The Paladin

by David Ignatius

  “Yup,” said Dunne.

  “I promise you one thing, Mr. Dunne. I will stay out of your way. I am here to advise and consult.”

  “Have you worked overseas recently?” asked Dunne.

  “Not for some years, I’m afraid.” Hoffman smiled and clasped his hands across his tummy. “Many years.”

  “Operations is a different game these days. Everything leaves a digital trail. Unless we’re very careful, people will see us coming. So, to do this right, I will need a base camp first to scout the people and terrain. I’ve been thinking that Switzerland is the best bet. It’s a secure operational environment and the base chief can help with real estate.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. Dunne. We are entirely at your disposal. Take as many of our support people as you need. Your budget, as I understand it, will be unlimited, essentially. You collect the information and we will analyze it, as needed. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure, Morris. And by the way, it’s Michael. Mr. Dunne is my father. I hope you’ll at least come visit us overseas.”

  “Oh, I’d just get in the way, Michael,” said Hoffman. “You’ll do much better on your own.”

  8 Geneva – September 2016

  Michael Dunne established his base camp in a Geneva suburb called Carouge, south of where the Arve River joins the Rhône. The local CIA base had a never-used safe house there, a two-bedroom apartment in an old building. Dunne booked an overnight flight from Dulles to check the location and wander the neighborhood. It was a noisy district known as Little Italy, without the sheen of the chic, French-speaking Geneva by the lake. That suited Dunne; he liked the anonymity that came with crowds and commotion. Headquarters requisitioned the apartment and flew in a suite of computers and communications gear with its own satellite uplinks.

  Dunne said an awkward goodbye to Alicia before he left. She was seven months pregnant. He told her he wasn’t sure when he would be back. It was hard to look her in the eye.

  “Cuidado, meu querido,” she said. Be careful, my darling. She never knew where he was going or what he did. Dunne’s four-year-old daughter Luisa didn’t want to let him go, and she cried at the door as the Red Top taxi arrived to take him to the airport.

  Dunne brought his two best tech support people, Adrian White and Arthur Gogel, to assist him in Geneva. They arrived two days after Dunne, along with the computer gear. Like many of Dunne’s S&T colleagues, they looked like hipsters on vacation, but they were meticulous at their jobs. They shared the front bedroom, which quickly took on the funky, chaotic look of a college dorm. Dunne claimed the bedroom in the back, overlooking a courtyard.

  In the living room the team created a small computer lab, with secure servers, laptops, and a half dozen monitors, all shielded to prevent detection of signals. The team had two communications links to the outside: One was a high-speed broadband connection to the “dirty wire” of the public Internet; a second accessed a satellite array that carried CIA special-handling traffic. All the Internet connections were routed through two proxy servers, a first in Luxembourg that bounced to another in Thailand, to hide their tracks.

  Dunne’s team spent the first few days scouting Fallen Empire’s messaging. Adrian managed the initial online research. After three days, he had enough to present a briefing.

  “This is some weird shit,” began Adrian, when he gathered his two colleagues. He was a dark-skinned Jamaican-born man, with dreadlocks falling to his shoulders. His ethnic identity had given him cover over the years to do close-in S&T operations in places where a white man wouldn’t survive. He was beloved among colleagues as an unflappable professional, the man you would most want to have with you in a foxhole.

  “First, let’s look at some of the propaganda these so-called journalists have been putting online. They post from fifty different IP addresses, but all the stuff I’m going to show you gets the ‘Fallen Empire’ brand.”

  Adrian displayed a visualization he had created to map the messaging. It showed dozens of topic clusters, but he focused on four big themes: freedom for Edward Snowden; police violence against African Americans; environmental action; and anti-Semitic hate crimes in Europe.

  “We’ll start with Snowden,” said Adrian. “It’s the basic crybaby line you would expect.” Over a career in the CIA, Adrian had developed the same conservative political views as most of his colleagues.

