Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  In the late 1990s, Binney, along with Ed Loomis and a few other NSA experts in the SARC, began to work on programs to bring the NSA kicking and screaming into the digital age. Their first attempt was a research project called Grandmaster, which was later refined and developed into a program called Thin Thread. Thin Thread was really four programs in one. The most important of the four was called Mainway. It was the primary analytical tool included in Thin Thread, and was a graphing and social network building process that was years ahead of its time. It applied chaining and link analysis to the data that was streaming through Thin Thread, providing one of the most powerful data search tools devised by the NSA up to that time. It allowed intensive web-based data searches without requiring the NSA to store the data first.

  And so, at about the same time that Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were working on a research project on search engines that they turned into a start-up company named Google, Bill Binney and Ed Loomis were working in a small government lab on a project they thought would revolutionize the way the American intelligence community collected and analyzed data in secret.

  Just before the turn of the century, Binney, Loomis, and their team at the SARC were convinced that Thin Thread provided a leap forward for the NSA and would put the agency back in the forefront of web-based technology. They expected NSA’s top managers to embrace their program and give them the modest funding required to deploy it throughout the NSA system.

  Instead, their ideas and program were rejected. First, the NSA’s in-house lawyers raised objections, saying that Thin Thread would violate the law by collecting too much data on U.S. citizens, dismissing Binney’s claims that the protections built into his system would comply with the law. Next, NSA managers said that Thin Thread would not “scale,” meaning that it could never handle the enormous volume of data searches that NSA’s analysts conducted on a daily basis. Eventually, it became clear to Binney and his team that the real reason for the opposition to Thin Thread was that top NSA officials were already backing a different approach to dealing with the Internet—a huge new program called Trailblazer. While Thin Thread was a small, in-house pilot project developed on the cheap by a few NSA employees, Trailblazer was a sprawling multibillion-dollar program that involved large outside contractors, led by SAIC, a national security consulting firm that was deeply intertwined with the NSA and its management. SAIC was the prime contractor on Trailblazer, and in 2000, SAIC executive Bill Black was named deputy director of the NSA.

  Stonewalled by management, Binney decided to go around his NSA bosses and take his case for Thin Thread to Congress, and specifically to Diane Roark.

  Diane Roark was a staffer on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, assigned to handle oversight of the NSA. Born on a farm in Oregon in 1949, Roark had graduated from Catholic University in Washington, earned a PhD in political science from the University of Florida, and then began working for the government in 1981 when she joined the Energy Department. She rose quickly over the next few years, moving first to the Department of Defense and then the National Security Council at the White House in the Reagan administration. She had been at the House committee since 1985. By the late 1990s, her oversight work on the NSA had made her increasingly skeptical of the agency and its hodgepodge approach to coping with the digital revolution. The NSA had no strategy to make sure that its technical research would provide useful tools for its intelligence operations.

  “There wasn’t any coherent approach to dealing with the Internet and the digital age,” recalled Roark. “Everybody just did what they were interested in. There was a big separation between the technical and the operations people, and the technical people didn’t seem to care about whether what they were doing helped the operations people. Nobody tracked how they were spending their money. It was pretty bad.”

  Worse, Roark realized that the NSA didn’t really want to change. “They were so used to believing that they were ahead on technology, they didn’t realize that they had fallen behind. There was just about no relationship between the NSA and Silicon Valley at that time. They had extreme insularity. I was really alarmed. But they just kept saying we are okay, just give us money and everything will be okay.”

  A massive computer crash at the NSA that lasted for three days in January 2000 only increased Roark’s skepticism, and made her realize that the agency had to undergo fundamental change.

  Her doubts made Roark a natural ally for a brilliant maverick like Bill Binney. She had first met him when Binney briefed her on the SARC’s work. She had been impressed and stayed in touch with him as she began to investigate the NSA’s weaknesses. And so in his battle with NSA management to save Thin Thread in the years just before 9/11, Binney decided to turn to Roark for help.

  After Binney briefed her, Roark became excited by Thin Thread’s potential, and she began asking top NSA officials uncomfortable questions about the program’s status. She was frustrated that the program had not been used before the millennium, when there were reports of possible terrorist plots.

  She also began to look more closely at Trailblazer. She realized to her horror that the NSA liked Trailblazer so much in part because it was designed to try to connect the agency’s old, existing analog technology to the new digital revolution. Roark insisted on briefings from Trailblazer managers and came away convinced that the program was doomed to become a costly failure.

  “Trailblazer was supposed to build an Internet software-based system on top of an analog hardware system, and it just wasn’t going to work,” she recalled. “They had always felt comfortable with their existing systems. They wanted to use pre-Internet technology for the Internet age. I told them right away that would fail. It was just common sense.” (Roark proved prescient. Years later, the NSA abandoned Trailblazer. After spending billions of dollars on the program’s development, the agency was finally forced to admit that it would not work.)

