The Watchers

by Shane Harris

  In July 2003, with the controversy over TIA about to hit the boiling point, Hayden sat down with the Democratic and Republican heads of the House and Senate Intelligence committees. They were his legislative overlords. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Vice President Dick Cheney joined Hayden for the meeting at the White House.

  Porter Goss, the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA officer, had attended five briefings on the NSA’s secret surveillance program already. Only his Democratic colleague, Nancy Pelosi, had received as many. But that day they were joined by three relative newcomers. California congresswoman Jane Harman, a Democrat, had taken over the ranking House committee slot from Pelosi. And on the Senate side, Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas, and John Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, had been made aware of the NSA’s new orders only recently. This was only the second briefing they’d ever received on the program from administration officials.

  And brief was the operative word. Harman thought that the PowerPoint presentation she saw was pretty thin stuff and didn’t constitute full disclosure. These presentations, led mostly by Hayden, had been limited almost entirely to the intelligence committee heads—four people at any given time. The administration had still never briefed the four party leaders from the House and Senate. Together, these members constituted the so-called Gang of Eight and were customarily let in on sensitive operations like this.

  Hayden, Tenet, and Cheney gave the four intelligence overseers a glimpse into the NSA’s world, but they forbade the lawmakers to speak publicly about it. They couldn’t talk to their staff members or the committees’ lawyers. Rockefeller was troubled by the presentation. The details weren’t entirely clear to him. What exactly had he just heard?

  Later that day, he penned a letter to Cheney. “I am writing to reiterate my concerns regarding the sensitive intelligence issues we discussed today,” Rockefeller wrote. “Clearly, the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues.” The senator confessed that he was “neither a technician nor an attorney.” And since he couldn’t discuss the program with his staff, he could not “fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.”

  But there was something else. “As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter’s TIA project came to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.”

  What Rockefeller heard sounded familiar indeed. “Without more information and the ability to draw on any independent legal or technical expertise, I simply cannot satisfy lingering concerns raised by the briefing we received.”

  Rockefeller signed the note, put a copy in a sealed envelope, and filed it in a classified facility in the Senate committee’s offices.

  Poindexter packed his bags in early August. The press seemed to say he’d been forced out. He was in no position to say otherwise. Even if FutureMAP hadn’t blown up on him, Poindexter was well past his self-imposed one-year tenure. It was time to leave.

  Before he headed home for good, Poindexter stopped in at the Pentagon, to say good-bye to Rumsfeld. He walked into the office, and the secretary came straight for him. Before Poindexter could say a word, Rumsfeld apologized. “John, I think we overreacted on the FutureMAP thing.”

  “Don,” Poindexter said, “I agree. It’s a good idea.”

  That was the last time they spoke.

  Popp took over at the office for the next couple of months. His sole job was to salvage Poindexter’s work, managing the transition over to ARDA. It was a quiet, last-ditch effort, conducted entirely out of the public eye. The move itself was classified. As far as civil liberties activists were concerned, Poindexter’s brainchild was imploding. He had left. Congress was going to pull the funding. TIA was on its deathbed.

  Not quite. Buried deep within the massive Defense Department spending bill for the coming year, cobbled together by the powerful senators and staffers that Popp had been courting, TIA found an escape hatch.

  None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available in this or any other act may be obligated for the Terrorism Information Awareness Program. [The congressional appropriators used the program’s old and new names interchangeably.]

  That was the pledge. As far as the Defense Department’s budget was concerned, not a nickel would go to TIA.

  But then, a caveat.

  Provided: That this limitation shall not apply to the program hereby authorized for processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence, as described in the classified annex.

  It was the black budget. An underground river of undisclosed billions flowing directly into the spy agencies. It would carry the program formerly known as TIA. With a pair of obscure yet legally elegant sentences, Poindexter’s vision was given a second chance.

  The compromise for keeping TIA alive in some form was that it not be used for domestic counterterrorism or against U.S. persons. But that was a flimsy rule, and one easy to break, since the lines between foreign and domestic were getting blurrier all the time. And the prohibition technically only applied to the current fiscal year. If a TIA system was ever up and running, the rules could be changed. But lawmakers had struck a compromise, one that sustained a research program some considered vital, but blocked it from being unleashed on the American public, at least for now. Each side had gotten what it wanted.

  Now, a black veil descended over Poindexter’s program. Every dollar once spent on TIA in the open now was spent in the dark. Every experiment conducted outside the wall of secrecy now went to the other side. As far as the public knew, TIA was dead.

  But as Poindexter drifted back into his private world and watched his enemies declare victory, he comforted himself with the secret. TIA lived.

