‘That’s for someone’s reporting. You did the same to my hearing testimony.’
Stella couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘I saw it. You did a good job hiding it under an old issue but I saw it. You printed a copy of my congressional testimony that morning. Ask me the question you wrote in the margin.’
It took Stella a moment to gather her nerve. ‘Did you lie about how the NSA papers were leaked to you?’
Novak nodded then said, ‘Yes. I lied.’
In the moment, he felt the weight of a year-long lie leave his shoulders.
Stella was almost afraid to ask. Actually hearing him admit it was more shocking than she’d imagined. ‘How did it go down?’ she asked.
Novak stared into his hands. ‘I was a junior reporter that had been handed a job at The Republic because Diane Schlesinger used to work with my dad. I made some decent stories in my twenties, but nothing that was boosting any circulations. I came to Washington and I was nobody, working the most boring process stories. Every day, I was a glorified stenographer. Then one day there was an NSA briefing, and when the press room cleared I found a memory stick on the floor. I sat there for ten minutes on my own waiting for someone to come back for it. While I was waiting, I plugged it into my laptop, and I realised the biggest story of the decade had fallen out of the sky into my lap.’
Stella found herself playing devil’s advocate. She asked, ‘What if someone accidentally dropped it, then once Republic printed the documents they were too scared to come forward?’
Novak replied, ‘The first file on the drive was a README with instructions about how to read the files securely.’
‘What about the pull quotes you used in the story about the leaker’s intentions?’
Novak was clear-eyed and telling the truth. ‘Everything after that was as I described. The memory stick had a tracker, which the source used to find me. That was it. We started talking on OTR after that.’
‘Why the hell did you lie?’
‘Whoever left the stick there, left it for someone random. I didn’t intercept anything. I didn’t think...’
‘Didn’t think what?’
‘I didn’t think I’d get as much credit if everyone knew it was luck. So I came up with a cover story. Then I took it to Mark, who showed it to Diane. Six months later I was on the cover of Time.’
Stella shook her head, as if she trying to clear her head. ‘I think your lawyer is going to be earning that retainer pretty soon.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Let me put this the way a government prosecutor will: Mr Novak, if there are two memory sticks sitting on the ground in front of you, one of which has been dropped purposely, the other by accident: how can you tell which is which?’
Novak bristled at the point. ‘Stella, it was right in the middle of the room. No NSA personnel walked through the media gallery, and would never have been assigned seating amongst–’
‘To professional reporters like you and I, yes, that’s obvious. But to anyone else, the prosecutor’s introduced doubt: has Tom Novak published classified material without the aid of a whistleblower?’
Novak asked, ‘Do you really think that’s a distinction the public cares about?’
‘It’s a distinction the federal government cares about. Without that material coming directly from an NSA or Pentagon whistleblower the leaking of the intelligence is on you. And there aren’t any legal protections for that. That’s why the government prosecutes whistleblowers and not reporters.’ She then added, ‘Normally.’
Feeling dire about his position, Novak tried to change tack. ‘What I’m saying, Stella, is that story could have landed in the laps of fifty other reporters, and probably all more talented than I am. So yeah, I’m going to Bastion because I’m not what everyone thinks I am. I’m just trying to earn a living.’ The weight of this admission seemed to have taken something out of Novak. He leaned forward on the end of the bed, exhausted by it all.
If he was expecting praise for his admission, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Stella said, ‘What a load of bullshit. You know your problem? You want to be like your father: popular, inoffensive, and wealthy.’
‘There are worse things to be in life, Stella.’
‘I read those Republic articles you wrote before the NSA papers. On conflict diamonds; embedded in Fallujah; lobbying in Washington... The guy who wrote those, I’d walk into fire with. Because that guy knew exactly what he was doing.’
‘I think you’re easily impressed.’
Stella sat down next to him. ‘Judging by my last four boyfriends, I’m inclined to agree with you. But look at all the shit you shovelled at the NSA. For months on end. What did they ever do?’
