The Director

20

Graham Weber had always had a civilian’s restrained view about leaks of classified information. He knew how difficult the disclosures made life for the intelligence professionals who were supposed to keep the secrets. But he was never sure that they damaged the nation in the way that the secret-keepers asserted. He’d fought that battle as a businessman when he threatened to close his business if it were forced to keep quiet about actions by the FBI and NSA that he thought were unconstitutional, and he had won that fight, and briefly become a champion for the libertarians. But now he saw the problem from other side of table, and he was frank enough to admit that it looked different.

The leak that rattled Weber most in his first weeks was the disclosure by the British newspaper the Independent of a new American program for collecting economic intelligence via the Internet. According to the London newspaper, the CIA had just approved a new program for using automated systems to monitor and analyze new inventions, patents, securities-trading algorithms and foreign-currency movements via Internet data that was available on financial-market platforms such as Bloomberg and Reuters, and in specialized scientific and professional journals. The story said the program had been approved by the new CIA director, Graham Weber, in the first week of his arrival. The inference was that Weber’s talk of reform was hypocritical, and that he had in fact approved a significant new extension of CIA economic-monitoring capability.

When he read the story, Weber felt queasy and thought for a moment that he would be physically sick. The leak was disclosing a program he had in fact approved at the end of his first week on the job. It was a new initiative being managed by James Morris and the Information Operations Center, under authorities approved by the agency’s most secret panel, known as the Special Activities Review Committee. What frightened Weber was the possibility that the leak had come from one of the people in the small group that had been sitting in his office that first Friday afternoon when he approved the plan.

Ruth Savin called soon after Weber was given a summary of the Independent story. The general counsel arrived in his office thirty minutes later and proposed that the inspector general’s office immediately begin an investigation, and that they start now with their referral to the Justice Department requesting a criminal investigation.

“How long will all this take?” asked Weber.

“A month to gear up, six weeks at the outside,” answered Savin.

“Jesus, that’s forever. We have information spilling out of this building into the news media and it takes that long even to start hunting for who leaked it.”

“Welcome to the real world, Mr. Director. Leak investigations are sensitive. The president doesn’t want to look like he’s beating up on the press. He’s taken a lot of grief for that already. You can call Mr. O’Keefe and ask him to approve a quicker referral, but I think he’ll say no.”

“That’s okay,” said Weber glumly. “I guess on this stuff, where you stand depends on where you sit.”

Savin looked at her boss. Already, his ruddy Seattle complexion was turning that pale color that comes from early mornings and late nights and a life spent indoors.

“You want to hear a joke?” she said. “Maybe it will cheer you up.”

Weber nodded. He wasn’t really in the mood for laughing, but Savin seemed determined.

“Okay, You’re at a Jewish wedding… how can you tell if it’s Orthodox, Reform or Liberal?”

“I give up. How?”

“In an Orthodox wedding, the bride’s mother is pregnant. In a Conservative wedding, the bride is pregnant. In a Reform wedding, the rabbi is pregnant. See, that’s funny, and you aren’t even Jewish.”

Weber was chuckling, despite himself.

“You’re good,” he told his general counsel. “Now go start the leak investigation.”

The next day, Marie stuck her head in the door and said that Mr. O’Keefe was calling from the White House. Weber’s first thought was that they had decided for real to fire him. But when the national security adviser got on the line, he was polite, solicitous, even. The British foreign secretary and the chancellor of the Exchequer were coming to Washington for a hastily arranged visit. They would be at the White House the next afternoon at two, and the president wanted his new CIA director there. O’Keefe suggested that Weber bring along an analyst to talk about the global economy. The president would be most grateful.

“Let me be honest, Tim,” said Weber. “From what I’ve seen so far, we don’t have very good economic intelligence. I wouldn’t want to embarrass you or the president. You’d be better off inviting someone from Goldman Sachs.”

“Bring someone anyway,” said O’Keefe. “It will make the president feel better.”

Weber got a call just before he left for the White House the next day from the British Embassy. They patched through a man who introduced himself as Sir John Strachan. He identified himself as the director of the Secret Intelligence Service, modestly, as if Weber might not have known that. He had come over on short notice that morning with the foreign secretary and chancellor, Strachan said, and he was hoping there would be time for a proper chitchat, maybe a “walk in the woods.” He made that last proposal sotto voce, as if the two of them were doing something very private.

Weber suggested a venue where they would be able to do just that, and asked his chief of staff, Sandra Bock, to make some hasty arrangements for late that afternoon at the newly useful golf club in Arlington.

