The Liberty Covenant

by Jack Bowie

  Ikedo made a quick scan of the senior agent’s office. “You must be on one hell of an assignment.”

  “The impressive library you see around you,” Slattery waved his arm above the jumble of documents scattered on his desk, “is the net result of the best information the FBI, NSA, Homeland and ATF have on militia activity.”

  “What are you doing messing around in domestic militia business?”

  Slattery had to tread lightly here. Markovsky had made it clear that the advisory group’s topics were strictly need-to-know. But he really could use some fresh thinking. “Peter must have owed somebody a big favor. I’m trying to see if there’s any recent changes in tactics.”

  Ikedo’s brow wrinkled and his head tilted awkwardly. “Find anything?”

  “I found out how little we really know about these guys. It’s downright scary. This internal shit frustrated me so much I went out to Tysons last night and bought everything I could find on the militia movement: The Gathering Storm, A Force Upon the Plain, Harvest of Rage. Everything.” He pointed to the mound on the floor.

  “That wasn’t any better, huh?” Ikedo replied.

  “Not really. Most of it is more propaganda than fact. There’s enough crap in those for a thousand conspiracy novels: the New World Order, Third Continental Congress, Posse Comitatus. Some of the history’s okay, stuff on the Montana Freemen and Michigan Militia, but nothing recent.”

  “How about checking open sources? Research is getting pretty good at it these days.”

  The intelligence agencies had frequently been criticized for relying too much on their own classified data and not exploiting so-called “open sources,” information accessible through public channels. With the explosion of information on the Internet, this was now one of the richest sources available.

  “Sure why not? Let’s give ‘em a try.” Slattery reached for the phone and dialed a familiar number. “Rachael? . . . How are you? . . . Got a favor to ask. I need all you can find out on the militia movement. . . . Of course, it’s important. I wouldn’t come to the expert otherwise. . . . Great. I’ll be right down.” He set down the phone and turned back to Ikedo. “Want to go for a walk?”

  Fifteen minutes later Slattery and Ikedo were two levels underground, staring at six inches of computer printout, complete with pictures, maps, and diagrams. They were seated at a small conference table inside the Research area. Hardly looking like a library, it was filled with cubicles and oversized LED monitors. Perfect for the computer-age spook. Which mostly left Slattery out in the cold.

  “This all you can give me?” Slattery called with a smile to a young Indian woman with long black hair sitting at one of the workstations in a nearby aisle.

  “Give me a few more minutes and I’ll fill up the rest of your day,” Rachel Bhan replied. “That’s just the top level stuff. Mostly home pages, archives and newsgroups. I’m still tracing the secondary cross-references and a couple of dark web sites.

  “I knew you liked paper so I did the printouts, Roger, but I’ll email you the Intelink folder. I hear paper-cuts can be really dangerous.”

  Intelink was the intelligence community’s ultra-secure intranet. It had been designed to improve sharing across the multiple agencies. To Slattery, the technology was usually just another sign of his obsolescence, but today it was also a beacon of his paranoia.

  Slattery walked over to Bahn’s desk. “About that, Rachael,” he whispered. “Can we keep this one between us?”

  Bahn furled her normally glass-smooth forehead. She hesitated, then gave the spook a smile. “Okay, Roger, but only for you.”

  “I owe you, Rachel,” Slattery replied.

  He returned to the table and continued his study of the documents.

  After a couple of minutes, Ikedo looked up from the papers. “You do that often, Roger?” he said.

  “Do what?” Slattery replied as calmly as he could. “Come down to Research?”

  “No, Roger. Kill the Intelink file.” The analyst’s voice turned cold. “That isn’t exactly Agency policy. What’s really going on?”

  Slattery tried to look surprised, then realized he couldn’t keep lying to Ikedo. His cover story was slipping away fast. “It’s complicated, Manny. But important. I can’t talk about it here. Later. I promise. Will that do for now?”

  Ikedo dropped his head and started wringing his hands. Slattery hoped he hadn’t gone too far already.