  ACT FOUR

  Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. . . . But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity—or the appearance of anonymity—is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

  —Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director

  of national intelligence, speaking to an

  intelligence symposium on October 23, 2007

  I once asked someone in the diplomatic corps, What do you think about intelligence as a professional? . . . The answer was, Well, let me tell you what a diplomat is. A diplomat is someone that can tell another person to go to hell and make them look forward to the trip. An intelligence officer is someone who can tell another person to go to hell and has the means to deliver them to that track.

  —Mike McConnell, the director of national

  intelligence, speaking at a military

  communications conference, November 17, 2008

  CHAPTER 21

  BASKETBALL

  Poindexter’s crew waited for news of his next move. One Tuesday morning in early December 2003 word arrived: They were back in business.

  Brian Sharkey sent an e-mail to firms working with his company, Hicks & Associates, to build the TIA prototype. He explained that an organization had come forward to sponsor their project. The precise scope of work going forward still needed to be sketched out, but Sharkey confidently reported that there would be a lot of it.

  TIA had barely skipped a beat. Even the contract used to pay Hicks remained in place. Besides the new sponsor, only TIA’s name would change.

  “We will be describing this new effort as ‘Basketball,’ ” Sharkey wrote.

  Sometimes one could only guess what inspired the vague, innocuous code names attached to secret government programs. The fact that they were vague and innocuous counted for a lot. Basketball was no different, although the image of TIA simply bouncing from one agency to another was apt. One of Sharkey’s colleagues sent a follow-up message to Hicks employees, instructing them not to use the name of Poindexter’s old program: “TIA has been terminated, and should be referenced in that fashion.”


  Sharkey’s contract wasn’t the only ball passed. Appropriators spelled out in the classified annex which elements would continue to receive funding. Genoa II was saved, and it reappeared with a name that harkened back to its nautical creator: It was now called Topsail.

  Along with Basketball and Topsail, the evidence extraction and link discovery research also survived. This was the area where Jeff Jonas’s NORA system had been tested. The new program was code-named Eagle.

  Finally, the TIA network, with its central node in the Information Dominance Center, remained intact. Now known as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration, or more simply, “the RDEC,” it continued the wind-themed experiments. In August, the very month that Poindexter resigned and Congress began to hammer out TIA’s secret compromise, the network was in the thick of “Sharqi,” named after a persistent, dry Saharan wind that kicked up a thick cloud of dust and sand.

  Poindexter had reason to celebrate. Not only had core elements of his research remained intact, but the vast network he’d established continued to grow. By the end of 2003 the RDEC—pronounced phonetically as “r-deck”—boasted more than 27 nodes and 350 individual users. An entire community had grown up, and it continued to flourish.

  But he regretted that the privacy research had been tossed into the dustbin. He’d never felt that the idea got traction, and what little research there’d been would wither without funding. It was a fateful decision, since the agency inheriting TIA would soon enough find itself accused of a massive and illegal incursion into Americans’ private lives.

  Few officials in government actually knew how far the Bush administration had gone. More than two years after 9/11, headlines about the Total Information Awareness program obscured the real story playing out just below the surface. The NSA had already plumbed the depths of the global communications system. The agency was the nerve center of a new war. The analytic engine, the hub, the place where all those dots that the government had failed to connect were now coming together. More than any single agency, the NSA had become the all-seeing eye.

  The war took its toll. In late 2003 Mike Wertheimer left the agency that had reared him. He took a job with a high-end technology company that mostly worked for the intelligence agencies. Washington’s revolving door was well oiled. Senior officials routinely took more lucrative jobs in the private sector and ended up under contract to their old bosses. But when Wertheimer left the NSA, he left more than his job behind.

  It had been two years since President Bush granted the agency extraordinary authority to monitor Americans’ communications without warrants. In the beginning Wertheimer supported the move. It was the right response to a crisis, he thought. But those authorities, and the surveillance they unleashed, went on too long, Wertheimer decided. As the threat of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil diminished, so too should have the NSA’s special powers.

  “When I walked away from that program,” he would recall years later, “I wanted nothing to do with it ever again.”

  The agency’s relentless pursuit to comprehend the once unknowable continued without him, and without customary restraints. Officials across the government saw that firsthand. One senior CIA official who was privy to the security agency’s reporting routinely saw American citizens and other U.S. persons directly named in its reports without the minimization procedures that had once shielded their identities. It was a clear indication that the president’s authorities really had pushed the agency into new territory—they could spy directly on Americans now.

  After the TIA programs moved into their new home, Popp tried one last time to revive the privacy research. He spoke with ARDA’s director about what funds were in the pipeline. Fortunately, the budget was laid out through the 2007 fiscal year. If the research group were looking for new areas to fund, Popp suggested, they might consider privacy research.

  “Thanks, but no thanks” was the message Popp received. ARDA wanted nothing to do with all that.

  CHAPTER 22

  RESURRECTION

  John Poindexter had already proven F. Scott Fitzgerald wrong. There were, in fact, second acts in American life. And he was about to have his third.

