The Enemy Inside

by William Christie

  He’d had to fill out the SF-86 questionnaire, the background investigation form. Basically, everything he’d done and everyone he’d known his entire life to date.

  Then he was polygraphed. Mostly questions about whether he knew any terrorists or had been a member of any groups. No problem there. Then more questions about his relatives in Egypt. He barely knew them. His father brought his grandparents over to visit every other year or so, but no one else. His parents never went back, not even for visits. And he’d only been to Cancún on spring break.

  So he passed, even though the blood-pressure cuff and all the wires and contacts had scared the crap out of him. They told him later that was the whole point, since the machine measured your physiological response to the questions, not your truthfulness.

  Then came the personal security interview, which after the drama of the polygraph was a major letdown. Probably because the agent who conducted it did five or six of them a day. Nasser got the impression that you passed if you didn’t go out of your way to make him dislike you.

  The whole process took more than a year. Even though he’d applied at the start of his last semester in college, he still had to take another job after he graduated. Yes, the $20,000 congressional staff errand-boy position, which he’d happily quit when the FBI finally called.

  Most of the contract linguists were farmed out to all the FBI field offices. But because of Nasser’s Arabic proficiency, and the fact that he was an American citizen, he was assigned to the Language Services Translation Center at FBI headquarters in Washington. It was the command and control center for translator assignments, and also had twenty FBI and thirty contract translators who handled urgent taskings from the field offices and legal attaché offices in the embassies abroad.

  After all the excitement of recruitment, and the first day walking into the J. Edgar Hoover building wearing his own ID badge, the reality of an office crammed full of cubicles was another letdown.

  He started off as a Contract Monitor, only allowed to provide summary translation and analysis for internal dissemination. It had taken him a while to get the hang of it. It wasn’t the Arabic—that was easy. You didn’t need to translate everything in an audio session, and it took time to recognize what was important and what wasn’t. And the military terms and euphemisms terrorists used were like a whole other language.

  But pretty soon he moved up to Contract Linguist, which meant he could perform the same job as a permanent-employee Language Specialist. He could act as an interpreter in FBI interviews, though that had never happened. His material could go out for external dissemination or be used in court, and he could testify as an expert witness. That hadn’t happened either. He just translated conversations. Lots of conversations.

  Which usually ended up with Barry saying exactly what he was saying in the coffee room now: “I’m going to need you to send that off to the New York office before the end of the day.”

  “Okay, Barry.”

  The pressure was always on, because the bottom line was that FBI couldn’t translate all the foreign language material they collected. They were at the point where 98 percent of the audio material was being translated, since that was the priority. Like most government statistics, it sounded really impressive. As long as no one mentioned that the 2 percent was nearly 8,000 hours of recorded audio. And no one really knew if there was anything important in those 8,000 hours. The supervisors spent so much time preparing reports for the FBI leadership on how much was getting translated—not what wasn’t—that they didn’t have any time to monitor the priorities of most cases. The Counterterrorism Division rarely set priorities, and the field offices gave almost everything the highest priority to keep it from getting stuck in the backlog.

  And all the emphasis on audio meant that only 2 percent of the text material was getting translated. Nasser hadn’t worked on a document in a month.

  Farah was finally off the phone. Passing her coffee, Nasser said, “If you’re not careful, when you get your one-year work review they’re going to fire you.”

  “Who cares?” she said.

  It had gotten to the point where everyone felt that way, even those like Farah who did half the work everyone else did.

  Nasser mostly translated counterterrorism Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act audio sessions. This was electronic surveillance of conversations obtained by warrants from the FISA court in Washington.

  The policy was to review FISA audio within twenty-four hours of interception. And al-Qaeda FISA audio within twelve hours. When the field offices couldn’t meet the deadline, they passed it on to the Language Services Center.

  It wasn’t easy, and the FBI’s computer systems made it even harder. Nasser had been amazed to discover that the University of Maryland’s computer system was like Star Wars compared to the FBI’s.

  Everything was sent back and forth from the field offices over a secure communications network called Arach-net. But the system had trouble forwarding material. Then the office that sent it didn’t know it hadn’t been received, and the receiving office had no idea anything had been sent.

  And the computer systems had unbelievably limited storage capacity, particularly for audio files. So sometimes the automatic system deleted files on your computer to make room for new audio sessions. Without warning and without review. The traffic was so heavy that sometimes a file disappeared after only three days. A few times Nasser had come back from a break to find that audio files he was just about to start work on were gone. When it deleted them, the system didn’t distinguish between completed work and unreviewed files. There were no system controls at all.

  The deleted files didn’t disappear, they were archived. But the archived audio sessions didn’t include status information. Not even “reviewed” or “unreviewed.” So when you did drag something back up from the archives, you had to go through it all over again.