‘Well,’ Novak said, ‘they’re forcing me to give up my source – who I clearly don’t know – and if I don’t the U.S. government’s going to send me to jail.’
Stella wasn’t swayed. ‘That’s long after the story got out, to send a message to other leakers, not reporters. You could do Dateline, Fox and Friends, and Larry King one after the other and go home afterwards without having to switch cabs. Artur Korecki sends you one video from a field in Poland, and suddenly you’re hiding out here like Frank Pentangeli?’ Stella made her way to the mini-bar, and took out two vodkas. Both for herself. She didn’t bother with a glass. ‘Nathan Rosenblatt just wants to hurt Diane and The Republic by taking you away.’
‘Do you think I don’t know that!’ Novak snapped. ‘Do you think I’ve not been around long enough to know I’m being played? But I’ve got to go somewhere with a future for me.’
Stella opened one of the vodka miniatures and necked it. ‘Well when you realise we’re onto something a little more important than your career, let me know. I’ll be over on this side of the bed, drinking. A lot.’
Novak turned back to the TV, and started Artur’s video over.
Rebecca Fox residence, Cheltenham – Tuesday, 11.55pm
With the sort of day she’d had, Rebecca should have been wiped out, crawling across her front doorway and longing for her bed. Instead she charged into her flat, heading straight for her computer, resolved to an all-nighter.
The DVD with Mackintosh’s files was booting up by the time she realised she was still wearing her coat, standing over the keyboard. All the letter keys were faded, but the space bar and Ctrl buttons (most-used by programmers) were especially worn, like the spot where a drumstick has repeatedly landed on a snare. She threw the coat off, dropping it straight to the floor, then sat in front of the screen, where she would remain for the next six hours. Four hours would be spent reading. Another two would be spent sitting back in her ergonomic chair, staring at the screen in disbelief as everything she thought she knew about Abbie Bishop dissolved on the screen in front of her.
She started with the now-decrypted files Abbie sent her. As Rebecca started to read it became clear Abbie hadn’t been lying when she told Rebecca in her last email that she might not like what she found out about her. The facts were undeniable. Abbie’s entire GCHQ history was laid out on the screen.
Abbie had joined GCHQ in 2007 – only a year before Rebecca, but in that year Abbie had seemingly made about five years of progress, and had already been granted STRAP Three clearance after her first six months. It was unheard of. It had taken Rebecca – who had been the very picture of a model recruit – three years to even advance to STRAP Two level. Someone, somewhere high up in GCHQ or in the government, had been pulling strings for Abbie almost as soon as she had arrived. Fast forward to 2009 and things started to get really murky.
Abbie had left a digital trail to a bank account in her name, into which exactly £5000 had been deposited every month for the last nine months. Now the account was flush with £45,000. Not bad for a civil servant.
In Rebecca’s eyes it had all the hallmarks of a slush fund – or some kind of bribery, maybe even blackmail – except Abbie hadn’t touched a penny of it. No withdrawals, and no othe
r deposits. There had been some inventive accounting going on, but Abbie had circled all the linked accounts that traced the cash going into her account from ‘The Goldcastle Group’.
Rebecca searched online for the name, finding a slick, graphically impressive website.
“Data is what we do” said the website banner. “We know how to find voters, and make them yours.” On the face of it, Goldcastle looked like a very high-end political consultancy firm: “We are a global leader in political consulting, with a unique focus on voter data. We have supported over 100 campaigns in twenty different countries. Our speciality is in the United States, where we played a pivotal role in Presidential, state, and congressional elections.”
The homepage carried the logos for the last two U.S. Presidential campaigns, a host of prominent congressional campaigns, and politicians who were regular guests on conservative news channels. It also carried the logos for two pro-Brexit campaigns, and Simon Ali’s last General Election campaign, “Britain First.”
What Rebecca didn’t understand was what Abbie was being paid for. Whatever it was, she’d been keeping it secret for a long time.
