by Tom Clancy
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that at the direction of the President of the United States you are in on something that I think you’re not ready for.” Jack handed him the SPINNAKER report. “Read.”
“Why me, and why did you say—”
“I also said you did a nice job predicting the breakup of the Pact. It was better than anything we did in-house, by the way.”
“You mind if I say that you’re a strange guy to work with?”
“How do you mean that?” Jack asked.
“You don’t like my attitude, but you commend my work.”
Ryan leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Ben, believe it or not, I am not always right. I make mistakes. I’ve made some whoppers even, but I am smart enough to know that, and because I’m that smart, I look for people with opposing views to backstop me. That’s a good habit to get into. I learned it from Admiral Greer. If you learn anything from your time here, Dr. Goodley, learn that. We can’t afford fuck-ups here. They happen anyway, but we still can’t afford them. That paper you did at Kennedy was better than what I did. It’s theoretically possible that you might again one day be right when I am wrong. Fair enough?”
“Yes, sir,” Goodley replied quietly, surprised at the statement. Of course he’d be right when Ryan was wrong. That’s why he was here.
“Read.”
“Mind if I smoke?”
Jack’s eyes opened. “You a smoker?”
“I quit a couple of years ago, but since I’ve been here ...”
“Try to break that habit, but before you do, give me one.”
They both lit up and puffed away in silence, Goodley reading over the report, Ryan watching his eyes. The Presidential Fellow looked up.
“Damn.”
“Good first reaction. Now, what do you think?”
“It’s plausible.”
Ryan shook his head. “That’s what I just told the President an hour ago. I’m not sure, but I had to take it to him.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want to play on this a little. The DI’s Russian people will chew on it for a couple of days. I want you and me to do our own analysis, but I want a different spin on it.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that you think it’s plausible, and I have my doubts. Therefore, you will look for reasons it might not be true, and I’ll look for reasons that it is.” Jack paused. “The Intelligence Directorate will play this conventionally. They’re too organized down there. I don’t want that.”
“But you want me to—”
“I want you to exercise that brain. I think you’re smart, Ben. I want you to prove it. That’s an order, by the way.”
Goodley considered that. He wasn’t accustomed to getting or taking orders. “I don’t know that I can do that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s contrary to my views. It’s not the way I see this, it’s—”
“Your beef with me and a lot of people here is the corporate mind of CIA, right? Part of that is correct, we do have a corporate mind, and there are drawbacks to that. It’s also true that your way of thinking has its own pitfalls. If you can prove to me that you are no more a prisoner of your views than I try to be of mine, then you have a future here. Objectivity isn’t easy. You have to exercise it.”
It was a very clever challenge, Goodley thought. He wondered next if he’d perhaps misjudged the DDCI.
“Will Russell cooperate?”
“Yes, Ismael, he will,” Bock said, sipping at a beer. He’d gotten a case of a good German export brew for Fromm, and kept a few for himself. “He thinks we’ll be setting off a large conventional bomb to eliminate television coverage of the game.”
“Clever, but not actually intelligent,” Qati observed. He wanted a beer himself, but could not ask. Besides, he told himself, it would probably upset his stomach, and he’d actually enjoyed three consecutive days of relative health.
“His outlook is limited to tactical matters, yes. On tactical matters he is quite useful, however. His assistance will be crucial to that phase of the operation.”
“Fromm is working out well.”
“As I thought he would. It really is a pity that he will not see it to fruition. The same with the machinists?”
“Unfortunately, yes.” Qati frowned. Not a man who blanched at the sight of blood, neither was he one to kill unnecessarily. He’d had to kill people for reasons of security before, though never this many. It was almost becoming a habit. But, he asked himself, why worry about a few when you plan to kill so many more?
“Have you planned for the consequences of failure or discovery?” Bock asked.
“Yes, I have,” Qati replied with a sly smile, followed by an explanation.
