The Director

6

K. J. Sandoval’s message arrived at Headquarters late Friday morning, Washington time. She sent it in her pseudonym, which wasn’t Kitten or even Helen, but “Mildred G. Mansfield.” It was transmitted on the “restricted handling” channel, personal for the director. In cablese, she described the Swiss walk-in (REF A) to the Hamburg consulate (LOC B); she summarized his claim that the agency’s internal communications had been compromised, including true names of officers of an organization she referenced only by cryptonym.

She sent Rudolf Biel’s true name and the location where he had appeared in separate cables for security. She described his warning that agency systems were insecure, and his supporting evidence in the list of officers’ names in Germany and Switzerland. She noted his references to Friends of Cerberus and the Exchange, but left out his self-description as “Swiss Maggot.” She asked that any traces on him be run off-line. She concluded by saying that he had refused to stay in an agency residence, believing that it was unsafe, and that he would return to the consulate on Monday morning.

The message was restrained and professional, but it rang alarm bells. It was routed to Graham Weber through the Europe Division, to which Sandoval reported, with a copy to the director’s chief of staff, Sandra Bock. When the message landed on the seventh floor, Weber was at lunch on Capitol Hill visiting the chairman and ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. The communications clerk made sure the chief of staff was notified that the director had an RH message in his queue.

Bock knew the information was urgent as soon as she read it. The worst calamity for an intelligence agency is a penetration agent or a code break, and this hinted at both. She cabled the base in Hamburg and told Sandoval to stay put, pending instructions. Bock was not an excitable person. She was a twenty-year CIA veteran who had risen in the organization through brute competence, starting as a Near East South Asia analyst, then moving to Science and Technology, then serving as station chief in Tunis and finally running the Support directorate. She was a sturdy woman, big all over and allergic to dieting. She dressed in black pants suits every day, as if she were wearing a uniform.

Bock considered alerting the director while he was at lunch. But she decided it would be unsettling for him and might only make the members of Congress ask questions. She checked to see if the head of the Office of Security was in the building, but he was traveling. As a backup, she checked the Information Operations Center, which was located in an office block a few miles away. The director, James Morris, was at lunch, so she left a message asking him to call as soon as he returned.

Finally, she called Weber’s security detail and asked the chief to alert her when the boss was leaving the Capitol on his way back to Langley. She was waiting in his outer office when he returned.

Weber was removing the necktie he had worn for his luncheon at the Capitol when he walked in the door. His cheeks were red. At the congressmen’s insistence, he’d had a glass of wine at lunch. He was hurrying. His face said, Don’t bother me.

“What’s up?” he asked Bock, barely looking at her. He wanted her answer to be nothing, so that he could get to work on the pile of paper in his in-box. Listening to the congressmen lecture him about how to run the agency had put him in a bad mood. But she was such a large presence he couldn’t very well walk around her.

“I think you need to take a look at this, Mr. Director,” she said. “It arrived while you were at lunch.” She handed him the cable, clad in a red folder, and followed him into his interior office.

Weber sat down at his big desk and studied the cable and attachments. When he finished, he looked up at her, focusing those marble-blue eyes. He trusted Bock, a tough woman manager who didn’t know how to cut corners. He was sensible enough, in his first week, to take her advice before issuing any orders.

“What the hell does this mean?” he asked.

He motioned for Bock to sit down, but she remained standing.

“We don’t know. But we have to assume that it could be bad.”

“I thought CIA communications were unbreakable. That’s what people have been telling me all week.”

“Nothing is unbreakable, sir. Our systems are supposed to be secure, unless someone is inside the gap.”

CIA systems, in theory, were protected by what was known as an “air gap,” which meant that they were entirely separate, electronically, from the Internet or any other nonsecure computing systems.

Weber thought a moment. There wasn’t passion or anxiety on his face, just the cold calculation of options and possibilities.

“Could this be some kind of provocation from another service?” he asked.

“Maybe,” answered Bock. “Most of our people are declared to the Germans and Swiss. Someone could get those officers’ names through liaison. But I don’t understand how this walk-in would have that information from any normal channel.”

“Why did she let him leave the consulate?”

“She thought she had no choice.”

“Mistake,” said Weber. “There’s always a choice.”

The director thought some more. He put a finger to his lip and traced its outline while his chief of staff waited like a big black crow across from his desk.

