The Director: A Novel

  “I hope so, Mr. Director. I’m a little nervous.” She took a drink from the water glass before her.

  “Is your name really ‘Kitten’?” asked Weber. “That’s different.”

  “I’ve taken a lot of grief about it, but that’s what my parents named me.” Her hand was shaking and she spilled a little of her coffee.

  “Sorry. I am so nervous.”

  “Take it slow,” said Weber. “I have all morning, and this isn’t a promotion board.”

  She adjusted her skirt, took a bite of a grape and then put the plate aside.

  “Let’s start at the beginning,” said Weber. “Tell me about the walk-in, this kid Biel. You’re the only one who met him. What was he like?”

  “He was frightened, Mr. Director. When he came in off the street, he mentioned two things, specifically, that he wanted to warn you about, face-to-face. He made a point about that.”

  “Why me? What did he think I could do for him? I had only been director for a week. I was barely on the job yet.”

  “Maybe that’s why he wanted you. He said people were preparing something. I guess he thought you were outside a system he thought had been penetrated.”

  “But there was nothing in your first cable about a penetration of the agency.”

  “I was being careful. But when I think back, that’s what he was telling me. He knew people had hacked our communications systems. They were inside. That’s why he wouldn’t stay in one of our safe houses. He thought the information would leak. That’s why he wanted to talk to you directly. You weren’t contaminated. He’d read about you. He knew you were the new guy.”

  “What do you think he would have told me, if we’d ever gotten to a meeting?”

  “His secrets, I guess. Who the penetration was; how the communications systems had been compromised; what they were planning; why the rush. Whatever he knew, he wanted to tell you. That was his protection: You would take care of the people who were threatening him.”

  “But I didn’t. I picked a ‘specialist’ to handle it. Another hacker. I thought that was the right thing to do.”

  Weber took a long drink of his coffee.

  “Poor Biel.” His voice was a bitter sigh. “I let him down.”

  Sandoval was startled. She hadn’t expected her boss to have taken it personally.

  “It was my fault, Mr. Director. Not yours. I should never have let him leave the compound. And then, when Mr. Morris came, I felt a little . . . I don’t know . . . intimidated. At first he thought he could find Biel. Then Mr. Morris kept disappearing.”

  “Where did Morris go?”

  “He never said. I thought he had special sources, private operations he couldn’t tell me about. He made me feel . . . dumb. Then he got, like, depressed.”

  She was getting upset again, short of breath.

  “Eat some more fruit,” said Weber. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine.”

  She took some more grapes, and ate a half dozen, while Weber called for a Diet Coke, bringing forth another huge platter, with cold drinks and finger sandwiches.

  “Jesus, no wonder we’re having budget problems,” said Weber, looking at the array of food. “So tell me why you came today, all of a sudden. Why the crash meeting?”

  Sandoval took a deep breath.

  “Okay, so to prove his bona fides to me the Swiss boy mentioned the two names I told you about: the Exchange and Friends of Cerberus. I wanted to know more about them, but Morris waved me off, said it wasn’t my case. So I didn’t do anything until you called me and asked me to help.”

  “Right. So what did you do?”

  “I went to a German friend, Walter Kreiser, who used to run the BND. I asked him to find me someone in the underground. I hope that’s okay.”

  “That was smart. Did Kreiser come up with anything?”

  “Yes, indirectly. Through a cutout, he introduced me to a young German hacker, very smart, who traveled in these same circles. His name is Stefan Grulig.”

  “Did this Grulig know about these hackers, whatever, the Exchange and Friends of Cerberus?”

  Sandoval gave him a look somewhere between yes and no.

  “That’s the strange thing. He said the Exchange and Friends of Cerberus weren’t real organizations, they were just names people gave to the underground. He claimed they weren’t really criminal groups attacking governments. They were all part of a market, and governments were their customers. He made it sound like they were all in it together. And I thought maybe that’s what Biel was trying to tell us. ‘We’re inside you because we are you.’ I know that must sound crazy.”

  Weber shook his head.

  “It doesn’t sound crazy. What else did he say?”

  “He said the U.S. government was hungry for the malware that the hackers in Cerberus Computing Club could produce. Those were the ‘friends’ Biel was talking about. They wanted to get inside everyone’s systems. Grulig didn’t say why. He made it sound like our Internet people were no better than hackers. Worse, really. We pay really big bribes, we say in Spanish, ‘cañonazo,’ to get this information.”

  “That’s what Morris does,” Weber mused, barely mouthing the words. “He buys malware. But why?”

  The director took another sip of his Diet Coke as he thought about the pieces of the puzzle.

  “Did your source know anything about why Biel was killed?”

  “That was the creepiest part. I asked if it was the Russian Mafia and Grulig just laughed, like I didn’t understand anything: He said the Russian hacker Mafia and the U.S. government looked like enemies, but really they were the same team. That’s when I began to worry.”

  “Me, too,” said the director under his breath, barely audible.