  “Okay,” Ikedo finally replied. Then his face lightened and Slattery noticed a sly grin. “But if this is hot, I want in.”

  Slattery nodded. Nobody liked secrets better than spooks. “Be careful what you ask for, Manny. Deal.”

  They had been working through the documents for about thirty minutes when Ikedo sighed and leaned back in the chair.

  “So when did you get this assignment, Roger?” he asked.

  “Peter dropped it on me yesterday,” Slattery answered quickly. The analyst knew something unusual was going on. He had to change the subject of this inquisition quickly. “By the way, how’s Kit? You still refusing to marry that beautiful lady?” Kit Tomika was an analyst in the Far East section. She and Ikedo had been a “number” for years.

  Ikedo’s smile disappeared and he stared intently at the ceiling. “Crashed and burned, Roger. She met some hotshot lawyer from State. Said he had more to talk about than spook work.”

  “Sorry, Manny. Maybe next time.”

  “Roger!” The call came from across the room. “You ought to come and take a look at these.”

  Slattery and Ikedo joined the researcher at her station.

  “Thought you might like to look at some of the sites,” she said. On the screen was a bright, colorful web page with multiple animations of waving flags, men in combat, and military statistics. “This is the homepage of the Utah State Militia. Not bad, huh?”

  “Jesus. This beats the tail off anything I’ve seen out of Washington. How’d these guys get so sophisticated?”

  “It’s not all that hard these days,” she replied. “Any high school kid with spare time on his hands can put up something like this. I can think of worse things they could be doing.”

  “Yeah, except this kid’s getting an education in a lot of other stuff as well. What else is out there?”

  The researcher surfed through a few more sites, giving Slattery a brief look at the state-of-the-art in militia information. He usually ignored the reactionary scare tactics on the TV news, but he couldn’t argue with this. There was a helluva lot of military and counter-political information on the Internet. Enough to feed any kind of militia conspiracy. And who knows what was going on behind the scenes.

  They spent another half-hour in Research and collected at least three inches more of printouts and images. Then it was back to Slattery’s office for the analysis. Ikedo scanned through some of the Agency’s intelligence data while the older agent reviewed the new material.

  “I didn’t think we had this much on domestic militia,” Ikedo commented looking up from one of the files.

  “Theoretically, we shouldn’t. By charter we can’t work domestic issues. But occasionally some piece of intel will have a domestic connection. So we send the analysis off to the FBI. But it wouldn’t do to just throw the background away, now would it?” Slattery grinned at the young agent’s naiveté. Had he ever been that green?

  “It would still be easier to review on the screen,” Ikedo suggested.

  “Maybe for you, Manny, but I’m still a paper and ink kinda guy. If I can’t touch and feel it, it isn’t real.”

  “So what makes you think someone is trying to coordinate militia activity?”

  Slattery was good at hiding surprise. One of the best, he had been told, ever since the interrogation training at the Farm. But he knew he had lost the battle with Ikedo’s off-hand remark. His hesitation was an eternity too long.

  “Why would you ask that?” Slattery tried to ask flatly.

  “Okay, Roger,” Ikedo replied with a smile. “T
he topic never came up. Of course, one of the things I would be looking at if I were investigating militia would be the possibility that an external group was trying to direct militia activity.”

  “Why would you look for that?”

  “Because of the high risk potential. Individually these groups can be dangerous. Look at what McVeigh did in Oklahoma. But once they reveal themselves they can’t escape an investigation by the FBI and ATF. If the activities were coordinated however, they can back each other up: present multiple alibis, commit copycat crimes. Anything that could confuse the authorities. Then there’s the Nazi scenario.”

  “The what? How does Germany figure into this?”

  “What did they teach you in school, Roger? The fanaticism didn’t start with Hitler. There were over forty organized parties and hundreds of splinter groups in Germany after the First World War. Most of them running around being pains in the ass to the new democratic government but never getting any real support. What Hitler and his band of brown shirts did was give them a vision, a political legitimacy. When the groups started communicating, and acting in concert, that’s when the real trouble began.”