“Who’s the best person to manage this? You know the staff. I don’t. Who’s the right one? Start with the case officer. Who’s she?”

“I pulled her file,” said Bock. “Her name is K. J. Sandoval. The ‘K’ is for Kitten, and don’t ask me because I don’t know. She’s a hard worker, good fitness reports, GS-13 but will probably never make supergrade. She has a few recruitments, but nothing spectacular. I’m told EUR gave her the base in Hamburg as a reward for not making trouble.”

“She sounds like mediocrity, squared.”

“I can’t disagree with that, Director.”

“Who else? The Clandestine Service is just sitting around waiting for me to make a mistake. Who’s a superstar over there?”

“The NCS doesn’t do superstars anymore. Operations officers decided that sticking their necks out was dangerous to their health. I’d suggest you ask Mr. Beasley, for starters.”

“Black Jack Beasley is a card counter,” said Weber. “That’s what everyone says. He’ll always stand on seventeen.”

Earl Beasley was the first African-American to head the National Clandestine Service. His nickname “Black Jack” came not from his skin color, but because in his younger days he had hustled every casino from Las Vegas to Atlantic City. He was a math prodigy who had dropped out of Princeton to play cards. His secret advantage had been racism. People just couldn’t imagine back then that a black man could actually keep track of all the numbers. Later, before joining the agency, Beasley had a brief but very lucrative stint as a trader for an investment bank. He was a risk-taker, which Weber liked, but he had become a creature of the CIA culture.

“Who else can we bring in? I want someone who’s smart enough to see around corners. This walk-in is a serious hacker, from what Sandoval says in her cable. What about the young guy who runs Information Ops? I met him last year. He seemed smart as hell.”

“James Morris,” she said, taking a step toward his desk. “He’s the director of the Information Operations Center. The book on him is that he’s a computer genius. He used to be a mathematician, then some kind of hacker. He’s spooky smart, that’s what everyone says.”

Weber’s eyes narrowed. It was part of his character, as a smart man himself, to believe that other smart people could solve problems. He’d been known at his company for picking the brightest kids and giving them lots of responsibility. That was part of his management style, hiring the special while bypassing the ordinary.

“I liked this kid when I met him,” said Weber. “He’s hard to read, but he knows a lot. Get him over here.”

“I called him while you were on the Hill. He was at lunch, but I left an urgent message.”

“Find him. I want to talk with him as soon as I can this afternoon. I have to meet with employees at four. After that let’s have a senior staff meeting at five with Beasley and the general counsel and the DDI and whoever else should be on the card, plus Morris. Does that make sense?”

“Yes, Mr. Director, I’ll let you know when Morris is on his way.” She spoke crisply, without a trace of emotion on her face. That was the problem with Bock. She was so immune to charm and manipulation that she didn’t give any clues what she was thinking beneath the surface.

“And call the base chief in Hamburg. Tell her you’ve briefed me, and to sit tight while we figure out what to do.”

Marie knocked on the director’s door just after three and said that Mr. Morris had arrived. Weber had a sense of anticipation, the way he used to feel before launching a new business deal.

James Morris hadn’t changed from what Weber remembered. He was tall and thin. The glasses were tinted now, and he was wearing a plain black T-shirt and a black linen jacket. He didn’t look like anyone else that Weber had met in his first week at the CIA.

“What do you know?” asked Weber. It was his habitual, informal greeting. He took Morris’s hand. “Good to see you again.”

“You got the big office,” said Morris, trying to reciprocate the informality. “Quieter than Caesar’s Palace.”

“Not anymore,” said Weber.

Weber motioned for Morris to take a seat on the couch, while he settled into the big easy chair. Weber’s office was still undecorated except for a large map of the world and a photograph of the president. What drew the eye was the outdoors, glimpsed through the glass windows. With the trees nearly stripped of their leaves in mid-October, it was a scene painted with a palette of reddish brown, rather than green.

“What have you been doing the past year?” said Weber.

“Working hard, trying some new things, but spinning my wheels a lot of the time. People have been, you know, distracted with the Jankowski thing.”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Weber. “To push ‘restart.’ Tell me about yourself. The details you weren’t supposed to tell me before.”