  One of Nasser’s jobs was to review the work of the Contract Monitors. Some of them might work on the same audio session. And the computer kept track of only the last person to work on a particular task. So that was overwritten if someone else worked on it later. A lot of the Contract Monitors were really sloppy. Nasser had seen some stuff that made him wonder if they really understood Arabic. But sometimes you couldn’t even tell who had screwed up. So the sloppy translators kept doing sloppy work.

  Nasser sat down at his desk and put the earphones on. The first time he’d seen a document with a black “Top Secret” stamp across the top had been a rush. As was translating a recorded conversation between two Arab diplomats.

  But for every bit of excitement like that, there were days of listening to Arab men slurp tea and lament the state of their bowels. Hours and hours of constipation. It was probably all the tea.

  That and the pressure and fighting the computers was wearing him down. It was probably time to see what that Top Secret clearance could do for him. Congressional staff, maybe. Or a think tank or contractor. Something better than this.

  His phone rang. He picked it up. It was his mother. “Hey, Mom. Well, I’m really busy right now. What? I don’t know. I don’t know, I’ll see. Yes, Umma. Yes, I’ll come for dinner this weekend. No, not Saturday night. Sunday. Yes, I promise. I have to get back to work now. Love you, Umma. ’Bye.”

  Nasser sighed. His mother could teach the FBI a thing or two. Every time he came to dinner there was some chunky Egyptian girl with hair on her upper lip. And his mother calling him every day for the next week asking how he’d liked her. Not only that, but she wanted him at mosque for Mawlid al-Nahi, the Prophet Mohammad’s birthday. It wasn’t one of the main Muslim holidays, and some parts of the Arab world considered it undignified and refused to celebrate it. But in America there was music and dancing. Kind of like St. Patrick’s Day for the Irish. The exiles celebrated it with a lot more enthusiasm than the natives. Dancing around the mosque with a bunch of old farts instead of hitting the clubs at Georgetown. Wouldn’t that be great?

  But if he b
lew off his mother then the old man would be on the phone, without a doubt. Except he’d call only after work. And then Nasser would get the faith, heritage, and tradition lecture. Not forgetting your roots. The old man might as well put that on a CD—it never changed.

  He was going to have to think of something good to get out of it.

  Chapter Five

  Ed Storey was damned if he was going to stand at attention in front of a desk and get his ass chewed like a private. So after reporting as ordered he’d snapped into parade rest without asking for or receiving permission. Such damned foolishness. They were all in civilian clothes, and there was no one in the unit under the rank of staff sergeant. They weren’t even on a military base—they were in an office park in Northern Virginia for crissakes.

  The unit didn’t even have a name. It had a Joint Task Force number that, for security, changed as often as the seasons. So often that no one who worked in it, other than the admin clerks, even bothered to keep track. “What are we this week?” was the running joke. Everyone called it “the office.” Which, for purposes of operational security, was ideal anyway.

  On the front door was the seal of the Defense Security and Cooperation Agency (DSCA), the arm of the Pentagon that handled selling weapons and organizing military training around the world. The unit was inside the DSCA budget, though it was a certainty that no one in DSCA knew anything about them.

  It had its origins as a cell within the headquarters of Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. JSOC was the umbrella command responsible for the nation’s Tier-1 counterterrorist units: Combat Applications Group/Delta Force, Naval Special Operations Development Group/SEAL Team Six, and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, along with some smaller spooky units and Air Force aviation assets.

  The JSOC headquarters cell had been known as Advance Force Operations (AFO). Not manned as a regular unit, it drew very senior personnel from Delta or SEAL Team Six for specific missions. These could be four operators living in a hole dug into a hillside overlooking an Afghan village for two weeks, collecting every scrap of information that would be needed for a raid by a Delta squadron. Or two men in civilian clothes photographing a terrorist safe house in the heart of urban Samarkand, Uzbekistan, that would be hit later by a combined Uzbek Spetsnaz and SEAL Team Six assault group. Hence the name Advance Force.

  After 9/11 the secretary of defense had run into a few problems taking the fight to terrorists around the world. Basically, he couldn’t get anyone to do what he wanted.

  The CIA had vivid memories of doing exactly what the president wanted, and then being screwed over by Congress and the press for the Bay of Pigs, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and Iran-Contra. Even their greatest success, the covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, was now regarded as the breeding ground of modern Islamic terrorism. So they would play in Afghanistan and Iraq with their Special Activities paramilitary people, but they always felt the covert action mission was something they could do without. As a perfect illustration of this, the paramilitaries were almost all contract employees instead of regular CIA officers. Most of them retired military special operators.

  In the Pentagon, the generals and admirals who ran the U.S. military were very careful, orderly men who had gotten where they were by making few waves and no mistakes. Special Operations wasn’t their cup of tea, but they recognized the necessity of it in wartime. But sending military teams to snatch or—even worse—gun down terrorists on the streets of countries they weren’t officially at war with was something else entirely. If anything went wrong careers and reputations could be ruined. But they were willing to sign off, as long as the lawyers reviewed every mission and the decision was unanimous so everyone’s ass was covered. Unfortunately, this process took days or weeks, and most missions had to be pulled off in hours or not at all. Worse, if the generals didn’t want to do something they didn’t salute and carry out their orders. They’d blow the operation by leaking the details to the press.

