The Watchers
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316 Steve Dennis, a technology official from Homeland Security, offered up the history of the program: This narrative is contained in the aforementioned document from the private-sector source.
316 KSP stood for Knowledge System Prototype, a major initiative under way at the signals agency: The KSP was described to me by the private-sector source as well as in an e-mail from an NSA employee. For more descriptions of the KSP, see the Defense Department’s “Joint Transformation Roadmap,” published on January 21, 2004. This publicly available document was prepared by the U.S. Joint Forces Command for the director of the Office of Force Transformation at the Pentagon. www.ndu.edu/library/docs/jt-transf-roadmap2004.pdf. “Force transformation” was the top policy initiative of Donald Rumsfeld when he was secretary of defense.
317 Known as the Threat and Vulnerability Information System, it included a “threat mapper”: A description of the system is contained in the testimony of Charles McQueary, the undersecretary for science and technology at the Homeland Security Department, before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on March 2, 2004.
317 Toward the end of the discussion someone noted that Poindexter’s old TIA network was testing components for the ADVISE system: The reference in the notes of the September 2005 meeting on the ADVISE program is to the RDEC.
317 Poindexter had trouble keeping up with all the ersatz programs that rode his wake: Interview with Poindexter.
318 Jeff Stewart sensed that this new whirlwind of corporate information was something to be embraced: I interviewed Stewart in 2008 about Monitor110, his concept, and his work forming the start-up. It received some attention in the financial press as well. See “Monitor 110 Brings Blog Intelligence to Wall Street,” by Richard Koman in Silicon Valley Watcher, September 21, 2006. A helpful chronology was also written by Roger Ehrenberg, an investor in Monitor110, on his blog Information Arbitrage. Called “Monitor110: A Post Mortem,” it was posted on July 18, 2008, and contained background on how Ehrenberg met Stewart and what they hoped the technology would be able to do.
320 inside the intelligence community people knew that Stewart’s creation had the same core that the Livermore lab had sold to Homeland Security to build ADVISE. The BAG was at the heart of Monitor110: This is based on an interview with the private-sector source, as well as the internal NSA e-mail, which specifically discussed ADVISE and Monitor110.
CHAPTER 29: ASCENSION
Unless otherwise noted statements, thoughts, and actions attributed in this chapter to Mike McConnell come from interviews I conducted with him in 2009. I also covered McConnell throughout his tenure as director of National Intelligence, from February 2007 to January 2009. See “The Return of the Grown-Ups,” published in National Journal on January 13, 2007; “The Boys Are Back in Town” in the April 2007 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings; and “Clearing Barriers,” Government Executive magazine, May 7, 2007.
322 the rewards of a seven-figure salary ahead: The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2007 McConnell was earning $2 million a year. See Siobhan Gorman’s “McConnell to Return to Booz Allen,” January 27, 2009.
322 Bush was convinced that certain career employees, particularly at the CIA, had tried to sabotage his reelection bid in 2004: This was conveyed to me by a former administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
322 McConnell was widely seen as a professional and a nonpartisan: I wrote about McConnell’s return to government for National Journal, Proceedings, and Government Executive. See above.
323 Rumsfeld, long distrustful of the CIA, was setting up a covert human intelligence apparatus that reported through the Defense Department chain of command: Intelligence experts presumed that after Rumsfeld left office his successor, Bob Gates, would curtail these activities. See my article “Rolling Back Pentagon Spies,” National Journal, March 9, 2007.
325 McConnell spent the first few months on the job getting adjusted to the hours: McConnell described his daily routine in a speech at the Excellence in Government conference in Washington on April 4, 2007; http://odni.gov/speeches/20070404_speech.pdf. This was his first major public address, and he chose to lead off by telling the audience how grueling his new hours were. McConnell often cited the physical and time demands of the job when he spoke publicly. Transcripts of all McConnell’s major speeches are available at the Web site of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
325 Bush liked McConnell with him in the Oval every day, as his emissary and his eyes and ears: Bush made no secret of his desire to keep his intelligence directors close. It was well known to journalists covering the White House and the intelligence community that McConnell was in the Oval Office almost every day, personally delivering the president’s intelligence briefing.
326 McConnell wanted to get Bush’s permission to use a particularly modern weapon on the insurgents, one that he had come to admire and fear: Interview with McConnell in 2009 and two former senior administration officials in 2008; both former officials were in the Oval Office during the meeting. They asked not to be identified.
Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker also wrote about this meeting in his profile of McConnell, “The Spymaster,” published on January 21, 2008.
326 McConnell explained the principles of information warfare to the president: Interview with McConnell and aforementioned former administration officials.