Rebecca kept searching and found a document that appeared to be the holy grail: ‘Operation Tempest – STRAP Three eyes only.’ It was what she needed more than anything. A file explaining exactly what Tempest was and who was involved.
She clicked to open it and her heart sank.
A window opened in the centre of the screen: ‘PLEASE ENTER THE DECRYPTION KEY THEN CLICK OK.’
Of course, Rebecca thought. Abbie told her she had encrypted the most important files and left the key on her laptop.
The key was 128 characters long.
As disappointing as the setback was, Rebecca’s experience with encryption helped her: she knew how impossible it was to break without Abbie’s laptop. So she moved on to Mackintosh’s files.
When she’d copied the files from Matthew’s computer, it had copied all the root data associated with the files too. So all it took was about two and a half minutes for her OPEN WINDOW program to scan for the most frequently used phrases associated with certain documents that had been password-protected.
Mackintosh may have been in GCHQ, but even he wasn’t above one of the cardinal sins of digital protection: using the same password for multiple items. He’d grown lazy with the wealth of documents in his possession, and assumed he had little to fear from internal security breaches.
Rebecca did ‘Select all’ on the files, had OPEN WINDOW assign the same password to every file, and sure enough every one of them unlocked.
Now she could do keyword searches on everything inside the files. Names, places, dates. She had it all.
She looked first for ‘STRAP Three’. It wasn’t pertinent to exposing whatever Mackintosh might be up to. She just wanted to see what she was dealing with.
Her excitement quickly turned to trepidation at the words at the top of the first file:
Top Secret STRAP Three document.
‘OK...’ she said through a long exhalation, knowing the gravity of what she was looking at. ‘Holy shit.’
Even the different font it was written in compared to STRAP Twos set Rebecca’s fingers tingling. This was as real as it got.
There were memos inside it from the Prime Ministers’ personal secretaries; minutes from Cabinet briefings, with follow-up emails from Secretaries of State, all swearing and bickering with each other; personal opinions on foreign heads of state; and transcripts of personal phone calls.
Browsing through the other files it became clear Mackintosh had access to the sort of material that would leave a newspaper editor salivating. On a few pages Rebecca saw mentions of two incidents that would have been front-page news for at least a week, and another that would have been worthy of a prominent MP’s resignation. There was even loose talk of a young member of the Royal family having a different father than was commonly acknowledged.
Rebecca took a moment to gather herself. There wasn’t time to screw around and get seduced by gossip.
She needed to find any material on Abbie.
There was nothing immediately obvious. The first thing to come up when searching ‘ABIGAIL BISHOP’ was a dossier on a young MI6 agent called George Abassi.
There were ‘Highly Classified’ digital watermarks on every page. A level so high some British army generals weren’t authorised to read the dossier, let alone Rebecca.
The agent’s picture was head and shoulders, a young light-skinned British Asian. The eyes were wide yet blank, giving nothing away. He looked neither cruel, nor gentle. There was no smile. Everything that was real to him – far away from the elaborate cover stories he’d nurtured throughout his career – was buried so deep inside him, no one would ever have guessed they were there. His DOB gave his age as thirty, but he looked five years older. Under his real name, it listed various aliases the agent had used throughout his missions. The last of which was Abdul al-Malik.
Skipping to the end of his bio Rebecca saw it noted Abassi was ‘killed in action, 8th December 2018 during Operation Tempest.’
She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. ‘Only on Sunday night. Tempest again...’
Wondering why the file had been caught in a search for Abbie, Rebecca was about to click away when she saw a single line at the bottom of Malik’s profile:
‘AGENT CONTACT: Abigail Bishop.’
With each document Rebecca read, the Abbie she thought she knew drifted further away. Yet she couldn’t help but be full of admiration for her. She’d been secretly running an MI6 agent for more than a year. Rebecca couldn’t imagine doing that for a fortnight and getting away with it.
