The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  Senator Ron Wyden, Poindexter’s old nemesis, was up next. He wanted to know what happened to the information the NSA collected on Americans who turned out to have nothing to do with terrorism. Were there restrictions on its use?

  Again, Negroponte awkwardly replied. “Whether you’re talking about one program or another with respect to NSA, those programs are under the strictest possible oversight,” he said. “General Hayden may want to amplify.”

  Negroponte was treading water.

  “Mr. Director, that answer isn’t good enough for me,” Wyden shot back, before Hayden could intercede. “That answer is, essentially, ‘Trust us. The Congress and the public just have to trust us.’ And Ronald Reagan put it very well. He said, ‘Trust, but verify.’ ”

  Hayden snuck in a few lines of support, once again averring, as he had at the Press Club, that the NSA had “lawfully acquired signals intelligence.”

  Wyden reminded Hayden that they’d discussed before how there were “virtually no rules on data mining” and that they could continue that discussion another time. Wyden moved on, but his next question came as a surprise.

  “Mr. Director,” he said, turning to Negroponte, “is it correct that when John Poindexter’s program, Operation Total Information Awareness, was closed that several of Mr. Poindexter’s projects were moved to various intelligence agencies?”

  Negroponte seemed stunned, as if he didn’t understand how the discussion had shifted so suddenly from the NSA to Poindexter. He offered only a sentence in reply. “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

  “Do any of the other panel members know this?” Wyden asked. “I and others on this panel led the effort to close it. We want to know if Mr. Poindexter’s programs are going on somewhere else. Can anyone answer that? Mr. Mueller?”

  “I have no knowledge of that, sir,” Mueller replied.

  The room waited. And then Hayden leaned forward.

  “Senator, I’d like to answer you in closed session.”

  Soon the secret was out. Later that month the first press account detailing TIA’s transfer to the National Security Agency research shop appeared in National Journal, a nonpartisan Washington political magazine. The programs had moved, and their funding sources remained intact. As recently as October 2005 SAIC had won a $3.7 million contract for more work under Topsail, the new name for Genoa II.

  The story quoted Tom Armour, one of Poindexter’s former program managers, who said that the NSA unit absorbing TIA had pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. “That’s, in fact, what the interest is,” Armour said. When TIA was still funded openly, its program managers and researchers had “good coordination” with their counterparts at the NSA shop and discussed one another’s work on a regular basis, Armour said.

  There was still one more step in the intricate dance between TIA and the National Security Agency. Its research unit was about to get a change in name and management. The Advanced Research and Development Activity would now report to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. There it would be known as the Disruptive Technology Office, an allusion to a term of art for any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, upended established procedures.

  John Poindexter’s vision would soon be in the hands of John Negroponte. But not for very long. He too was on his way out. Within a year another, much closer ally of Poindexter’s, and a true believer in TIA, would take over as the nation’s top spy.

  If 2005 had been a year of revelations, then 2006 was the time for retribution. Leaks about sensitive and classified intelligence programs sprang up across the government. Bush administration officials were outraged, and they were particularly aggrieved by secrets about the war on terror emanating from CIA headquarters.

  The new director, Porter Goss, tried to round up the leakers by interrogating his own employees. Longtime officials were given polygraphs. The director wanted to know who was talking to reporters.

  “Do you have any contact with journalists?” one interrogator asked a thirty-year intelligence officer working at the agency.

  “Well, sure,” he replied. “I just talked to one last week. Do you want his number?”

  In fact, some senior officials were not only encouraged to reach out to the press but were told to, in order to defend agency policies. Where was this line of questioning going to get Goss? some of them wondered. Was he looking for leakers? Or for political detractors?

  Perhaps both. Amid the internal probes Goss imposed new, tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who were still working for the agency under contract. They had always had to submit their work to a publications review board, which was supposed to ensure their writing didn’t contain any classified information. But the new rules amounted to an unprecedented “appropriateness” test. The goal was not just to stop leaks but to suppress political criticism of the administration and the agency.

  Relations between the CIA and the White House had soured when invading U.S. forces in Iraq failed to find any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons stockpiles, as George Tenet had said they would. Careerists at the agency thought that Goss had been sent to clean house and to whip them into shape.

  Goss was shaking up Langley, for sure. Although he was a former CIA clandestine officer and longtime chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Goss was still an outsider. When he took over he brought along his Capitol Hill staff, rankling the old-timers. Some senior officials chose to resign rather than work under the new chief and his flock of “Gosslings.”

  Goss weathered a storm of leaks directed at him from many of those longtime employees turned disgruntled former employees. Still, the leaks about intelligence programs were his top concern. And Goss was particularly incensed by one that led to a story in the Washington Post.

  In November 2005, more than a month before the NSA surveillance story broke, the Post revealed a global network of CIA-run prisons in foreign countries where the agency held certain terrorists the government thought had especially useful insights into Al Qaeda planning. These so-called black sites kept the suspects out of reach of the U.S. justice system and under the thumb of CIA interrogators.

