The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  “I found it remarkable,” Harper said, “that you, as an expert in this field and somebody who works for a company that would sell this product if it were viable, tells us that predictive data mining is not viable. I think that is an important thing to hear from you.”

  Jonas obliged. “While there’s a large market for data mining, I’m suggesting that using data mining to predict the intent of a terrorist, where you’re basically putting the finger on a trigger that is going to cause government scrutiny upon an individual, is where I see it as a bit problematic.”

  He didn’t use the name, but Jonas had implicated TIA directly. “I consider my life’s work in the area of knowing who is who and who’s related to who,” he said. But this kind of knowledge had limitations. The chances of finding one meaningful signal in the noise were almost nil. “One in a million things happen millions of times a day,” Jonas said. “And bad guys don’t leave as many transactional footprints.”

  Jonas had just turned his back on Poindexter. He declared that no one could detect terrorists by looking for patterns, not without ensnaring many more innocent people than guilty ones. When their paper was published a year later, Jonas and Harper warned against embracing technology. “Though data mining has many valuable uses, it is not well suited to the terrorist discovery problem,” they wrote. “It would be unfortunate if data mining for terrorism discovery had currency within national security, law enforcement, and technology circles because pursuing this use of data mining would waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties, and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national security community.”

  Poindexter read the paper and found it both flawed and misguided. He objected strenuously to any characterization of TIA as “predictive,” and he took pains to tell people why it wasn’t “data mining.” He knew the difference, though most people didn’t. Data mining was something that marketers used to sell more products—more beer and diapers. But Poindexter was chasing a deeper level of insight. He was after patterns and the ability to detect anomalies without any known starting point. He wanted to see the unseen. Not the future, just the present as it truly existed. He thought that Jonas’s technology—which was more akin to data mining—was too simplistic. Just like his critique. While Jonas and Harper hadn’t singled anyone out, the message was implied. Poindexter’s grand vision would never work. The guru of data mining, Jonas, had said so.

  The paper was only ten pages long, but it was a watershed. It became a pivot point in the debate over TIA, NSA surveillance, and the whole concept of using data to detect and preempt terrorism. Critics from the left and the right, anyone who’d harbored a grudge against TIA or even a sneaking suspicion that its powers were overstated, seized upon this new theory. Technologists without a dog in the political fight also thought highly of it, and many were inclined to believe Jonas because he was an expert and also had worked with Poindexter. Now he declared that this powerful, mystical, and artful science the man had employed could never do what he imagined.

  Poindexter didn’t take it personally. He moved on, confident that he could solve the problem eventually.

  Jonas’s admiration for Poindexter never dimmed. He still considered him a friend, and an unparalleled mind. But they had declared a war of ideas, and there could be no truce.

  Elsewhere, a real war was on. And Poindexter’s friends, along with his adherents, were arming their weapons.

  CHAPTER 27

  BOJINKA II

  In the summer of 2006, the United Kingdom’s warning system was blinking red with indications of new terrorist plots. Home Secretary John Reid, who, like some of his American colleagues, had been accused of exaggerating the danger, declared that Britain faced “probably the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War.” And most of the sources of this new wave, British officials concluded, traced back to Pakistan. There, in mountainous regions outside the government’s reach, Al Qaeda’s senior leadership had regrouped, after eluding U.S. forces in Afghanistan years earlier. They had recruited new operatives and were busy plotting more strikes on the West.

  That’s when twenty-five-year-old Ahmed Abdulla Ali appeared on British security’s radar. Agents kept close watch on Ali, whom they feared had connections to the resurging terrorist network in Pakistan. Britain was still reeling from a coordinated bomb attack on its subway and bus lines less than a year earlier, pulled off by Muslim men living in the United Kingdom. Now they worried that Ali, who was born in Britain, had joined the growing ranks of homegrown radicals and could be searching for targets in a brazen new attack.

  It wasn’t hard under the circumstances to arouse the government’s suspicion and for security officials to follow up on it. British law allowed for intrusive and secret surveillance of terrorism suspects as well as for preliminary detention before the government ever brought official charges. In June, after Ali flew back home from a trip to Pakistan, security officials covertly searched his luggage. What they found only heightened the government’s concern: a container of powdered Tang, the neon-orange flavored drink, and a large number of batteries. Fine powders could be used as accelerants in bombs, and batteries were a common triggering device.

  Officials began a massive surveillance campaign. They followed Ali on foot. They saw him using public phone boxes, mobile phones, and anonymous e-mail accounts. Undercover officers observed Ali as he paid cash for a £138,000 flat in the London borough of Waltham Forest. Then they bugged the apartment with a camera and microphone. On August 3, they watched him and another man construct disturbing-looking devices out of drink bottles. If Ali and his associate were building bombs, they were certainly small ones. Investigators could presume that they were meant to be hidden. Three days later, on August 6, officers followed Ali to an Internet café, and they watched him spend two hours researching airline timetables.