On a hunch, Rebecca tracked down the same encrypted Operation Tempest file Abbie had sent, but Mackintosh’s version required a key as well. She thought it telling that for all the indiscreet, politicised, and highly sensitive material on his hard drive, the only encrypted files all related to Tempest.
If anything, it made her even more determined to press on.
She sorted the list to ‘Date modified’, then most recent at the top.
The first was a template document for creating an ID card. Namely from the U.K. Press Card Authority. In the top-right corner was a BBC logo, under which it read, ‘RIZ RIZZAQ, TV CAMERA OPERATOR’. The only thing missing was the accompanying photo.
Although the BBC had their own ID cards for clearance on BBC property, when attending outside events with any kind of police cordon or secure entrance, the police only accepted valid U.K. Press Card Authority passes. It was the media’s equivalent of a driving licence. And it had just as many security features: various holograms, raised lettering, raised tactile pattern, Optical Variable Ink feature which changed the colour of the UKPCA logo from blue to gold when the card was tilted, and a ten-digit alphanumeric code. In short, they were completely impossible to counterfeit. The cards were produced by the same manufacturer that made U.K. driving licences and credit cards, all made on secure units that were protected like prisons. The cards were made from a central database, supplied by certain ‘gatekeepers’ of the industry: BBC, Sky, the NUJ, ITN among others.
Rebecca knew she was looking at no fake. It was the root document for a new U.K. press pass.
Which could only have come from one place: Mackintosh had hacked the card manufacturer’s database.
A quick Google of Rizzaq brought up numerous reports on his murder, seemingly during a home invasion. Rebecca couldn’t work out why Mackintosh would have the root document of Rizzaq’s press pass.
When she searched the files for ‘RIZ RIZZAQ’ she got her answer: a file created two weeks ago, this time a PDF called ‘Press ID final draft’.
As soon as she opened it Rebecca’s stomach flipped. The pass had Rizzaq’s name on it but it now had a photo added. Not of Rizzaq’s kind face, and soft eyes, but of the slightly steeled, hollow expression of Abdullah Hassan Mufaza.
For a moment all Rebecca could do was sit and stare at the screen
, her mouth covered by a slightly trembling hand.
This can’t be right, she thought.
She unwound and disassembled any possible reason for Mackintosh to be in possession of such a document. A theoretical what-if to demonstrate how Downing Street security could have been breached? Or perhaps Mackintosh had mandated a red team hack (where GCHQ operatives try to hack the very systems they’ve made) to prove the UKPCA was vulnerable to outside hacking?
There was only one thing that could maintain Mackintosh’s innocence: the date the file was created.
If the file had been created after the Downing Street attack, then it was conceivable Mackintosh had just been experimenting with some graphics – perhaps to see how easily a terror cell might have made a forgery. But the ID was in a unique GCHQ file format called RIG, which were totally impenetrable. Any attempt to edit them would be as convincing as changing the name on someone’s passport by cutting out letters from a newspaper.
Even though Abbie’s final email to Rebecca warned her Mackintosh couldn’t be trusted, it was a stretch for Rebecca to accept any notion she’d been working for years with someone capable of colluding with the sort of people who had attacked Downing Street.
With half-averted eyes she right-clicked the file and selected Properties. When she saw the date she whispered, ‘Mack. What the hell have you done?’
On the screen the tab said, ‘File created 1/12/18. File last modified 1/12/18.’
Two weeks before the Downing Street attack.
The Mayfair Motel, New Jersey – Tuesday, 9.32pm
Stella was asleep on the bed with two mini-bar empties by her side. After a twenty-hour day, that was all it took to finally wipe her out. She was on her side, tucked in a corner of the double bed, her back to Novak.
He was sat up with the clean laptop Kurt had given him. The email from Nathan Rosenblatt was up on the screen, and had been for some time now.
The TV was turned to CNN on mute with subtitles – Novak’s idea so Stella could catch some much-needed sleep before the red eye east.
Official Secrets Page 16