  Senior operations officials, the people using the intelligence gleaned from interrogations to target and kill other terrorists, were devastated by the leak. They thought the prisons were an invaluable resource, and now they’d probably have to be shuttered. The Post story also put on ice a plan to open a new, more sophisticated prison that the agency had built from the ground up in a friendly country.

  Goss was incensed. He would send a message: Leak and you will be punished.

  Goss’s investigation of the prisons story led him to a longtime agency employee and an old friend of Poindexter’s: Mary McCarthy, his chief advocate on the Clinton National Security Council staff. Now in her early sixties, McCarthy was back at the CIA, working in the inspector general’s office and looking forward to retirement. She was also preparing for a new career, having recently graduated from law school. McCarthy passed the bar and planned to go into practice.

  She’d already signed all the paperwork to leave the agency officially at the end of April 2006. But less than two weeks before her departure date McCarthy was fired and escorted off the premises.

  Goss sent a commniqué to agency employees, never naming McCarthy but announcing that he’d found the leak: “A CIA officer has acknowledged having unauthorized discussions with the media, in which the officer knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence, including operational information. I terminated that officer’s employment with the CIA.”

  The first part was true. McCarthy had been in touch with journalists, most of whom she had known during her days at the White House. And technically that was a violation of the CIA’s rules. But it was unprecedented to fire an employee over unauthorized contacts, particularly one so senior. McCarthy also thought Goss’s move was petty,
since she was already on her way out the door. Responding to Goss’s second allegation, which was far more serious, McCarthy adamantly denied that she was the source of the information in the Post story. Friends and former associates said as much in the press on her behalf. The real reasons for her dismissal were more vindictive.

  McCarthy’s job in the inspector general’s office was to oversee a criminal probe into the CIA’s terrorist interrogation. From that perch she was privy to extraordinary information about what the agency was doing and what its intentions were as it subjected detainees to grueling physical and mental abuse. McCarthy was an analyst, not an operator. She came from the brainy side of the agency. That immediately put her at odds with those, like Goss, who had spent their careers in the field fighting bad guys.

  What McCarthy learned in the course of her investigation made her a target. In June 2005 a senior CIA official had told senators in a classified hearing that the agency didn’t break any laws or treaties banning the cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of the detainees. McCarthy thought that was patently false. She also believed that a senior CIA official hadn’t given the full account of the agency’s policy for handling detainees in a February 2005 appearance before the House Intelligence Committee. McCarthy also feared that agency officials would successfully bury the truth about the interrogation program. Officials were misleading Congress, probably breaking the law, and were prepared to cover it up. McCarthy was a Democrat. An unapologetic critic of the president. And she’d admitted talking to reporters. She was the perfect sacrifice.

  A few days after McCarthy’s dismissal she met her old friend Poindexter for lunch at the Tower Oaks Lodge, a robustly appointed establishment with hunting memorabilia hanging from the walls. Conveniently, it was just a short drive from Poindexter’s house. (He’d finally given up fighting traffic, and these days he asked people to come to him.)

  McCarthy told Poindexter she was not the source of that prisons story. She didn’t even know where the prisons were located. The Post reporter had found out, but the paper had agreed not to disclose the names of the host countries in Eastern Europe after the administration said it could disrupt counterterrorism operations there and invite retribution. McCarthy insisted that CIA officials knew that she didn’t have the information.

  She wasn’t sure, but McCarthy suspected that Goss’s lieutenants had been telling reporters that she was the leaker. She knew Goss from her days in the White House and when he was on the Hill, but she told Poindexter she had no idea what Goss’s people had told him.

  Few things mattered to Poindexter more than loyalty. To a person. To an institution. To an idea. Poindexter had been on his boat, Bluebird, when several colleagues e-mailed him the first news reports alleging McCarthy was the source of the black prisons exposé. He never thought for a minute that the accusations were true.

  Poindexter knew that McCarthy was a Democrat. And that she was a civil libertarian. And McCarthy knew full well Poindexter’s colorful history running covert intelligence operations in foreign countries. But their political differences had never divided them from a shared sense of mission. They had come too far together. It would have been easy for Poindexter to accept the line of his party, take the CIA director at his word, and indict McCarthy as a treacherous leak. But he never considered it. A friend needed him, and he didn’t turn away.

  News reports indicated that McCarthy had failed a polygraph test about whether she’d had any contact with journalists. But contacts didn’t equal a specific disclosure. McCarthy was hardly the only senior CIA official being questioned with a lie detector about talking to the press. And clearly other intelligence agency employees had leaked information about other programs, yet they hadn’t suffered McCarthy’s fate.

  Some of her friends thought that Goss was looking to scare the spy workforce. If he was willing to ax someone who’d dedicated much of her career to fighting terrorism, then he would come after anyone.

  If those were his intentions, they backfired. Goss and his staff’s hard-charging management style had alienated the CIA lifers. Leakers or not, they knew how to run the traps at Langley. Two weeks after he dismissed McCarthy, Goss found himself sitting in the Oval Office with President Bush, who announced that Goss was leaving too.

