by Shane Harris
Poindexter briefly gave McCarthy the rundown on the Genoa program. What it was about. What problems he was hoping to tackle. As she listened, McCarthy had to pinch herself. This was her soapbox.
McCarthy disdained the analytic capability of her home agency, the CIA. She’d been trying to point out where the analysts were falling down. To her mind they were more concerned about writing pretty prose than collecting and weighing facts. McCarthy had published articles connecting this systemic problem to high-profile intelligence failures. And she was concerned about the implications for counterterrorism. Her old boss, Charlie Allen, had been the last national intelligence officer for terrorism—the position, as with so many others, had been a casualty of the Iran-Contra scandal. The only unit left doing warning for terrorism was the CIA’s counterterrorist center, which McCarthy thought was an amateur operation.
Of course, McCarthy evinced none of this to Poindexter who, though retired, was so many years and ranks her senior. But as she listened she realized that she didn’t have to say a word. They were already in sync.
“One of these days I’d like to come back and talk to you about my project,” Poindexter said. She was surprised that he’d phrased it as a request. If a man of Poindexter’s stature could make an issue of these problems, and improve the quality of not only the product but the intellectual process of analysis, she wanted to help. “Fine,” McCarthy replied. “I’ll be anxious to hear.”
Poindexter kept Clarke updated, as he’d requested, but McCarthy became his primary contact in the White House. She was so different from most CIA officers; open to new ideas, to technology, but also not afraid to be wrong. And she held a position of influence among those Poindexter most wanted to impress.
McCarthy became Genoa’s best advocate on the NSC staff. She helped to introduce Poindexter to the people who might actually use the tool or who’d be willing to experiment with it in their own agencies. She helped Poindexter attract a wide audience.
When it came time for the Genoa researchers to explain their ideas to the curious, they put on a show. In a black box-style performance space at DARPA headquarters, the team constructed a mock-up of a crisis command center. A team of actors sat at computer screens and deftly responded as an imaginary nightmare unfolded before the audience’s eyes. Poindexter called it “A Day in the Life of an Analyst.” Sometimes the performance was augmented by an animated video segment; McCarthy even showed up as an avatar.
The team built another staging center near the DARPA building, hiring a Hollywood set designer and former head of Disney Imagineering to give the place a futuristic quality. There was a little magic in Genoa after all. But what Poindexter wanted most was for his audience to appreciate what Genoa could be. The system was still in its infancy. There was no equipment behind the bright, flashing screens. But the scene was compelling enough to leave visitors with the distinct impression that maybe Poindexter and his wizards were onto something.
All the right people were coming to the shows. Clarke attended. So did a recently retired rear admiral named Mike McConnell, who’d stepped down as the director of the National Security Agency and taken a lucrative position as head of the intelligence business for Booz Allen Hamilton, a top-shelf consulting firm. Another former intelligence luminary also made an appearance—James Clapper, whose most recent position among a series of high offices was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was also a senior member of the Downing Assessment Task Force, convened to investigate the June 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia. Nineteen service members died there in the second attack on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia in less than a year.
Poindexter had invited these wise men of the spy world not so much to find customers but to ask them if he was heading in the right direction. To a person, it seemed, everyone supported his ambition. They thought the problems he had tackled needed to be solved. The Genoa team was on the right track, exploring a new frontier. Poindexter was starting to build a power that they needed.
But he wasn’t the only one.
CHAPTER 7
THE NEXT GENERATION
When Curt Weldon picked up the phone to call George Tenet, the director of the CIA, he wasn’t expecting much. The agency had let the congressman down plenty of times; why should this one be any different?
Through an improbable series of adventures, Weldon had risen from the rough streets of Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and served two terms as mayor, to Republican member of Congress and intelligence gadfly. An obstreperous debater, Weldon delighted in pointing out the many shortcomings of a bloated, disconnected, and at times politically defiant bureaucracy. The agency’s so-called intelligence failures were legion—missing the collapse of the Soviet Union, failing to predict entrants into the nuclear club. More often than not America’s spies seemed out of touch with a world quickly evolving beyond them. And so, when Weldon called Tenet in April 1999 to report that he knew of a foreign source who might help end the vicious ethnic war raging in the Balkans, he had reason to believe the CIA couldn’t tell him much about the man.
That a seventh-term congressman from hardscrabble Pennsylvania was even in a position to have such contacts was perhaps the most improbable part of Weldon’s career journey, and one of constant annoyance for the Clinton administration. For reasons that must have escaped many people who knew him, Weldon majored in Russian studies. He learned to speak the language fluently and, with little effort, became Congress’s foremost Kremlinologist. He collected friends and sources in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. By the mid-1990s, much to the State Department’s chagrin, Weldon had fashioned himself into a diplomat without portfolio. He trotted the globe, visiting with world leaders—and a few outcasts—on unofficial, and unendorsed, visits. As with the intelligence community, Weldon liked to publicly enumerate the ways the Clinton administration was spoiling its relations with potential allies. And, of course, he happily volunteered his services toward their repair.