327 Intelligence officials had collected evidence that they believed showed hackers based in China, working on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army, had wormed their way into the systems that ran electrical generators and the power grid: I wrote about this in a piece for National Journal titled “China’s Cyber Militia,” published on May 31, 2008. Sources for these and other allegations about Chinese cyber activities include Joel Brenner, who was then the government’s head of counterintelligence; Tim Bennett, the former president of a trade group called the Cyber Security Industry Alliance; and a network forensics expert who works for intelligence and law enforcement agencies and asked not to be identified. A CIA official, Tom Donohue, had said publicly that cyberhackers had seized the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and had demanded a ransom. And in a speech at the White House on May 29, 2009, President Barack Obama acknowledged, “We know that cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.” This was the first time that a U.S. president had admitted that the nation’s electrical grid had been penetrated over the network.
327 Bush was impressed. He gave McConnell the go-ahead to begin an information operation in Iraq: Interview with McConnell and one of the previously mentioned former senior administration officials present at the Oval Office meeting.
327 The information operation was credited as one of the most successful aspects of the “surge”: The aforementioned administration official confirmed that this operation was used during the surge. McConnell didn’t address that point.
327 he was also visibly unnerved by the vulnerabilities that McConnell had just described: Interviews with previously mentioned former officials; also, see Wright’s account in The New Yorker.
328 He turned to the president and said, “If the capability to exploit a communications device exists, we have to assume that our enemies either have it or are trying to develop it”: Interview with one of the previously mentioned former administration officials. McConnell didn’t recall the exact quote but didn’t dispute this account.
328 officials found it so revealing that they decided to classify it: McConnell to Wright, The New Yorker.
328 He turned to Bush and said, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single U.S. bank through cyberattack, and it had been successful, it would have had an order of magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy”: This is the quote as it appears in Wright’s piece. McConnell agreed it was accurate, as did the two former administration officials who were also in the room.
> 328 “Is this true, Hank?” Bush asked: Interview with McConnell and the two officials. Brenner, the counterintelligence chief, also told me in an interview that the exchange among Bush, McConnell, and Henry Paulson was accurate.
329 “This is our competitive advantage for the next seventy to a hundred years,” he said to the room: Interview with McConnell. The account was confirmed by one of the former administration officials, who was present.
329 Homeland Security lacked the resident cyberexpertise and political clout to effectively do the job: This is my assessment, based on my coverage of the department.
329 McConnell knew the political dangers: See Wright’s profile, The New Yorker.
329 McConnell believed that despite Americans’ love of spy novels and James Bond movies, they mostly associated intelligence with duplicity and dirty dealings: McConnell spoke about this love-hate relationship with spies in a speech at Furman University, his alma mater, on March 28, 2008. At http://odni.gov/speeches/20080328_speech.pdf.
332 The covert program, known as Operation Shamrock, was believed to have collected 150,000 messages per month at its peak: See the U.S. Senate’s “Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” also known as the Church Committee, published April 23, 1976, www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIj.htm.
333 McConnell thought that FISA had to be fixed: It’s true that McConnell came into office with reform of FISA on his agenda. But a former senior administration official, speaking on background, told me that the White House had been eyeing him for this job as well, because McConnell would bring the reputation of a professional and the imprimatur of the intelligence community to the debate. McConnell wanted to change the law. But the White House was making a political calculation in allowing him to become the point man for that effort.
333 He outlined his vision in an essay: See “Overhauling Intelligence,” Foreign Affairs, July/ August 2007.
333 On January 10, 2007, a judge on the secretive FISA Court issued orders that essentially blessed much of what the administration had already been doing under its own authority: See letter from Alberto Gonzales to Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter, January 17, 2007, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/politics/20060117gonzales_Letter.pdf.
334 unlike the first judge, who had given the administration the latitude it wanted, this one rejected a significant part of the arrangement that had been struck in January: Interview with McConnell.
336 His captors had tortured him. He’d been burned, cut, and made to suffer: Interview in 2008 with former senior CIA official, who asked not to be identified.
337 The next day, McConnell and his staff pulled an all-nighter to get ready for a meeting with the Democratic leadership: The play-by-play of McConnell’s negotiations with Democratic lawmakers is detailed concisely in Wright’s New Yorker piece. Many journalists, including me, covered these negotiations.
339 “We have worked to achieve deep penetration of those who wish us harm”: See McConnell’s commencement address to George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences on May 17, 2008, http://odni.gov/speeches/20080517_speech.pdf.
339 “The FISA court ruled presented the program to them and they said the program is what you say it is and it’s appropriate and it’s legitimate, it’s not an issue and was had approval”: See the transcript of McConnell’s interview with Chris Roberts of the El Paso Times, published on August 22, 2007.