  “What would someone look for if they suspected some type of coordination was going on? Theoretically, of course.”

  Ikedo thought for a moment before continuing. “Theoretically, first of all they’d forget about big public groups like the Michigan Militia.” He dropped the listings of web pages on top of the pyre of library books. “They’re too large and too well-known. They’re more interested in spreading propaganda than causing real damage. Plus they’re probably littered with ATF informants that would turn in their brothers for a trip to Las Vegas. They could never keep an operation secret.

  “Then I’d, sorry, these theoretical analysts, would look for the small cells. The ones with a handful of close knit members, often tied together by family. They’re usually motivated by a single, very personal, event and keep their focus by fueling the hatred. That’s where the conspiracy will start.”

  Slattery had learned more in the last two minutes with Ikedo than he had from all of the files combined. This was a resource he needed.

  “Something wrong, Roger?”

  “Yeah. All this shit around me. We’ve got to get you some more visibility. You want a real job?”

  “With counterterrorism? I don’t know. Would I have to wear a suit?”

  Slattery doubted it would be any trouble convincing Markovsky to reassign Ikedo. He didn’t need to divulge anything about the IMAGER background now, but he did need some help isolating the militia targets. And he had just found it.

  The phone rang and Slattery picked it up.

  “Slattery. . . . Sure, Rachael. Thanks. Send it over.”

  “What’s up?” Ikedo asked.

  “Rachael found some new stuff on a couple of the sites. Said we ought to take a look.” He stared down at the keyboard. “Uh, I want to check a few other things, Manny. Can you pull it up for me?”

  “Sure, Roger.”

  Ikedo moved around to the back of the desk and confidently typed a few commands. A collage of web pages flashed on the monitor. The headlines exploded Slattery’s usual calm:

  Movement Strikes at Government Propagandists

  Fires Silence History of Lies

  Missions for Truth

  Revolution Begins!

  Chapter 14

  National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Virginia

  Thursday, 2:00 p.m.

  “What’s up, Peter?” Slattery asked after they had passed out of earshot of the lobby guard. “You sounded a little uptight when you called. ‘Get your ass over to Fort Meade’ I believe were your words. I thought you wanted to go over the FBI report?”

  The two men were walking down a non-descript gray corridor in NSA headquarters at Fort Meade. Door after door was closed tight, each with an electronic access lock.

  “Sorry about that, Roger,” the DDI replied. “Events are moving rather quickly. I got a frantic call from Claude just after noon about the militia incident and IMAGER.”

  The NSA Deputy Director was another lifelong spook and nearly as uptight as Markovsky. They were both long-time friends and agency adversaries. “I have a hard time picturing Claude as frantic, but what does NSA have to do with our asset?”

  “That’s the problem. There is no asset. There is no IMAGER. They’re all a story Claude and I concocted.”

  Slattery stopped short and gaped wide-eyed at his boss. “Concocted? What the hell do you mean? You’ve been giving fake intel to the Director of National Intelligence? They’ll send your ass to Leavenworth for that.”

  “Calm down, Roger,” Markovsky replied as he eased Slattery back into their walk. “I doubt it will go that far. Actually, the intel is real. Claude got it from a top secret SIGINT project. We didn’t want to jeopardize the project so we made up IMAGER.”

  Slattery shook his head. “Sounds like something the Puzzle Palace boys would think up. How’d they talk you into it?”

  Markovsky’s blank expression told Slattery he wasn’t getting an answer to that question.

  “Okay, I don’t like it,” Slattery finally replied, “but I’ve done worse. So what’s the problem? Just keep up the front.”

  “The project was led by a hot-shot NSA cryptologist, Kam Yang. He developed a decryption algorithm for AES. A real breakthrough. But only he could do the decryption. And last night, he was killed in a traffic accident.”

  “Shit. That’s a game-changer. Who’s in charge of the project now?”