  Back in Washington, senior intelligence and security officials had been watching developments across the pond since late June. The Brits had alerted the Americans, and for weeks no one was precisely sure of the suspects’ intentions. But by August multiple streams of intelligence had helped bring the plot into sharper relief. Both sides were convinced that they were dealing with a terrorist cell that planned to go after civilian airliners.

  Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of Homeland Security, was used to a daily flow of threat intelligence. It arrived with the ferocity of a fire hose. Each day he and his boss, Michael Chertoff, examined a grid of known and suspected threats displayed as a collection of dots. Each dot represented a person or potential threat that the government was monitoring. It could be a known target of surveillance or a tip from a nosy neighbor about the suspicious guy next door. Sometimes the dots disappeared after a day or two. The target went silent or the tip turned out to be a bogus prank. But occasionally connections formed between the dots, an indication that intelligence had linked them together in some way. And sometimes clusters of dots formed. When that happened, Jackson and Chertoff knew to pay closer attention.

  Throughout July Jackson had seen clusters forming with regard to the unfolding plot in Britain. The number of dots would swell and dissipate quickly, sometimes after a few days of probing specific individuals. From his office in Washington, Jackson watched the mass morph over time, and he grew increasingly concerned.

  Only a small group at Homeland Security was apprised of the burgeoning plot. Along with Jackson and Chertoff, intelligence chief Charlie Allen and his deputy were aware. On the day that British authorities observed Ali building devices in his apartment, Kip Hawley, the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration, had still not been told. Hawley was in charge of protecting the entire U.S. aviation system. Jackson and Chertoff decided it was time to tap him in.

  On Friday, August 4, they asked Fran Townsend to talk to the president. They wanted to tell Hawley to start making plans for protecting the airline system. Townsend had been monitoring th
e plot from the White House and was keeping the president up to date. John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, and FBI director Robert Mueller were now involved as well. Negroponte was responsible for making sure all the components of the intelligence agencies worked together in a crisis—as they hadn’t before 9/11. And Mueller’s agency was the lead counterterrorism force in the United States, responsible for hunting down any terrorist agents and connections to the British suspects. Townsend got the president’s go-ahead to tell Hawley. Jackson reached him by phone in California, where he was traveling with a congressional delegation. “I can’t explain why, but I need you to get on a plane here tomorrow,” Jackson said.

  “You need me to take a red-eye?” Hawley asked.

  “No, but you must get here by Saturday.” Jackson knew Hawley well, and he told him to keep this under his hat. He should return to headquarters and come straight to Jackson’s office. “Don’t say why,” Jackson said.

  Hawley arrived the next day, and Jackson let him in on the details of what looked like a massive plot.

  Over the past several days, anxiety had been building on the American side. Investigators still weren’t clear they’d identified all the players involved in the plot. Jackson worried that the surveillance nets might have missed some operatives. If the Brits moved in to take down Ali, those unknown agents might get wind and move ahead with the bombing on their own. Officials kept the entire investigation compartmentalized. Only those who needed to know were let in. Any leak could blow the operation.

  The intelligence agencies had seen a plot like this once before, in the midnineties. An Al Qaeda explosives expert had fashioned bombs out of liquid components, batteries, and a simple timing device built with a Casio digital watch. He and a team of operatives planned to assemble their bombs in flight on as many as a dozen trans-Pacific airliners. They would plant the bombs in the life vests under their seats, set the timers, and then get off the plane during a stopover. The aircraft would explode over the ocean simultaneously. Al Qaeda dubbed the plot Bojinka, and it was only disrupted when the bombers accidentally set fire to their apartment in the Philippines where they kept their materials.

  Chertoff arrived at headquarters on Saturday and joined Jackson and Hawley. He would brief the president on Monday morning about what looked to be a repeat of Bojinka, and what steps his people were taking to stop it. The three men had to come up with a plan to keep bomb-making equipment, disguised as harmless liquids, off civilian airliners.

  Jackson looked around for a laptop computer to start drafting a presentation. But he didn’t have a machine handy with the requisite security devices installed to write such a sensitive document. He borrowed a laptop from Charlie Allen, who joined in the conversation. The group took the computer into Jackson’s office, which was designated a secure facility, and spent Saturday night and all day Sunday writing a plan to keep liquid bombs off planes.

  As soon as British authorities moved in TSA would announce a ban on all liquids and gels carried on to U.S. domestic flights and others bound for America. The prohibition would be just a stopgap. Eventually TSA would have to allow some items into the cabin.

  Chertoff met with Bush on Monday morning. That night Jackson and Hawley discussed how to notify the airlines, once British authorities moved in and rolled up the suspected cell. They also prepared for the fallout of the raid—canceled flights, scared passengers, and massive confusion at airports.

  Meanwhile, at the White House, Townsend had been trying to learn as much as she could about the suspects. Whom did they know? How were they connected? The NSA had some answers.

