by Shane Harris
The IDC’s techniques muddied those rules. As Kleinsmith and his analysts harvested thousands of Web pages, they unavoidably vacuumed up the names of American citizens—probably thousands of them—who were mentioned in news articles, in chat rooms, or on electronic bulletin boards along with people Kleinsmith actually wanted to know more about.
They were the innocent bystanders of the investigation. Ordinary people who had done nothing wrong, and whom the government had no reason to believe were helping the Chinese or any other hostile service. Their connections to potential targets were coincidental. A college president mentioned on the same page as a visiting Chinese scholar. A U.S. executive who visited China on a trade delegation. Kleinsmith had plenty of logical explanations, but in order to verify them, he’d have to dig deeper into the connections. And that meant, in effect, investigating an American citizen without legal cause.
Even if he’d had the authority to vet these names, he didn’t have the time. There were simply too many names to sift through without slowing down the rest of the analysis. But it wasn’t just names that the IDC team collected. The harvest revealed facts about a person’s life. His job. His hobbies. Any trivial fact mentioned in an online newsletter, an annual report, a transcript, became part of an ever-widening profile. What could an industrious snoop have found out about Kleinsmith just by scanning the Internet? That he was thirty-three years old. That he was a Cub Scout den leader. That he liked to play online war simulations in his spare time. It was all out there for the taking.
Only with a duly authorized warrant, issued pursuant to an official investigation, could an intelligence agency start building files on U.S. persons. And by law, that designation covered not only American citizens but also legal residents, American corporations, and even unincorporated associations substantially composed of American citizens or resident aliens.
Regulation 5240 was the Defense Department’s legal guide. It specified what kinds of information an agency could collect (it must concern foreign powers and governments), under what circumstances (generally, with a warrant or pursuant to a legal authorization), how long it could be retained (if it had no demonstrable intelligence value, no longer than ninety days), and how widely the collecting agency could share it.
These were the rules, and people in Kleinsmith’s business were trained to follow them. But technology had outpaced such restrictions. Now they were holding him back. His team had obtained no warrants because they weren’t specifically targeting anyone. And their task was an experiment, not an operational mission. To confuse matters, the team was combing through publicly available information, which was not absolutely off-limits to intelligence agencies. But after they harvested those Web pages, they deposited them in storage with classified government data. The names of U.S. persons were being commingled with those of people actually under investigation.
Kleinsmith and his analysts risked breaking just about every rule spelled out in 5240 and the laws from which it flowed. They collected information. They stored it. They were searching it after they stored it. They intended to craft reports, which would be shared, perhaps widely. Their data mining was some bizarre hybrid of covert monitoring and public research.That’s how the Army’s lawyers saw it, and they conveyed that concern to the Pentagon’s senior leadership.
But there was something else about the China experiment that proved far more troubling and politically perilous. The IDC wasn’t just collecting information on ordinary people. The names of many prominent Americans popped up as well. For starters, there was Condoleezza Rice, the provost of Stanford University and a former member of George H. W. Bush’s National Security Council. The hit was another by-product—Stanford, an elite research institution, hosted a number of Chinese scholars and delegations.
But the connections didn’t stop there. William Cohen, the secretary of defense, also appeared. Was this the promise of “intelligence on steroids”? Condoleezza Rice and Bill Cohen implicated in a military smuggling ring? Hamre and other Pentagon leaders blanched at the political implications. The controversy over technology leaks to China had inflamed the White House. Republicans accused Bill Clinton of weakening U.S. export control laws in exchange for smoother diplomatic relations with Beijing and after generous campaign contributions from U.S. missile and satellite companies. The whole affair was radioactive. And so a chill shot through the Pentagon’s upper ranks when Kleinsmith’s China harvest churned up the name of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The Pentagon placed an urgent call to the House Intelligence Committee. Hamre wanted to come up to the Hill and talk to the staffers personally. A number of them had heard of the IDC already, but they didn’t know much more than that the analysts were using computers in new ways.
Hamre explained the problems the IDC had encountered with “U.S. persons” information. He wanted to know, Should the Pentagon shut down the program? The legal implications were obvious to everyone, but the IDC had shown real potential. They had to weigh the competing concerns of an intelligence breakthrough and privacy law. The Chinese were gaming the United States, but the country’s laws arguably were making it harder to fight back.
The committee’s lawyers had an easy gauge for deciding whether to continue a promising program like this or to kill it: Does it pass the Washington Post test? In other words, if the details of this operation ended up on the front page of the nation’s most important political newspaper, would you—or more to the point, your boss—feel comfortable explaining it? Could you live with the headline “Defense Department Collecting Information on Americans in Espionage Investigation”?
No way. Even if the IDC analysts operated in a legal gray area, and there was some indication they did, this operation would never pass the test. The committee staff also wondered why the IDC was on this job in the first place. The National Security Agency was the expert in handling U.S. persons information. The Army intelligence command didn’t have a clue about this stuff. It seemed to some staffers, as they listened to Hamre and worked through the legal implications, that the IDC team was utterly unaware that they even had a legal problem.
