The Director

30

Admiral Lloyd Schumer called the CIA director to alert him that he was sending a report for his eyes only. Weber read it as soon as it arrived, while the courier waited outside. It was a brief analytical report describing evidence that James Morris and other CIA personnel who worked for him had been in unauthorized contact with foreign nationals from China, Russia, Israel and Britain. The report cited the NSA’s forward network-monitoring of malware that might be used by Morris, and the analysts’ assessment that an attack was likely.

The report was written in careful, noncommittal language, but the inference was clear: A foreign intelligence service might have access to the CIA’s secret networks, through Morris or some other channel. The report also cited an earlier CIA defector report from Hamburg, never confirmed, about a possible hostile penetration of the agency’s systems.

Weber’s throat was dry. He had trouble swallowing for a moment. He took a drink from the jug of water on the credenza. There was nothing in the report that he hadn’t already suspected, based on what Ariel Weiss had discovered. But it was a jolt seeing it typed on a page and bound in the top-secret folder of another agency. He felt the vulnerability of an automobile driver who sees another vehicle veering toward him as if in slow motion. The driver sees the crash coming with perfect vision, a frame at a time, but he cannot stop it.

On his desk Weber had taped the words of the oath of office he had taken a few weeks before. The language was dry and archaic, but he took the words seriously and looked down at them occasionally as a reminder of what mattered: He had solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. He had taken that obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and he had promised to faithfully discharge the duties of his office.

And now, he thought, so help me God, I am failing. He sensed enemies, foreign and domestic, but he couldn’t touch them. He wanted to defend the Constitution, but he wasn’t sure what that meant.

Beside the copy of the oath Weber had taped the three rules Sandra Bock had given him after he arrived as director: Always have a plan. Always be the first to move. Always seek cover and escape the fire zone. He was violating all three injunctions. This wasn’t his world. The CIA wasn’t his enterprise. His movements in this job were not intuitive and natural. They were guesses, rather than instincts.

Weber had only one colleague he trusted, and her only partially, a young woman with abundant intelligence and ambition but limited experience. He suspected the motives of most everyone else around him; even his chief of staff Sandra Bock was an agency loyalist who would work easily enough for another director when he was gone. But he had asked Ariel Weiss to be his person and work secretly for him. He needed to talk with her now, and he couldn’t wait for another elaborate exchange of signals and a meeting in a suburban parking lot.

Instead of sending a circuitous message, Weber decided to invite Weiss through the front door. He summoned Bock and told her that with James Morris still unreachable, whereabouts unknown, he needed to see the deputy director of the Information Operations Center immediately.

Dr. Weiss appeared in the director’s office an hour later. She was carrying a red folder that contained summaries of the IOC’s current activities along with some new research on Morris.

Weiss hadn’t had time to dress up for the sudden visit to the seventh floor. She wore her casual IOC outfit: black jeans, white shirt, short tailored jacket, long black hair pulled up in a bun that revealed her graceful neck. Weber still found Weiss’s physical presence disorienting.

“Take a seat, Deputy Chief,” said Weber. “We need to talk.”

He opened his desk drawer and removed a plastic device that looked like a radio — alarm clock. He set it down on the coffee table facing the couch where Weiss had taken a seat. He flipped a switch, and from the device came the sound of surf on a beach: the gentle cascade of the wave rolling inshore and the pebbly wash of its retreat. Weber turned up the volume until it was loud enough to cover their voices.

“It’s called a Sound Soother,” he said. “It’s supposed to help you fall asleep. Never travel without one.”

“Are you kidding me? You think you might be bugged in your own office?”

“The walls have ears,” he said, smiling, under the sound of the waves. “People have been playing games with me from the first day I took this job. Around here, even the shadows cast shadows.”

She appraised him. He wasn’t Superman, certainly, but he was tough. He was making bets without knowing the outcome.

“You’re a gamer,” she said. “You don’t scare easily.”

“I’m stubborn. I received a report this morning from the NSA. They’re seeing the same foreign tracks around Morris that you did. They’re wondering if there’s someone inside the agency with a foreign connection.”

“How can I help?” That, at least, was not an offer she had made to Hoffman.

Weber ran his hands through his hair. It was too long. Since becoming CIA director, he hadn’t found time to get a haircut.

“I’ll draw you a chart. You’re an engineer. You people always like charts.”

Weber went to his desk and retrieved a pad of paper. When he returned to the couch, he drew a circle, and around its circumference he wrote five names: Timothy O’Keefe; Cyril Hoffman; Earl Beasley; Ruth Savin; and Graham Weber.

“These are the five members of a committee that nobody is supposed to know about. The members call it the Special Activities Review Committee. The committee, how should I put this? It authorizes things in the name of the president that would probably be illegal, if anyone outside this circle knew about them.”

Weiss studied the list. She pointed to one of the five names.

“Ruth Savin is the CIA general counsel. How can it be illegal if she’s a member of the group?”

“That’s precisely what she would say if anyone ever raised questions. She has legal opinions saying that the impermissible is permissible. That’s what this committee is all about. I decided my first week here I can live with that. The president is the president. The Constitution says he can order whatever he wants through his representative on this committee, who is O’Keefe. So for constitutional reasons, I’m removing the commander-in-chief’s man from my list of suspects. I’ll remove myself, too, unless you object.”

Weiss laughed. “You’re the only honest one in the bunch.”

Weber crossed out O’Keefe’s name and his own from the chart.

“Let’s suppose,” continued Weber, “that someone on this committee is working for another government. My first job as CIA director is to identify that person and stop him, or her.”

Weiss shook her head.

