by James Becker
They refused to pay for the enhanced version of the software, did their very best to drive Inslaw into bankruptcy so that the company couldn’t take legal action against the government, and then even sold versions of the software on the black market. There were several legal actions, and almost every finding supported Inslaw’s contention that the software had been stolen, but despite this the company received no compensation. The government actually replaced judges who agreed with the findings with other judges who did not, or who had been told not to support the conclusions.
One attorney general was implicated in the theft, and another one simply ignored all the recommendations of the House Judiciary Committee and reneged on every relevant agreement he had made with that committee. To say it was a corrupt administration barely even hints at the lengths the American government went to in order to avoid paying for the software program that they’d ordered, and then stolen and were using.
The final kick in the teeth for Inslaw was when the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled that all versions of the PROMIS program were in the public domain, so the government could do what they liked with them. The female judge presumably had no idea what the word copyright actually meant, or, far more likely, she’d been told exactly what her finding should be before the hearing even started.
But the final irony is that some of the copies of the program that various American officials sold on the black market for their own personal gain almost certainly ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, so the software that the American government had stolen was actually used against America by terrorists, the very people whom the program had been designed to identify and locate. Now, is that ironic or what?
In short, modern electronic surveillance systems are all-pervasive. The CIA and NSA and all other three-letter agencies in America and Britain—they’re often referred to collectively as “Alphabet Soup”—extract an enormous amount of data from Internet traffic. Of course, what they claim to be doing is watching out for terrorists communicating with one another by e-mail as they plan some new atrocity, and there’s a thing called the Echelon Dictionary, which allows any intelligence service to choose words and phrases that they believe to be important, and that that particular surveillance software will look out for. Some of the obvious words include bomb, explosion, weapon, assassination, and so on.
The problem, fairly obviously, is that today’s terrorists are certainly not stupid. Fanatical and misguided, definitely, but stupid, no. Absolutely the last thing any terrorist is going to put in an e-mail is something like: “We plan to position the bomb at the United Nations building next Saturday evening at eleven o’clock.” They’re far more likely to say: “We will be at the farm with the donkey on Saturday evening at eleven.”
Of course, some of the code words used by terrorists are quite well-known. Al-Qaeda, for example, uses the word wedding to refer to a planned attack or other atrocity, but the trick is to identify an al-Qaeda “wedding” from within all the tens of millions of real marriage ceremonies that might be referred to on the Internet at any one time, an almost impossible task.
And even when a potential terrorist is known about, and his communications are being monitored, clues can still get overlooked. Back in 1999 the American government started a program called “Able Danger,” which was intended to source intelligence about potential terrorists and possible targets of international terrorism. According to one of the senior officers involved in the program, Able Danger identified a man named Mohammed Atta as a possible suspect. He, of course, later steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. There was a lot of controversy about the quality—and even the existence—of this information, and the officer who had revealed it had his security clearance revoked and was essentially sacked, probably just to shut him up.
But whatever the truth of that, it’s certain that in the summer of 2001 Mohammed Atta was in contact with a terrorist cell in Germany, disguising his e-mail correspondence as messages to a fictitious girlfriend named Jenny. In one of them he used a rather curious phrase: “two sticks, a dash, and a cake with a stick down,” which obviously meant nothing to anyone who saw it. But if you draw something like that on paper, what you end up with is the number eleven and the number nine, and that was essential information for Atta’s masters in al-Qaeda, because it told them the date the attack on America would be launched. That would have enabled them to work the financial markets and make a real killing when the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, because they knew absolutely that the American stock market would tumble.
It’s never been proved, though it’s widely believed, that al-Qaeda bought a whole load of put options, well out of the money, on the market index and on the two airlines whose planes were hijacked. If that did happen, the al-Qaeda traders would have purchased the options through a whole flock of proxies, so tracing the ultimate investor would be almost impossible. But it would have made sense if they’d done that, because it really wouldn’t be a gamble. Once those planes hit the Twin Towers, the only direction American stocks, and especially airline stocks, were heading was down.
This also highlights the near impossibility of using electronic surveillance to discover terrorist plots, because unless you know what code words the particular terrorist group is using, or the terrorists are monumentally and terminally stupid, there’s almost no chance of gleaning any useful intelligence through this kind of monitoring. In fact, the Americans have admitted this in various confidential reports. Mostly it’s a complete waste of time, effort, and resources.
Undeciphered Letter Code
Mention has also been made of various cipher systems, and particularly Atbash, the simplest possible single substitution code. But some early ciphers have so far refused to yield to decryption. One of the most interesting codes that has never been solved is the line of initials on the eighteenth-century Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough Hall in Staffordshire in Great Britain. The inscription is underneath a carving that is a mirror image of a painting by Nicolas Poussin, the Shepherds of Arcadia, a painting that is itself full of symbolism and unanswered questions. The inscription has two letters placed slightly below the line, D on the left and M on the right, and between them is inscribed “O U O S V A V V.” There have been a lot of interesting theories about that, but the truth is that nobody has ever come up with a convincing explanation of what the letters mean.
