassed.”

He could tell she was. “That’s all right. You have a lot on your plate. And the fact that Robert Hansen is missing doesn’t mean he’s Messenger, but the possibility is … interesting.”

Dillon smiled as Claire left his office, thinking it was extremely rare when she overlooked something. She was incredibly bright, very good at her job, and she just hated to lose. And she was, without a doubt, the most driven person he knew. In fact, it worried him that she had nothing else in her life: no lover, no pets, no hobbies—no joy. She had her job and nothing else, and that wasn’t healthy. She had never learned, as Dillon had a long time ago, that some days you had to forget the work and simply enjoy being alive.

Dillon also knew that Claire wanted his job, but not for the usual reasons. She didn’t want it because she desired advancement or status or higher pay. She wanted it because she thought Dillon was blasé about the work and she could do it better. But Dillon never considered her ambition a threat; it was merely a characteristic he exploited.

Nor was he worried that Claire might one day turn against him and tell his bosses what he was
really
doing—tell them about the shadow net that he’d created. He wasn’t worried because
he
knew the demons that drove Claire Whiting.

The headquarters of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, is located in an immense cubic structure that appears to be constructed of black reflective glass. It looms like an obsidian monolith—mysterious and ominous—over parking lots large enough to accommodate eighteen thousand vehicles.

Dillon’s office was on the ninth floor, and after Claire left he walked over to a window—a window designed to prevent anyone from seeing into his office or record what was being said there—put his hands in his pockets, and looked eastward. As he stood there, he didn’t think about Paul Russo. He thought, instead, about how it was that he and Claire came to be involved with Russo at all. He had been standing at the same window on September 11, 2001, and had just witnessed, on television, Tower Two of the World Trade Center collapsing into a mound of rubble.

That was the image burned most vividly into Dillon’s brain. Not the image of the jets flying into the towers but the image of the towers collapsing. It was America collapsing. He had never before experienced such a sense of failure, and he vowed, on that day, that he would do anything to keep such a thing from happening again.

The day the towers collapsed, Dillon knew—he knew with absolute certainty—that politicians would never have the courage to do what needed to be done. And the recommendations of the blue-ribbon bipartisan commission that had investigated the causes of 9/11 had proven him correct. The commission’s most significant recommendation was that a National Security Director—an intelligence czar—be appointed: a single individual who would ensure that sixteen divergent and competing federal intelligence agencies would act in a coordinated fashion in the future.

What a joke. What a horrible joke. There was no way sixteen agencies—agencies staffed by bureaucrats who protected their rice bowls more fiercely than any tigress ever protected a cub—would give up their authority, their autonomy, or their budgets for the sake of cooperation.

More importantly, what the 9/11 Commission didn’t seem to understand was that the War on Terror was a war for
information
. The U.S. government was no longer fighting other governments—governments that declared their policies and advertised their intentions, governments that could be penetrated and spied upon. Now they were dealing with thousands of isolated terrorist cells spread about the globe, under no centralized control, independently plotting America’s destruction—and an unknown number of those cells were operating in America, just as the 9/11 hijackers had done. The men who flew the planes into the towers on September 11 were on American soil almost two years before the event, chattering to each other on cell phones about the best places to take flying lessons and how easy it was to sneak box cutters on to airplanes. The 9/11 Commission concluded the government’s failure to stop the hijackers was an interagency
coordination
problem, whereas Dillon knew the failure occurred because the right people weren’t listening—and the reason they weren’t listening was because the law prevented them from doing so.

What the 9/11 Commission should have concluded was that the NSA needed to start monitoring all communications occurring inside our borders as well as outside—that the agency needed to spy upon citizen and foreigner alike, to identify any future mischief being planned. But even before the commission issued its spineless report, Dillon had known that would never happen. So on that morning, as the dust was still choking the inhabitants of Manhattan, he began to think about what needed to be done.

Although most Americans have no idea what the National Security Agency does, it is America’s largest intelligence service both in terms of personnel and funding. It employs more than thirty thousand people, and their primary mission is eavesdropping on foreigners, friend and foe alike. And as practiced by the agency, eavesdropping is not a man with his ear pressed to the wall. Eavesdropping means capturing any communication in any medium. Buried fiber-optic cables are tapped; microwave, radio, and telephone transmissions are intercepted; satellites listen; codes are broken. No communication is safe from the Net. To do what Dillon wanted to do wasn’t, therefore, a technical problem; it was instead a legal one—a pesky law called FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The father of FISA was the late Edward M. Kennedy, and he introduced his legislation following years of Senate investigations into Richard Nixon’s use of domestic intelligence agencies to spy on political activists. Surprisingly—or maybe not—Democrats
and
Republicans supported Ted’s bill, including folks like Republican Strom Thurmond, a man not known for leaning far to the left. It appeared that neither conservative nor liberal liked the idea of presidents ignoring the privacy protections guaranteed Americans by the Fourth Amendment.