“That is ingenious. Good to plan for every contingency.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
21
CONNECTIVITY
It took two weeks, but something finally came back. A KGB officer in the employ of CIA nosed around and heard something: there might be an ongoing operation about nuclear weapons in Germany. Something being run out of Moscow Center. Golovko himself was overseeing things. People working in KGB Station Berlin were cut out of it. End of report.
“Well?” Ryan asked Goodley. “What do you think?”
“It fits the SPINNAKER report. If the story about a fluky inventory of tactical nukes is correct, it certainly makes sense that it would have something to do with the pullbacks of their forward-deployed forces. Things get lost in transit all the time. I lost two boxes of books when I moved down here myself.”
“I’d like to think that people take closer care of nuclear weapons than that,” Ryan said dryly, noting that Goodley still had a hell of a lot to learn. “What else?”
“I’ve been looking for data to counter the report. The Soviet reason for their inability to deactivate the SS-18s on schedule is that the factory they built for the purpose is inadequate. Our on-site inspectors can’t decide if it’s true or not—engineering question. I find it hard to believe that if the Russians actually built the thing—and, hell, they’ve been building SS-18s for quite a while, haven’t they?—they should be able to design a place to dismantle them safely. They say the problem is in the fueling systems, and the wording of the treaty documents. The -18 uses storable liquids and has a pressurized body—that is, the missile structure depends on pressurization to remain rigid. They can defuel in the silos, but then they can’t extract the birds without damaging them, and the treaty requires that they be taken intact to the disposal facility. But the disposal facility isn’t designed right for defueling, they say. Something about a design flaw and possible environmental contamination. The storable liquids are nasty, they say, and you have to take all sorts of precautions to keep from poisoning people, and the facility is only three kilometers from a city, etc., etc.” Goodley paused. “The explanation is plausible, but you have to wonder how people could have screwed up so badly.”
“Structural problem,” Jack said. “They have trouble placing facilities out in the boonies for the simple reason that there few people have cars, and getting people from their homes to their place of work is more complicated there than here. It’s subtle stuff like that that drives us crazy trying to figure the Russians out.”
“On the other hand, they can point to a basic mistake like that and try to explain all kinds of things away.”
“Very good, Ben,” Jack observed. “Now you’re thinking like a real spook.”
“This is a crazy place to work.”
“Storable liquids are nasty, by the way. Corrosive, reactive, toxic. Remember all the problems we had with the Titan-II missiles?”
“No,” Goodley admitted.
“Maintenance of the things is a bastard. You have to take all sorts of precautions, despite which you routinely get leaks. The leaks corrode things, injure the maintenance people....”
“Have we exchanged positions on this?” Be
n asked lightly.
Ryan smiled, eyes closed. “I’m not sure.”
“We’re supposed to have better data than this. We’re supposed to be able to find things out.”
“Yeah, I thought that way once myself. People expect us to know everything there is about every rock, puddle, and personality in the whole world.” His eyes opened. “We don’t. Never have. Never will. Disappointing, isn’t it? The all-pervasive CIA. We have a fairly important question here, and all we have are probabilities, not certainties. How is the President supposed to make a decision if we can’t give him facts instead of possibly learned opinions? I’ve said it before—in writing, even. What we provide people with, most of the time, is official guesses. You know, it’s embarrassing to have to send something like this out.” Jack’s eyes fell on the Directorate of Intelligence report. Their teams of Russian experts had chewed on SPINNAKER for a week and decided that it was probably true but could represent a misunderstanding.
Jack’s eyes closed again, and he wished his headache would go away. “That’s our structural problem. We look at various probabilities. If you give people a firm opinion, you run the risk of being wrong. Guess what? People remember when you’re wrong a lot more often than when you’re right. So the tendency is to include all the possibilities. It’s intellectually honest, even. Hell of a good dodge. Problem is, it doesn’t give people what they think they need. On the user end, people as often as not need probabilities rather than certainties, but they don’t always know that. It can drive you crazy, Ben. The outside bureaucracies ask for things we often as not cannot deliver, and our inside bureaucracy doesn’t like sticking its neck out on the line any more than anyone else. Welcome to the real world of intelligence.”