Weber brought along to the White House Loomis Braden, the deputy director for intelligence, and Sandra Bock, who knew something about everything. They joined him in the black battlewagon as it made its way down the George Washington Parkway to the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge.

The meeting began at two in the Roosevelt Room on the main floor of the West Wing. O’Keefe had assembled the core national security team: the secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, along with the attorney general. Aides to these luminaries took the small, straight-backed chairs along the wall, occasionally passing memos and briefing papers to the principals at the big table. The British visitors sat in the middle, across from the president, framed by the Cabinet secretaries. O’Keefe guarded the end of the table, bland and self-effacing.

The president sat at the center of the table under an oil painting of the “Rough Rider” atop his horse. He said so little in Cabinet meetings these days that people were whispering that he suffered from depression. Weber had only met him once since he’d taken the job. The chief executive preferred getting his morning intelligence briefings from O’Keefe. The vice president sat at the other end of the table from O’Keefe, chatting away volubly with his seatmates, in his own world of irrelevance.

Weber’s first thought was to sit in the outer rim, next to his aides, under a painting of a Hudson River landscape. But O’Keefe insisted he join the big table with the principals.

The agenda seemed to be mutual reassurance. It was a season when America’s superpower status was looking more dubious, and the benefits for Britain of the “special relationship” were being questioned at home. The reaffirmations on both sides were emphatic, but not quite convincing. The foreign secretary and the chancellor both wanted the president to know that even as Britain drew closer to the European Union, its relationship with the United States remained as strong as ever. The Europeans were trying to draw London into tax-equalization schemes, and trade-protectionist policies, and data-sharing regimes, and even intelligence-sharing that would undermine the Anglo-American partnership. But Her Majesty’s government would resist whatever pressure was brought to bear, they assured the president.

Behind the foreign secretary sat Strachan, the chief of the SIS. When he arrived he had nodded at Weber and offered a half smile.

The president asked each of his principals around the table to say a few words. When it was Weber’s turn, he talked about the challenge of running an intelligence service in an open society, and how much he had learned about the difficulties in his first weeks on the job. O’Keefe at the end of the table made a gesture with his hand that Weber took to mean, Cut it short, so the director pitched to Loomis Braden, who talked plausibly for five minutes about the perturbed state of global financial markets.

Then it was O’Keefe’s turn to sum up for the American side, and fifteen minutes for the chancellor and foreign secretary to give their final thoughts, and then after ninety minutes the meeting adjourned for “working groups” at several departments and agencies. As Weber listened to the discussion, he found himself wondering if the world of 1945 and its axiomatic policies had meaning any longer, outside of meetings like this.

While the Treasury secretary steered the chancellor through the West Wing lobby and out to waiting journalists’ microphones, a small group of national security officials, including Weber, passed through the far door of the lobby into a small hallway and down the narrow stairs that led to the Situation Room.

Weber took one of the black leather swivel chairs that lined the long polished wood table, six on a side. It didn’t look like a global command post: there was simple furniture, pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting that might be found in any suburban family room; some video monitors along the wall to display imagery from sensors around the world; a camera pointed at the head of the table where the president sat, for those who might be watching the meeting on video teleconference. Seats had been marked with little name cards, military-style; Weber took a seat on the far side of the table.

O’Keefe stopped by Weber’s chair.

“I’ll want you to say a little something about the economic surveillance program that was in the Independent,” O’Keefe whispered. “The Brits are upset.”

Weber nodded. So that was the subtext.

The other principals wandered in, a few stopping off at the Navy Mess next door to get coffee or a cookie. Weber noticed that the outsized figure of Cyril Hoffman had entered the room. He was wearing his usual three-piece suit, blue this time, with notched lapels on the vest, and whatever his efforts, he was not inconspicuous. The president didn’t pretend to be running the gathering. He simply deferred to O’Keefe.

“Everyone in this room knows what makes the ‘special relationship’ special,” began the national security adviser. “It is the quality of intelligence-sharing across the Atlantic. Our two countries depend on the bonds between the CIA and SIS, the NSA and GCHQ, and the FBI and MI5. Everyone here also knows how hard these partnerships have been hit by the disclosures of the last several years. Our most secret programs have made their way into the press. That is our fault. The chief leakers have been Americans, and as we have repeatedly told our British friends at every level, we are sorry.”

