Even the garage was partitioned. It would be possible, I realized, to gain entrance by concealing myself in the back of someone’s car. But once inside, I’d still have to use a photo ID—and I’d still be admitted only to a specific portion of the building.
After two hours of walking and watching, I met Wonder in a coffee shop on F Street, where we dried off and compared notes over breakfast. His findings were as depressing as mine. He’d checked out the janitorial side of things—one of the best ways to break and enter is as a janitor, because clean-up crews are generally given access to an entire site. He discovered that the FBI’s janitors were all dedicated FBI employees—and that they cleaned specific sections of the building.
We drank bad coffee and went over our B and E possibility lists. Sewer entry? All the manhole covers within two blocks of the building were spot-welded. Sneak undetected? There was a subterranean tunnel from the Department of Justice across the street, but Wonder’s recon indicated that the tunnel led to an elevator that ran directly to the director’s office suite—a dead end, so far as we were concerned. Steal an ID and brazen my way in? That works only if the guards don’t look at the pictures. At the FBI, the guards did their jobs—and I was screwed.
Pose as a phone repairman? The FBI did its own phone repair to keep the opposition from installing listening devices. Take a tour and drop off? No way. Unlike tours at State, the Pentagon, or even the White House, the FBI tour was conducted by and in a self-contained unit. Tours left at half-hour intervals and were led through a secure series of corridors that had no access to any of the Hoover Building’s working areas.
Well, I have never surrendered. There is nothing that is impossible—you just have to be flexible. So there had to be some way to break in undetected and secure the information we needed.
Wonder munched on a pumpernickel bagel piled high with cream cheese and sipped his coffee. “Arferskopic,” he said, his mouth full.
“What?”
Wonder chewed and swallowed. “Arthroscopic,” he said.
“Yes?” I was willing to humor the boy.
“Don’t you see?”
I told him that I didn’t see, and what the fuck?
He shook his head at me more in sorrow than pity. “You are an old asshole,” he explained. “You come from the Leo Gorcy school of life—by which I mean that you think the only way to get anywhere is to break inside avec le crow bar and la sledge hammer.”
I love it when Wonder speaks French. “So?”
“So, Dickhead, sir, there are other, more sub-tile ways of doing business these days. Like, we break in electronically.” He wiped a bit of cream cheese from the starboard corner of his mouth. “Look—you don’t even know where the goddamn records you want are being stored—and there are, what—six, seven floors of fucking files and records over there. So let’s find what we need fast by using a computer. Besides—that way they won’t ever know we’ve come and gone.”
He had a point. I tend to look at things in an old-fashioned way. That is because I was schooled by a bunch of old-fashioned chiefs whose idea of having fun was blowing things up. But they also taught me to be flexible.
So I listened to Wonder. Sure, he’s a youngster. But he’s computer literate. Besides, he’s a natural-born thief. There’s not a whole lot he can’t break into—including, I was willing to bet, the United States’ most top secret computer network, Intelink.
Well, that’s its name now, but since I’ve told it to you they’re probably going to change it.
If you’re one of the 99.9 percent of the population who hasn’t heard about it, Intelink is a classified computer system that links the intelligence agencies, DOD, the Department of Justice, the White House, and the State Department. It was built about five years ago and is run on a series of huge, 32-bit supercomputers, similar to the immense Cray servers CIA, DIA, and No Such Agency are currently using.
I’d used information from Intelink’s databases, but I hadn’t ever sat down at a terminal and played with it myself, because so far as I am concerned, all computers are programmed in gibberish. Still, the basic concept is simple enough: all users must have a Secret clearance to access the system and receive the most basic information from the databases, the most basic classification being “Confidential.” To get the real pearls—all the information rated above confidential (the two classifications are Secret, and Top Secret) you have to undergo an EBI or an SBI—which stand for Extended (civilian) or Special (military) Background Investigation—clearance process. SBI is a finetooth-comb affair—one of four do not make it through the process successfully.