“I never figured you for a cynic.”
“I’m not a cynic. I’m a realist. Some things we know. Some things we don’t. The people here are not robots. They’re just people looking for answers and finding more questions instead. We have a lot of good people in this building, but bureaucracy mutes individual voices, and facts are discovered more often by individuals than committees.” There was a knock on the door. “Come in.”
“Dr. Ryan, your secretary isn’t—”
“She’s having a late lunch.”
“I have something for you, sir.” The man handed the envelope over. Ryan signed for it and dismissed the messenger.
“Good old All Nippon Airlines,” Ryan said after opening the envelope. It was another NIITAKA report. He snapped upright in his chair. “Holy shit!”
“Problem?” Goodley asked.
“You’re not cleared for this.”
“What seems to be the problem?” Narmonov asked.
Golovko was in the uncomfortable position of having to announce a major success with unpleasant consequences. “President, we have for some time been working on a project to penetrate American cipher systems. We’ve had some successes, particularly with their diplomatic systems. This is a message that was sent to several of their embassies. We’ve recovered all of it.”
“And?”
“Who sent this out?”
“Look, Jack,” Cabot said, “Liz Elliot took the last SPINNAKER seriously, and she wants State’s opinion.”
“Well, that’s just great. What we’ve learned from it is that KGB has penetrated our diplomatic ciphers. NIITAKA read the same cable that our Ambassador got. So now Narmonov knows what we’re worried about.”
“The White House will say that it’s not all that bad. Does it really hurt that he knows what our concerns are?” the Director asked.
“The short version is—yes, it does. Sir, you realize that I didn’t know about this cable, and how do I read it? I get the text from a KGB officer in Tokyo. Jesus Christ, did we send this inquiry out to Upper Volta, too?”
“They got it all?”
Jack’s voice turned to acid. “Care to check the translation?”
“Go see Olson.”
“On the way.”
Forty minutes later, Ryan and Clark breezed into the outer office of Lieutenant General Ronald Olson, Director of the National Security Agency. Located at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore, it had the atmosphere of another Alcatraz, but without the pleasant view of San Francisco Bay. The main building was surrounded by a double fence patrolled by dogs at night—something even CIA didn’t bother with, considering it overly theatrical—as physical evidence of their mania for security. NSA’s job was to make and break ciphers, to record and interpret every bit of electronic noise on the planet. Jack left his driver reading a Newsweek as he strode into the top-floor office of the man who ran this particular outfit, which was several times the size of CIA.
“Ron, you got one big problem.”
“What, exactly?”
Jack handed over the NIITAKA dispatch. “I’ve warned you about this.”
“When did this go out?”
“Seventy-two hours ago.”
“Out of Foggy Bottom, right?”
“Correct. It was read in Moscow precisely eight hours later.”
“Meaning that someone in State might have leaked it, and their embassy could have sent it over by satellite,” Olson said. “Or it could have leaked from a cipher clerk or any one of fifty foreign-service officers....”
“Or it could mean that they’ve broken the whole encoding system.”
“STRIPE is secure, Jack.”
“Ron, why haven’t you just expanded TAPDANCE?”
“Get me the funding and I will.”
“This agent has warned us before that they’ve penetrated our cipher systems. They’re reading our mail, Ron, and this is a pretty good piece of evidence.”
The General stood his ground. “It’s equivocal and you know it.”
“Well, our guy is saying that he wants personal assurance from the Director that we haven‘t, don’t, and will never use comm links to transmit his material. As proof of that necessity, he sends us this, which he got at some significant hazard to his own ass.” Jack paused. “How many people use this system?”
