The Chameleon Conspiracy (13 page)

A day later, when I called Dr. Fischer back, she had the officer’s name: Bahman Hossein Rashtian. He was working in Iranian
state security.

I consulted Nicole.

“What we should do is go to London,” she said immediately, “to see what the NSA has to offer on the Iranian connection to
our case.”

“Why London?”

“Because their UK base is the largest outside the U.S. There’s no point in asking the French station for broadscale assistance—
they’ll just send us to London, or even to Washington.”

I called Bob Holliday, my new boss. David had just retired. To add to my other bones to pick with the Chameleon, he’d made
me miss David’s retirement party.

“Bob, we need NSA assistance.”

“Why?”

“We need unrestricted international communications-intelligence reach, the kind of air sniffing that only NSA can
provide.” I gave him the details and answered his many questions. Each time we spoke I could see more clearly that working
with him was going to be a world of difference from having David as my boss. He had a way of firing questions at me that sometimes
made me feel as if I were performing under the baleful eye of a strict but very cordial schoolteacher.

After he exhaustively interrogated me, he agreed to see what he could do.

The following morning Bob called. “OK, an NSA connection is established. You’ll be picked up tomorrow at nine a.m. from your
London hotel.” He gave me the details. “We expect a nice and sunny day.”

The journey to London was fast. Bob was wrong on the weather. The next day brought us the typical English weather of rain
and fog, and a new friend: a slim African-American woman in a black pantsuit. “Hi, I’m Pamela Johnson. I’ll be taking you
to Menwith Hill.”

“What’s in Menwith Hill?” I asked.

“That’s the major station of NSA, operated jointly with the British Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ.”

“And what about the sunny weather you promised?” I asked. “Well, you know. Weather forecasts are horoscopes with numbers.”

After a three-hour drive ending amid the green meadows of Yorkshire, we arrived at a heavily fenced and guarded area. Following
thorough security screening, we were brought to a round, windowless building.

“Welcome to NSA,” said a man with an accent that smacked of the American South, as we entered his small office. “I’m Dr. Ted
Feldman, and I’ll do my best to help you. What’s going on here?”

He and Pamela took notes as Nicole quickly explained.

“I see,” Feldman said. “We’ll try to do what we can, once formalities are satisfied.”

The NSA picked up where others were bound by legal restrictions. As I well knew, they operated in cyberspace, where there
were few rules, breaking encrypted communications and transferring the messages to linguists to analyze the messages in more
than 110 languages.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“We can engage Echelon, our global surveillance network,” he said briskly. “It’s the most comprehensive and sophisticated
signals intelligence ever made. It can monitor every communication transmitted through satellite, micro wave, cellular, and
fiber optics. That includes communications to and from North America.”

“How much does that all add up to?” I asked.

He shrugged. “We estimate it at five billion telephone calls, e-mail messages, faxes, and broadcasts daily.”

“Any communication?” I asked with concern, thinking about some private conversations I’d held with several women I’d dated.

He smiled. “Not to worry.” He must have heard that anxious question many times.

“How do you do it?”

“Echelon collects data through a variety of methods, including through radio antennae at listening stations located in key
areas around the world. We scan the enormous amount of data through filtering software using a computer network hosted by
the UK’s GCHQ, Canada’s CSE, Australia’s DSD, and New Zealand’s GCSB.” The torrent of acronyms could make you dizzy. Only
insiders knew and cared that they stood for Communications Security Establishment, the Defense Signals Directorate, and the
Government Communications Security Bureau. We needed little explication.

“The filtering software flags messages containing any of a set of key words, such as
bomb
or
nuclear
,” Feldman continued.

“How does the actual process of data sifting work?” asked Nicole.

“We’ve got word-pattern recognition technologies, plus advanced technology in speech recognition and optical character
recognition. See, the computers convert sound gleaned from intercepted telephone conversations and text images from fax transmissions,
and store them in a searchable database.”

“What about foreign languages?”