Once you have been cleared, which can take more than two months, then you are initiated into the rites that permit you access to the holy of holies—a series of special passwords. Those passwords are chosen at random, and then encrypted so that they remain secure.
Once you reach the top tier, the system allows you to call up a plethora of highly sensitive goodies. At the basic level, if you punch up Islamic Terrorism, for example, you will be able to see Department of State cables and some of the CIA and DIA analyses. At the Top Secret stage, the system will toss in NSA intercepts, and DIA TECHINT. When you get to the code-word stuff, there are real-time NRO (that’s the National Reconnaissance Office, home of big bird and friends) satellite pictures, and DIA HUMINT materials, including the kinds of names and faces you need to see if you’re running SEAL Team Six or Delta missions.
But to get access to Intelink, you have to be operating a classified computer work station, you have to know the current passwords, and you have to be able to program your requests in a complicated computer language created exclusively for Intelink. Moreover, the system has built-in security measures. All users are logged by date, time, access code, and password. Terminals are kept under lock and key—they don’t simply sit out on desks where visiting crackers— standing for CRiminal hACKERS—can get at them.
There had, for example, been a terminal at the UT/RUS offices in the Pentagon. But it had been removed within minutes of SECNAV’s nasty memo. Go to the Pentagon and find another? A possibility. But weak tactics. Okay, we could break into the Navy Yard—if you read Red Cell you know I’ve done that before—and use one of NIS’s terminals. But that, too, was a nonstarter.
Wonder explained that, unlike Irish sex, these things take time. It might take him a few days to get what we needed—and there was no way we could set up in someone’s office, whether it was the Pentagon or the Navy Yard, and use their secure terminal.
So far as I was concerned, we were screwed. But none of the above considerations seemed to bother Wonder. “Come on, Cochise,” he said. “Let’s get back to the reservation and play with the tom-toms.”
* * *
Ninety minutes later we were sitting at the 100-plusmegahertz Pentium workstation that I’ve got in my office at Rogue Manor. Wonder opened himself a Coors light and fired up the computer.
He connected the modem, and dialed the number for the Navy Yard’s computer network—an unclassified system.
******* WASHINGTON NAVAL DISTRICT ********
********* DEFENSE DATA NETWORK ***********
LOG IN:
Wonder typed system.
The computer answered
PASSWORD:
Wonder typed operator.
The screen, went blank, then:
**WELCOME TO NDW COMPUTER NETWORK**
It had taken Wonder less than fifteen seconds to break into the Navy Yard’s secure computer network.
He grinned at me. “Easy, huh?”
“How the fuck—”
I could tell you”—Wonder grinned—“but then I’d have to kill you.”
“Wonder—”
“Okay, okay. Remember when I went to Iraq a couple of years ago?”
“Yeah.” He’d been sent over masquerading as a U.N. nuclear weapons inspector.
“Well, the Iraqis bought a bunch of old Digital VAX computers, and I had to break into them and retrieve
information about their missile sites.
“So before I left for Baghdad I went to visit the people at Digital. And guess what? It turns out that all DEC VAXes come with built-in passwords—the same built-in passwords. Workstations all come with log-in prompts that show the word user, and require the password user. The mainframes all come with a system log-in, which uses the words system, and require the password operator.”
“Yeah, but—”
He was too pumped up to let me get a word in edgewise, or sideways. “And guess what, Dickhead—most people, and that includes the Iraqis, and the asshole panjandrums at the Pentagon—are too lazy to change the goddamn passwords, which means that it’s easier than you’d realize to shimmy the door open.”
I was impressed. But this wasn’t Intelink. It was a nonclassified computer network—and I mentioned as much to Wonder.
He looked at me with his goofy smile, and swiveled his head left-right-left, right-left-right, just like the other Stevie Wonder, and said, “Right on, Mr. Dickhead, sir.”