340 McConnell would insist that he meant pressure from Congress: Interview with McConnell.
342 At the FBI and the White House some senior officials viewed him as a terrible choice for FISA point man: These sentiments were conveyed to me by two former senior officials, one each at the White House and the FBI, who asked not to be identified. One of McConnell’s former aides also told me that it had been a bad idea, politically, to put him in charge of the FISA reform effort.
CHAPTER 30: RENEGADE
347 He spent two semesters at American University in Cairo, and four years later he entered the clandestine service: See Eli Lake’s “CIA Vet Aids Obama On Anti-Terrorism,” Washington Times, March 1, 2009.
348 Brennan gave a wide-ranging interview: I conducted the interview for National Journal. See “The Counterterror Campaign,” March 7, 2008.
350 Obama announced that he would be voting for the bill: See the June 29, 2008, post “Barack Obama on FISA” at my.barackobama.com.
351 Obama had once been ranked the Senate’s “most liberal” member: See National Journal’s “2007 Vote Ratings,” published January 21, 2008. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, came in second. Joe Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware, came in third.
352 He’d been at the CIA when the agency was in charge of preparing detailed “threat assessments”: See the “Report on the President’s Surveillance Program,” released on July 10, 2009, in which the inspectors general of five agencies and departments involved in the program explain the writing of threat assessments, which organizations wrote them, and how they were used. Brennan’s tenure at the CIA and later at the Terrorist Threat Integration Center is a matter of public record.
352 On September 2, Mike McConnell prepared for an unusual intelligence briefing: The account of Obama’s first intelligence briefing comes from an interview with McConnell, as well as from another individual with direct knowledge of the briefing. Tom Fingar, the head of analysis at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, publicly stated that the meeting took place. He spoke at the “Analytic Transformation” conference in Orlando, Florida, on September 4, 2008.
353 “Until this point, I’ve been worried about losing this election,” he told McConnell and his colleagues. “After talking to you guys, I’m now worried about winning ”: Interview with McConnell.
355 officials discovered that the agency had inadvertently collected the phone calls and e-mails of Americans: This “overcollection” was first reported by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times on April 15, 2009: “Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law.” I also discussed the matter with a congressional official who asked not to be identified.
EPILOGUE
357 the agency had rejected a new data-analysis system that had such protection built in: See “NSA Rejected System That Sifted Phone Data Legally,” by Siobhan Gorman, Baltimore Sun, May 18, 2006.
361 A special appeals court, the Foreign Intelligence Court of Review, publicly announced its decision in a challenge to the Protect America Act: The court decided the case on August 22, 2008, and it was publicly released in redacted form on January 15, 2009. Case No. 08-01, In Re: Directives [Redacted] Pursuant to Section 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, is available from the U.S. Courts at www.uscourts.gov/newsroom/2009/FISCR_Opinion.pdf?WT.cg_n=FISCR Opinion_WhatsNew_homepage, and from the Federation of American Scientists at www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr082208.pdf. Importantly, the court also ruled that incidental collections of Americans’ communications, of the kind that were later disclosed by Obama officials to have occurred under the amended FISA, were not in themselves illegal. So long as the surveillance itself was lawful and reasonable, such sweeping up of uninvolved parties wasn’t a crime.
362 It was a clear, and perhaps rare, demonstration of a company’s power to push back against the government: Telecom lawyer and FISA expert Michael Sussmann wrote about the decision and companies’ important role as a check on government surveillance in a blog post, “Rare FISA Court of Review Decision on Warrantless Surveillance,” on January 15, 2009, www.digestiblelaw.com/electronicsurveillance/blogQ.aspx?entry=5295&id=32.
362 That time, it sided with the government and in favor of broader surveillance authorities: See In Re: Sealed Case No. 02-001, decided November 18, 2002, http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/fisa111802opn.pdf.
362 a reporter asked Hayden what he thought: See “Court Backs U.S. Wiretapping,” by Evan Perez
, Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2009.
INDEX
Abbas, Abu
Able Danger:
and Al Qaeda
code name of
comparisons with
data deleted
data mining in
network mapping by
public airing of
resurrection of
and secrecy
accountability, lack of
Achille Lauro
capture of hijackers
hijackers escaping
interception plan
isolate the ship
locate the ship
negotiations with hijackers
Sara Lee decision
success of mission
take the ship
track the ship
U.S. citizen killed
ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)
Addington, David
Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA)
Advanced Systems and Concepts Office
ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement)
Afghanistan, British policy in
airline industry:
ban on liquids in
bomb-sensing equipment
and British terrorist threat
invisibility
passenger profiling
stealth aircraft
and terrorist patterns
and TSA
Alcoff, Sam
Alexander, Keith
Ali, Ahmed Abdulla
Ali Baba
Allen, Charlie
Allen, Dick
Al Qaeda
Able Danger study of
bomb-building
and CIA
financing of
global network of
nexus of terrorism
search for
Special Operations mapping of
spread of
Al Qaeda