The Dominicans and Roberto Calvi
In Britain the Dominicans were known as the Black Friars, as in the bridge over the Thames. That was the bridge under which the body of a man named Roberto Calvi was found hanging in 1982. He was known as “God’s Banker” because he headed the Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed spectacularly in June of that year owing something like one billion American dollars, most of which had been transferred to it from the Vatican Bank, which ultimately meant that the money came out of the Vatican’s resources.
It could almost be said that Roberto Calvi had stolen the money from the pope, and if you take a somewhat jaundiced view of what happened, the result was virtually a kind of joke. Calvi had stolen the pope’s money and offended the Vatican, and even if his murder wasn’t actually engineered by members of the Dominican Order the “Black Friars,” and nobody knows for sure whether it was or not, it’s probable that the site chosen to kill him, underneath Blackfriars Bridge, was meant as a definite warning to others. It showed metaphorically that the pope’s torturers and enforcers were still around and still able to take whatever action was needed to protect the pontiff.
At first his death was ruled to be a suicide, until it became quite obvious to everyone that it was simply impossible. The construction of Blackfriars Bridge means that a man of his age and physical condition simply could not have climbed up to the spot where his body was found, tied a noose around his neck, and jumped off. In short, he didn’t jump. He w
as definitely pushed, and it had to involve more than one other person.
It seems clear that his killers chose that location deliberately, to send a definite and unmistakable message to somebody. Otherwise why would they decide to kill a man in such a public place, in the middle of one of the busiest cities in the world, with all the risks that that would entail? If they just wanted to murder him in revenge for the collapse of the bank, they could just have driven him out into the countryside somewhere, shot him or knifed him or something, and then dumped the body. The event only makes sense if it was intended as a reminder that nobody gets away with messing with the Vatican, even today.
Chartres Cathedral
Without any doubt, the Gothic Cathedral of Chartres, located in the town of the same name about fifty miles southwest of Paris, is one of the biggest and most impressive structures of any sort on earth. Roughly four hundred and twenty-five feet long, a hundred and fifty feet wide, and crowned by a tower that rises over three hundred and seventy feet, it contains over a hundred and seventy windows that basically tell the story of the Bible in stained glass. Almost as famous as the cathedral itself is the pavement labyrinth located on the west side of the nave.
Unlike a maze, which is deliberately intended to be confusing, the labyrinth has a single entrance, which is also its exit, and was probably designed to be a meditative tool, allowing worshippers to walk the path while praying or reflecting on their religious beliefs. The labyrinth is forty-two feet in diameter and contains eleven lunations or circular paths divided into four quadrants, and the total distance from the entrance to the center and back again, following those paths, is about one-third of a mile.
The present cathedral is at least the fifth, possibly the eighth, religious building erected on this site, each being destroyed in succession by fire or war or some other calamity. The existing cathedral dates from the first half of the thirteenth century, at a time when the Knights Templar were at the height of their power, and was one of about eighty cathedrals built in France during this period. It cannot now be definitely established, for obvious reasons, but it is at least possible that the construction of this great building was financed wholly or in part by the Templars.
The cathedral broke new ground in a number of different ways, including using flying buttresses to support the massive weight of the walls, which in turn allowed larger windows to be fitted, and there is some evidence to suggest that the architect was familiar with what is known as the golden ratio. This is a mathematical relationship (approximately 1:1.618) that can be found in nature, in mathematical constructs such as the Fibonacci number, and in geometric shapes such as the pentagram. It can also be applied to architecture, and can be found in both the Parthenon in Greece and in Chartres Cathedral. It produces visually satisfactory and pleasing proportions.
According to one authority, most of the major dimensions of the cathedral are unequivocally based upon this ratio and this is the principal reason for the feeling of calm and serenity that many visitors experience. And this is despite an expensive and extremely ill-conceived renovation project nearing completion in the cathedral. Widely condemned, this attempt to re-create the interior as it would have looked just after the building had been completed has been described as a “scandalous desecration of a cultural holy place” and an “unfolding cultural disaster.”
The carvings depicting the Arc of the Covenant and the carved inscriptions are exactly as described in this novel.
About the Author
James Becker spent more than twenty years in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. Throughout his career he has been involved in covert operations in many of the world’s hot spots, including Yemen, Russia, and Northern Ireland. He is the author of The Lost Treasure of the Templars as well as the Chris Bronson novels, including The Lost Testament and Echo of the Reich. He has also written action-adventure novels under the name James Barrington, military novels as Max Adams, and novels exploring conspiracy theories as Jack Steel in the U.K.
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