by Tom Clancy
The ITP was credited in the article for finding and then protecting the whistleblower who passed the intelligence to Der Spiegel, though ITP made no formal announcement itself.
This was but one of many “gets” attributed by the ITP over the next few months, and the more Ethan looked into them, the more he liked what he saw. He was fascinated by the anonymous nature of the organization, the impressive list of successes ascribed to them, though he was skeptical at first of the claims that the organization kept whistleblowers safe through encryption that even the American National Security Agency could not hack.
Still, Ethan had to admit, the Project seemed to be getting things done.
He learned more about the ITP in an award-winning documentary film with the sanctimonious title The Future of Truth. The movie portrayed the loose consortium of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and ethical hackers (the film used the laudatory term “hacktivists”) as a group of citizen world police, a league of idealists who were the last line of defense between corrupt national governments and the common man.
Around this time, Ross was in Berlin for a NATO conference and he saw, just by chance, that the director and producer of The Future of Truth would be speaking at the nearby Berlinische Galerie about her film and her time documenting the work of the ITP. On the spur of the moment, Ethan walked over to the event. As an American government employee with TS security clearance, this could have raised a red flag had anyone known about it, but he simply bought a ticket to the gallery and slipped into the back of the room as the filmmaker gave her presentation.
The director’s name was Gianna Bertoli, she was a fortyfive-year-old Italian who’d learned filmmaking at UC Berkeley and spoke perfect English. She talked at length about the ITP, fawning over both the integrity and the technical prowess of the organization. The one skeptical reporter in the room asked her about rumors of foreign sponsorship of the group, but Bertoli dismissed the allegation out of hand, saying in the year she spent researching and filming her documentary, she never once caught even a hint the Project was anything more than a wellmeaning cadre of egalitarians who were sponsored by wealthy progressives, mostly in the United States and Europe. Ethan was as impressed with Bertoli as he was with the subject of her film, and by the end of the evening he decided he would reach out to the ITP.
Ross contacted the organization via their website using Cryptocat messaging, and within weeks he and Harland Banfield were meeting face-to-face in a greasy-spoon diner in Chantilly, Virginia. It was Ross’s idea to meet in person. He had no intention of passing intelligence off to another country, and he had to at least entertain the possibility the website and the film were all part of some elaborate false-flag scheme to get American government employees to reveal secrets to the Chinese or the Russians. But by meeting with Banfield face-toface, and by looking into his past history and affiliations, he satisfied himself that the Project was just what it claimed to be: a clandestine clearinghouse where whistleblowers could share information in safety with journalists.
DURING THAT FIRST MEETING, Banfield was on guard much the same as Ross. He had worked sources since before the man in front of him had been born, he knew better than to press this confidant and intelligence NSC staffer for information. Instead, he let Ross talk about his philosophy, and his desire to work in the shadows against policies he disagreed with. Banfield listened quietly and carefully, and he took note of the fact Ross had some grievances against his coworkers who did not appreciate him and an administration that did not share his worldview or beliefs about international law.
Banfield had been around the block a few times, especially with whistleblowers, and although he loved them for the product they passed, he didn’t hold the individuals themselves in much regard. Ross, in Banfield’s estimation, was full of grandiose ideas about diplomacy and politics. Some of them the veteran newsman actually agreed with, but as he sat there quietly in the diner listening to Ross talk, it occurred to him if this handsome young man did someday run for political office, Banfield wouldn’t vote for him.
The guy was a pompous-assed narcissist.
Still, Harlan Banfield said all the right things and he told Ethan Ross he hoped they could work together to make right some of the current administration’s many wrongs.
There was little risk to Banfield in this endeavor. He knew no one was ever prosecuted in the United States for publishing classified data, only for leaking it. Even though Banfield would serve as a channel for the intelligence breaches and not as a publisher himself, he was a respected member of the fourth estate, and because of this he knew he was safe. Ross wasn’t there to entrap him, although he still might have been a government plant, and this could have been a ploy to get Banfield to reveal himself as the ITP’s U.S. liaison. There was little Banfield could have done to prevent this, but if he were outed by the U.S. government, he couldn’t be arrested. He would simply pass the baton to someone else and end his formal relationship with the Project.
At their first meeting, Ross handed Banfield a single typewritten sheet of paper in a plastic bag. The paper wasn’t an original document, it was instead a piece of classified intelligence Ross had typed himself, and the bag was to keep his fingerprints off it during transport.
This first leak was small; it was his notes of a transcript of a top-secret NSA SIGINT intercept between two executives of an Israeli bank. In their conversation they went into some detail about their practice of not lending to commercial accounts that had supported a candidate in the Labor Party.
Ross provided no documentary proof this conversation ever took place, but Banfield promised to get the intelligence to the right person to have an effect.
More than a month after he passed on the information, Ethan received a secure e-mail from Banfield. Attached was a short article from that day’s copy of Haaretz, an Israeli left-of-center daily, exposing the bank and its politically motivated lending practices. The executives denied the charge, but they were equivocal, obviously because they didn’t know what information Haaretz had managed to uncover.
