Secrets of State

by Matthew Palmer

  Quick was another potential complication. With any luck, however, it would be weeks before anyone noticed he was missing. The CIA man had been something of a loner. Now he was rotting in a jungle grave in Brazil. Weeder had subcontracted the job out to a local network he had done business with before. They were professional, discreet, and expensive. Spears was confident that problem at least had been contained.

  He thought of Krittenbrink and Quick much as he had of the soldiers he had ordered into combat. It was a dangerous business and sometimes you had to lose a pawn to get to the king. The trick was to remember that other people were playing the same game, and while you were pushing your pawns around the board, some other player was looking at you with the same idea in mind. You never wanted to be someone else’s piece, or at least not a pawn. Pawns were for sacrifice.

  The congressman finished his pitch on ethanol and shook Spears’s hand with the consummate skill of a practiced politician. Firm grip. Two pumps. Left hand on the upper arm. “Stay in touch. Don’t forget to vote.” Spears flashed the ingratiating smile that had been instrumental in his climb up the slippery pole in the Pentagon.

  He sipped his mineral water and looked over the crowd as he mentally reviewed the state of play with the operation. The security leak surrounding the Krittenbrink analysis had been a real scare. He believed the leak had been plugged, but there was no way to be sure. Panoptes had done its work and it was time to deactivate the program. They had moved past that point.

  Krittenbrink’s putting the pieces together the way he had had been a neat piece of work. Spears was not, by nature, introspective. His few short forays into quiet reflection had led him to conclude that he was not particularly good at it nor especially interested in what was there to be found. It was the competitive world around him that engaged Spears. He was smart enough, however, to know that he needed people who could do the kind of thing that Krittenbrink had done. Sam Trainor, for one, would have been a real asset. He may have failed the trolleyology test, but, hell, no test was perfect. It was just broad-brush. Interesting, but not necessarily dispositive. Maybe he should give Sam another shot?

  Spears felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to find a man he knew vaguely standing there with a gin and tonic. He was wearing a blue blazer and gray flannel pants and one of those school ties with little emblems all over them that the East Coast elite seemed so fond of. He was State Department. What was his name? Tennyson? Tannenbaum?

  “Garret, how are you?”

  Tennyck. That was it. J. Winston Tennyck. He was the South Asia DAS who had helped steer the Panoptes contract to Argus.

  “Just fine, Tenny. Thanks.”

  “So your man came by to see me today,” Tenny said.

  “My man?”

  “Sam Trainor.”

  “What about?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. He had the strangest damn story to tell. I didn’t follow the whole thing, but frankly I’m worried about Sam. He didn’t sound entirely rational, and after the Snowden mess, we need to be careful about contractors with clearances.”

  All of Spears’s internal threat warnings lit up, but he kept his expression neutral. He needed more information.

  “To tell you the truth, I’ve been a little concerned about him myself. Sam hasn’t seemed quite right for a while now, and the death of that young analyst in INR hit him really hard.”

  “Do you think it would be a good idea for him to be evaluated?” Tennyck asked, with evident concern. “By a mental health professional, I mean.”

  “This may well require the services of a professional,” Spears replied flatly.

  He leaned in closer to Tenny as though taking him into his confidence.

  “Now, tell me exactly what he told you.”

  • • •

  There was nothing about his demeanor that would have betrayed any hint of alarm to J. Winston Tennyck as the South Asia DAS summarized his conversation with Sam. But behind the mask that he controlled with such care, Garret Spears felt a brief stab of fear and anger.

  Krittenbrink had had a partner.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  SEPTEMBER 12, 1941

  Do you mind if I join you?”

  Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, Office of Naval Intelligence, looked up from his beer and assayed the man who had interrupted his circular train of thought. A civilian in a dark suit and a fedora. He was thin and of average height. In his right hand, he held a black briefcase. The eyes behind the silver wire-rimmed glasses he wore were so blue they were almost clear and they reminded McCollum of the sea. It was a maudlin thought. He was on his fourth beer of the afternoon.

  “It’s a free country,” he said.

  “For now.”

  The civilian doffed his hat and sat across from McCollum at the small table near the back of the bar at the Cosmos Club. He set his hat on the table and his briefcase next to his chair.

  “I haven’t seen you here before. Are you a member?”

  “No,” the man replied. “But I have certain privileges. My name is Smith and there is a particular issue that I would like to discuss with you.”

  “What is it?”

  “This.” From the briefcase, Smith retrieved a manila folder and placed it on the table. McCollum opened it and the shock of adrenaline he felt at the contents cut through the fog of alcohol like a hot knife. McCollum did not need to read the Top Secret memo inside the folder. He knew what it said. He had written it.

  “How did you get this?” he asked.

  “It came to me in the normal course of my duties,” Smith explained unhelpfully.

  “Am I under investigation?” Smith looked like a G-man and McCollum had been keenly aware when he sent the memo that it was the kind of thing that could be used to hang a man.

  “Perhaps. But not by me.”