He is such a polite boy. He worked at the keyboard with the flowing shoulder action and rapt concentration of a concert pianist, and suddenly we were reading electronic mailboxes at the Naval Investigative Service Command. “Thing is,” Wonder explained, momentarily slowing his byte-size glissando, “I logged in as the system manager, so I get to go through every fucking file in the damn computer.” He giggled. “That’s what I did in Iraq, too.”
I watched as he scanned notes from investigators, scrolled through memos, E-mail, and reports. He found—and printed out—a copy of SECNAV’s itinerary from the NIS security office. They hadn’t even bothered to password the goddamn file—it was available to any twelve-year-old hacker who could get inside the NDW computer. Finally, after half an hour of eavesdropping, he sat back, stretched, and cracked his knuckles. “Bingo, Dickhead.”
I squinted at the screen. Wonder had isolated a single message—a note from one NIS gumshoe to another that had been written six days ago.
BILL—I’LL BE our OF TOWN FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS TAD NAPLES, SO YOU’LL HAVE TO PICK UP THE PIECES ON THAT COUNTERESPIONAGE THING I’VE BEEN WORKING WITH WMFO [he used the acronym for the FBI’s Washington Metropolitan Field Office at Buzzard Point]. THE BUREAU FILES ARE ALL IN IL. USE THE VAGRANT ACCOUNT FOR ACCOUNTING PURPOSES. ACCESS IS THROUGH TOPHAT, AND THE COMPARTMENTED STUFF IS IN LIMETREE. HAVE FUN. JIM.
“They can’t be that stupid.”
Wonder grinned and swiveled his head. “Sure they can— they’re NIS.”
He wrote the passwords down, disconnected from the Navy Yard system, then dialed the Department of Defense’s Intelink network access number—which, incredibly, can be found in the DOD locator—in civilian terms, the phucking phone book.
The system answered on the second ring.
********** DODNET INTELINK 6.2 **********
*********** ACCESS RESTRICTED ***********
Trying …
DODNET INTELINK 6.2 CONNECT
welcome to DODNET INTELINK
log in:
When the log-in prompt came up, Wonder typed the word vagrant.
He was immediately asked
password:
Wonder keyed in the word tophat, and was greeted with “password accepted.”
So much for classified systems and restricted access and all the rest of the security mumbo-jumbo. He took a pull of Coors, and grinned at me. “Watch.”
Wonder typed “@intelink”
The computer bleeped a couple of times.
He hit the return key and typed: “intelink>open FBI intelink”
It took less than a second for a message to appear.
********** FBI INTELINK **********
******* ACCESS RESTRICTED ********
log in:
Wonder typed the word guest.
invalid password, try again
Wonder typed the word visitor.
welcome to FBI Intelink
Restricted, my ass. The damn thing was wide open. It was time to ask a technical question. “What the fuck?” I inquired of Wonder.
“Ah, Sir Dickhead,” he said, “most system managers know that there are always going to be visitors. Like, say, an agent from Butte is visiting for a couple of days, and needs to use the computer to check something. Now, said agent doesn’t use Intelink more than once a year in Butte. So he’s forgotten his password, and his access code, or left it in his desk back home. So, said system manager can either spend his time programming new passwords every time a transient user passes through town, or he can just program a permanent one—something that’s easy to remember, like visitor, or guest. That way, he doesn’t have to worry about new passwords.”
“But that’s insane.”
Wonder smiled. “What’s your point? Of course it is. But as we all know, people talk about security a lot more than they practice it.”
TWO HOURS LATER, I WAS LOOKING OVER MORE THAN A HUNDRED pages of printout. We’d extracted the FBI’s counterintelligence files on Alpha Detachment/Armed Militia, as well as dug up their internal memos on the group—a treasure trove of information that told me La Muchacha—you remember my favorite SAC from Miami—had lied through her expensively capped teeth when she’d said the Bureau had no files on those tangos. They’d had a sheaf of ’em hidden away—they just hadn’t wanted to share any with me.