FISA strictly prohibits randomly monitoring the communications of U.S. citizens. That is, it does not allow an intelligence agency to listen to as many phone calls as it possibly can just hoping to hear two guys talking who might be terrorists. FISA basically says that if you want to eavesdrop on the communications of Americans and foreign residents on American soil, you need a warrant, and to get said warrant, the government has to be able to show that these folks are suspected of being engaged in terrorism or espionage. Now getting these warrants isn’t particularly difficult, because the warrants are approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a group of federal judges who act in total secrecy and whose decisions are not really monitored by anyone. Furthermore, suspected isn’t a particularly challenging legal standard to meet. Nonetheless, obtaining these warrants takes time—and in a war, minutes count—but more importantly, there was an obvious catch-22. You might suspect that an American named Muhammad who attends a mosque led by a radical, fire-breathing, anti-American imam is plotting nefarious things, but you couldn’t really be sure until you listened to a few of Muhammad’s calls. In other words, just being named Muhammad wasn’t sufficient justification for a warrant.

Then, to Dillon’s immense surprise and delight, he found that there was, in fact, one politician who had the courage to do what needed to be done: the president of these United States. Following 9/11, the president concluded that FISA was a major roadblock to his forces engaged in the War on Terror, and he issued an Executive Order—which no one ever saw—which said that in the future the NSA didn’t need a warrant to eavesdrop on folks suspected of terrorism. The president’s intention was never to spy on Americans communicating with other Americans, however. His intention was that if an American or a foreigner on American soil was a suspected terrorist and was calling
overseas,
no warrant was required anymore. And to calm the nerves of those people at the NSA who were worried about going to jail for breaking the FISA laws, he sent them to his top lawyer, the Attorney General. The AG told the spies not to worry, that the president’s directive trumped FISA—and the NSA was off to the races, with Dillon leading the pack.

Dillon did have one other small problem, though. It was relatively easy for the NSA to capture wireless signals—signals that swam through the atmosphere like blind fish, bouncing from satellite to satellite. The Net just vacuumed these babies up. The problem was that in the twenty-first century the majority of all communications—voice and e-mail—were being routed through fiber-optic cables, and to tap into a fiber-optic cable wasn’t a matter of simply attaching a couple of alligator clips to a wire. To tap into fiber-optic cables, it was necessary to go into communications company switching stations and connect complex equipment and sophisticated computers to the cables. Fortunately, thanks in large part to the Justice Department’s interpretation of the law, companies like Verizon and AT&T agreed to cooperate. And once this equipment was installed it became possible to monitor
everyone’s
communications—and Dillon began doing so. Again, this was not what the president had in mind, but once he opened the door, Dillon jumped right through it.

It was impossible to listen to everything, of course. Every twelve-year-old in America—and maybe in the world—has a cell phone, and billions of calls, e-mails, and text messages pass through fiber-optic cables every day. So the NSA’s marvelous computers listened for key words and phrases, or calls going to certain locations, or calls spoken in certain languages. To use a simple example—the actual process was much more complicated—if a man in Washington speaking in Arabic said the words white house and ka-boom in the same sentence … well, the spies at Fort Meade perked right up.

But Dillon knew it wouldn’t last. The NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program was a secret being kept by politicians, several thousand spies, telecommunications company employees, and big-mouthed lawyers at the Department of Justice. It was, in fact, amazing the secret was kept for as long as it was—for nearly four years—but in 2005 one of the big-mouthed lawyers squealed. He squealed to a reporter named James Risen who dwelled in that bastion of anarchy known as The New York Times, after which The Times told everybody what the NSA was doing and things came to a screeching halt—for everyone but Dillon, that is.

Since Dillon had expected this development, he had set up Claire’s division well in advance of Mr. Risen’s party-spoiling revelation. The division consisted of a few hundred handpicked folk out of the thirty thousand employed by the NSA, and they were moved into an isolated annex on the sprawling grounds of Fort Meade. And when the rest of the agency went back to playing Mother-May-I with the FISA Court, Claire’s technicians just continued to monitor communications as they pleased—and warrants be dammed.

The majority of the work that Claire’s techs did was accomplished inside large computers, and it’s rather difficult to tell what a person is doing when all that’s evident to the naked eye is a man sitting in front of a machine. It becomes even harder to tell when that same person controls the reports generated by the machine. And the functions accomplished by Claire’s eavesdroppers were not in any way unique to the agency, and almost everything they did was electronically piggybacked on top of legitimate FISA-sanctioned operations. That is, when the NSA obtained a FISA warrant to tap into certain cables to monitor certain folk, the work would be assigned to Claire’s division and they significantly expanded the scope of the warrant.