Banfield followed up the link with a note.
“Good job! No smoking gun, but the bank is on notice, and the eyes of the world are upon them!”
Harlan was stroking his ego, this Ethan could plainly see, but Ethan did feel a jolt of power nevertheless, a confirmation of his ability to effect outcomes. His own disclosure had made a positive difference. Not in any great way, but he felt the risk had been minimal, and very much worth the reward.
The Haaretz article became a proof of concept. Ethan Ross was now an ITP whistleblower. Ross and the ITP were a perfect match. Neither was in it for any fame or notoriety, and both felt they knew better than the U.S. government what should be classified and what should be revealed to the world.
His early successes as a whistleblower were impressive. He slipped Banfield information about a CIA/Mossad operation to discredit an outspoken opponent of the U.S.-backed government in Jordan, and this led to harsh criticism of the policy in the world press. Next he outed a Cayman Islands registered enterprise that was, in actuality, a front company set up by the Mossad to pay off journalists in Latin America who ran stories promoting Israeli business interests. This revelation created a minor firestorm in Argentina as a right-of-center television station was exposed as a shill for a foreign power and the leftist government revoked its license.
For more than a year Ethan continued in this vein with the Project. Every two months or so he’d either meet Banfield in person for a chat or forward something via the encrypted e-mail. The process was going well for both parties, and although Ross remained frustrated by what he saw as his stalled career in government, he truly believed he now possessed more real power than even those with the dedicated parking spaces at the Eisenhower Building.
Then Ethan learned about the U.S. involvement, a few years earlier, in the Israeli attack on the Turkish ship SS Ardahan taking part in the Gaza peace flotilla. He had sat in on a morning meeting
with some White House staffers, CIA execs, and senior military advisers. The subject was funding for political opposition parties in Lebanon, something Ethan knew quite a bit about. He was there to quietly advocate for pushing U.S. dollars to a UN program to educate Palestinian refugees through a Hezbollah-supported organization, but his position wasn’t getting much traction. One of the CIA men made an offhand remark about the secondary benefits of direct CIA funding of some of the smaller Lebanese factions in areas where the Palestinian camps were located. A White House staffer seconded this line, adding, “We saw how beneficial it can be to have people inside the camps during the so-called Gaza peace flotilla attack. Beneficial for us as well as the Mossad.” Immediately one of the CIA execs put a hand up and reminded the staffer that not everyone in the room was cleared for that code-word operation. The staffer apologized sheepishly— these things happened—and the conversation moved on.
Ross spent the rest of the meeting wondering what the hell the staffer was talking about. He knew nothing of any CIA involvement in the Mossad attack on the SS Ardahan—an event that dominated the news cycle for more than a week and nearly brought the Middle East to the brink of war—but he damn well planned on finding out. When he got back to his desk, it took Ethan only minutes to find the relevant data about the CIA involvement in the affair. The primary documents were located in a code-word-access database on Intelink-TS, but Ethan was able to gain access to a brief summarizing the operation with his SCI access.
The CIA had an informant on the boat, the informant had a CIA sat phone, and the CIA passed Mossad all the tactical intelligence necessary to take the ship. They did this not by giving primary access to the source via the sat phone. No, they kept their informant’s identity secret to the Israelis. Instead, a CIA officer with military experience met with the Shayetet 13 commandos on the day of the raid and gave them all the details of the armed Palestinians on the Turkish-flagged freighter.
After the raid, Tel Aviv went out of its way to stress that the U.S. had not been involved in the operation. Ethan bought the line, and now he realized he’d been tricked.
Ethan fumed. The simple knowledge that the CIA had passed the intel to the Israeli commandos before they dropped down to the boat and started shooting peace activists made him furious.
He’d gone into government service to follow in his mother’s footsteps and make the world a better place, not to bolster a hegemonic America by helping its shills around the globe kill peace activists.
There was no turning back now. Ethan decided to act.
He passed his limited and unsubstantiated information in an e-mail to Banfield, who promised to get it to The Guardian.
Ethan woke each morning to check the website of The Guardian for any news about the flotilla raid. After a week of nothing, he received a Cryptocat chat request from Banfield. The older journalist told Ethan The Guardian dismissed Ethan’s tip because he’d provided nothing to substantiate such an incendiary charge.
Ross was furious the British paper did not publish on his anonymous assertions alone.
Banfield did what he could to calm Ethan in the chat, saying the SS Ardahan allegation had simply proved to be too much for The Guardian to swallow without proof. He then helpfully suggested that if Ethan could somehow safely get documentary evidence, then they could pass this along and get some real traction for the intel.
Ethan thought it over, enjoying the mental challenge of devising a plan to leak the information without getting caught. He knew if he downloaded the documents off of Intelink-TS, it would leave a digital fingerprint of his doing so. As soon as the news came out about the U.S. involvement in the Ardahan attack, computer security officials at CIA would be able to track the user who accessed the information and moved it from the database portion of the network to the file-sharing portion of the network, a necessary step for items downloaded to pass through. Even if he just printed out the files, he’d still leave a trail.