  “They have a site called WeLoveSnowden.org,” he began. “No shit. It’s really called that. They quote various predictables demanding that Snowden be pardoned. Hollywood actors, a Black Lives Matter dude, some bleeding-heart novelists, even a British comedian. It’s nasty, but let’s face it, half the people in Europe feel the same way.”

  “Sad but true,” said Dunne. “You finding any fakes? Anything that doesn’t smell right?”

  “Yes, indeed. The WeLoveSnowden site is circulating an NSA document that’s supposedly a memo authorizing surveillance on European citizens, everywhere. Not just their metadata, but everything. It’s backed up by a recording of the NSA director’s voice, supposedly talking to the head of the German BND.”

  “And that’s fake?”

  “NSA hasn’t issued any public statement. But I got a message overnight from the Fort that it’s a crock. The voiceprint is flawless. It’s the director. But his XO says he never said it. And there’s a fake video, too, in which President Obama supposedly asks an aide off-line about a drone strike he ordered in Russia to kill Snowden.”

  “You’re shitting me. That’s online at the Fallen Empire site.”

  “It’s password-protected, for their inner circle only, but yeah. It’s fake, but unbelievably good. The video looks exactly like brother Barack, down to the white hairs on top. But Hoffman got confirmation from the NSC that it never happened. Here, take a look.”

  Dunne watched a figure identical to Obama, speaking in the unmistakable high, thin, precise voice of the president, inquiring about a drone assassination attempt on Snowden.

  “That would fool Michelle,” muttered Dunne. “What else have you got besides the Snowden file?”

  “They’re playing the race card pretty hard, even for me,” said Adrian, flipping his dreads back from his shoulders. “Look at this stuff from Ferguson.”

  Adrian clicked through a string of images that had been posted since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, two years before. The recurring theme was that nonviolence was a mistake and it was time for a reprise of Black Panther radicalism.

  One had a picture of Bobby Seale and the words, “Hands up. But next time we’ll shoot!” Another featured the iconic photo of Huey Newton in a wicker chair with a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. A third had a line of young black men in berets and leather jackets and the words, “Black Panthers tried to protect black people from the KKK. The government destroyed the Panthers but the KKK survives.”

  “You go deep into the site and there are lots of videos of black people getting whipped and shot. Close up, gory, makes your skin crawl. That shit happens in real life, but I asked Hoffman to do some tests, and this particular shit ain’t real. It’s staged. We’re trying to figure out how they did it.”

  “These folks are going to get someone killed,” said Dunne.

  “Uh-huh,” said Adrian. “I think that’s the plan.”

  Dunne pointed to the “Fracking” cluster on Adrian’s map. “What’s that about? Does shale oil kill black people, too?”

  “It kills everybody, according to our friends,” said Adrian. “Check it out.”

  The screen displayed a series of the environmental posts that Fallen Empire had disseminated through social media. They all centered on the idea that finding oil and gas through the technique called hydraulic fracturing would contaminate groundwater and harm public health forever.

  “Fracktivists Unite!” said one, showing a group of militants brandishing rakes and shovels. The slogans repeated versions of the message that fracking was a rip-off scheme to hurt ordinary people and help
rich corporations: “We Can’t Drink Money,” “No Jobs on a Dead Planet,” “Keep the Frack Out of My Water,” “The Poison Doesn’t Stay in the Ground.”

  “Maybe they have a point,” said Arthur, the other tech. He was wearing a black football jersey with the name ORWELL over the number 84.

  “Nah! They just hate oil companies,” said Dunne. “They want to kill the energy business the way people killed the steel business. Believe me, I’ve seen this movie.”

  Adrian motioned for Arthur to come closer. “Check this out, brother, before you decide these dudes are the good guys.”

  He displayed a link analysis that showed the countries where most of the anti-fracking posts had been disseminated. Nearly all were in Europe.

  “So, the funny thing about these European anti-fracking activists is that they’re using some material that shows up on a Gazprom website,” explained Adrian. “The Russians hate fracking because it would take away gas sales. Some of the video embedded in these sites looks too good to be true.”