In October 1999, two months after the IDC had started the China experiment, the Department of the Army sent down new orders to the team. They should conclude the experiment and then purge all the data from their systems. That included the harvest and any reports they’d created, with visualization tools or by hand. The IDC must also return all information obtained from other agencies. And under no circumstances could they retain any nonessential U.S. person information for more than ninety days. Since they had no time to vet, everything would have to go.
Kleinsmith tried not to fret. Hamre was just one of many customers, he told himself. The IDC was still a hot ticket across the military commands. They had plenty of work to keep them busy.
Kleinsmith wasn’t oblivious to the lawyers’ concerns. He knew that the IDC’s methods skirted the edge. But he also knew that most of his customers weren’t bothered.
Over the next several months Kleinsmith gave more than one hundred briefings on the IDC to members of Congress, generals, and senior government officials. He could tell almost immediately whether someone got it. The look in his eyes. How he leaned forward. If he nodded as Kleinsmith elaborated on the technology’s potential. Hamre got it, he thought. And so did two officers from the Army’s Special Operations Command, who showed up at the IDC in December 1999 looking for information about a little-known terrorist organization called Al Qaeda.
CHAPTER 9
ABLE DANGER
A pair of officers showed up unannounced, a Navy commander and a Marine captain. Ordinarily, military visitors got the VIP reception, with a formal welcome and nickel tour. But these two had meant to come in quietly.
They explained that Special Operations Command, headquartered in Florida, had heard about the IDC’s work on the China experiment. People were impressed. Word was that the analysts here had developed some unique capabilities. Could they ask Kleinsmith
some questions about that?
Kleinsmith brought the officers into the IDC’s main conference room. He was used to the dog and pony show by now, and the China presentation was as good a way as any to introduce people to his new breed of analysis. But as he walked the officers through those results, they interrupted him with pointed questions that had nothing to do with tracking military hardware.
These men wanted to track people. And, presumably, kill them. They never revealed a specific mission, but Kleinsmith knew that Special Operations guys were hunters. Their elder brothers had taken down the hijackers of Achille Lauro. Special Ops went places no one else would, or could. And based on the places that seemed to interest these officers most—“Can you track a vehicle moving real-time through the streets of Karachi?” one asked—Kleinsmith got the drift. They were hunting terrorists.
Kleinsmith always cautioned his audience that he didn’t have superpowers. (Some of his more enthusiastic colleagues were less restrained.) The IDC could not direct spy satellites, and they certainly couldn’t implant tracking devices on people or their vehicles. “No, we can’t do that,” Kleinsmith replied to the Karachi question. But, he explained, the IDC could provide new insights. They could help answer questions. If these two had shown up at Kleinsmith’s door, then the establishment intelligence agencies probably had failed to do that.
The officers thanked Kleinsmith for his time, and then they left. Kleinsmith understood that Special Ops worked that way. They gave you nothing until they let you in. The past hour wasn’t a presentation. It was an audition.
When it came to Al Qaeda, Special Operations most wanted one thing: Boots on the ground to go after the terrorists where they lived, trained, and planned. Al Qaeda had burst onto the scene a year earlier with a brazen, simultaneous attack on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The military hadn’t seen anything comparable since the bombings in Beirut fifteen years earlier. This new generation of extremists seemed equally bold but somehow more unmanageable. Al Qaeda, unlike the ideologues who had dogged Americans in Iran and Lebanon, appeared uninterested in negotiation.
The Special Operations officers who’d sought out Kleinsmith were given a straightforward yet utterly perplexing task: Draw up a military campaign plan for dismantling the Al Qaeda network. In October 1999, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs had directed Special Operations to map out Al Qaeda and all its support mechanisms, including its linchpin members.
Precisely how they should do that, no one knew. Al Qaeda wasn’t a country. It had no obvious infrastructure and an opaque command and control system. It seemed to have a reach beyond Afghanistan, where the intelligence agencies knew Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader, kept his base of operation. But Special Operations could only judge that reach after an attack. If the military wanted to destroy Al Qaeda, then it had to understand it inside and out, just as it would a foreign army. How did the members communicate? How did they move money around? Who gave the orders to cells in the field? These were the weak spots. Disrupt those functions, and Al Qaeda would find it difficult, maybe even impossible, to launch attacks. Special Operations was given clear instructions: Identify the key players, roll them up, and bring down the network. It was more like a hit list than a blueprint for invasion. Death by dismemberment.
The planners kept their work close to the vest, but they gave their mission an oddly conspicuous code name: Able Danger. The word “Able” had been used to describe military exercises for more than two decades. But it was the second word of the nickname that revealed the planners’ view of their target and the sense of urgency they attached to the mission.