  The NSA’s terrorist surveillance efforts had not alerted U.S. officials to the planes-bombing plot. But once some of the suspects were on their radar, the agency provided new insights that Townsend thought were otherwise unavailable.

  Keith Alexander, the NSA director, had been giving daily briefings at the White House that summer, talking about patterns of terrorist activity that analysts thought were important.

  The UK plot had taken on such urgency that the president’s top terrorism team officials held a weekly meeting in the Oval Office to update him on the situation. The director of national intelligence, the attorney general, the FBI director, Chertoff, and Townsend all chimed in. They called it Terrorism Tuesday.

  Townsend could see that the NSA program wasn’t going to solve all her problems. Some of the leads turned out to be garbage. In a crisis, that was expected, although the agency did have a reputation for turning out more noise than signals.

  Still, Townsend thought the intelligence advanced the government’s understanding of the plot. Because of its wide lens the surveillance revealed connections among the suspects that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. As she saw it, the United States could easily monitor calls between person A and person B. But unless the surveillance pulled back and examined the larger patterns of those two people, they might never see person C. And person C, it turned out, could reveal a lot.

  Throughout the course of the investigation, Townsend came to rely on this wide-angle tool. The NSA was able to recalibrate when new targets were discovered and start collecting on them too. She believed that the only way to provide deeper insight into opaque terrorist plots was to collect a lot of information. The value of the NSA’s analysis depended entirely on how much the agency collected. The program had to be big, or it wouldn’t pay off.

  From the moment she was cleared to know about the program, Townsend decided that if she was the one responsible for preventing an attack she didn’t care how much information the agency gathered. The Justice Department, her old home, had said this was legal. She had struck her own balance. Massive surveillance for a modicum of insight—and the hope of more. This was one more tool in the kit. Why would she throw it out?

  Jackson had not been read into the surveillance program, but he understood that the daily flow of intelligence coming into Homeland Security emanated from Fort Meade. And, like Townsend, he didn’t want to go without it.

  In Jackson’s view it was as important to find meaningful connections among suspects as it was to find the gaps in his knowledge. He needed to know what he didn’t know. And it was essential, he thought, to shake every tree in search of answers. He didn’t want to learn after the attack that one of the bombers had a brother working in a secured area of the Washington national airport.

  As the plot unwound, Jackson could see other clusters of dots on those daily grids. These were people of concern, at least, but Homeland Security officials weren’t certain if they were related to one another, or how. The Brits wanted to keep their investigation confidential until the last moment, to ensure that they hadn’t left any loose ends. That only added to the tension, and the sense of uncertainty, for Jackson and his colleagues.

  Jackson considered it a grave responsibility to look at data and try to decipher it. That was his job. On 9/11 he was the deputy secretary of the Transportation Department, and he became the administration’s point man on aviation security. It fell to him to set up the TSA, hiring tens of thousands of new security officers in airports. He lived each day not knowing whether this would be the one on which terrorists boarded planes again.

  Jackson was also the government’s liaison to the airline industry. After the attacks, on a plane ride home from Atlanta after meeting with the chief executive of Delta Airlines and a group of his employees, Jackson sketched out the first notions of a passenger-profiling system. He’d seen a test version of a data-mining tool in Delta’s offices, and he was surprised by technology’s power to collect vast amounts of personal information using one start point. Jackson volunteered his Social Security number and watched the tool retrieve his address, the names of his neighbors, his wife’s name, and the date they were married, all from publicly available information. Some of the Delta employees had been test subjects already, and when his own personal data started popping up for all to see, Jackson joked that he’d seen enough. But the demo convinced him
that the government had to have this capability. Not because he wanted it. But because he was afraid he couldn’t do his job without it.

  By the time Ali was spotted checking flight schedules at an Internet café the entire United States security apparatus was revving up to its highest alert. From the daily grid of dots, as well as other intelligence sources, Jackson and others could see this was potentially as big a plot as the United States had faced since 9/11.

  But the public knew nothing yet. British forces continued monitoring the plotters. And within the Bush administration officials hotly debated whether to continue watching, in the hopes of learning who was directing the cell, and from where, or whether to shut the plan down before the bombers could purchase their tickets and board flights.

  Precisely what prompted the Brits to make their move on August 10 would remain a subject of speculation. But early that morning, authorities fanned out and arrested two dozen suspects, including Ali. They found him carrying a blueprint for his alleged plot sketched out in a small, worn diary. On a portable memory stick in his pocket, police found details about airport security procedures and specific airline flights.

  It was late at night in Washington. Chertoff ’s small office suite in upper northwest Washington was packed full of officials from across the department. Hawley and his team were joined by a communications officer, who’d been told to convey news about the liquids ban to the press. The various operational chiefs from across the department swung into play—the heads of border control and customs, as well as intelligence officials, who worked with FBI agents to run to ground any of the cell’s connections in the United States.