  “Are you Naval Intelligence?”

  “No.”

  “What then? FBI?”

  Smith smiled, exposing his teeth. “Something else.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “You have it backwards, Commander. The question is not what I want; the question is what am I offering.”

  McCollum looked at Smith suspiciously.

  “Your reasoning in this memo is quite compelling. It so happens that there are others in positions of influence in this government who share your views and appreciate your logic.”

  Some months ago, McCollum had drafted a memo to his superiors in Naval Intelligence detailing eight actions the United States might take to provoke Japan into an attack. War was sweeping the globe. The democracies were losing. The American people, however, having burned their fingers in the Great War and having just begun to pull themselves out of the Great Depression had no interest in foreign entanglements. By the time they awoke to the dangers, it would be too late. The United States could not remain neutral in this global conflict, but it would require some shock to the system to rouse the sleeping American giant. Pushing Japan into an overt act of war, McCollum had argued in his memo, would do just that. His superiors had warned him off this line of argument. It was dangerous, maybe even treasonous. McCollum had been shunted off into a series of lesser assignments, but he had not lost faith in the fundamental rightness of his views. It was this logic loop that had been occupying his thoughts when Mr. Smith arrived to interrupt his beery reverie.

  McCollum closed the folder and pushed it back toward Smith.

  “So what do you propose to do about it?” he asked.

  “Those of us of like minds have been working to put in place policies quite similar to those that you describe in this memo. We believe that we have been successful in bringing the Empire of Japan around to the view that it has no choice but to attack the United States preemptively, although the when and where are for the time being uncertain. Personally, I think the Philippines is the most lik
ely target. More important, there are reasons to believe this attack will trigger war not only with Japan, but also with Germany—a much more dangerous opponent.”

  “What sort of reasons?”

  “Magic.”

  McCollum did not deign to respond.

  “We have broken the Japanese codes,” Smith explained. “Naval and diplomatic. The program is called Magic.”

  McCollum worked in intelligence and he had heard rumors from those in a position to know that the U.S. government was reading the emperor’s mail, but this was the first solid confirmation he had that the program was real.

  “And what do you want from me?”

  “It is important that when the blow finally falls it is strong enough to force the United States into a war it does not yet want. If the military knows through intercepted Japanese traffic that the attack is coming, the navy might respond to preempt it or at least soften the attack to the point where it is no longer a compelling casus belli.”

  McCollum understood this.

  “In my memo, I made the same point, that when the Japanese were ready to attack we should let them hit us hard enough to hurt.”

  “We know. And we appreciate the clarity of your arguments.”

  “I need to ask you again. What’s my role in all this?”

  “Magic is a priceless asset, but it is poorly understood by the navy’s senior leadership and it is underfunded. There are a limited number of translators and analysts. All are overworked. There is a single position responsible for taking the raw intelligence and directing it to the analysts. They only have the time and resources to examine the pieces marked high priority. Routine reports are rarely, if ever, looked at. Those deemed nonsubstantive are simply destroyed. We want you to take that position and use it to ensure that any Magic traffic related to an attack on the United States is kept out of the system.”

  “Who would I be working for?”

  “Nominally, you would be under Admiral Croft, the head of the Magic project. In reality, you would be working for me.”

  There were risks to this, McCollum knew. But they were manageable. The naval bureaucracy was slow and cumbersome. Once war came, all of the antecedents would be lost in the flood of new information. No one was likely to go back to review old reports, at least not until the war was over. He was a patriot. He couldn’t say no.

  “When do I start?” he asked.

  “Would tomorrow be soon enough?”

  “I think that will do. Where do I report?”

  “That’s the best part. One of the sweetest and safest assignments the United States Navy has to offer, right in the belly of the beast. Magic operates out of the headquarters of the Pacific Fleet . . . Pearl Harbor.”

  DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY

  APRIL 15

  Spears had little respect for the Department of Homeland Security. The agency had been cobbled together like some kind of Frankenstein’s monster from various cast-off pieces of the federal government in the frantic and panic-stricken atmosphere following the 9/11 attacks. When the Bush administration ran the proverbial twenty thousand volts through the hybrid beast, however, it did not come to life. Quite the opposite. There was no plan in place to merge the cultures of such disparate agencies as the Secret Service and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Bodyguards and botanists, it turned out, had very different corporate cultures. DHS was a misshapen mishmash of goals and missions typically presided over by a second-tier, swing-state politician who had just lost an election. Little wonder it routinely came in dead last in every federal government survey on the quality of life and work.

  The physical plant of the DHS’s sprawling Nebraska Avenue Complex reflected its organizational entropy. The NAC had begun its life as a World War II–era U.S. Navy facility where mathematicians had worked on cracking Nazi codes. It had all been downhill from there. Since then, the NAC had been—among other things—a seminary and an all-girls school. Now it was in a sorry state of disrepair, with peeling paint, moldy carpets, and exposed asbestos insulation. The government did not want to put any money into the place because it was planning to build DHS a shiny new headquarters facility in southeast D.C., fittingly on the grounds of a former psychiatric hospital.