“You’re looking for trouble, Mr. Director,” she responded. “Don’t complicate things. The bad guy here is Morris.”

“That’s what it looks like. But if there’s one thing I’ve begun to learn around here, it’s that you shouldn’t assume the obvious. It could be any of them. We don’t have a ‘mole.’ That’s Cold War talk. We have a big fat worm that’s eating us from the inside out. It’s hiding now, waiting for me to make a mistake and get fired, so it can go back to work. But it’s here. There’s a ghost in the machine. I can feel it.”

She gave him a look that mixed fear and something else, between sympathy and pity.

“I’m sorry for you, Graham.” She had never used his first name before, so the word had a kind of intimacy. “What are you going to do about it?”

“We stress the system, to see who gets nervous. I am going to hit my fellow committee members. Scare the hell out of them, probe for the areas that would make them vulnerable to foreign manipulation: debts, personal connections, past activities. And then we see if they sweat. It’s like what the Office of Security does around here, hooking people up to the box — except without a box.”

“I can sweat their computer systems, too,” said Weiss. “Have you ever heard of ‘digital hydrosis’? If you stress a system hard, it perspires.”

“The things I don’t know… How do computers sweat?”

“Malware has tells. When you interrogate the system, it can’t help but reveal inconsistencies like latency and other stuff when it’s under the control of an outside attacker.”

“Sorry, but that is unintelligible to me.”

“Easy explanation?”

“That’s the only kind I’ll understand.”

“Okay: If an attacker is controlling a system remotely, their interaction is slower than a user interfacing through a local mouse and keyboard — because it has to route through the global network. That’s latency. And automated software accessing content on a network is going to do so in set intervals, where a human browsing would be at random intervals. That’s another tell. Lastly, everything that executes on a computer has a unique digital fingerprint which can be hashed into a unique identifier that can’t be changed or spoofed.”

“So make the machines sweat. Scare the crap out of them.”

“I’ll try. But you make me nervous with your sound machine. I don’t want to get fired. I want to get promoted.”

“Your request is logged.” Weber was trying to make a joke of it.

“That’s not good enough. I’m risking everything. I need a promise.”

“The only person who can fire you is me, and I trust you.”

Weiss studied him. She understood him so little. Perhaps it was the businessman side of him, that he had so few edges or corners. His life was smooth. It didn’t have tracks.

“How do I know that I can trust you?” she asked. “Some people warn me that I shouldn’t. They think I’m making a mistake. They think you’ll never last here.”

“Do you believe them?”

Weiss thought about her conversation with Hoffman, the warning from her ex-boyfriend Aronson, the gossip among friends, the occasional shots across her bow from rivals within the building. These dangers were in the air, but the man across from her was real.

“I don’t know. I want to believe that you can deliver. This place will be a mess if you fail.”

“Then make a bet on me,” he said. “You’ll come out a winner.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Graham,” she said.

“I don’t.”

“Let me ask you something, since we’re being honest. Do you have a private life?”

“Not really. Not since I took this job.”

“Well, here’s some unsolicited advice. Be careful. There are a lot of people in this building who don’t like you. When the secretaries see me walking into your office, they roll their eyes. And outside, it’s even worse. The DNI hates you. It’s an open secret around town. You need to be careful. You’re not from this neighborhood. If I’m the only friend you have, that’s not enough.”

Weber nodded. She stood and walked toward the door. He was going to call her back, but he knew that every word she had said was true. He did need to be careful. But he was going to run this all the way down to the end — find out who the traitor was and catch him in the act.

When Ariel Weiss left his office, Weber told Jack Fong, the head of his security detail, that he was going for a walk. He went to his desk and removed his Nokia trash phone and several one-time SIM cards; from another drawer, he took the encrypted BlackBerry that had his personal contacts. He took the elevator downstairs, accompanied as always. His security chief pressed the button for the garage level, thinking that they were taking the vehicle, but Weber punched “Lobby.”

As he walked through the marble court, a few employees nodded but only one came up to shake his hand. The electric atmosphere of his first days had gone. People understood that the agency was in some kind of difficulty, even though they didn’t know what it was. The rumors were flying that Weber might be leaving after a month on the job.

When he was outside, in the slight chill of early November, Weber stopped a moment and told the chief of his detail that just this once he thought he could manage by himself. He was only going a few hundred yards. When the chief protested, Weber told him it was an order. He descended the steps and walked across the VIP parking lot to the main road that circled the Headquarters complex. He headed right and walked just past the drive that led to his private garage.

Weber stopped and sat down on a bench. He took out his Nokia and made three calls, each to a senior national security official he had met through the Intelligence Advisory Board and an earlier tour on the Defense Policy Board. One now held a senior position in the National Security Agency; the second worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; the third was in the National Security Branch of the FBI. Each had access to the most secret counterintelligence information in the government.

Weber hoped that he had established a personal relationship with each one that was strong enough to carry the weight he was about to impose. But he wouldn’t know for sure until his private network was in action.

Weber began by asking each one if they would promise not to reveal what he was about to tell them, regardless of other commitments they might have. Each agreed, reluctantly. Weber then explained that he was beginning a very secret counterintelligence investigation and would need help. He would be examining three senior intelligence officials. He explained the specifics of what he would be looking for: names, actions, reference points. He asked each of the three to report anything relevant to him personally, after leaving a coded message in Stratford Park off Old Dominion Drive in Arlington.

“I need to see who runs where, after I squeeze them,” he told each of his accomplices. “If they contact foreigners, I want to know.”

Before each new call, he changed the SIM card in the phone. When he was done, he walked back to find his security chief pacing by the front door.