  “Which means it probably isn’t. Send it home to Hoffman. Tell him to put it in the ‘Fakes’ file.”

  “What about anti-Semitism in Europe?” asked Arthur, pointing to the fourth cluster. “That’s not fake. My mother’s family is French-Jewish, and I’m telling you, it’s no joke.”

  “Understood, amigo,” said Adrian, clicking on another link. “But watch this.”

  The images in the anti-Semitism cluster were a jumble. A synagogue in Brussels attacked by Arabs. A crowd of North Africans outside a kosher market in Paris chanting, “Death to Jews.” A public mural in a Pakistani section of London showing Jewish bankers playing Monopoly on the backs of naked brown men. An image of Afghan refugees in Germany covered head to toe in burkas with the caption: “George Soros brought them here. Is there a terrorist underneath?”

  “Jew-hating bastards,” growled Arthur.

  “Racist crap,” agreed Dunne. “How does it fit with the other stuff?”

  “Because it’s so slick. I mean, there are videos of Muslim women being assaulted by Jewish men. Men in yarmulkes, men with side curls. They’re obviously fake, but they don’t look fake. They hired actors, or something else. I don’t know.”

  “Send them to Hoffman,” said Dunne. “What’s the bottom line?”

  “The anti-Semitism images are just like the rest. They’re all about getting people ripshit-angry at each other. They start with real stuff and then crank in fake stuff. Muslims are killing Jews. Corporations are destroying the environment. Blacks should kill racist white people. It’s all stirring the pot.”

  “What’s the pot?” asked Arthur.

  “Wrong question,” said Dunne, half to himself. “Who’s holding the spoon?”

  “There’s one more thing I’ve got to show you,” said Adrian. “It’s the weirdest part, really. I just found it last night, when I was putting the briefing together.”

  “Let’s have it,” said Dunne.

  “Well, all this left-wing crap I just showed you, with the inflammatory fake images about surveillance, race, the environment, and Jews, that’s all Fallen Empire, okay?”

  “Check. We just watched the highlight reel. What’s weirder than that?”

  “Well, last night I came across the same stuff in reverse. Sometimes the same video links, but with the fake stuff spun the other way. In this other version, Snowden was a traitor. Obama was chickenshit for not having killed him. The police were the victims in Ferguson and the other shootings. The oil companies are under attack and losing jobs. Jews are creating phony evidence of anti-Semitism. It was the same narrative, upside down.”

  “Who was posting the counter-narrative?” asked Dunne.

  “It’s a right-wing group called Save the West. But they’re playing with the same cards as Fallen Empire. It’s like a hockey face-off. Mirror image. Two sides manipulating the same fake information for different purposes.”

  “These people are scary good,” muttered Dunne. “Like the Russians, but better. How did you detect the fake stuff, Adrian?”

  “Slow the imagery down. Your eye doesn’t catch it, but if you go pixel by pixel, with a high-res image, you can see it. The splice isn’t quite right. The lighting is off. It’s a coherence problem. But they’re seriously good at it.”

  “Who are they?” murmured Arthur. He had watched the anti-Semitic videos in horror and was now struggling with the possibility that the same team of Internet manipulators had created evidence that the Jews were really the aggressors. He took it personally.

  Dunne moved to the center of his small team, his eyes blazing.

  “We have to find these people, now. Stop looking at their videos and start messing with their shit. Do we have anything that can locate them physically? Servers, proxies, anything?”

  “Not yet,” answered Adrian. “They’re bouncing around a bunch of different servers.”

  “Let’s feed all the video to Hoffman. Maybe there’s a tell we’re not seeing. We need to get inside this organization, now, and see how it works its magic tricks, and then it’s lights-out. Agreed?”

  “Roger that,” said Arthur and Adrian, in unison.

  * * *

  Hoffman called on a secure line later that day. His usual laconic manner was gone. His voice was thinner, and up an octave.

  “I believe we have found something of interest,” he said. “Something locational.”

  “I’m holding my breath,” said Dunne.