Weldon called Tenet after receiving urgent calls to his office from contacts in the Russian Duma. NATO bombs and missiles had started falling on Yugoslavia two weeks earlier. The world had been waiting for Western intervention while thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were being murdered or displaced by the marauding Yugoslav army. Now the Clinton administration wanted those soldiers out of Kosovo, and they were prepared to topple Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević to do it.
That put the Russians on edge. “We’ve got a real problem,” Weldon’s contacts fretted. Moscow was suspicious of Clinton’s real intent in bombing YUGOSLAV civilian and military targets. Did he want to oust Milošević or to extend America’s sphere of influence? It was hard to tell.
“What do you want me to do?” Weldon asked.
He should convince President Clinton that Russia could help end the war and get Milošević out, the Russians said. They intended to go to Belgrade to meet with the besieged leader. Weldon should come as the United States’ representative.
This wasn’t a public relations stunt, they promised. They would take Weldon, and any other congressmen who wanted to join him, to a refugee camp, so they could see for themselves the human suffering Milošević had caused. They also would intercede with the government to get it to release three American soldiers captured near the border with Macedonia. And the Russians assured Weldon they would set up a meeting with Milošević himself at a future date, to persuade him to step down.
Weldon was surprised that the Russians could offer so much. How would they deliver? The Russians replied that they had a man in Belgrade. A close personal friend of Milošević who could convince the president to end the war, with certain commitments.
“Who is he?” Weldon asked. His name was Dragomir Karic.
Weldon had never heard of him. Where had the Russians found this guy? And how did he know Milošević? If anyone should know, it was the CIA. “I don’t know who this guy Karic is,” Weldon told Tenet over the phone. “The R
ussians are convinced he can give us information that will allow us to get Milošević to agree to our terms. Can you tell me something about him?” Tenet said he’d look into it.
Weldon liked to kick the CIA in the ass, but he told himself it was tough love. He wanted the agency to succeed, thought they had to. But he had to keep them honest. A dogged proponent of missile defense, like many of his fellow Republicans, Weldon once walked out on a closed-door briefing by CIA officials who had told him there was little risk that China or North Korea would fire off a ballistic missile at a U.S. city. Weldon claimed to have his own intelligence sources and firmly believed such an attack was not only plausible but imminent.
The CIA’s assessment, contained in a National Intelligence Estimate, infuriated the congressman, and he publicly vented his appraisal of the secret document: “The NIE is the most outrageous politicization of an intelligence document that I’ve seen in the 10 years I’ve been in Washington,” he told a reporter. Weldon was a master of rhetoric, and hyperbole was a favorite device. Tenet, himself a former Capitol Hill staffer, was used to handling men like Weldon, but he could test one’s patience.
Tenet called Weldon back the next day, with little to report. His analysts had dug up a few sentences of information. “We think he’s tied in with corruption in Russia,” Tenet concluded. The same could be said for thousands of others, none of whom wanted to sit down with a congressional delegation. Useless, Weldon thought.
Weldon ran Karic’s name up the flagpole with State Department officials, who were likewise at a loss. Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary, warned Weldon not to meet with him in Belgrade. “We don’t know who this person is,” he cautioned. “He’ll just use you.”
But Weldon had set his mind to the task. He gathered a delegation of ten members, evenly divided between the two parties, and arranged for a flight. Weldon granted Talbott’s request not to go to Belgrade by selecting an alternate meeting spot in Vienna.
Weldon still hadn’t vetted Karic, a man who, for all the Russians’ vouchsafing, had appeared with alarming suddenness. The CIA predictably had failed him. But Weldon had a plan B. He picked up the phone again, but this time he called his own sources.
When Erik Kleinsmith got the request from Weldon’s office to draw up a profile on the enigmatic Karic, he didn’t expect it to be an onerous task. The electronic sleuth with the Boy Scout demeanor had cracked much harder cases.
Kleinsmith recently had been assigned to the Information Dominance Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just outside Washington. Weldon had become acquainted with the futuristic outfit during his relentless oversight of the intelligence community. He was enamored of the IDC’s unconventional methods, and its people.
The IDC was a haven for computer-geeks-turned-soldiers like Kleinsmith. He and his civilian colleagues had wanted to ride on the bleeding edge of technology, and the IDC didn’t disappoint; with its flat-panel screens, sleek surfaces, and mission commander chair in the center of the room, they could imagine they worked on the set of a science-fiction movie.
Kleinsmith and his fellow analysts were engaged in a dizzying array of secretive military operations. Much of their work involved tracking cyber attackers who relentlessly tried to penetrate military systems and steal secrets. The analysts had developed methods of tracking and tracing these bandits across cyberspace and, if need be, sending some digital fire their way in the form of a computer virus or an assault on their network. The IDC also practiced the dark art of information operations—the spread of lies, misinformation, and other forms of propaganda to make an adversary act contrary to his own best interests.
Kleinsmith was the chief of intelligence for the Land Information Warfare Activity, a subgroup of the larger Intelligence and Security Command. The IDC operated under LIWA’s umbrella. Nestled deep within layers of acronyms, Kleinsmith suffered little outside interference. In the military bureaucracy, the lower one flew beneath the radar, the freer he could operate. Kleinsmith managed two dozen officers, soldiers, and civilian intelligence analysts. The IDC was their home base.