  Then there was the State Department. Who ensured that the military had to get prior permission from the ambassador of every country involved. And ambassadors either didn’t want gunfire or kidnappings disrupting their friendly relations with the host government, whether the host government was friendly or not, or they wanted to play armchair general and direct the operations themselves.

  In frustration over this state of affairs, the secretary of defense had formed his own unit. He snatched the AFO cell away from JSOC and took sixteen men, one troop and four boat crews, from Delta and SEAL Team Six respectively. All senior men with AFO experience. He made it into a Special Access Program, as deep black as stealth aircraft, which reduced the people who knew about it to such a small number that they wouldn’t dare leak. And he received permission from the president for a command system of only two people: himself and the national security advisor. If they gave the okay a mission could be launched instantly with the transmission of a code word from the Pentagon Command Center to the team in the field. No military involvement at all.

  Small teams, usually two men, would be sent around the world to hunt terrorists and act on breaking intelligence. They would operate undercover in unfriendly countries, or liaise with the intelligence and special operations units of friendly countries. If the target was small enough, they’d take it out themselves. Otherwise they were supposed to prepare the ground and then call in anything from a Delta troop or SEAL platoon all the way up to a 600-man Army Ranger battalion.

  The office building headquarters in Rosslyn, Virginia, kept them away from the clutches of the uniformed military. Including, surprisingly enough, U.S. Special Operations Command, which was transforming from an administrative to an operational war-fighting command, and didn’t want to give up any units or control over them.

  At first it was totally ad hoc, commanded by the kind of snake-eating special operations officers who didn’t care about risking their careers in a new deep black unit and expected to retire at the colonel level as a badge of honor. The total strength was around fifty, broken down with uncharacteristic bluntness into the subsets of the classic raid mission: assault, security, and support.

  Support was the technical surveillance specialists, like the boys Storey had with him in Paraguay.

  Security was the assault team backups: medical specialists, snipers, and operators being groomed for assignment to the assault teams.

  Assault was the elite two-man teams.

  The problem, Storey reflected as he stood in front of the desk, had been their success. When, out of gratitude, Rumsfeld made a general out of the first commanding officer, an animal of an Army full colonel who hadn’t even been considered refined enough to command Delta, the floodgates had opened. The unit had gotten bigger, as special ops units always did. Of course, there weren’t many who wanted to put on civilian clothes, travel on a false passport with no diplomatic immunity, and live by their wits on the streets of Khartoum. But there were a hell of a lot more who wanted to be staff officers and have the duty on their resume. And so the generals began trying to slip their little butt-boys into the organization.

  It seemed like every unit Storey had ever been in, the executive officer (XO), or second in command, was always a weasel-dick with high-ranking friends trying to give him a career leg up. And now, with the commanding officer traveling in the Middle East, the XO was in charge of the unit.

  And he obviously didn’t like the fact that Storey was standing at parade rest in front of his desk. But was just smart enough not to try and call a Master Sergeant to attention.

  He was doing the old “read through the papers on my desk and make you stand there and sweat” routine. Storey always wished they’d come up with something original.

  Finally he glanced up, as if he was surprised to see Storey there. “Master Sergeant, this unit’s mission statement is low visibility operations.”

  “I’m aware of that, sir,” Storey replied in a neutral tone of voice.

/>   “You think what you did in Paraguay was low visibility?”

  “Yes, sir. I do.”

  “Oh, you do? You think firing rockets into a building in a residential neighborhood is low visibility?”

  “High noise, sir, but low visibility.”

  “Don’t try to be funny, Master Sergeant. Do you know what a diplomatic incident is?”

  He was the type of officer who couldn’t speak to the troops without either sneering or talking down to them. “As a matter of fact, sir,” Storey replied, “I do know what a diplomatic incident is. And it’s only a diplomatic incident if the host country knows who created the incident. In this case they have no idea.”

  That set the XO back for a moment. “The point, Master Sergeant, is that you fired rockets in the middle of a neighborhood full of civilians.”

  “Yes, sir. If you’ll check the after-action report, you’ll see that no property other than the terrorist safe house in question was damaged. And no one got hurt except the ones who were supposed to get hurt. And it was done in such a way that the local authorities believe that either drug gangs or terrorists did it.”

  “That’s my point. You acted like terrorists.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s how we fight them. That’s why we’re successful.”

  “Master Sergeant, you’re going to start briefing us before you pull off these little ops of yours.”

  Storey’s warning systems went off. “Excuse me, sir, but the protocol is that we inform the Pentagon Command Center of a prospective operation. And when we receive the go word, we execute. There is no other chain of command.”