“Translation software recognizes many languages and can translate them into English. Once text is stored in the database,
our analysts engage data-mining software that searches data to identify relationships based on similarities and patterns.”

“What about help in our operation, including getting access to enemy computers?”

“We’ve developed new tools to assist in covert-surveillance operations. One example is Tempest, a surveillance technology
that captures data displayed on computer monitors by collecting electromagnetic emissions from the internal electron beams
that create the images.” Had he avoided answering my question on computer hacking?

“So much has changed since I last had contact with the NSA,” said Nicole.

He smiled. “We’ve additional developments: Fluent and Oasis. Fluent does computer searches of documents written in various
languages. Our analysts put in queries in English, just as if they were using any Internet search engine. Those results that
come up in any foreign languages are translated.” He paused. “Oasis picks up audio from television and radio broadcasts, and
keeps them as text. The software is very sophisticated. It can identify the gender of the speaker, and if that audio has already
been previously captured, our analysts can obtain a digital transcript of the data and compare. Oasis is limited to English,
but the CIA is adapting it to understand additional languages.”

“What about recordings from the past?” That’s what I wanted to know.

“We occasionally have that, if what you’re looking for was already captured for other purposes,” he answered.

“It all sounds like omnipotence,” I said.

“Hell no, far from it,” he said. “Sure, we’re the largest intelligence service in the world. We employ more mathematicians
than anyone else, and we’ve got the strongest team of
code makers and code breakers ever assembled. But the volume of information generated every day exceeds the capacity of our
technologies to process it. Not to mention the encryption technologies that can give you a look at what turns out to be gibberish,
without any possibility of breaking the code. We know, for example, that Osama bin Laden and other terrorists are using steganography:
hiding data within a benign-looking file, such as a picture of a sunset in the South Pacific. Can you imagine the computing
power necessary to detect it? And I’m not even talking about breaking it, which is even more complex.

“But why go that far? Even simple tricks can slow us down, and sometimes even derail us. That happens when messages are ciphered
in a simple method that substitutes letters for other letters. Let’s go to an even lower level of sophistication, to elementary
school games, and create messages that substitute the word
football
for
bomb
and
baseball
for
American president
. Do you set the software to alert us each time it recognizes these words? We would drown under the sheer volume.”

“I see,” said Nicole.

“So you see why there’s no assurance that any of these systems will be fail-safe and provide the kind of intelligence that
you want.”

I nodded. “I get it. Knowing those caveats, all I need to do is provide you with key words?”

“It’s not that simple, but essentially, yes. Once a key word included in the Echelon dictionary is captured, it flags the
entire message. After decryption, our analysts forward the data to the client intelligence agency that requested the intercept
of the key word. We pass the signals through SILKWORTH, our supercomputer system where voice recognition, optical character
recognition, and other analytical tools dissect the prey. Although five billion messages pass through the system every day,
we actually transcribe and record only very few text messages and phone calls. Only those messages that produce keyword ‘hits’
are tagged for future analysis.”

“Can I give you the key words now?”

“No. We must first start an IDP, an intercept deployment plan. I’ll also need your agency’s formal request. I was asked to
give you only a presentation. But tell me more about the case.”

I ran quickly by him the leads we had. The run was long, but the list of solid leads disturbingly short. We had a dozen aliases
that the Chameleon had used.

“We don’t know for sure if it’s one person, or eleven, or twelve. So far Ward has been my prime target. He could be in the
U.S., Australia…or back in Iran, although I’d be surprised if he were there.”

“Why?

“I hardly think he could adapt or would want to adapt to living in Iran again after living in the great satanic country for
more than twenty years. No matter what the Iranians have to say about it, it still beats Tehran. So maybe he decided to be
a sleeper for a few more years and live comfortably, hoping his handlers in Iran would forget about him. I thought I found
him in Sydney, but there are conflicting reports about whether the person I saw there was indeed the person who assumed Ward’s
identity.”

