Deep State

by Marc Ambinder

  ∗Vice President Dick Cheney writes that when he briefed members of the Gang of Eight on the NSA surveillance program in March 2004 (after the Justice Department’s objections threatened to curtail the operation), the Gang agreed that Congress could not be trusted with writing legislation because it would leak. Another official present at the meeting recalls the Gang’s objection differently: they didn’t think Congress would pass something so controversial.

  Notes

  1. Dennis Merrill and Thomas Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations, Volume II, Since 1914 (Boston: Wadsworth, 2009), 291.

  2. Norman Friedman, The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2007), 238–239.

  3. Ibid.

  4. “Defense: The Missile Gap Flap,” Time, February 17, 1961, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,826840-1,00.html.

  5. Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 58–59.

  6. Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 501.

  7. Christopher Preble, “Ike Reconsidered,” Washington Monthly, March/April 2011, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2011/1103.preble.html.

  8. David Barno and Travis Sharp, “The Right Cuts,” Foreign Policy, January 7, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/07/the_right_cuts.

  9. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address (January 17, 1961), American Rhetoric, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/dwightdeisenhowerfarewell.html.

  10. Gregg F. Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985), 140.

  11. Thomas Fingar, “Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence and National Security Using Intelligence to Anticipate Opportunities and Shape the Future,” Lecture, October 21, 2009, http://iis-db.stanford.edu/evnts/5859/lecture_text.pdf.

  12. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Intelligence Estimate: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities, November 2007, http://www.dni.gov/press_releases/20071203_release.pdf.

  13. Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 222.

  14. Frederick P. Hitz, Why Spy? Espionage in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2008), 120.

  15. President George W. Bush, Memorandum, “Disclosures to the Congress,” October 5, 2001.

  16. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004), 127.

  17. Patrick Radden Keefe, “Cat-and-Mouse Games,” New York Review of Books 52, no. 9 (May 26, 2005).

  18. Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, “Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002,” Washington Post, December 9, 2007.

  CHAPTER 15

  Open Source Strikes Back

  Once upon a time, the federal government’s response to existential emergencies (known as Continuity of Government procedures, or COG) was the holy of holies. There was a time when the FBI wouldn’t even inform members of Congress about their designated relocation site in the event of a catastrophe (the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia). Instead, the Bureau entrusted the heads of its local field offices with that knowledge and instructed them to impart it to members when FBI headquarters in Washington cabled them permission. The cover organization for COG activities, the Defense Mobilization Programs Support Activity, remained a secret for two decades, until journalist Ted Gup exposed it in 1982. (It would be replaced by the National Programs Office, which used the same office space and did the same thing.) After COG programs atrophied in the 1990s, the Bush administration reconstituted many of them after September 11, 2001.

  At first, stories appeared about an “undisclosed location” where Vice President Dick Cheney would spend much of his time. This was a secret in name only, as most everyone in Washington assumed that Cheney was either at Site B, the Mount Weather bunker on the border of Virginia and West Virginia, or Site R, the enormous underground compound near Maryland’s border with Pennsylvania. Then Bob Woodward and his colleagues at the Washington Post wrote about a “shadow government” that was replicating the functions of senior military and civilian officials, ready to step in and take over in case of a decapitation attack. The story offered little in the way of specific detail but created an unmistakable aura of gravity about the new post-9/11 reality—the Bush administration was really that worried about the threat of a nuclear explosion or a catastrophic biological attack.

  As the COG programs expanded, so too did the number of open positions. Jobs that officially did not exist had to be filled somehow. Job solicitations were posted on websites that cater to those seeking government employment. In July 2011, government contractor SAIC advertised for a “Continuity of Operations Watch Officer” who would monitor incoming national intelligence data and be prepared, on a moment’s notice, to provide intelligence analysis to senior policymakers. The officer would monitor the “health” of the intelligence community and provide daily updates to the director of national intelligence about the status of critical intelligence systems.

  Notably, the advertisement mentioned that the “actual work location is on the VA/WVA border.” That meant that the analyst was destined for the Mount Weather bunker and would actually be a part of the government-in-waiting. If the headquarters of the director of national intelligence were to be destroyed and its analysts incapacitated, this analyst would be among a small team of surviving, fully cleared all-source analysts who could jump in and provide the analytic support that would otherwise be unavailable. (The job posting also provided a list of some of the classified COG computer systems that the officer would use, including “the PCT,” “ADAPT V2,” and “the SPURS system.”)