Special Operations had ideas about how to hit Al Qaeda. First, they’d strike the terrorists’ redoubts with AC-130 gunships, fearsome birds of prey armed with a bewildering array of guns and cannons. Alternatively, or perhaps in concert, commandos and elite special forces could stalk and eliminate individual Al Qaeda members on the ground. Special Ops had plenty of fire and manpower for the job. But they lacked an essential ingredient—specific, “actionable” intelligence that showed them where to aim.
For years now the military had depended largely upon the CIA for that information, and commanders had grown impatient with the paucity of results. The CIA had practically no presence in Afghanistan since the Soviets had abandoned their occupation in 1989. The agency had reestablished contacts more recently, and they were paying some dividends. But these sources were mostly tribal chiefs and rebels trying to oust the Taliban regime. They had their own agenda.
The CIA’s counterterrorist center, along with a unit at headquarters solely devoted to tracking bin Laden, believed their Afghan sources could say reliably when he was on the move, where he might be on a particular day, perhaps even where he planned to spend the night. Locating bin Laden, and either killing or capturing him, became the agency’s chief strategy for undermining Al Qaeda. The CIA had devised a dramatic plan in which the tribes would pounce on bin Laden in the middle of the night and then move him to a hiding place. They’d hold him there for a month or so while things quieted down and any suspicion of U.S. involvement wore off. (The agency and the White House were deeply concerned about antagonizing extremist elements in neighboring Pakistan, a key domino in the unstable region.) Once the tribes had an opening, they’d spirit bin Laden from his secret location and then put him on a U.S. aircraft, which would take the terrorist leader back to America for trial, or they’d hand him over to a friendly government. The chief of the CIA’s bin Laden tracking unit thought it was a solid plan, the best anyone had devised so far. And the agency’s chief Afghan field operative cabled headquarters that it was “almost as professional and detailed . . . as would be done by any U.S. military special operations element.”
Special Operations begged to differ. This looked like amateur hour. A half-cocked, risky scheme that relied far too heavily on unreliable locals. In the time they wanted to hold bin Laden, he could die, be discovered, escape, or make a deal with the tribes. The commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations forces said the CIA wanted results “on the cheap.” The senior military leadership refused to outsource bin Laden’s capture and then risk American lives when it came time for U.S. forces to extract him. Memories of another failed attempt to snatch a wanted terrorist loomed in their calculations: the disastrous Black Hawk Down incident of 1993. Then, nineteen soldiers died in an ambush in the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. Warlord loyalists dragged their burned corpses through the streets. The military blamed the disaster in large part on poor intelligence gathering before the strike.
So it was under this umbrella of mistrust and hesitation that the Able Danger team tried to develop another way forward. They wanted to broaden their focus beyond bin Laden, and to think about Al Qaeda more systematically. Kleinsmith’s presentation had made a deep impression on the two officers. Perhaps he had something they could use. In mid-January 2000, Commander Scott Philpot, the lead in the pair, called Kleinsmith and asked him to attend a special all-hands planning session, to be held at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. Able Danger was going back to the drawing board, and he wanted Kleinsmith’s ideas.
Kleinsmith was unsure what to expect. He’d never sat in one room with so many emissaries of the big three-letter agencies. The CIA sent a team. The National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency also sent their reps. As Kleinsmith sized up the gathering, he thought that they didn’t seem especially collegial. He guessed that this might have been the first time they’d ever come together in one place.
Philpot hadn’t asked Kleinsmith to give a formal presentation, or even to ask questions. Instead, he should be the fly on the wall. Were the group’s methods sound? Were they overlooking anything?
To start things off, a CIA analyst, billed as the leading expert on the life and times of Osama bin Laden, laid out what he knew, or believed, about the terrorist leader. Most of what Kleinsmith knew about Al Qaeda came from the news. And he knew nothing of the agency
’s arduous slog to track bin Laden, or that they’d come closer to him than anyone else. But what the analyst had to say just didn’t make any sense: Bin Laden would be dead within six months. According to intelligence, he was suffering from pancreatic cancer.
You’ve got to be kidding me, Kleinsmith thought. He couldn’t imagine that the start point for a major campaign plan began and ended with the death of one man. Even if bin Laden had cancer, what about his second-tier leaders? Wouldn’t they just take his place? And if the CIA had this kind of specific intelligence, then why wasn’t it enough for the Able Danger team to act upon? Kleinsmith had been in the room for only a few moments, but he could see things didn’t add up.
The analysts from the other agencies each gave their assessments of Al Qaeda. And in their often emphatic presentations, Kleinsmith recognized a certain myopia. This was the kind of narrow analysis produced by people who relied mostly on one kind of information. For the CIA, it was human spies on the ground. For the NSA, intercepted phone calls and communications. The satellite guys had their photographs, and so on. They all had gotten too close to the target. And in the process they’d let their own parochial biases guide them.
Kleinsmith considered himself a member of a new generation. These guys were the old guard. They’d become powerful, and they forgot to question their own assumptions about how the world worked. Or maybe they couldn’t. Maybe that would undermine their dominance. Maybe that was why they were starting to yell at one another now.
