The Merchant of Secrets

by Caroline Lowther

  Mulally rubbed his chin, “well of course that’s the next step isn’t it? Okay, I’ll ask our Abu Dhabi station if they can get the bank to give- up the information on what happened to the funds after they arrived. There’s certainly enough here to keep this investigation going until the end. I’ll make a call and get it covered.”

  “And what about David Jones?” I asked.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of him,” Mulally said.

  I was beside myself with joy, Mulally doesn’t personally take care of anybody, but he was breaking with tradition to handle Jones himself. Jones versus Mulally, I could just imagine it.

  “One more thing,” Mulally added, “are you turning up any evidence of involvement by North Korea?”

  Bailey and I looked at each other, we were taken back by the question which seemed so out of context. “No” we replied in unison. (We later learned from Colin that North Korea had just launched a major cyber-attack against South Korea. It meant that the enemy in the North was gaining cyber warfare skills at a rate previously unsuspected by our analysts who covered that region.)

  “Okay, keep plugging away at the wires from China, we want to know much has been wired in the past year to that account in Kabul, I want to get an idea of how big this thing is”.

  Bailey replied, ‘We’ll keep working on it sir.”

  “Good, just keep me in touch, there are still too many gaps and not enough solid evidence.”

  “Yes sir,” we replied, watching Mulally and Flumm walk away.

  CHAPTER 16

  Keisha came over to later in the week to join Bailey and me for lunch and to talk about Mulally’s request that we find out how much money had been wired from China to Kabul. We couldn’t rule out that some money might be in other bank accounts we still weren’t aware of. Keisha and I slid into a wooden booth at a local restaurant and ordered diet coke and macaroni and cheese. Bailey arrived a few minutes later. I broke in with a question about North Korea because of Mulally’s remarks at our previous meeting.

  ‘Keisha, what’s going on in North Korea? Mulally was asking me about it at a meeting.”

  “Nothing unusual,” she shrugged.

  “Well what about their rockets and the nuclear program, how are we handling that?”

  “Any third rate country has rockets Caroline,” she said dismissively before letting a faint smile cross her lips.

  ‘What about the long range missiles?” I asked.

  Keisha broke out in a laugh. “They’re guided missiles………”

  I continued, “They’re guided missiles so……..they’re not autonomous rockets. They run off of radios based in North Korea and signals are uploaded onto North Korean satellites…….”

  Keisha laughed again.

  “Ahhhh…I get it….we control their satellites and therefore control their guided missiles…”

  Keisha remained silent.

  “Okay, very interesting, I didn’t know that. So they can’t launch anything.”

  “Sure they can launch something,” Keisha corrected me.

  I replied, “But we’ll control the missiles when they’re airborne and force them to drop into the ocean? The Navy probably controls the North Korean satellites from our ships located off of the Korean Peninsula.”

  Keisha had this magical way of leading people to figure things out on their own.

  She directed conversation back to our investigation. “Okay, so here’s where we think we are with Project Hades Drone. Stolen Top Secret information from Jones was illegally being taken to China and in turn the Chinese were paying money to Qureshi’s brother. Presuming that the Chinese were getting designs of advanced weapon systems to copy, that leaves us with a huge national defense issue.”

  I added my speculation “And they can copy the designs to manufacture in their own factories. U.S. technology worth billions of dollars is being stolen. The measly millions in payoff money to a middleman like Qureshi and a spy like Jones is a bargain in exchange for the billions of Chinese Yuan they’ll amass by copying the U.S. advanced weapon systems, and selling parts of those systems to Iran and North Korea, not to mention that acquiring a high level of technology would enhance their own power globally, especially in the Pacific Rim where rights to the lucrative South China Sea are in play.”

  Bailey shook her head and laughed. “I’d better get a promotion after this project.” She had deserved a promotion long ago, but this was out of her comfort zone.

  Keisha continued, “We’ve got to find what information Jones is selling. It must be advanced, high quality stuff if there are so many people involved in getting it to Beijing.” Keisha was right. Beijing wouldn’t spend the time or the money on some low level weapon system that they could build themselves. It would have to be something really advanced, cutting edge.

  “Let’s backtrack a minute. How do we know that Jones isn’t selling PFG drones to China?” Keisha asked.

  “Because they were never produced, just a prototype,” I said.

  “But with the money he’s getting from Shanghai, I bet he could produce a couple of drones. Do you think he’s going to manufacture the weapons and sell them overseas?” Keisha asked.

  “He’ll do anything to keep the company going,” Bailey said, “It’s worth a fortune to him. If he can hold out until he gets a Pentagon contract he’ll make millions. How much do you think a DOD contract would be worth?"

  “Ballpark, five billion dollars over a ten year period,” Keisha replied.