Then I realized that perhaps she hadn’t lied. It was more likely that she hadn’t been told anything about these files.
Why? The answer lay on the table in front of me. See, in the days after Oklahoma City, the Bureau had requested more lenient guidelines in order to operate against domestic terrorism. Those requests had not been granted by a Congress that remembers such FBI disasters as COINTELPRO—the mostly illegal COunterINTELligence PROgram instituted by J. Edgar Hoover against home-grown, left-wing subversion in the midfifties—and other domestic escapades that broke dozens of laws.
Regardless of congressional stricture, the Bureau still needed intelligence in order to operate against domestic terrorism. So what it—or at least one element of it—had obviously done, was to go covert.
And judging from the contents of the memos in front of me, ADAM had been the subject of several black-bag jobs over the past year or so. Now, as we all know, black-bag jobs are highly illegal. My conclusion was that the Bureau’s panjandrums in Washington had decided to play dumb when La Muchacha requested background information on ADAM, because if they’d divulged what they knew, someone might ask how they’d known it.
I read on. There was no doubt about it—the memos indicated that the Bureau had evidence ADAM was one small element of a larger, informal network of crazies—domestic malcontents, fringies, psychos, and terrorists who advocate the violent overthrow of our government.
Now, let me digress here for a little while. There have, as you are all very well aware by now, arisen a number of what are known as citizen militias. These groups, whose membership may exceed a quarter of a million Americans by now, are linked together in more than thirty-five states by fax, computer network, shortwave radio, desktop publishing, video cassette, and cellular phone. Unlike the far-right-and-left-wing kooks, ethno-terrorists of all backgrounds, and KKK white supremacists, most of these new militias have a broad-based constituency, not to mention the support of many in local law enforcement.
Most of the groups share common values. They believe, for example, that the government is no longer a government of, by, and for the people, but has become a huge, expensive, national bureaucracy that has spun out of control. They believe that most of the laws and regulations concerning gun control, abortion, education, and welfare are misguided, irresponsible, or just plain wrong. Come to think of it, they sound a lot like many of those Republicans elected to Congress in 1994.
There is a feeling, among many militia members, that Americans are just not in control of their lives anymore—that government has hijacked control, and that if you object too loudly to that fact, you will ge
t stepped on and squashed. The evidence they cite includes the Internal Revenue Service’s confiscation of property, the SWAT-team tactics of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the foreclosure on large numbers of family farms and homes in the Midwest and Northwest by banks that turn out to be fronts for huge corporations that wrecked the land.
Some in these militias are convinced that the New World Order is the most dangerous threat America has ever faced. According to these folks, there is a huge, secret conspiracy involving the United States government, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations, all of which will somehow combine to bankrupt the United States, then take over the country and occupy it with U.N. troops.
Now, I don’t hold with the latter conspiracy. And I’ve spent too much of my life working for the government to believe that it can act as one entity. But I respect—and would defend—the rights of these militia members to educate themselves, to speak their minds, to defend and protect themselves, and to train as they see fit to do.
Having said that, I must also tell you that, since we are a nation of laws, I believe that anyone who actively conspires against the government to bring it down by violence is nothing more than a terrorist—and should be treated as one, just the way we’ve dealt with the perpetrators of Oklahoma City. The sons of bitches ought to be fried. The Constitution, which I have taken an oath to preserve, protect, and defend, guarantees all of us the right to protest. Well, protesting is one thing. Sedition is another.
The groups cited in the FBI’s memos were not the lawful, law-abiding militias I have just described. Alpha Detachment/Armed Militia was one of the nasty-boy fringe groups. It had, so the files said, ties to the white supremacists of the Aryan Order, the Waffen Strike Force, and the White Hand of God. Even more astonishing was its apparent ties to certain other, equally dangerous groups coming from the opposite political direction.
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