The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  Dejected, Weldon and his bipartisan gang got back on their plane. They would never know if Karic was the man the Russians claimed, the man that the IDC averred he was. The answer remained hidden as the plane lifted off from Vienna.

  A few weeks after his return to Washington, Weldon’s office got a phone call from the FBI. A couple of agents wanted to debrief him about Karic and his brothers.

  “Fine,” Weldon told his staff. “Set it up for next Monday.” The congressman headed back to his home district for a scheduled visit. A few days later he received an emergency page from his staff, asking him to call the CIA’s congressional liaison office immediately.

  The agency wanted to fly two agents to Philadelphia right away. The State Department wanted to know more about Karic and had asked the CIA to find out. The agents would come to Weldon’s home, a hotel, the airport, whatever he wanted.

  They could wait. “The FBI already asked for that information,” Weldon replied. “We can do it together on Monday afternoon.”

  Once again, Weldon found himself in an improbable spot: sitting in his Washington office with two G men and a pair of spooks who were begging him for information on an elusive Serbian banker. At the time, Weldon and his colleagues on the House’s International Relations Committee were preparing for a hearing on diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia, at which Pickering was slated to testify. Apparently State had realized this Karic guy was interesting after all.

  Weldon laid it all out for the agents. Karic. The brothers. The missile sales, the house, the wives. Weldon had been a schoolteacher before coming to Washington. When he’d finished the lecture, he asked, “Now, do you know where I got this information?”

  The answer seemed obvious to the agents. From the Russians, and from Karic himself.

  The congressman was delighted. “No,” he said. “I got this from the Information Dominance Center.”

  The agents looked at him and at each other quizzically. “What’s the Information Dominance Center?” one of them ventured to ask.

  “They’re the people who gave me eight pages,” Weldon said. “The CIA gave me a paragraph.”

  He told the agents that both their organizations had come up short. And now, here they were asking a congressman to brief them, so they could report to the State Department.

  “This is ridiculous,” Weldon said.

  NATO planes bombed Milošević’s forces for seventy-seven days. The campaign convinced him of the alliance’s resolve, and that Russia wasn’t coming to his rescue. By mid-June he had withdrawn from Kosovo, under an agreement hammered out by the United States, the Russians, and the G8. Weldon had briefed the administration on the aborted Vienna agreement, and he told himself that it had provided a framework for the ultimate pact. He’d done his job.

  But the encounter with the agents had left Weldon peeved. The Miloševićs of the world, and all the other big problems, were only going to get bigger. Human analysts slogged through swamps of data about an array of threats—warring ethnic factions in Albania, ascendant capitalists in China, dissident Saudi expatriates in Sudan. No one could keep it all straight, much less reach deeper conclusions about how the United States should act in this volatile world. Technology was the answer. Computers could do what humans couldn’t—ingest heaps of data, then digest sensible, instructive information. The IDC was the next generation of intelligence, Weldon thought. He became its biggest congressional patron, singing the analysts’ praises at the highest echelons of the Defense Department. And despite Weldon’s outsized reputation, people listened.

  Over at the Pentagon, word was getting around about the IDC’s exploits. The armed services committee had been talking them up. And the military services, as well. Rumor was, the IDC could do amazing things. New things.

  The men who ran the Defense Department decided it was time to put the tiny band of analysts through their paces, but this time on a bigger problem than Balkan businessmen.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CHINA EXPERIMENT

  John Hamre, the number two man at the Pentagon, had a big problem: Somehow, U.S. military secrets were ending up in Chinese hands. And he wasn’t certain how.

  The Defense Department had been aware for some time that hostile intelligence services were running agents against U.S. government facilities and military contractors, and Hamre, as the deputy secretary of defense, was actively trying to stop one aimed at the U.S. industrial base. But the scale and scope of clandestine operations were broader and more frightening than almost anyone outside the government knew.

  In January 1999, a special congressional committee revealed that since at least the late 1970s, Chinese spies had stolen design information about advanced thermonuclear warheads from the U.S. national laboratories, a rich repository of military hardware secrets. The pilfered cache covered seven warheads, including all those currently deployed on U.S. ballistic missiles, as well as plans for the apocalyptic neutron bomb, which was designed to wipe out whole population centers with a massive dose of radiation. Chinese agents also had obtained other vital missile and satellite technology from U.S. companies allegedly doing unauthorized business with the Chinese government. The espionage was ongoing and heading toward a crucial point: The commission predicted that China had enough information to base the next generation of its nuclear arsenal on U.S. designs.

  Hamre didn’t really need a congressional investigation to tell him that the country’s most sensitive secrets were up for grabs, and that the countermeasures in place to stop such a massive step were faltering. With the demise of the Soviet Union Congress and the administration had cut back intelligence budgets dramatically, a multibillion-dollar savings known as the “peace dividend.” The agencies, along with the national labs and defense contractors, were becoming blind to the security threats arrayed against them, and in some cases appeared to unwittingly assist their adversaries. The very fiber of secrecy was disintegrating. So, Hamre decided to do something dramatic.