  “If he wants to sell PFG drones overseas, I bet he’ll be manufacturing them overseas as well. It would be prohibitively difficult to manufacture aircraft here and ship them to an overseas client without detection by at least one federal agency,” I said.

  “He could manufacture the parts here, and ship them piece by piece to be assembled in the buyer’s country,” Bailey suggested.

  “So really, you think this guy could be selling drones to the Taliban, Iran, Syria… you name it. To kill our troops in the field? Shit I want this guy’s ass!” Keisha replied slamming her fist on the table. She was never one for subtlety. “I know Mr. Mulally wants you to trace the money flows, but from the Department of Defense point of view, our top priority is to find out what the Hell he’s selling!” Keisha couldn’t bear to eat her lunch now, she was too upset. “See you guys later, I’m going to the Pentagon to talk with some people about this sociopath, drone maker and his personal banker. If I were one of those Afghan women? I would have cut his balls off with a pocket-knife!” She grabbed her jacket and stomped out of the restaurant.

  Bailey and I finished eating and returned to the office.

  I was still on the payroll at work and had to account for my time, so Mulally gave me a project that I could put on a time sheet as The Hades Project was a secret project that couldn’t be documented on a payroll record. I was assigned some of the type of work I was originally hired to do. It seemed we had a new big problem with hackers using shortened URLs for a link which would conceal the true identity of the website. In the new cloak and dagger world of cyber-espionage this was like a 1950’s era spy hiding in a trench coat and sunglasses except the spies were in our own homes. The unsuspecting public was too casual in their use of abbreviated URL’s. Shortened URL’s became frequently used in the Twitter environment where abbreviations had become particularly prevalent, then it caught on in other applications and now we had a big problem on our hands. With a shortened URL it’s more difficult to tell whether a link will take you to a trustworthy website or alternatively, to a potentially malicious site. So people will click on these abbreviated links leading them into a threatening situation more readily than if the whole address were on the screen. It was causing us headaches, as if we didn’t have enough already. So I had system clean-up work to do. To minimize future problems I drafted a memo to send to government contractors and federal agencies suggesting that they include in their official security policy a provision making it a security violation to open a shorte
ned, or abbreviated URL. I also attached the links to the websites that can lengthen URL’s so that email recipients could check a link before opening it. In the memo I also advised against opening links received in emails like notifications from stores announcing a sale or of a new product, or from social websites saying that a message was waiting on their social page. “Always type the link yourself in the browser window,” I said. I copied it onto Mulally’s email (with his permission) and pushed it out to dozens of people in defense and intelligence. Then I reminded them that security precautions that they use at work should also be used on their smartphones. Hackers show no preference in the type of device they target; as long as they can access the network, they don’t care.

  Mulally called. He wanted to set up another meeting with Keisha and Bailey, at the same time and same place as the prior meeting.

  Mulally entered as before but without Flumm on this particular day. He was mellow in a sophisticated way, rarely budging from a stoic facial expression that left you guessing what he was thinking. He had come with more information from our surveillance team but wanted to talk to us about Pakistan and the need to tread lightly in our investigation of Qureshi. Historically the U.S. and Pakistan had very bad relations after Pakistan developed the nuclear bomb. The international community was very worried because the Pakistani nuclear sites weren’t adequately guarded and this created a dangerous environment for everybody. But after September 11, 2001 the relationship with Pakistan changed. We needed Pakistan to help us defeat al-Qaeda so we offered money in exchange for cooperation in the hunt for those responsible for the bombings in New York and at the Pentagon, as well as the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. U.S. –Pakistani relations had come along way and we didn’t want to upset them by accusing a Pakistani national, Qureshi, of wrongdoing until we were absolutely certain that we had all necessary evidence.

  Then he pondered aloud the opportunities lost with Iran. “After 9-11 the Iranians were willing to work with us in catching Al-Qaeda operatives seeking shelter in their country. Al-Qaeda was of a group of Sunni extremist and Iranians are Shiites, so Iranians were helping us capture them and they detain them in Iranian prisons including many members of the Bin Laden family. If we had done things differently eight..nine..ten years ago we would have a completely different relationship with Iran now. We should never have demonized them. That served no purpose.” Mulally then returned to talking about the investigation after that brief lesson on diplomacy.

  Joe had booked another flight to China, presumably to take the next shipment of stolen classified information.

  “Sir, what about picking up Joe at the airport when tries to board the flight, and grab the bag full of information? We could catch him in the act.”

  “Not that easy, Caroline. I took a peek inside Jones’ gym bag while Jones was on the treadmill. There was nothing illegal in the bag, just a stack of brochures from trade shows. Photos of F-22’s and other material. Granted, there’s too much information made available out there at these trade shows and on the internet and he shouldn’t be allowed to take that stuff out of the States but the fact is that there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  He took a bite of a croissant then continued.