  He had held off on calling Fran Townsend. In May 2003, before he left government in a firestorm, she’d taken a new job in the White House. Townsend was now the deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, working under Condoleezza Rice. She wasn’t exactly the new Ollie North, or the new Dick Clarke, but she did have the terrorism brief. If Poindexter hadn’t already admired her since their meeting at the Coast Guard, he might well have sought her out anyway.

  Poindexter hadn’t been far from Townsend’s mind. When she read the first news reports about TIA, and the New York Times column, she felt a pit forming in her stomach. This is exactly what I was afraid of, she thought. Townsend had worried that Total Information Awareness would follow the path of Carnivore, the FBI’s e-mail surveillance tool. She hadn’t spoken to Poindexter since she took the White House job. But a few months after he left government, Townsend received a message that Poindexter had called. She contacted him right away.

  Poindexter said that he’d like to get together. “Sure,” Townsend replied. “Why don’t you come see me?”

  He was cautious. “Why don’t I not come to the White House?” he suggested. “Why don’t we meet for lunch?”

  A few days later Townsend walked across Lafayette Park to the Oval Room. The restaurant was a power stop for politicos where food was an afterthought.

  Poindexter thanked her for coming, and said it took some courage. Townsend felt a mix of admiration and sympathy. She thought that Poindexter had been taken to the Washington woodshed, for the second time. As they dined together she considered that for John Poindexter to thank her for coming said more about him than about Fran Townsend.

  There was no doubt about it. They were kindred spirits.

  Poindexter wanted to explain what had happened. He made it clear that the government was still going to get something out of his presumably defunct program. The baby had not been thrown out with the bathwater. After they finished lunch Townsend walked back to the White House with a comforting thought. All was not lost.

  From then on, Poindexter and Townsend kept in closer touch. They swapped ideas, discussed current events. She revered him, and he admired her tenacity and her thoroughness, two qualities that could endear just about anyone in his eyes. Poindexter had a powerful ally now in the heart of the White House.

  Poindexter also reemerged quietly in TIA’s new home. He got the word out to the new crew of program managers who’d taken over his research that he was available for consultations. Some of them called on him. They wanted his guidance, and he gave it. TIA was not gone, nor was its creator.

  Poindexter spent seven months underground reforging his alliances with key administration officials and the career class. Then, one chilly afternoon in March 2004, he reemerged in public.

  Syracuse University had invited him to debate the prominent privacy advocate and legal journalist Jeffrey Rosen on the subject of privacy and security. A small, invitation-only crowd attended—mostly current and former intelligence officers. Rosen had a new book out, The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age. In it he decried Total Information Awareness and related programs that seemed to feed off the public’s fear about terrorism.

  Poindexter gave his trusty PowerPoint briefing. It was precise, thorough, and tedious. Rosen delivered a more passionate address, with no notes or slides. The two men were a discordant pair.

  When it came time for rebuttals, the audience was primed for a verbal brawl. But Poindexter and Rosen hardly threw a punch. Each conceded points to the other. They kept eye rolling and groaning to an acceptable minimum. Rosen also acknowledged Poindexter’s long career of public service and steered clear of the obvious targets—Iran-Contra, lying to Congress, spying on Americans. They argued over policies, not personalities. This was the kind of intellec
tual pugilism that Poindexter liked and hadn’t gotten much of in a while. It was civil. Tidy.

  After a spirited hour-and-a-half discussion, Poindexter appeared satisfied. He had wanted to test public reaction to his ideas—and to him—in an intimate setting before heading out for a broader campaign to salvage his concept. The members of the audience, several of whom knew Poindexter and had worked with him over the years, seemed intrigued.

  When it came time for questions, the moderator called on a young, bespectacled man, apparently a student, sitting in the middle of the small crowd. Amid the gray usuits and jackets and the neatly trimmed haircuts, his baggy clothes and shaggy mop quickly raised eyebrows.

  Sam Alcoff opened with the obvious and indelicate question. How could the public be sure that TIA wouldn’t be incorporated into some larger, unchecked “domestic spying” program?

  A few people in the audience winced at those two dreaded words. Others toward the front row craned their necks to see who was talking.

  Simple, Poindexter declared. TIA would be used to monitor the people using it—watching the watchers, logging all abuses. Poindexter looked mildly annoyed. Hadn’t Alcoff been listening to his speech? But he also looked cautious. How had this young man gotten into the room? This wasn’t a public event.

  Alcoff considered Poindexter’s response. “I guess we’ll have to take your word for it,” he said, his voice rising. “But how can we, Admiral Poindexter, when you lied to Congress and the American people!”

  Poindexter sighed.

  “You’re a liar!” Alcoff shouted. “You authorized death squads in Nicaragua, who raped and murdered people!” A few gray-haired spies in the crowd shot Alcoff pointed looks. “Why don’t you shut up?” someone grumbled.