  “Is this dangerous, Mr. Weber?”

  Weber looked away from her. Lying had become his profession, but he still wasn’t very good at it.

  “I don’t know what this is yet. I’ll give you an answer when I find out.”

  “I’m not backing down.”

  “Good. I want you back in Germany tomorrow. I don’t want anyone to think we know a thing. You have anything else for Mr. Director?”

  “Can I ask you something off-line? You don’t have to answer.”

  “Sure. This whole conversation is off-line.”

  “Was Biel right?” she asked. “Do we have a mole?”

  “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Maybe it’s more like a worm. A piece of code, or a person, it does the same thing. It eats us from inside. Maybe it’s someone like Snowden, who thinks he’s a hero. I honestly can’t say yet. But I’m looking.”

  “How will you kill the worm?”

  The director didn’t answer at first, because he didn’t know.

  “Carefully,” he said after a moment. “We need to know how the worm got there. Who helps him? Are there more worms? I don’t want to pull out a piece of the worm and leave the rest in there.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Director.”

  It wasn’t an apology, but an expression of sadness for the weight that this new arrival at the CIA, in his job for less than a month, was now carrying on his shoulders.

  Weber told Kitten Sandoval to return to Hamburg and go about her business. He wrote down the password for an email address that he had used to communicate with a confidential business associate in his previous life. He told Sandoval to check that address twice a day and look at anything that had been saved as a draft message, and to respond by leaving another draft. It was a simple trick, but it worked.

  Sandoval left in a Red Top taxi that she hailed on the street outside the big sign that read STORMHAVEN.

  As Weber was departing Fairlington with his security detail, he asked Oscar the driver to stop at a 7-Eleven on Seminary Road. When a member of the detail tried to follow him in, he told the man to chill out, he needed to use the men’s room. He went into the dirty bathroom, locked the door of the stall and pulled out his Nokia. He dialed the number of the identical phone he had given to
Ariel Weiss.

  “It’s Wall-E,” he said.

  “Hi,” Weiss answered. “What’s up?”

  “I just heard a story that made my hair turn white.”

  “I think your hair is already turning white.”

  “I’m serious. The walk-in was right. Hackers are inside our system. They brag about it. We can’t leave any electronic footprints, if we can help it.”

  “RTFM.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Sorry. ‘Read the fucking manual.’ As in, ‘obviously.’”

  Weber smiled. In this anesthetized organization, he felt lucky to have found a live body. He had a plan, and he needed help.

  “Did they teach old-fashioned tradecraft when you were at the Farm? The old Moscow rules, ‘denied area’ procedures?”

  “Yes, of course. Dead drops and brush passes. They said we wouldn’t need to use them. Our ciphers and crypts were all unbreakable. But I remember.”

  “I’m out of my league here, obviously, but that’s how I want to run this. I’m going to set up a drop we can use on North Glebe Road. I play golf at a country club in the neighborhood, so I can go there without being noticed. There’s an underpass that leads to a parking lot. Look for a loose stone at the end of the underpass, on the west side. That’s where we’ll leave messages. We can use the Nokias, too, but sparingly. Otherwise it’s too obvious that it’s a closed loop. There’s no GPS transmitter on the handset I gave you, but don’t use it near your house. You have a house, right?”

  “An apartment. I’m single.”

  “Me, too. That’s lucky, because for the next while, you and I are going to be joined at the hip. We are going to live an analog lifestyle. Is there some geeky expression for that?”

  “We call it ‘deceased.’”

  Behind Weber, there was a loud knock. Someone was pounding on the door of the 7-Eleven bathroom.

  “I gotta go,” he said, ending the call without waiting for her answer.

  Weber removed the SIM card and stowed his cell phone. He flushed the SIM down the toilet and washed his hands, and then walked back to his black caravan, which had been waiting patiently for Mr. Director to finish in the bathroom.

  When he got back to the office, Weber asked Sandra Bock to summon James Morris back from wherever he was overseas. He told Bock to deliver the message through the Information Operations Center and also through Beasley’s retinue at the National Clandestine Service. The flash messages went out; station chiefs in Europe and Asia were asked to make discreet inquiries about the possible whereabouts of the IOC chief. But the aggressive messaging yielded nothing but silence.

  Late that day, Bock got a call from a man who said he worked for Mr. Hoffman in the DNI’s office. He said that James Morris was on assignment for a joint task force that was run through the NSA. He understood that an effort had been made to contact Mr. Morris, but he couldn’t be reached, for the time being. He asked Bock to apologize to Director Weber.

  When the conversation ended, Bock phoned the operations room and asked them to see if they could trace the last call. The watch officer said it had come from a number that had been assigned to a freight forwarding company in Denver that had gone out of business.

  Bock told her boss what she had learned. He deliberated calling Cyril Hoffman to ask for more information and decided against it. He doubted that Hoffman would tell him the truth.

  20

  WASHINGTON

  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.