  The government needed a new counter intelligence center for the post-cold war and national threats, he decided. And their first order of business should be to understand precisely how spies were “exfiltrating,” in the parlance of the trade, so many technology assets. Hamre wanted to create a “threat mapping model” of the military technology supply chain. It should show all the security weak points, the conduits through which an individual could move secrets out of the country, physically or electronically. It wasn’t enough to know that the labs or contractors writ large were vulnerable. How did the spies obtain access to those labs in the first place? Did they have contacts on the inside? Did they pose as legitimate researchers? And which technologies were most at risk of theft? In a losing game of Spy vs. Spy, Hamre wanted to know the bad guys’ avenues of approach.

  The question was, how? The intelligence agencies with their traditional craft had come up relatively empty. Hamre wondered whether this new counterintelligence unit needed to get ahead of the curve. A few months after the China report was released, Curt Weldon, who sat on the congressional committee that authorized it, recommended to Hamre that he pay a visit to the Information Dominance Center. He needed to see how these high-tech detectives were outrunning the CIA and others.

  Hamre went down to Fort Belvoir. Not long after, he reported his impressions back to Weldon: “It’s amazing what they’re doing down there.”

  August was Washington’s slow season, but Erik Kleinsmith was barely catching his breath from the Karic episode and the crush of a normal workday at the IDC. Requests were coming in from a range of customers now at the military command level. But when the call came down from Hamre’s office, Kleinsmith snapped to attention.

  The Pentagon had a challenge: Use advanced data-mining techniques to determine paths and avenues for hostile intelligence services. Hamre wanted to know whether he should invest in these cutting-edge tools for the new Joint Counterintelligence Assessment Group, or JCAG. Officially, what Hamre asked the IDC to do was just an experiment. But Klei
nsmith saw a perfect opportunity to impress the Pentagon brass. Let’s show them what we’ve got.

  The rules of the game were simple. The IDC should pick a sensitive military technology, and then map out how individuals, working together or collectively, could gain access to U.S. facilities, obtain sensitive information, and then take it back to China. They should nail down, in as much detail as possible, which labs or companies had been compromised, which organizations were behind the theft, and—perhaps most important—which facilities were most at risk. This wasn’t an investigation of past abuses. Congress had taken care of that. This was now about preemption. Kleinsmith and his team would have access to a limited number of classified databases, but they could also mine the Internet.

  The IDC had a range of technologies to choose from for their experiment, but it was really an arbitrary point. The tools and techniques would work just the same. Kleinsmith and his team decided to focus on component technologies in the Joint Strike Fighter, a stealth aircraft then in development and upon which the military had pinned much of its future fighting strategy. A small group of three analysts started with wide search strings, looking for pairings of their target technology with “China,” “espionage,” “export.” They stretched digital reapers through the classified databases and across the fertile field of the Internet, pulling in thousands of Web pages containing potentially relevant information. They retrieved an enormous harvest.

  Next, Kleinsmith and the analysts took a first pass with their mining tools, separating potential leads from dead ends, wheat from chaff. Typically, some connections just seemed implausible on their face, or obviously coincidental, and the analysts used their common sense to help them sort things out. The initial take showed tantalizing correlations among universities, national laboratories, and Chinese nationals, all of which popped up as references in news articles, intelligence reports, and other sources in the harvest. This was just a first step, but it hadn’t taken Kleinsmith very long.

  The beauty of the IDC’s approach, Kleinsmith had always thought, wasn’t its ability to collect information. Vacuuming up the Internet or a database was a crude technique compared with what he did next: convert all that information into a picture.

  Kleinsmith ran a collection of now filtered information through a “visualization tool.” In a matter of seconds it read all the information, which consisted of news stories, Web pages, classified cable traffic, and other documents, and then pulled out pieces of information such as names, places, and actions. Something discernible, with a clear point of reference in the harvest.

  Then the tool plotted each document as a small point on a graphic map. A trade press article about satellite acquisitions by the Chinese military, say. Or a cable from the embassy in Beijing about a space research delegation visiting universities in California. Documents with similar subjects appeared close together. Then the tool created peaks, signaling a high concentration of documents about a specific topic. This was the visual component. The distance between two peaks showed how closely those topics were related.

  As Kleinsmith stepped back and took in the entire map, he could see the landscape of information. And with that, he could start to ask questions. What does the harvest say? Who are the most important people? Where were the gaps in his intelligence base? The tool let an analyst click on a specific data point and pull up the underlying report, to read it in full and put it in context. One could suddenly not just see the forest but zoom in on a single tree.

  This kind of production, from beginning to end, would have taken large teams of analysts weeks, if not months, to complete. They’d have to manually collect the data first, or use proprietary searching tools that only let them scan one or a few databases. Then they’d have to draw all the links themselves. And they certainly would not have used the Internet for source material.