  Open source job postings for classified functions and organizations are ubiquitous and create a headache for counterintelligence. One recent posting sought a civilian “director for mobility” at the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and described, in excruciating detail, the classified special mission unit that transports special operations forces to and from their secret missions. The entity that currently provides cover for Continuity of Government contracting and acquisition services (we shall not disclose the name, although it is distinctly unmemorable and therefore enormously powerful) operates out of a highly secure facility in Elkridge, Maryland.

  Tracking job postings can give interested parties a pretty good idea of where the government hides its dozen or so continuously operating secret bunkers. These open source security breaches are self-inflicted intrusions, but they are arguably necessary in order to efficiently staff critical government positions. Still, the level of detail that can be found on social networking sites like LinkedIn is often astonishing. One former program manager of the Ground Applications Program Office (GAPO), a secret office of JSOC, bragged openly that his five-hundred-million-dollar portfolio included acquisitions for U.S. Special Operations Command’s most secretive units. Though the “U.S. Army Ground Applications Program Office” can be found in Fort Belvoir’s telephone directory, its existence and function is classified.

  If you’re interested in the budget levels for satellite programs, a LinkedIn search for the National Reconnaissance Office or “Air Force satellites” will be illuminating. Résumés often include the names of intelligence databases that the job seeker is familiar with, along with operating locations. (The NSA, for example, has an enormous facility near Denver that is not classified, but plenty of LinkedIn resumes matter-of-factly report unusual NSA deployment locations, such as Jordan.)

  Then there’s the swarm of gadflies, obsessives, and good-government critics who consciously, conspicuously, and boastfully watch the watchers. Some do it for fun. The day that NATO launched bombing operations against Libya, for example, a Dutch scanner enthusiast named Huub posted to Twitter the identities of military planes his commercial software setup was able to tra
ck. He even recorded a U.S. information operations drone, Commando Solo, as it broadcast messages urging Libyan troops to surrender. By monitoring the transponder codes of the planes (Libya is too close to Europe for military jets to operate invisibly, as civilian planes might otherwise inadvertently get too close), Huub and his online followers were able to track French Air Force jets as they closed in on Benghazi. The enthusiasts got a remarkably close look at how the United States operates its airborne reconnaissance and command and control platforms, like the RC-135 Rivet Joint.1

  Using websites (and even iPhone apps) like Flightradar24.com, a gaggle of Google Groups regularly monitor the progress of U.S. military aircraft across this country, scraping their ADS-B transponder codes and listening in as they interact with air traffic controllers. They send logs of their daily monitoring to sites like RadioReference.com, allowing enthusiasts to compile fairly accurate databases of training flights and even overseas troop deployments. With remarkable precision, members of these groups (a lot of them former aviators) report the location of U.S. nuclear command and control command posts, from the TACAMO E6-Bs (which are tasked with sending war orders to submarines in the event of a nuclear war) to the various Boeing jets that serve as transports for high-ranking U.S. officials in the event of emergencies. On a frequency of 111.75 megahertz, on the high-frequency band, they listen and transcribe the Emergency Action Messages that are transmitted by the main STRATCOM nuclear communications hub at Andrews Air Force Base, as well as strategic detachments around the world that are testing the system. (MAINSAIL is the call sign for “Is anyone out there?”)

  They’ve even monitored U-2 pilots. On March 28, 2011, Jody in North Georgia reported, “Currently have DRAGON 69 working CHECKER OPS on 381.3 requesting they call their ops and let them know that they are in the green. Wonder where the U-2 is headed?”

  On May 30, Monitor Ed L. in Maine tracked Air Force One and its backup, two aerial refueling aircraft, a Boeing E4-B nuclear command post plane, and two large cargo planes as they flew President Barack Obama and his entourage to Europe.

  Earlier that month, tracker and aviation geek David Cenciotti caught the Boeing 757 used by the Foreign Emergency Support Team, a semicovert rapid response team of U.S. nuclear technicians and experts, flying into Andrews Air Force Base and using a call sign reserved for the FBI. He first noticed the flight on a free tracking website. It had no official call sign—indeed, it was tagged as “NO CALL SIGN”—but when he cross-checked the tail number of the plane, he discovered its base squadron. When the plane maneuvered into an area where he could use a radio scanner to pick up its transmission, he recorded it and posted the audio on his website. The planes, and others operated by the government, try to change their call signs and their transponder codes, but the Federal Aviation Administration makes it almost too easy to subvert the feeble efforts at cover. “Don’t you believe it is somehow weird that such elusive aircraft, deploying U.S. teams in response to terrorist attacks or (as someone speculated) to transport prisoners, was transmitting full ADS-B over the U.S.?” Cenciotti wondered.2