  By early 2000, Roark’s intervention began to infuriate NSA Director Michael Hayden. He had already decided to go with Trailblazer and SAIC over Thin Thread, and he wanted Congress to give the agency the billions of dollars that Trailblazer would demand, no questions asked. He certainly did not want to have to explain himself to some lowly congressional staffer.

  Hayden suspected that it was Binney who had been feeding Roark information, and so he called Binney on the carpet, accusing him of insubordination. He then issued an agency-wide directive to make sure that no one else tried to go around him to Congress again. In an April 14, 2000, message to the NSA workforce, Hayden demanded loyalty, compliance, and silence. He made it clear that he considered Congress the enemy, and that giving congressional overseers any unfiltered information was an act of betrayal.

  “Some individuals, in a session with our congressional overseers, took a position in direct opposition to one that we had corporately decided to follow,” Hayden wrote. “This misleads the Congress regarding our Agency’s direction and resolve. The corporate decision was made after much data gathering, analysis, debate and thought. Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform NSA, and I cannot tolerate them. I have dealt with the people involved. . . . This was a disregard of decisions we had made together and, as such, could not be tolerated.”

  “I do not expect sheepish acquiescence,” he added, “but I do expect that problems necessitating course corrections will be handled within these walls. I must insist on all of us having the personal discipline to adhere to our corporate decisions, including those with which we disagree.”

  Binney’s efforts to go around Hayden effectively ended his career at the NSA. His lobbying campaign for Thin Thread was now met with deaf ears throughout the entire agency, and the program stalled and then languished, despite Roark’s continued pushing. Binney stayed on for another year, but by the fall of 2001, he and two others from the SARC—Ed Loomis and Kirk Wiebe—had had enough. They decided to retire together to start the
ir own company. If the NSA didn’t want Thin Thread, maybe they could sell it on the open market.

  The 9/11 attacks happened just as Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe were on their way out. Like the rest of the intelligence community, the NSA had failed to prevent the attacks, and a sense of guilt and shame spread quickly among NSA personnel who knew the truth about the agency’s failings. Prior to 9/11, terrorism had been a low priority within the NSA, which was still fixated on listening to the secret communications of foreign governments. Its dismissive pre-9/11 view that there was little intelligence to be gained by monitoring open communications on the Internet proved disastrous.

  In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration scrambled for answers, and CIA Director George Tenet sent out a secret directive to each intelligence agency to move aggressively to bring any tool they might have available into the fight against al Qaeda. At the NSA, Trailblazer, the agency’s long-term answer to the new digital age, was still little more than a proposal on a series of PowerPoint presentations.

  But there was Thin Thread.

  Three days after 9/11, Ed Loomis was working in the SARC when he got a call from Maureen Baginski, one of Hayden’s top lieutenants. She was looking for Binney, but he was out for the morning, so she asked Loomis to come to an urgent meeting, Loomis recalled. When he arrived in a conference room at the agency’s general counsel’s office, Loomis was met by a whole team of NSA lawyers, including some of the attorneys who had previously rejected Thin Thread on the grounds that it would illegally collect too much information on Americans. He was also met by Ben Gunn, a senior NSA analyst who was familiar with Thin Thread.

  The lawyers asked Loomis whether the SARC had any programs that could have helped to uncover the 9/11 plot. Loomis immediately reminded them about Grandmaster and Thin Thread, and how they had been rejected on legal grounds. The lawyers then turned to Gunn and asked him about Mainway, the part of the Thin Thread program that might have helped connect the dots among al Qaeda operatives. Baginski and the NSA lawyers never met with Loomis again to discuss Thin Thread or Mainway. But Loomis later realized that for Gunn, the meeting was something of a job interview; Gunn went on to become one of the technical managers of the NSA’s domestic warrantless wiretapping and data-mining program.

  In October, just as Randy Jacobson approached Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe also began to see evidence that something unusual was going on around him. First he saw lines of large boxes stacked in the hallway outside the SARC, filled with Dell computer servers. They seemed destined for a mysterious locked room down the hall, which from past experience Wiebe knew had work space for as many as a hundred people. Next, Wiebe accidentally walked into a meeting in the SARC’s conference room being run by Gunn, and was quickly told that the meeting was secret and that he had to get out. That was strange for Wiebe, because he thought he knew everything that was going on inside the SARC.

  Finally, Binney told Wiebe what Jacobson had told him, and Wiebe realized that he had walked in on one of the first meetings of the technical team in charge of setting up the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program. Wiebe also realized that the Dell servers stacked in the hallway were going to connect the Mainway software to the AT&T phone lines streaming into the locked office space just down the corridor. Mainway was to become the heart of the NSA’s domestic spying program.