  Building 19 was a tired-looking, five-story brick structure that was as ugly as it was dysfunctional. But it had a SCIF and it was Homeland Security’s turn to host the meeting of the Governing Council. The Stoics had to keep moving. Routine risked exposure and exposure would ruin them. The country was not yet ready for the kind of higher thinking that the group represented. Someday, maybe. But not today.

  The SCIF on the second floor had mustard-colored drapes covering a window that had been bricked in. The conference table was vintage seventies Formica.

  God, Spears thought with some distaste, DHS really is the bottom feeder in the national security establishment.

  He was early. He had made a point of it.

  One by one, the other members of the Governing Council arrived for what was nominally a routine review of the intelligence collection priorities for the next calendar year. It was the kind of agenda that would explain a senior-level interagency gathering while simultaneously eliciting exactly zero curiosity or interest in the proceedings. In D.C., there were hundreds of meetings a day that looked like this.

  Weeder arrived separately from Spears and took his customary seat in a chair alongside the wall rather than at the table. Ordinarily, the outer ring in a Washington meeting was for staffers and less important participants in the conversation. Weeder, Spears knew, was neither of these.

  Spears looked around the room and marveled at what this group could do. These were largely anonymous men and women whose names would be all but unknown to ordinary people in outside-the-Beltway America. But from within the bureaucracy, the people on the Council could move mountains . . . or crush them into gravel if that was more convenient.

  The current Vice Chair commanded no more than a desk and a phone, but with a single call, she could deploy aircraft carriers across oceans on the far side of the globe. Finance could make you rich or break you as a single carefully worded statement sent stock prices climbing or wheat futures crashing. Cross him and Legal could turn your life inside out with a federal investigation so overwhelming in its intensity that it hardly mattered whether you were ultimately found guilty.

  This was real power, the power to change the world. Change it for the better, Spears was confident, even if that meant that some had to be sacrificed for the greater good.

  The Chairman brought the meeting to order.

  “Thank you for coming on short notice,” he began. “This is an extraordinary session of the Governing Council, which itself is a rare event. It will be so noted in the records. We are approaching the culmination of one of the most ambitious and complex operations in the history of our organization, and it may behoove us to scale back the meeting schedule once our plans have come to fruition. For now, however, there are decisions to be made. Operations requested this session and I turn the floor over to him for his report.”

  Spears took a sip from the glass of water in front of him. He was uncharacteristically nervous. The Council, he knew, would not be pleased with what he had to say. He would have to shape his message with care.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d like to begin by emphasizing that Cold Harbor remains very much on track. There is no change in the timeline, and the operation on the ground has been making better-than-expected progress.”

  “It sure sounds like there’s a sizeable ‘but’ attached to the end of that sentence,” Reports interjected.

  “There have been some challenges,” Spears said, “and some setbacks requiring . . . creative solutions.”

  “Like murder?” Plans asked icily.

  “Yes,” Spears replied with equanimity. “Something very much like that. The greatest good and al
l . . .”

  “So what . . . setbacks . . . haven’t you told us about, yet?”

  “You are all aware of the Krittenbrink situation.” Heads around the room nodded. “We had to act urgently and before obtaining the full authorization of the Council. Krittenbrink had drafted a paper describing in remarkable detail the outlines of the Panoptes program. Even if he did not yet understand the purpose of the program, a document like that in the hands of our opponents in the Lord administration would almost certainly have forced the cancellation of Cold Harbor. That outcome was not acceptable. We needed to move quickly. I authorized the Commander to eliminate the threat.”

  This was not entirely accurate. Weeder did not really take orders from Spears. He took his cues directly from the Chairman, and it had been the Commander who had recommended taking Krittenbrink out before he could share the document more widely.

  “In addition to dealing directly with Krittenbrink, we eliminated any trace of the Panoptes material from the databases. The DTG numbers linked to the products produced as part of the Panoptes program now link to innocuous material unrelated to Cold Harbor. That program had largely run its course in any event, and we would soon have moved to strip those products from the system, so it is no real loss.”

  “I assume, though, that your efforts to contain the threat were not successful,” Reports said. “Otherwise, why summon the Council to an extraordinary session? What is the current complication?”

  “Krittenbrink was not operating alone. I now have reason to believe that he had a partner, Samuel Trainor. He is an Argus employee hired to head up the South Asia unit and he previously worked with Krittenbrink at State/INR. Trainor has somehow obtained a copy of some of the material that our operations team has been preparing for Phase II of Cold Harbor. It is not on the face of it incriminating material, and we are prepared to dismiss it as war-gaming activity. But Trainor has been shopping some theories to at least one senior official that are distressingly accurate. This is not as urgent as the Krittenbrink situation since Trainor does not seem to have a copy of the Panoptes file, but it is important and I am bringing this issue to you to seek guidance from the Council.”