  “One of Claude’s golden boys, Garrett Robinson. That’s who we’re going to see. He’s been baby-sitting Yang since he made the discovery.”

  “Didn’t do a very good job, did he?”

  “Nobody’s perfect, Roger. Even you.”

  Slattery didn’t want to take the conversation down that road. Markovsky knew too many of his skeletons.

  “So what’s Robinson’s plan? Does he have another way to get the decryption done?”

  “I don’t think so. From what I heard, Yang kept the algorithm secret. Wouldn’t let the agency know the details.”

  Slattery eyes popped. “Secret? I’m surprised they didn’t keep him under house arrest.”

  “I’m sure they tried. But the guy was uncontrollable. A real screwball. But a genius screwball.”

  “There’s a lot of those around here. He must have fit right in. Who is this Robinson anyway?”

  “He’s NSA’s top troubleshooter. Background is Georgetown, Army and DIA. The org charts show him as a mid-level special projects manager, but he takes his orders from Claude. Ever since Yang discovered the algorithm, Robinson has had the job to keep the lid on it.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “He’s always been behind the scenes. He was the guy that came up with the Clipper Gambit.”

  “The Clipper Chip? Shit, Peter. That was a disaster. We spent millions on it, let go of some real intel, then the damn lobbyists still got it deep-sixed.”

  Slattery viewed the Clipper Chip as a classic case of federal paranoia gone amok. Even though it had been publicly backed by his agency, Slattery had thought that it was at best ill-conceived, and at worst incompetent.

  By the late eighties, electronic communication had been exploding. Cellular phones, the nascent Internet, land-based telecommunications all were carrying an ever-increasing load of data as well as voice. And the data was significant: business negotiations, stock trades, product designs, government contract evaluations. Things that were too sensitive to be broadcast freely over relatively public media. The private sector had decided that it needed to protect itself and invested in any number of proprietary encoding schemes that would protect its transmissions from prying eyes, and sometimes prying wiretaps. Among the most enthusiastic users of this new technology was that part of the private sector known as organized crime.

  Needless to say, the eavesdroppers of the country, the FBI, NSA, and all their friends, were beside themse
lves. They couldn’t let private citizens communicate in ways that prohibited their listening in. So they declared data encryption a “national security issue.” Laws were passed prohibiting export, researchers had their projects declared “Top Secret” which prevented them from releasing results, even writing scientific papers, and the black agencies set about to invent a “better answer.”

  That answer turned out to be the Clipper Chip. Introduced in 1993 and broadly endorsed by most government groups, the Clipper Chip was a semiconductor device that was to be placed in every telephone, every computer, and every communication device in the land. It would encode outgoing messages into an unintelligible form, and decode incoming messages so that they could be understood. Outside the device, in the “free,” the messages would be gibberish, they couldn’t be understood. Or at least not understood by anyone without a football field of supercomputers buried in their basement. The same basement Slattery and Markovsky were now walking over.

  The proposal was supported by volumes of complex mathematics, fancy new words like private-key escrow and trap-door algorithms, but most of the country saw it for what it was: a ploy to let Uncle Sam continue to stick his nose in their private business.

  How great could Robinson be if he was behind all this? From the beginning, Slattery had had questions about Clipper. As a counter-terrorist he knew the importance of intelligence data on your enemies. Internal communications were a big part of that intelligence. He couldn’t do his job without it.

  On the other hand, he didn’t trust most of his colleagues any more than did the average citizen. Probably even less; he had worked with many of them. The way Clipper had been bludgeoned onto the country, he couldn’t help but feel a little uneasy.

  In the end, the Clinton administration just couldn’t pull it off. Opposition was everywhere; from the American Civil Liberties Union to privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and even the European Commission. So in 1996 VP Al Gore was sent out to announce that Clipper was dead and the country would have to live with the result. There had been stillborn efforts at Clipper II and Clipper III, but none ever had a chance of being adopted. The SIGINT spooks went back in their hole. Or so he had thought.