Mission Compromised

by Oliver North

  There were also larger video screens that showed weather displays around the globe and others with detailed military dispositions on tactical maps. There were monitors for receiving images from space satellites, some even offering infrared pictures of areas that were in total night darkness.

  “Let me show you the comm center—the communications part of this outfit,” Komulakov called to him from the raised carpeted walkway surrounding the room. It was some six feet higher than the floor of the command center operations, giving Komulakov and other planners or decision-makers a panoramic view of what was going on. “Come,” he said, with a wave for Newman to follow him.

  Newman followed him to an unmarked door at the far end of the room. The two of them went inside, shutting out the buzz of activity in the larger area. As soon as they stepped inside, a British SAS major jumped to his feet at attention.

  “Please,” Komulakov said softly, “don't let us disturb you. I'm just taking Lieutenant Colonel Newman here on a little tour of our toy store. Major Ellwood is the watch chief for this section. We have seven other sections, each one covering a designated geographical area. You'll no doubt be communicating with Major Ellwood and his counterparts here when your people are overseas.”

  Newman shook the hand of the major. He smiled and nodded to Newman, “Glad to meet you, Lef'tenant Colonel Newman,” he said, using the British pronunciation. “It's nice to be able to put a friendly face together with a voice when the messages come in.” Ellwood then gave Newman a tour of his comm room operation. Newman surmised that the word of his promotion had now spread internationally—yet his own wife didn't even know about it. He drove the thought from his mind and said, “It looks to me like you have nothing but the best in here, Major. I'm impressed. Is there any piece of the most recent technology that you don't have here?”

  “I don't think so, sir. All we have to do is ask, and the SG gets it for us.”

  Newman was puzzled. “The ‘SG’?”

  “Why that's the secretary general, sir. We all work for him, don't we now?” replied Major Ellwood.

  As the British major was talking, Newman absently ran his hand over the smooth console. Suddenly an alarm buzzed on one of the machines. Newman drew his arm back quickly.

  Ellwood chuckled. “That wasn't you, Colonel. It's the signal that we have an outgoing message that we have to transmit. I'll have to encrypt it first. Excuse me, please.”

  He squeezed past Newman and reached beside one of the computers that was linked with video feeds to a small, covered box with an electronic lock on it. He took his plastic key and swiped it into the front of the box. “This just records who serviced this message and who encrypted it before transmission.” A green signal light came on after Ellwood passed his plastic key through the reader. He opened the door to the protective cover, reached inside, pulled out an EncryptionLok-3 device, and made sure it was securely interfaced with the feed coming into the comm unit from somewhere else in the UN's vast command center. Ellwood checked the message on the screen for correct addresses and then put the EncryptionLok-3 back inside its housing and pushed the Lock key on the touch-screen computer monitor. Then he pushed the icon on the screen for Encrypt, and immediately the screen was filled with letters, symbols, and digits. Without any spaces, punctuation, or even comparative words or sections, code-breakers would find it impossible to make sense of it.

  The mathematical algorithms used for the EncryptionLok-3 were so unique that every letter or number could have a totally different replacement even if the letter was a repeat. Most of the codes from World War II used a basic template to decipher words. It was a rather straightforward process; for example, whenever you used the letter a in your code it was meant to read as another letter, say k. But the EncryptionLok-3 had 56 billion equivalents for a replacement for just the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet if it were transmitted as a message.

  Newman, of course, knew that the EL-3 was an absolutely superb device for keeping communications from the enemy. But now, as he had just witnessed its use in the comm room of the UN Security Council Operations and Command Center, directed by a former Russian KGB agent, the significance of the event nearly bowled him over. What other U.S. top-secret equipment is being shared with these people? he wondered.

  “Major, how long have you been using the EL-3?” he asked as nonchalantly as he could.

  “Well, let's see … I started this tour in July of '92. We didn't have 'em then. If I remember right we got 'em just about a year ago. Yeah, that's right—last November. They're really remarkable little assets, aren't they?”

  “Yeah,” Newman muttered, not knowing what else to say. “Remarkable.”

  THE

  DEVICE THAT BETRAYS

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Corporate Headquarters

  ________________________________________

  Silicon Cyber Technologies International, Inc.

  Newport Beach, CA

  Monday, 5 December 1994

  1500 Hours, Local

  Marty Korman, founder and CEO of Silicon Cyber Technologies International, Inc., had to be convinced that hiring high-profile military retirees to shepherd the company's sales efforts through the government bureaucracy was a good idea. It was SCTI's cofounding partner, Stanley Marat, who insisted that they follow existing protocol to get things done in Washington.

  Marat and Korman had been classmates at Cal Poly and after graduation when Korman went to Los Alamos, Marat had been stolen by one high-tech firm after another, always with the enticement of greater and greater compensation. He had been with six different companies over seven years until the two old friends had bumped into each other in 1981 at a high-tech seminar in Vail, Colorado. Over drinks the two twenty-nine-year-olds decided that if they continued to work for other people they would never get rich. Three months later both quit their jobs, mortgaged their homes and marriages, rented a warehouse in Paramount, California, and started Silicon Cyber Technologies Inc., then later adding the word International. And the rest, as they say, is history.