  “The question still is to determine how stolen information was taken to Beijing and to gather an abundance of solid evidence so that a federal prosecutor will have a chance of winning a conviction in the courtroom. You’ve got to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they were in possession of classified material, and if possible prove that they sold it”. If the I.R.S. can locate illegal wire transfers into or out of the U.S. we can get them on that too.”

  “Then why would someone in Shanghai wire money to Qureshi on the very same day that Joe arrives in China with the gym bag full of documents if the bag didn’t contain classified documents being purchased by the Chinese?

  “That’s what I want you to figure out,” Mulally said. He wanted us to pick it up again from there.

  Before he left, I wanted to impress him with my new knowledge on North Korea. “Did you know that the U.S. controls the missiles in North Korea?”

  “No, I didn’t know that,” Mulally replied with a cryptic smile. Then he and Keisha were smiling in unison and I had the feeling they were thinking the same thing.

  “Is this some sort of secret society that you two belong to?” I asked.

  “No but it’s interesting to hear what Defense is doing to keep Pyongyang in check,” Mulally responded as a smile broadened across his face.

  “And you never worried about North Korea launching missiles?” I asked, testing him.

  Mulally’s grin widened further, “Not much.” He was mentally circulating classified information in his brain. Quietly he leaned toward the center of the table and whispered to all of us, “Their nuclear program has a few flaws.”

  I looked up and implored him with my eyes to go further.

  “Their uranium was diluted.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that it was acquired from old Russian missiles from the cold war era, and mixed with another chemical ingredient that hinders its ability to react properly ….. ”

  “But I don’t….” I was cut-off mid- sentence.

  ‘Enough,” Mulally interjected, insisting on immediately ending any further discourse on the subject. Leaning back again in his chair and resuming a normal volume in his voice, he said “I’ve got to watch my weight, but the croissants are pretty good!”

  Boots and I remained contemplatively silent while Bailey couldn’t have cared less. She was pure business and didn’t like being drawn into matters that weren’t in her area of responsibility. I couldn’t resist a follow-up question to Mulally, “Was the corrupted uranium sold that way? Or did we arrange for it to be corrupted after they bought it and it was already in the North Korean arms factories?”

  “Enough Caroline! I’ve told you more than I should have already,” Mullaly scolded in a sharp, clipped tone while Boots glanced down at her lap.

  So much had been written in the press about sanctions against North Korea, and how they don’t work. We provide food aid to feed the North Korean people in exchange for North Korean’s agreement to control their aggressive behavior but invariably they have not held up their part of the deal, making our president look foolishly duped by Kim Jong-Il, and now his son. But secretly we’ve maintained the upper hand in their defense arsenal by limiting or controlling their strike capabilities. Since 1998 they repeatedly launched rockets that fail. They crash to the ground. Now that Keisha pointed it out why their rockets always fail it all seemed so obvious.

  Keisha carefully added a comment. “I wouldn’t rule out Japan’s cooperation with the effort to put a cap on their nuclear program. They don’t want North Korean rockets to land on their islands.”

  “How do the Chinese respond?” I asked, because China is the primary trading partner with North Korea.

  “The Chinese don’t like North Korea trying to create upheaval. They view North Korea as a child that won’t behave.”

  “So North Korea cannot wage an intercontinental war?” I asked, getting to the bottom line.

  “Any attempt to launch rockets will be put in check,” Keisha asserted.

  I turned to Mulally and asked, “So North Korean provocations don’t constitute a legitimate, actionable threat to our national security?”

  Mulally replied, “No.”

  After a momentary pause he said “Caroline, come and take a ride with me.” We both arose from our chairs and left Keisha and Bailey sitting in their chairs at the restaurant.

  He invited me to ride with him in his car, a large black sedan with tinted windows driven by a company driver with an armed security guard sitting in the passenger seat. I sat in the back seat with Mulally who always smelled as though he had just gotten out of the shower. During the ride he complimented me on putting such an important project into motion, and on keeping the pressure on Dave Jones despite considerab
le challenges. Then he got to the point, which was to politely remind me that my area of responsibility was the Hades Drone project and my normal duties covering internet security as assigned, but insisted that there be no further questions about North Korea. The message couldn’t have been more straight forward; in a world at war the custody of critical information was shared with only a few, and I was not included.

  He then explained that the office had become something of a battle ground between those who knew how to run the organization and those who thought they were entitled to run it because of their military service. The military employees didn’t grasp that a civilian operation cannot run like the army. Then he thanked me for dealing so well with Todd’s menacing behavior.

  Mullaly’s irreverence toward the military’s leadership did nothing in the slightest to masquerade his frustration with Todd and his hatred of David Jones’ corrupting influence.

  He turned and smiled, “Are we okay now?”

  “Yes, of course,” I replied, although his admonishments on North Korea never kept me from being curious.