  At Cryptome, a website run by retired architects named John Young and Deborah Natsios, users delight in “reversing the panopticon,” as Natsios once put it. They’ve compiled a cache of data about the secret geography and archaeology of national security, welcoming contributions for publication “that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance—open, secret and classified documents—but not limited to those.” They write, “Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a U.S. court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here—or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored.”3

  Using imagery provided by Terraserver, Google Earth, and MSN Maps, their “Eyeball” collection includes detailed, annotated photographs and maps of everything from nuclear storage depots to secret CIA training facilities to former vice president Cheney’s house. In early October 2012, the two found that Microsoft Bing’s commercial satellites had photographed the still-standing, full-sized mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s lair in Abbottabad.4 It was there that Navy SEALs trained for their eventual assault.

  Using commercial news photographs, the two created a series of pages—forty-four to date—devoted to “Obama Protection” and filled with specific references to the location and methods of the U.S. Secret Service. The Secret Service is aware of the site and probably has opened a watch file on Young and Natsios, but there’s nothing illegal about what the two are doing, which is using protected speech to expose the secrets of the president’s guard, simply because they can. The FBI has twice contacted the site owners about specific content but hasn’t done anything else. Microsoft threatened to sue the site’s ISP after Cryptome posted an internal guide about its cooperation with law enforcement, but later backed down.5 In 2011, apparently under pressure from the government, PayPal briefly stopped processing financial contributions to the site.

  Cryptome went live in 1996, well before Julian Assange ever contemplated his crusade against government secrecy. It has spawned dozens of other websites, ranging from publicintelligence.net to WikiLeaks rival OpenLeaks.

  Among the best chroniclers of the secret state has been John Pike, formerly of the Federation of American Scientists and now the director of GlobalSecurity.org. His original purpose was to bring transparency to the decision-making process and to the policies guiding nuclear weapons deployment, dispersal, and disposal. For years, through Freedom of Information Act requests, guesswork, and sheer doggedness, he managed to compile an open source repository of secret programs, policies, and images that almost certainly rivals anything our government has on any other government. And he’s still at it.

  This public domain information—even that which is fragmented and rudimentary—provides a decisive check against the secrecy apparatus. The men and women tirelessly piecing together the great puzzle of the deep state are only getting better at what they do and their tools more effective. Advancements in public databases and information technologies are outpacing government tools and thinking by orders of magnitude. As proven with Primoris Era and the Osama bin Laden raid and government flight patterns and military operations, the real-time crowdsourcing of data as events unfold is an overwhelming and unstoppable force against a lumbering, compartmentalized bureaucracy that’s only scarcely capable of internal communication, to say nothing of interagency cooperation. The intelligence community is damn good at what they do, but one man and his flash drive can throw into disarray the fundamental dynamics of the system on whose behalf they work.

  It all adds up to the inescapable truth of today and the reality going forward: the American deep state as we know it is over. There are simply too many amateur but interested parties; too much public data and too many tools that help that public drill down to deeper truths; too many news outlets and too much connectivity, where a secret can circle the globe femtoseconds after revelation; too many people with access to secrets; too many ways to steal those secrets; too many people with reasonable reasons to leak.

  The system will plod on because a century of inertia doesn’t stop overnight. The government will reel and overreact and prosecute with impunity. (Already we are seeing signs of this. In only three years, the Obama administration has charged six whistleblowers—not spies, but people interested in good government—with violating the Espionage Act.) And methods for safeguarding state secrets will see the occasional leap forward, just as the Soviet Union “disappeared” in 1948.

  But every day, the public knows more and the picture clarifies. The press is useful but no longer essential. Today, it wouldn’t matter if Allen Dulles implored Arthur Hays Sulzberger to spike a story. It would get out anyway, on a blog or an activist site or Twitter. It doesn’t matter where, because users—not only activists,
but mild-mannered men and women—would cross-post and click “Like” buttons and retweet.

  Days after it was reported that an al-Qaeda airline bombing plot was foiled, the world learned that the “bomber” was actually a spy working for Saudi intelligence who had penetrated al-Qaeda, gained its trust, volunteered for the martyrdom operation, and secured the new type of bomb for the CIA. We learned how the bomb was worn and that testing revealed that it would have slipped through Transportation Security Agency checkpoints. An operation that in any other time in history would rank as a triumph of tradecraft, counterterrorism, and international cooperation, and remain as close and treasured a secret as the nuclear launch codes, became public knowledge not just for newspaper readers but for everyone with a Facebook account and interested only in pictures of the grandkids.