  The match was perfect. Korman had a genius for every kind of communications technology. Some in the industry said he could “make electrons dance.” And Marat, it turned out, was a master salesman. He took their ultrasophisticated digital encryption algorithms, with complementary hardware and software, to the master communicators at the Pentagon, the Defense Communications Agency, the National Security Agency, and the White House Communications Agency. Marat convinced them that if they wanted to protect their classified communications from the Soviets and Chinese, they absolutely had to have SCTI's equipment.

  By 1983, the company's little prototype EncryptionLok-1A device, no bigger than a TV remote, was being alpha-tested in the most sensitive sites in the U.S. government: the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, North American Air Defense Command out in Colorado, the State Department, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency, NASA, the FBI, and, of course, the White House. Shortly thereafter the Pentagon ordered that they be put on every nuclear submarine and in every ballistic missile silo. They were purchased through a $288-million secret defense appropriation tacked onto another bill at the last minute that passed without fanfare.

  But SCTI's big break came just a year later when the company won another multimillion-dollar sole-source classified contract to produce major quantities of the little secure communications devices for the most highly classified undertaking in the U.S. government: the supersensitive Continuity Project. President Reagan was adamant that, before he could enter into talks with the Soviets aimed at reducing nuclear arms, we had to ensure that the Soviets could never “decapitate” our government. He sought and received from Congress billions of dollars for the highly classified construction and deployment of covertly pre-positioned mobile command-and-control facilities for use in the event of a Soviet attack so the U.S. would never be without a civilian president.

  The Project required thousands of
the little EncryptionLok-1A devices so that a president, even in the most difficult of circumstances, could still transmit and receive secure communications—data, telephone, and video—to and from U.S. military commands, the State Department, CIA, NSA, the Secret Service, and FBI. It was the break that Korman and Marat had been hoping for.

  Because secure communications were so essential to the Project, Jules Wilson, a senior officer at the National Security Agency, was appointed communications czar and charged with the responsibility for certifying all equipment to be used in the “presidential emergency communications suites.” Wilson put together a small team of communications, encryption, and security experts that he dubbed the “Comm Hawks” and set out to find the best means of ensuring that the civilian president would always have a secure means of communications—be it by telephone, fax, computer, radio, or video. The Comm Hawks unanimously agreed that nothing was better than the EncryptionLok-1A—which was the first time the device became known within the small circle aware of its existence as the more abbreviated “EL-1A.”

  The Project was coordinated at the White House by a single officer on the National Security Council staff. His office, on the third floor of the Old Executive Office Building, had an innocuous title on the door: Special Projects Office.

  Until the Continuity Project came along, SCTI had been building each EncryptionLok-1A individually as a discrete unit. But starting in 1984, the company had to gear up a full-scale production line so that each new unit would have a unique identifier code built into its encryption algorithm. This model would become the EL-2. However, before SCTI could start producing EL-2 units for the “presidential emergency communication packages,” the company was told that they would have to satisfy Jules Wilson at NSC about a couple of major concerns. The Korman technology was so sophisticated that the information being sent through an EL-2 unit was impossible to decrypt, even with the most powerful computers and the government's best code people. National Security Agency scientists at Fort Meade, Maryland, using Kray supercomputers, spent several months trying to crack the EncryptionLok-2 codes. The experts were good. But Korman's software and ideas were better. So the U.S. government bought more of these wonderful devices, and SCTI logged hundreds of millions in sales of the EL-2s.

  All went blissfully well until late 1988. Experts at NSA and the FBI turned in a top-secret assessment to the Vice President who was then, because of the recent elections, the Republican President-elect. The report may have been the first instance of intelligence cooperation between the agencies without threats or coercion. Whatever the reason, the NSA and FBI experts were terrified that if an EL-2 unit should fall into the wrong hands, an adversary or sophisticated criminal operation could reverse-engineer the technology, build their own version of the EncryptionLok technology, and then the secret military and government codes would be useless. Worse than that, America's intelligence community would forever lose the ability to crack their codes.

  Jules Wilson, a code-cracker, and two security experts from the Comm Hawks went to see Korman in his new digs. SCTI had already made enough to vacate the shabby warehouse in Paramount and move the company into a new, shiny, silver-and-glass structure overlooking Newport Beach. Were it not for the twelve-foot-high security fence, the guarded gate, two K-9 security teams walking the perimeter of the building, and the armed guards at the front desk, the SCTI facility would look like any other California high-tech giant. Korman thought that his highly visible security measures would be the crowning touch, but the government geeks weren't impressed.

  Nor were they impressed at Korman's responses to their concerns. So, because he couldn't offer them ironclad guarantees for their reverse-engineering or penetration problems, they required SCTI to make two changes to the EncryptionLok technology as a condition of granting the company the contract for any more devices that they called “contingency communications packages.”