  Bush needed to reassert control over the CIA. He needed someone with a smoother style but still a firm hand. He needed someone he could trust.

  The president turned to Mike Hayden, who took over the following month.

  Since leaving government for the second time Poindexter had come to rely on his friends more than ever. Many of them, particularly Fran Townsend, still exerted tremendous influence in the administration. Some were at the peak of their power; some were in transition. Still others were about to embark on second lives of their own. While the admiral enjoyed his resurgence, and watched with quiet delight as his ideas were absorbed into the mainstream of American spy craft, one of his close allies came forward with an unexpected message: John Poindexter had it all wrong. His system of total information awareness could never catch terrorists.

  Jeff Jonas had come a long way since Carmel. After meeting Poindexter at the Highlands Forum, his cheat-catching software had made the leap from Las Vegas to Washington. Poindexter’s research team had put NORA through its paces with the experimental network. But the software required a lot of hand-holding. The TIA researchers weren’t sure whether Jonas’s program had flaws, whether they weren’t expert enough to use it, or whether it was just ill suited to the task of catching terrorists—as Jonas had suspected from the beginning.

  Poindexter ultimately decided that NORA was very good at sorting out aliases and finding connections among groups of people in discrete environments, like a casino floor. But it wasn’t quite up to the task of finding bad guys in the vast unknown.

  Jonas thought he’d tried to tell Poindexter that in their first meeting. But Jonas was open-minded by nature. He had come under Poindexter’s spell—the White House photos on the wall, the high-level support for his idea from the Pentagon. Jonas was a patriot at heart. Poindexter became a catalyst for that emotion.

  But Jonas had moved on since then. He’d made a lot more friends in Washington. With his compelling personal story and decidedly unstuffy charm, Jonas became a darling of the policy wonk crowd. He once threw a cocktail party for his new friends at the Ritz-Carlton, not far from the Pentagon, and entertained them with a professional “mentalist,” who performed card tricks and sleights of hand. Jonas was unlike anyone they knew. And he was ceaselessly interested in whatever new idea someone wanted to plant in his ear.

  After meeting Poindexter, Jonas had fallen in with the civil libertarian set. He’d never imagined that data privacy could be such a contentious issue, but he came to see the problem differently. The people he had spied on, if he could even call it spying, handed over their personal information willingly to the casino. But this new surveillance the government had enacted—this wasn’t voluntary. And, he thought, it wasn’t accurate.

  In early 2005, Jonas attended a conference at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. During the lunch break he found himself standing in line for a sandwich next to a guy he’d never met, but who’d also grown up in the Bay Area.

  Jim Harper was a conservative, of the libertarian variety. He had carved out a niche as a digital privacy maven, running a Web site called Privacilla that came at the issue from a free-market, pro-technology perspective. He viewed himself as a counterpoint to left-wing activists, whom he regarded as hostile to capitalism. These were the ACLU types and advocates like Marc Rotenberg, who’d been one of Poindexter’s earliest critics.

  Harper felt out of place at Heritage, which he regarded as a den of “terror warriors.” He thought that these were the sort who, after 9/11, claimed the attacks had given the government permission to throw off law and custom. He thought that people had gone “tribal.”

  At lunch, Harper looked around the room for someone to talk to.
That’s when he spotted the guy who didn’t look like anyone else. The one in the black pants and T-shirt.

  Harper knew a bit about Jonas’s story; he’d even come up in discussion that morning. People knew him as the Vegas data guru who had tried to help catch terrorists. Harper also knew that Jonas had written a paper with a Heritage fellow and wondered if he was just the go-along-to-get-along type with the terror warriors.

  As they got to talking Harper saw that Jonas was open to new ideas. So over lunch, and in e-mails in the weeks that followed, they struck up a conversation that Harper was eager to have: Does pattern analysis of data really catch terrorists?

  Harper believed that it didn’t. Jonas agreed with him. And so another relationship blossomed. Harper suggested that they write a paper together, taking this flawed theory head-on. He knew that Jonas had worked with Poindexter, and he believed that killing TIA, while perhaps a pyrrhic victory, was still a victory for his side. Jonas didn’t want to whack Poindexter in print. Harper didn’t much care either way.

  Perhaps owing to their shared geographical history, he and Jonas hit it off quickly. They traded coy e-mails. “Where’s the love?” Harper would ask when he hadn’t heard back on a recent round of edits to the paper.

  Over the next several months, they hashed out their ideas, first in an outline, then in a draft. As they moved toward publication, Jonas emerged not only as a skeptic of Poindexter-style pattern analysis, but as an outright opponent. In December 2005 he spoke before a meeting of the Homeland Security Department’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee. Harper was a member, along with other prominent experts from academia, government, and think tanks, and they met periodically to discuss privacy with senior members of the department, including the secretary, Michael Chertoff.

  The group gathered at a hotel a few blocks from the White House. Harper joined a team of questioners sitting before Jonas’s panel, committee-style. He had a canned question at the ready, which would give his writing partner an opening to voice the ideas they’d been mulling over in print.