The more Ethan wrestled with the problem, the more his ego told him he had to come up with a solution. He decided to resurrect his interest in computers to try to find a way to cover his tracks to get the documents he needed.
He began spending his evenings studying computer science with vigor, reading everything he could about the security of the systems on which he worked every day. At work he pestered IT employees with made-up problems involving his logons and access, careful to adopt a constant look of confusion and bewilderment on his face so everything they explained was explained two or even three times.
He volunteered for projects that required him to have his access levels temporarily boosted so he could use the networks in the building that gave him some access, via JWICS, to deeper regions of the classified CIA databases.
But Ethan soon came to the realization that despite his incredible intellect, there was just too much even he did not know. The problem, as he saw it, wasn’t his intelligence; rather, it was that there existed no way for a man in his position to delve any deeper into the inner workings of computer security without raising eyebrows.
Then Ross found a serendipitous answer to this problem— her name was Eve.
11
ETHAN PULLED into his driveway just before six p.m. A light freezing rain fell, so he held his leather folio over his head while he ran to his front door and put the key in the lock, but before he could turn the knob the door opened suddenly. Eve Pang reached out and grabbed him by his tie and pulled him inside, and then she kissed him deeply.
He shut the door behind him and she pulled his tie off, her lips did not unlock from his as she completed the feat, and then she pushed him up against the door and went to work on his coat.
Ethan caught a quick full-body glimpse of her in the mirror against the wall by the hallway. She had already changed from work, and now she wore one of his white pinpoint oxfords that matched the color of both her panties and her thick wool socks.
Eve pushed his overcoat off him and tried to let it fall to the floor, but he caught it behind his back and laid it on a chair by the door. She began removing his suit coat, but he fought her attempts to pull it down.
Finally, she removed her mouth from his. “Is something wrong?”
“Tough day at work, babe. Can we talk?”
Surprised, she said, “Yes. Of course.”
“Good,” Ethan said, and he headed upstairs to change while Eve hung up his coat for him in the hall closet.
EVE PANG WAS KOREAN American, a network systems engineer for Booz Allen Hamilton, a government contractor. Ross met her six months earlier after a presentation she gave at a training conference for government employees with TS security at her corporate offices Tysons Corner, Virginia. He had signed up for the daylong class just to meet her. He knew she was one of the government’s top classified network administrators, and while most of the other NSC staffers in attendance couldn’t wait to get out of the mind-numbingly boring training and back to D.C., Ross, on the other hand, was captivated—primarily by the classes on secure network infrastructure, and secondarily by the Asian girl with the nerdy glasses who administered a portion of the course. She was attractive, but more important, it was obvious to Ethan she possessed incredible knowledge about the architecture of the U.S. intelligence community’s most classified systems, and he wanted some of that knowledge. Eve had worked on the security infrastructure of JWICS since she received her doctorate at MIT at the age of twenty-five. Now, at thirty-two, she was a highly paid Booz Allen systems engineer based at Fort Meade, but she worked all around the D.C. area on security protocols for the U.S. intelligence community’s VPNs, or virtual private networks, remote-access systems that allowed government employees to log on to some of the intelligence community’s most highly classified databases from outside of the confined networks.
Ethan Ross asked her out the day he met her, and she agreed with wide eyes and a thumping heart. She was flabbergasted by his advances—she’d dated only other computer geeks, and most of them had been Korean, bu
t he was an attractive, charming, and well-groomed White House staffer, who seemed as interesting as he was intelligent.
Ethan knew he was using her, but he wasn’t bothered by things like that, because he’d never possessed much in the way of a conscience when it came to relationships.
Their early dates involved a lot of talk about work. Eve had lived computer science for her entire life, she essentially had no other hobbies apart from her work, so networks and code were the easiest topics for her to talk about. And since her new and inquisitive boyfriend possessed top-secret clearance, she did so freely. Sure, there were aspects of her job she knew she shouldn’t and couldn’t discuss, even with her boyfriend, but little things slipped out here and there, and she saw no great harm in that.
They were on the same side, after all.
Ethan never even gave so much as a hint to Eve that he was leaking classified information to the International Transparency Project. And he passed his computer security infrastructure questions off as both his own personal interest in computer science and a desire to ensure the NSC was safe from both outside hacks and inside breaches.
Ethan liked to war-game scenarios with Eve while they ate dinner or sat in front of the fireplace in her condo. She knew he was extremely intelligent, just like she was, and he possessed orders of magnitude more curiosity about her job that she did about his.
It didn’t hurt that he plied her with wine while they talked, and her lips loosened by the glass. But she actually found the war-gaming fun and intellectually challenging. Eve fielded his questions, proud that her genius boyfriend took a real intellectual interest in her work. She joked with him on more than one occasion that even though she was an IT security professional, he was more obsessed with security than she was.