  First, they wanted Korman to build a GPS transponder chip into each EL-2 device and link it to that unit's identifier code so that NSA could “interrogate” any unit, anywhere in the world, to determine its location. That way if it ever found its way into the wrong hands they'd know it. Second, SCTI had to create an internal “command/destruct” circuit inside each unit so that, at a predetermined signal, the internal circuitry of the EL-2 would fry itself into a small pile of molten silicon, plastic, precious metal, and circuit boards. The command/destruct circuitry would permit a higher headquarters to send a coded signal to any EncryptionLok-2 device determined to be “out of location” and potentially in the wrong hands. If that were the case, the commander of that unit could instantly render the unit totally useless to anybody, forever, before the technology could be compromised.

  Korman's engineers struggled with the problems, believing that adding these features would also likely add size and weight to what was to become STCI's model EL-3, posing other problems in retrofitting the devices into already customized communications equipment and military gear.

  But it took Korman less than two weeks, working on his own, to come up with the modifications that Jules Wilson and the Comm Hawks demanded. Korman and Marat flew to Washington with three prototypes and demonstrated them to Wilson and his team. All three units performed perfectly, though when the command/destruct signal was sent to the third unit, it emitted a curl of black, acrid smoke and what sounded like a little high-pitched cry as its circuits immolated themselves. Korman almost cried as he watched the third prototype frying on an asbestos pad sitting on Wilson's conference table. It had cost them nearly $2 million of research and development to make them, and now they were just melted rubbish.

  The generals and bureaucrats examined the burned device. It was perfect. All that remained was a small, greasy black glob of charred and melted elements. Korman had sealed some volatile chemical components in a hollowed-out composite sleeve. The chemicals were inert unless mixed as part of the command/destruct sequence, but then they were fatal to the unit.

  One of the government dweebs took out some tools and tried to take the unit apart to see if any internal elements survived to enable someone to guess at reverse-engineering. Nope. Cross-section slices of the device further revealed absolutely no trace of identifiable components. It would be impossible to reverse-engineer a destroyed EL-3. Period. The matter was closed.

  The government buyers were satisfied and asked how much these changes would cost. Stan Marat had already estimated that the work to produce the newly modified EL-3 on a quantity production run with the new specs might be one thousand more than they were costing them now. But Korman, sensing the government's urgency and the lack of any competing vendor, quickly blurted out that “the per-unit cost to the government for each EncryptionLok-3 will rise from forty-three thousand to fifty-eight thousand dollars.” Nobody blinked.

  By the time Korman and Marat got back to California that night, they had government authority to scrap the model EL-2 and put the EL-3 into production with a purchase order for eight thousand of the new units to be delivered over the next forty-eight months. The order had come over a fax machine that was hooked up to a new EL-3 unit in Korman's office, and across the top of the page in bold letters were the words TOP SECRET and below that, SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION and below that, in much smaller type: Special Projects Office. The next four pages detailed technical, payment, and delivery requirements, much the same as other purchase orders that they had received over the past three years.

  There was one new stipulation in this contract, however: a strict nondisclosure agreement. If SCTI accepted this purchase order, there could be no announcement of any kind in any trade publication regarding the contract or the modifications that had been made in the EncryptionLok technology. SCTI was not even allowed to reveal to its other U.S. government customers that the improved model existed nor that they had received the contract award to make them. Only the National Security Agency the National Security Council's Special Projects Office, and the SCTI founders were allowed t
o have this information under threats of imprisonment and fines. Jules Wilson had told them that they were privy to “the greatest national security secret in postwar history.” While Korman and Marat doubted that, they weren't about to test their skepticism.

  For Korman and Marat, this new nondisclosure stipulation was a problem. They had already figured out that if these GPS-locate and command/destruct features were so valuable to this one customer, then they should also be important to those government agencies that had already purchased thousands of units without these capabilities. But if they couldn't even tell their existing government customers about this upgrade, what good was it once this contract was done?

  “I don't like it,” said Marat. “It ties our hands.”

  “Don't like it? What don't you like about $464 million? That's what this contract is worth! Are you crazy?” shouted Korman. He always shouted when he was agitated. Marat was used to it.

  “Besides, that's why I marked up the cost at the demonstration—to cover our R & D and future lost sales,” Korman said. But both knew he was lying; he'd raised the price only because he knew that he could get away with it.

  Korman initialed the corner of each of the first three pages, signed the last page on the line labeled “Accepts,” and turned to Marat and said, “Now, find a way around that nondisclosure so that we can replace all those old EL-1As and EL-2s already out there with these new models.”

  It was while he was driving home that night that it occurred to Stanley Marat that what SCTI needed was a stable of “brass hats” to push their product very quietly through the corridors of the Pentagon.

  Much later on, Marat admitted to friends that he should have quit that night. Quit while he was ahead. But he didn't because the money was so good. And so easy.