“You’ll hear from us soon after we get the formalities in place,” Dr. Feldman promised.

After we returned to Paris, I called Benny using his Belgian telephone number.

“Thank you for calling Marnix van der Guilder Trading Company,” said the announcement. “Please press the extension number
of the person with whom you wish to speak, or leave a message after the beep.” I pressed Benny’s code for this month, 8*890447**3#,
heard a series of beeps, and recognized the familiar sound of an Israeli phone ringtone.

“Bonjour, comment est-ce que je peux vous aider?”
—How can I help you?—I heard Benny’s secretary ask in French. Whenever a forwarded call from Europe came in, although a
complex code was necessary, the first voice identification was in French to hedge the remote chance that the code was correctly
put in,
but the caller didn’t know the call would end up in Mossad headquarters just north of Tel Aviv.

“Hi Dina,” I said in Hebrew. “It’s Dan Gordon. Benny back yet?”

“No. Still traveling,” she answered, switching to Hebrew. “OK, please ask him to call my U.S. mobile-phone number.” “Sure.”

I went to get one of those crunchy baguette sandwiches, my diet ruiner for a week, and as I was about to take a bite, my mobile
phone rang.

Damn. It had better be important.

“Dan?” I heard Benny’s familiar voice. “What did I catch you doing?”

I stared down at the sandwich longingly. “Nothing but a baguette sandwich. Anyway, are you still around? I need to talk to
you.”

“Yes, I’m in Paris too. What’s on your mind?”

“Can we meet?”

“Sure. How about you come to the George V hotel and meet me in the lobby at six p.m.”

I took a cab to 31 avenue George V and entered La Galerie, a high-ceilinged lobby decorated with Flemish tapestries and excellent
nineteenth-century paintings and furniture. A pianist was playing a quiet Chopin nocturne, while elegant waiters in the adjacent
courtyard were serving tourists who had deep personal pockets or expense accounts not scrutinized by frugal bean counters.

“What happened? The office discovered the lost treasures of the Count of Monte Cristo? We never used to stay in these hotels.”
I looked around. A typical room probably cost more than $1,000 a night.

Benny glanced at me above his eyeglasses, which had slipped halfway down his nose. “Of course not. I just like these first-class
places. Here money doesn’t buy you friends, but it can get you a better class of rivals.”

I felt that something was different with Benny, his cynical quip notwithstanding.

“What happened?” I asked, looking at his gloomy face. “Nothing,” his mouth said, but his expression gave a different answer.

“Is it something at home? Are Batya and the kids all right?”

“Yes, thank god, they’re fine.”

“Then what is it?” I persisted. I’ve known Benny for long enough to know that only a serious problem would affect his usual
easygoing demeanor. “Something at work?” I tried again.

He nodded. “Things aren’t the way they used to be.”

“That’s too general,” I said. “Something must have hit you hard. What is it?”

“Changes,” he said summarily. “Dagan is shaking up the house with the prime minister’s backing.” He was talking about the
Mossad head.

“Isn’t it time?” I asked. “Routine is the biggest enemy, right?”

“Well, Dagan has every right to install changes,” said Benny, but his tone belied the statement. He sighed.

“Look around you. The old historic rivalry between states that require foreign intelligence service is decreasing, and, as
a result, so is the need for classic intelligence gathering on enemies. We’ve had to redefine who the enemy is—and where
he is.”

“And the effect of that change on Mossad?” I said, pushing him to get to the point. I knew all that.

“Dagan says he wants to turn Mossad into a more operational body. Redefine Tsiach.” The acronym stood for
Tsiyun yediot hiyuniot
, indicating the vital information priorities historically determined by Aman, Israeli’s military intelligence. Benny said
Dagan wanted to take advantage of Israel’s known, and many more unknown, successes in recruiting human assets and informers
and concentrate on three major targets: Arab and Palestinian terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and intelligence gathering
on hostile forces’ armament with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.