Morris offered a shy half smile. He had a sparkle in his eye, a glitter. Weber had seen it before with very smart people. They were plugged into an energy that wasn’t on the normal grid.

“I’m the agency computer guy. That’s what you heard, I’m sure. And it’s basically true. I was a math major at Stanford, then I spent a couple of years in China working for Microsoft, then went to Carnegie Mellon to do my doctorate in electrical engineering but instead got recruited by Clowns in Action.”

“Clowns in Action?”

“Sorry, Mr. Director, inside joke. I apologize.”

“Don’t. I may use it myself. So keep going. What did you do when you got to the agency?”

“I did Operations. They wanted to send me to S and T, but I could have stayed at CMU if I’d wanted to be an engineer. It turned out that I was good at recruiting systems administrators. We spoke the same language. The Clandestine Service sent me to Paris and Hong Kong. Then they brought me home for a while, and then I worked at the White House on the national security staff for two years. Then they brought me back to run Information Operations. That’s me.”

“I already know you won Hacker Jeopardy three years in a row.”

Morris smiled.

“I didn’t tell you my screen name was ‘Pownzor.’ That’s still my nickname at the Information Operations Center. The new kids think it’s cool.”

“What does it mean, ‘Pownzor’?”

“It means, ‘I own you.’ On the Net, people say you ‘pown’ someone when you take down his system, and the guy who does it is the pownzor.”

Weber was nodding, liking what he heard. Those cold blue eyes were appraising Morris.

“Impressive,” said Weber. “And are you still a hacker?”

Morris smiled that wary, coy smile again. “What’s the right answer?” he asked.

“There isn’t one.”

“Then, yes, of course I’m still a hacker. I work for the CIA, for god’s sake. That’s the biggest hack in the world, right? We own everyone.”

“I lied,” said Weber. “There was a right answer.”

The young man smiled, just an instant. He was losing his shyness. He looked the director in the eye.

“You did something brave this week, Mr. Director.”

“What’s that? Showing up?”

“You removed the statue of ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. He represents some serious agency juju, all the way back to our godparents in London. Some people aren’t going to like that.”

“Hell, that’s just an old piece of sculpture. I’ll put it back in a year or two. This place just needs some new faces, a little airing out.”

“It’s more than that. It’s cutting the cord. It’s a declaration of independence. It’s—” The young man was going to go on, but he stopped suddenly, as if he were about to utter something dangerous, and closed his mouth.

The director got up and called to Marie for some coffee, and in an instant she carried in a tray of beverages, hot and cold, accompanied by cookies and finger sandwiches. Weber poured himself a cup of coffee. As he stirred the grains of sweetener into the black liquid, he made up his mind.

“So I have a problem,” said the director. “And I’ve decided that it’s about to become your problem.”

Weber waited for Morris to say something, but he didn’t, so the director continued. He handed Morris a copy of the cable that had been sent a few hours before from Germany.

“We had a walk-in at our base in Hamburg today. A young man asked to meet with me personally, but the base chief said that was impossible. He was a kid, a hacker from Zurich. He claimed to have urgent information.”

“What did he want to tell you?” Morris leaned forward intently and adjusted his glasses.

“He said we had been hacked. Someone had gotten inside our systems. I don’t know all the details yet, but he had a list of names of our officers in Switzerland and Germany that my chief of staff Sandra Bock says was legit.”

Morris nodded. He didn’t speak for a long moment, and then he turned to the director and said, “Of course.”

“What does that mean?” asked Weber.

“Of course I’ll help, if you want me to.”

Weber sat back in his chair, off balance. He wasn’t used to someone accepting an assignment he hadn’t formally made yet. But he liked the young man’s enthusiasm and spontaneity.

“Good. I want fresh eyes on this. I want you to be aggressive, but not stupid. This building would love to see me declare a three-alarm fire and lock all the doors and windows so that nothing will change, ever.”

Morris blinked. He looked down at the cable, then back at the director. “Where is the walk-in now?” he asked.

“We don’t know. He wouldn’t go to one of our safe houses. He said we were penetrated and that we couldn’t protect him.”

“I’ll try to find him, Mr. Director. Bring him out. It’s dangerous for him to be alone.”

“How are you going to locate someone who disappeared?”

“That’s my job, to be inside these networks.”

“I thought the hacker underground was off-limits. People have been telling me that all week.”