There were polite murmurs of thanks and sympathy from the British side. What O’Keefe said was true: From an intelligence standpoint, the disclosures had been calamitous. NSA and GCHQ had been tapping the world’s telephone and Internet traffic pretty much at will for the past decade, thanks to programs with code names such as BULLRUN, TEMPORA and STORMBREW that had been among the world’s most closely guarded secrets, until one day they weren’t. The agencies had officially adopted the ostrich approach on both sides of the Atlantic, insisting that the information was still classified even though it was public knowledge.

“We want to assure our British friends that we will do everything possible to operate in this new space,” said O’Keefe. He tapped one end of his pencil moustache as if to make sure that it was still firmly in place.

“Hear hear,” said Anthony Fair, his British counterpart from 10 Downing Street. He offered the appropriate assurances about how America could always count on British support, and vice versa, he hoped.

O’Keefe turned to a Navy officer in his dress blues, seated several seats away.

“We’d like Admiral Schumer to give you an update on how the NSA is managing SIGINT operations in the new environment, we hope with continuing British cooperation.”

Admiral Lloyd Schumer spent ten minutes reviewing the National Security Agency’s efforts to maintain what he kept describing as “lawful activities.” He didn’t use the code names or offer the wiring-diagram details for this audience. He spoke with a military man’s restrained, eyes-forward manner. You wouldn’t have known, as he reviewed the collection and cryptological capabilities, that he was, in effect, handling shards of glass from a broken window.

O’Keefe then asked Amy Martin, the deputy attorney general, to brief the British on the current review of legal authorities for surveillance and intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as amended. She was crisp and concise, and uninformative. You would have had no idea from her presentation that many of the activities she described were in a kind of legal limbo, pending review by courts, legal advisers and general counsels across the U.S. government. A British legal adviser responded by describing a similar state of uncertainty there, as politicians and Whitehall mandarins tried to decide what the new rules of the game would be.

Finally, O’Keefe turned to Weber, whom he described as “our new colleague.”

“I have asked Mr. Weber to say a few words about the program that was revealed in the Independent, which I gather came as something of a surprise to you.”

Weber didn’t talk long. He told them that the agency was continuing its long-standing practice of collecting intelligence through “open source” information on the Internet and some proprietary data it obtained through other means. That was what Ruth Savin had told him to say.

“Although we are collecting economic information, I want to stress that it is not being shared with American companies.”

“We thought you didn’t do that sort of thing, old boy,” said Fair, with icy precision. “We expect that from the French and the Israelis and the Chinese, but not from our American cousins.”

“We haven’t changed,” answered Weber. The British listened impassively, knowing that the gist of the Independent’s story was that the American approach had in fact changed, in the scope of collection if not necessarily in the recipients of the information.

“Business is your world, eh?” pressed Fair. “You’re coming straight out of the corporate technology side; unusual for a CIA director. So perhaps you can see why we were concerned that this initiative seemed to be one of your, what shall I say, early priorities. First week, I believe.”

Weber nodded. He should stop now, before he got in any deeper trouble, but he wanted these people to understand him.

“You should know this program was handed to me when I arrived. Rest assured: I came to the agency to make good changes, not bad ones.”

“Well, we’re pleased to hear that,” said Fair.

The talk moved on. The British still seemed anxious about something. Weber couldn’t put his finger on it. The military men discussed new overhead surveillance architecture, whose fruits would be shared with the Brits, and forward defense against cyber-enemies. It was a bloodless conversation until John Strachan spoke up.

“Here’s the thing,” began the MI6 chief. “We are facing an intelligence threat now that is unprecedented, really. These leakers and whistleblowers would be easier to control if they were paid agents of foreign intelligence services, but unfortunately, for the most part, they are not. That does not, however, make them any less dangerous to our common enterprise.”

Hoffman had been doodling before, but now he spoke up.

“I assure you that we share your concern, John. These liberty addicts are driving us crazy. Timothy has already apologized that we let several of them wander into the sanctum sanctorum. But what do we do about it? How do we pursue an adversary that is, as it proclaims, anonymous and self-perpetuating?”

“We penetrate them,” continued Strachan quietly. “Get inside these hacker cults and turn them upside down.”

“A lovely thought,” said Hoffman. “But I’m afraid that Mr. O’Keefe and his lawyers have concluded that would be illegal.”

“Pity,” said Strachan.

“Isn’t it,” said Hoffman with a pursed smile.

Weber was silent. This wasn’t his world yet, really. But he knew from what Sandra Bock had told him that Hoffman was attempting to do precisely what he had told the British, in this large gathering, could not be done.

As he was leaving the meeting, Weber stopped by to introduce himself properly to Strachan and hand him an index card with the address for their private rendezvous later that afternoon.