The analysts had a square-peg mind-set that the Army intelligence bureaucracy often rejected. Kleinsmith and his colleagues didn’t always fit in, and they liked that. Their analytic methods relied heavily on information technology “tools,” specially designed computer programs that processed vast amounts of electronic data and revealed connections among people, places, and activities that the human eye and mind often missed. The tools took the heavy lifting out of analysis, a tradecraft that had never kept up with the technological revolution. The IDC was a laboratory, and it attracted not just analysts but engineers looking to test the limits of the state of the art. Chief among them was a technologist named James Heath, who’d spent his career in the dark corners of the intelligence community crafting new surveillance and mining tools. He had visions of a master intelligence database, a collection of all the information known to all the agencies, held in one place that could be mined, sifted, and prodded. The IDC gave him a home base, and a testing facility. Kleinsmith and his peers saw Heath as a kind of “mad scientist,” and they were often thrilled to work with him. People like this were so rare in the intelligence community.
The IDC relished testing new tools, putting them through their paces on real missions. Some broke under the strain. Some proved indispensable assets in the IDC’s arsenal. The place was infused with a passion for the unconventional. And a hefty dose of competitiveness.
Kleinsmith enjoyed taking on tasks that befuddled the big agencies like the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. They had an army of analysts and infinitely larger budgets than his scrappy outfit. But they didn’t have his willingness to use new tools and methods, to take risks. Instead, other analysts adhered to an outdated tradecraft: read everything you can on a subject, become the expert, file everything you know away, and when someone comes looking for an answer, lecture them and intimidate them with all you seem to know. At least that’s how Kleinsmith saw it.
Kleinsmith’s immediate bosses had evangelized for the IDC’s impressive capabilities. Some of the marketing was based in reality; a good bit of it was exaggerated. Still, the center was earning a reputation as a place to go when you needed to get things done quickly. Kleinsmith and his cohort of high-speed visionaries were cut from the same cloth as Poindexter and McCarthy. Although they’d never met each other, their mutual ambition linked them. Even their physical environs shared a pedigree—the former Hollywood designer from Disney Imagineering who designed one of Poindexter’s demonstration spaces for the Genoa project also designed the IDC. It mimicked one of his recent projects—the set for the fifth film in the Star Trek franchise.
Kleinsmith knew the Karic job would be pretty easy. Some quick research, mostly of “open sources” on the Internet like news articles. Then he’d package up a report and send it back to Weldon. It didn’t require any detailed analysis; just organizing whatever information was available. And Kleinsmith could provide it faster; since the IDC was not classified in military parlance as a “producer” of intelligence, he could cut through layers of bureaucracy that slowed down other agencies. People could come to Kleinsmith directly to get answers. That also meant that whatever he sent back wasn’t vetted according to community standards. But most of Kleinsmith’s customers, including Weldon, could have cared less.
A day after he placed the call to the IDC, Weldon received its take on Karic. While the CIA had come up with a paragraph, Kleinsmith and his team produced an eight-page dossier.
The unofficial document claimed that not only was Karic tied to Milošević, but the men’s wives and their siblings all were good friends. It said that Karic had four brothers, who owned one of the largest banking systems in Yugoslavia, employing some sixty thousand people. The bank had tried to finance the sale of an SA-10 missile system to Russia, the IDC discovered.
And that wasn’t the half of it. The dossier also alleged that one of the Karic brothers had financed Milošević’s
election, that the house Milošević lived in belonged to the Karic boys, and that their wives were best friends with Milošević’s wife. The IDC analysts said that they found all of this in the open source—information available to anyone with an Internet connection.
After reading the document, Weldon was convinced that Dragomir Karic and his siblings were the closest people in Yugoslavia to the embattled president. He was the genuine article, just as the Russians had promised. Armed with what he judged a thorough profile, Weldon and his fellow Congress members boarded a military plane for Vienna.
The delegation met for two days in a hotel with Karic and Weldon’s Russian friends. Karic called Milošević several times on a portable phone. As the Americans and Russians negotiated a framework for compromise—which called for the release of prisoners and an international peacekeeping force—Karic relayed the details to Milošević. He agreed to the terms, on the condition that the delegation travel to Belgrade and meet with him in person. Karic said he’d provide the bus.
The American congressmen delighted over the possible end to the war—and the accompanying headlines in newspapers back home. Weldon called the State Department’s Operations Center, raising the number three man at the department, Thomas Pickering, the former ambassador to Russia. He was unenthused.
Pickering still couldn’t believe that Karic had the credibility to make these promises. The presence of the Russian delegation must have fueled speculation in the department that Moscow wanted to embarrass the Clinton administration. They would broker a deal with Congress instead. Force the White House to concede by releasing POWs as a sign of good faith. Pickering admonished Weldon that Karic was not to be trusted and that the delegation must not go to Belgrade.
Weldon relayed Pickering’s misgivings, and Karic was incensed. “You just blew it!” he fumed to Weldon. They could have ended the war, he said. Some of the congressmen insisted they would still go to Milošević on their own, but Weldon forbid it.