Morris’s voice fell to a lower register.

“We have some special operations. They’re run outside the building so we don’t have to clear them with intelligence committees. I have a few platforms and nonofficial cover slots. Ask Mr. Hoffman. He approved it.”

Weber nodded. A week into the job, and the secrets were beginning to come out of hiding.

“Is this kosher? I want you to be aggressive, but legal. This place doesn’t need more scandals.”

“It’s what it is, sir. Like most things around here. I just don’t want you to get blindsided.”

Weber took the cable in his hand and searched for the name of walk-in.

“Have you ever heard of this Swiss kid, Rudolf Biel?”

“No, sir. But I think I know the organization he’s telling us about. They spin around a German hacker group. They have Russian connections, too. We’ve been pinging them for a while.”

Weber drummed his fingers on the table. Morris took a set of jade worry beads from his pocket and then thought better of it and put them back in his pocket.

Weber broke the silence.

“Walk me through it: We need to get him out, but carefully, or his organization will know we’re on to them.”

“Correct, sir. They will take appropriate precautions.”

“But we can’t just throw him back. He’s a dead man if we do that. So what do you recommend to the new director?”

Morris disappeared behind those glasses for a moment as he pondered the problem. Then he began talking quickly, in a light, staccato voice, almost a patter.

“So… maybe we arrange his exfiltration so it looks like he’s dead. We prepare something: a car crash or a boat sinking or a drug overdose. We dummy up the paper for the Germans so they confirm he’s dead, and meanwhile we get him out on the sly. Then we watch his friends to see if they swallow the lie.”

“That works,” said Weber. “I like you. You’re ready to roll the dice. Let’s get you some help.”

Weber punched the intercom for Marie. “Get me Beasley,” he said.

Morris shook his head and mouthed the word, No.

“Hold that,” said Weber into the phone. He turned to Morris.

“Don’t you need Beasley? He’s the head of the Clandestine Service. How are you going to run your exfiltration without him?”

“This should be an IOC case. Beasley would do it old-style, break a lot of furniture.”

“But he runs operations.”

Morris answered with the assertive tone of a man who wanted to build a new franchise.

“We know the hacker underground, Mr. Director. We aren’t afraid of it. Hell, sir, we are it. We have a new capability: I call it our ‘special access unit.’ We have some ex-military people who help us out. We can use them.”

“Christ, how did you get all that? It’s not on any budget I’ve seen.”

“It was part of the same authority that gave us the IOC platforms overseas. Right before Director Jankowski left. It was a package. Everyone signed off on it.”

“Except me.”

The director leaned back and ran his fingers through his blond hair and then patted it in place. He wanted to trust the young computer wizard, but this was his first week on the job.

“I wish we had more time.”

Morris’s tone was calmer now, more reassuring.

“I can do it, Mr. Director. It’s on me, if something goes wrong. My resignation will be on your desk.”

Weber laughed at the false bravado.

“Oh, come on, Morris. Don’t overdo it. I’ll tell Sandra Bock to prepare the paperwork. Just don’t screw it up.”

Morris offered a thin smile. “Thanks, Mr. Director.” He flipped a half salute. “How soon should I get started?”

“Fly to Germany tomorrow. Meet the base chief. Her name is Sandoval. Help her out.”

Morris adjusted his glasses. The stubble on his face looked darker, as the afternoon light deepened.

“Who’s running the case, me or her?”

“You are. Find him, if you can. And work up your plan for getting him out and debriefing him.”

“And you’re okay that Mr. Beasley will be unhappy with this. The Hamburg base chief reports to him.”

“That’s my problem. I’m the director. Be back here at five for a staff meeting. Beasley will be here, along with the other ‘clowns.’ I’ll tell everyone this is the way I want to run it. You can explain your plan.”

Morris looked at the director curiously. He was a controlled, restrained man, but there was a flicker in one eye, almost a tremor.

“This will rock the boat, Mr. Director. People won’t be pleased.”

“Good. I get paid to take risks. You’re my first one at the agency. So like I said, don’t screw up.”

Morris smiled. The momentary tremor had vanished. He gave the director a thumbs-up, and then shook his hand.

“You need to own this, Pownzor,” said the director. “I mean it.”

Morris nodded gravely. Then the shy smile returned as he walked out the door.