  When Bill Binney had been frustrated by the NSA’s rejection of Thin Thread before 9/11, he had turned to Diane Roark, and it had cost him his career. Now, after 9/11, Binney realized that the NSA was taking the key component of Thin Thread—Mainway—and perverting its use in an unconstitutional program. And so he turned to Roark once again. Not long after Randy Jacobson first told him about the NSA’s decision to start spying on Americans, Binney called Roark and told her that he needed to meet with her, without going into any details on the phone. After work, he drove to her house in Hyattsville, Maryland, a few miles from NSA headquarters. He then told her what he had learned about the secret NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

  After listening to Binney, Roark believed strongly that the operation he had just described violated the Constitution. She also knew that it went against the core principles of the NSA. Ever since the Church Committee investigations of intelligence abuses and the reforms that followed in the 1970s, the NSA had been explicitly barred from spying on Americans. The idea that the NSA only looked outward, not inward on Americans, had become deeply ingrained in the agency’s culture. But now, Binney was telling Roark that the agency was secretly violating its most fundamental directive.

  At first, Roark was sure that this had to be some kind of rogue operation, completely unauthorized by either Congress or the Bush administration. “What he told me shocked me,” recalled Roark. “I thought this was a rogue operation, I couldn’t believe this was approved, because it was clearly illegal and unconstitutional. The big thing was that the protections had been removed. NSA had been rigorous on protections before that.”

  Roark knew she had to do something about it. What she didn’t realize was that her efforts would turn her into a pariah in official Washington.

  Diane Roark had no experience as a whistleblower. During her career conducting congressional oversight, people had always come to her to report problems, rather than the other way around. And so when Binney told her about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping operation, she did what came naturally—she reported it to the House Intelligence Committee. She was certain no one on the committee knew about it.

  Roark wrote a memo describing what she knew about the wiretapping program and submitted it to Tim Sample, the Republican staff director of the committee, and his Democratic counterpart, Mike Sheehy. Sample reported directly to the chairman of the committee, Porter Goss, a Florida Republican congressman and former CIA case officer who later became CIA director. Sheehy worked for Nancy Pelosi, a California Democratic congresswoman who later became Speaker of the House but who was then the ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee. Roark wrote that she wanted to warn the committee’s leaders from both parties that an illegal operation was under way at the NSA.

  Roark was confident that her memo would be met by outrage by the congressional leadership; instead, it was met by stony silence. After reading her memo, Sheehy meekly replied that, while he did not know anything about it, this NSA spying operation must explain why Goss and Pelosi had recently been called to a secret meeting at Vice President Cheney’s office. He then dropped the subject and did not talk to Roark any further about it.

  Sample’s response was even more chilling. He had obviously talked to Goss about Roark’s memo. Sample admonished her to drop the matter, and to stop talking about the NSA program. She was not to tell anyone else what she knew, Sample demanded, not even other staffers on the House committee. Roark now realized that she and Binney had not stumbled upon a rogue operation but rather on an unconstitutional domestic spying program approved at the highest levels of the government and sanctioned by at least some congressional leaders. That knowledge only made her more determined to stop it.

  Despite the warning from Sample not to talk with anyone else on the committee about the program, she privately warned Chris Barton, the committee’s new general counsel, that “there was an NSA program of questionable legality and that it was going to blow up in their faces.” In early 2002, Roark also quietly arranged a meeting between Binney, Loomis, and Wiebe and Rep. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. Binney told Burr everything they had learned about the NSA wiretapping program, but Burr hardly said a word in response. Burr never followed up on the matter with Roark, and there is no evidence he ever took any action to investigate the NSA program. He was later elected to the U.S. Senate.

  After getting nowhere with Burr and being shut down by Sample and Sheehy, Roark finally began to realize that if she was ever going to stop the illegal operation, she was going to have to go outside of the House committee, her institutional home. That meant that she w
as going to have to start taking risks. As she reached out to her network of contacts throughout the government, she gradually realized, to her horror, that there was a cover-up under way to protect the NSA’s illegal operation, and it involved far more people than she could ever have imagined—including many she knew and trusted.

  Roark first met with a former senior NSA executive who had been trying to help her improve her relations with Hayden and the rest of the NSA’s top management. When Roark told the former official about the warrantless wiretapping program, he seemed shocked and agreed to talk with NSA officials about it. But Roark never heard from him again.

  Roark then tried to set up a meeting with U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was also the chief judge of the so-called FISA court, the secret Washington-based federal court that was supposed to authorize electronic surveillance in national security cases inside the United States. Since the purpose of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was to avoid the legal process established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978—and to skirt the secret court established by that law—Roark assumed that Kollar-Kotelly would be outraged when she learned about the secret program. So Roark called Kollar-Kotelly’s Washington office and left a message with her secretary, identifying herself and asking for a meeting to discuss “an illegal NSA program.” The judge’s secretary called Roark back to tell her that the judge could not meet her or discuss the matter with her. Chillingly, the secretary added that the judge had called the Justice Department to inform officials there that Roark was asking questions, and that Roark should expect a call from a Justice Department lawyer. Roark was horrified and believed that Judge Kollar-Kotelly had betrayed her. Later, a Justice Department lawyer did call Roark, but, suspecting a trap, she refused to talk to him. What Roark did not realize was that Kollar-Kotelly had been told about the program by the White House, and she had agreed to keep the fact that the NSA was going around her own court a secret, even from the other judges on the court. When the NSA program later became public, one of the other FISA court judges, James Robertson, resigned in protest.