“STRIPE is exclusively for the State Department. Similar systems are used by the Defense Department. More or less the same machine, slightly different keying systems. The Navy especially likes it. It’s very user-friendly,” Olson said.
“General, we’ve had the random-pad technology available for over three years. Your first version, TAPDANCE, used tape cassettes. We’re moving over to CD-ROM. It works, it’s easy to use. We’ll have our systems up and running in another couple of weeks.”
“And you want us to copy it?”
“Looks sensible to me.”
“You know what my people will say if we copy a system from CIA?” Olson asked.
“Goddamn it! We stole the idea from you, remember?”
“Jack, we’re working on something similar, easier to use, little bit more secure. There are problems, but my back-room boys are almost ready to try it out.”
Almost ready, Ryan thought. That means anywhere from three months to three years.
“General, I’m putting you on official notice. We have indications that your communications links are compromised.”
“And?”
“And I will make that report to Congress and the President as well.”
“It’s much more likely that there’s someone at State who leaked this. Further, it is possible that you’re the victim of disinformation. What does this agent give us?” the NSA Director asked.
“Some very useful material—us and Japan.”
“But nothing on the Soviet Union?”
Jack hesitated before answering, but there was no question of Olson’s loyalty. Or his intelligence. “Correct.”
“And you’re saying that you’re certain this isn’t a false-flag operation? I repeat—certain?”
“You know better than that, Ron. What’s certain in this business?”
“Before I request a couple hundred million dollars’ worth of funding, I need something better t
han this. It’s happened before, and we’ve done it, too—if the other side has something you can’t break, get them to change it. Make it appear that they’re penetrated.”
“That might have been true fifty years ago, but not anymore.”
“Repeat, I need better evidence before I go to see Trent. We can’t slap something together as quickly as you can with MERCURY. We have to make thousands of the goddamned things. Supporting that is complex and costly as hell. I need hard evidence before I stick my neck out that far.”
“Fair enough, General. I’ve had my say.”
“Jack, we’ll look into it. I have a tiger team that does that, and I’ll have them examining the problem tomorrow morning. I appreciate your concern. We’re friends, remember?”
“Sorry, Ron. Long hours.”
“Maybe you need some time off. You look tired.”
“That’s what everybody tells me.”
Ryan’s next stop was at the FBI.
“I heard,” Dan Murray said. “That bad?”
“I think so. Ron Olson isn’t so sure.” Jack didn’t have to explain. Of all the possible disasters for a government to face short of war, none was worse than leaky communications links. Literally everything depended on secure methods of moving information from one place to another. Wars had been won and lost on the basis of a single message that had been leaked to the other side. One of America’s most stunning foreign-policy coups, the Washington Naval Treaty, had been the direct result of the State Department’s ability to read the cipher traffic between all of the participating diplomats and their governments. A government that had no secrets could not function.
“Well, there’s the Walkers, Pelton, the others....” Murray observed. The KGB had been remarkably successful at recruiting people within the American communications agencies. Cipher clerks held the most sensitive jobs in the embassies, but were so poorly paid and regarded that they were still called “clerks,” not even “technicians.” Some resented that. Some resented it enough that they had decided that they could make money from what they knew. They all learned eventually that intelligence agencies pay poorly (except for CIA, which rewarded treason with real money), but by then it was always too late to turn back. From Walker the Russians had learned how American cipher machines were designed and how their keying systems worked. The basics of the cipher machines hadn’t really changed all that much in the preceding ten years. Improved technology had made them more efficient and much more reliable than their stepping-switch and pin-disc ancestors, but they all worked on a mathematical area called Complexity Theory, which had been developed by telephone engineers sixty years earlier to predict the working of large switching systems. And the Russians had some of the best mathematical theorists in the world. It was believed by many that knowledge of the structure of cipher machines might enable a really clever mathematician to crack a whole system. Had some unknown Russian made a theoretical breakthrough? If so ...