  Kleinsmith’s approach offered liberation. It was as if he and his analysts had grown wings, and slipped the coil of gravity that kept their colleagues toiling in a vineyard of data. They soared over the terrain, dove down into the valleys, rested on peaks. Although Kleinsmith’s rapid-fire version of analysis would, only a few years later, essentially be available to the masses through Internet search engines and online collaboration sites, at the time, in 1999, his approach was something marvelous.

  And rather dangerous.

  As Kleinsmith and his team worked through their China harvest, the pervasiveness of the espionage startled them. But the fact that they had discovered it with relative ease, that the clues were out there for the taking, surprised none of them.

  The harvest had gotten them only so far. This high-tech analysis was not magic, as Kleinsmith often reminded his customers, particularly when they came calling in desperation. At some point the analysts had to put their own skills to work.

  The analysis indicated that Chinese agents had access to the target technology through the labs and research facilities of a number of U.S. universities. Kleinsmith wanted to know which ones they should focus on first, as they might represent the weakest points. Armed with that threat-mapping model, as Hamre wanted, counterintelligence agents could get to work plugging leaks.

  Kleinsmith and a colleague spread out a map of the United States on a table in the team’s workspace. He scanned the terrain, not immediately sure what he hoped to find. Lots of cities. Lots of rivers.

  Rivers.

  Without saying a word, Kleinsmith grabbed a stack of yellow Post-it notes and a pair of scissors. He cut the notes into triangles and affixed them to apparently random points on the map.

  “What are you doing?” his puzzled colleague asked.

  “I’m marking the areas where they’re stealing this stuff.”

  “How do you know?”

  He drew a path down the St. Lawrence River from Canada, into New York, and onto the Great Lakes. Sixteenth-century explorers had used this route when they first came to North America, he explained. Invading French and British armies had used it. Even the Germans snuck u-boats into the river during World War II. The river was a natural entrance point to the continent, and on its banks, hubs of commerce and activity had sprung up. “If you go back and look at intel,” Kleinsmith told his colleague, “you’ll see that the pattern of theft fits the river.”

  She checked. Indeed, the intelligence indicated that the technology in question was either found at or associated with universities and corporate facilities located in the geographic corridor Kleinsmith had isolated. He never thought that Chinese spies were floating missile parts up the St. Lawrence River. But he knew that this place, over time, was a beehive of activity. People and goods moved in and out. They conducted trade. They waged wars. These were entry and exit points. People come in, they take things out, whether physical devices or useful information.

  If the Pentagon wanted a way to model the espionage threat, here it was. Go back to history, formulate a hypothesis, and then see what the intelligence says. It all seemed perfectly logical.

  To Kleinsmith and his tiny team, the conclusions of their analysis were inescapable. The Chinese had established a veritable underground network inside the United States. The analysis showed front companies probably controlled by government officials. Ostensibly legitimate Chinese academics, scientists, and businesspeople, some of them with contacts and even teaching posts at major research universities, were well positioned to send technology designs and other useful intelligence back home.

  The leads needed to be vetted, no doubt. And as word of the China experiment spread throughout the intelligence community, Kleinsmith’s team drew vehement detractors. One Defense Department analyst confronted Kleinsmith over his conspiratorial notions, the “connections” he had found sitting right out in the open: “You could find a connection between China and dog poop, the way you’re representing this.”

  “You’re right,” Kleinsmith replied. “But that’s not what we’re showing.”

  Kleinsmith and his team, acting on their own and without prior knowledge of
the threat, had demonstrated that the congressional commission on Chinese spying was essentially right. And they’d done it all in a matter of days, with relatively little effort. So, if an entire congressional investigation had now validated the IDC’s methods, why wouldn’t the Pentagon eagerly pour money into more advanced tools? Why wouldn’t they build more IDCs to stop spies and counter a whole range of new threats that befuddled traditional agencies?

  They were good and fair questions. But Kleinsmith and his supersleuths had raised another that was far more troubling to the senior officials who’d put them on the case: How did these techniques, impressive though they were, not violate almost every privacy law on the books?

  Kleinsmith knew the regulation well. He could rattle it off as instinctively as his home address. DOD 5240.1-R:[T]o enable the DoD intelligence components to carry out effectively their authorized functions while ensuring their activities that affect U.S. persons are carried out in a manner that protects the constitutional rights and privacy of such persons.

  Kleinsmith didn’t have to be a lawyer to know what that meant. Regulation 5240 was the guardrail against domestic spying by the military. And he was bumping up against it.

  The government had been down this torturous road several times. After World War II, the National Security Agency began collecting all telegram traffic leaving the United States, a practice that continued well into the 1970s. The FBI had set up a covert spying operation against the Black Panthers and other perceived “hostile” groups, including political opponents of various administrations. Critical journalists had ended up on enemies lists; their phones were tapped, their movements were tracked, and in some cases their finances were audited by the IRS. The exposure of those and other scandalous operations prompted a near full stop on domestic intelligence work. For decades, America’s spies had kept their noses pointed overseas and had left stateside investigations of security threats to law enforcement agencies. They operated under crystal clear rules about what information the government could collect on American citizens.