  “We think that many of the videos were created in northeast Italy. In a region called the Marche, in the mountains west of the Adriatic coast.”

  “And why do you believe that, pray tell?”

  “Because different power grids have different signatures, dear boy. Tiny fluctuations in the current. No generator is precisely the same as another. That’s something we learned when we were looking for Osama bin Laden. Videos have much hidden information. The slightest oscillation in the lighting. A flicker you can’t see. Islamabad looks different from Peshawar, if you know what to look for. And we do.”

  “So where in the Marche were the videos shot?”

  “The grid can’t tell us that precisely. It’s uniform in the region served by the central Enel station in Ascona. But…”

  Hoffman paused for effect. This was his moment, and he wanted to savor it.

  “But what? Come on, Morris. We’re on the clock.”

  “We did discover that a significant new power transmission line was installed for the city of Urbino, in the Marche, a month ago, to meet a substantial increase in demand for power there. It’s the sort of increased power consumption that we find when a small server farm is installed.”

  “Bingo!” said Dunne. “They’re in Urbino.”

  “Quite possibly, yes. I should think so. Entirely possible. Likely, perhaps.”

  Dunne turned to his two support techs. They both had big smiles, as he did.

  “Boys, we have a target. We need to start prepping it, which means close-in surveillance, name identification, plans for how to get in and out.”

  “Mi deh yah!” said Adrian, dropping a phrase of Jamaican slang. “I’m here.”

  9 Geneva – September 2016

  A few blocks down the street from Dunne’s little war room was a nightclub called La Minette. The Pussycat. It featured hip-hop and reggae music, and it got loud. Around midnight, the street filled with young people clamoring to get in. Dunne and his group had been working hard all day and into the evening and had ordered Indian food from a local takeout. But as the clamor outside increased, Adrian took off his headphones, which weren’t keeping out the din.

  “Hey, boss,” he said to Dunne. “Let’s go check out that place down the street.”

  Dunne shrugged. “I could use a drink,” he said.

  “You’ll get more than that down the street,” said Adrian with a mischievous smile.

  Dunne and Adrian showered and changed. Arthur said he would stay and guard the equipment. He wanted to watch
a video. Adrian pointed to his dreadlocks and asked if they should wear disguises. Dunne thought a moment and said no. They were clean, so far as they knew, and people on the street had already seen them come and go. Arthur let them out the door and powered down most of the equipment.

  The club was upstairs in a simple stucco building. A DJ was spinning records when they arrived. The dance floor was filled, bodies close under pulsing lights, purple and red, and a spinning globe that flashed in every direction. In the crush of people, you couldn’t really tell who was dancing with whom. Dunne and Adrian stood on the side of the floor, drinking and watching the action. Dunne had ordered a vodka.

  Adrian had his shades on, chilling. Dunne had his eye on a blond woman in a black leather skirt. In the heat of the room, her blouse was tight against her body and with each beat the fabric moved with the sway of her chest. The woman was lost in the sound of the music, eyes closed, arms raised above her, somewhere else. And then she was looking at Dunne, returning his gaze.

  Dunne raised his glass. She smiled and arched her back. The song ended, and a new one powered up. As the beat changed and the crowd of dancers re-formed, she was gone.

  That’s lucky, Dunne thought. He ordered another vodka. The DJ thanked the crowd and stepped away from his turntable, and the lights dimmed. When they came back up, a reggae band was on the little stage and tuning its instruments. Adrian went to the men’s room; when he came back, he smelled like weed. Dunne asked if he wanted to stay for the reggae set, and the Jamaican mouthed the words, Fuck, yes.

  The house lights darkened, so that all you could see was the spotlight on the singer onstage. Dunne turned to pick up his glass from the rail, and in the dark he didn’t see at first that the blond woman in the black leather skirt was standing next to him. She looked up at him with radiant blue eyes, freshly lined with mascara. She had an unlit cigarette in her hand.

  Dunne knew he should ignore her. She extended the hand holding the cigarette.