The Watchers (2 page)

The Watchers have had their debate already, and they've made their choices. I cannot say that I agree with all of their conclusions, any more than I condone the extraordinary breaches of public trust that some of them have committed in the pursuit of their goals. But I have sat with them. I have listened to them. And I have watched them. After all that, I have arrived at this alarming realization: We are witnessing the rise of an American surveillance state. I use that phrase with some trepidation, because it conjures up images of the Stasi in East Germany, and I think that overstates the situation. Our system of government is not imperiled. The Constitution is not on the verge of dissolution. In that respect, the most strident civil libertarians among us have either missed what's really happening or have chosen to ignore it. At the same time, many of our national leaders—the very same architects of this new apparatus—have understated the basic risks it poses to how we communicate, move about, and conduct commerce without fear that our ordinary behavior will attract extraordinary and unwanted attention from the government. The surveillance state is an amalgam of laws, technology, and culture in which the government's default position is to collect information about people on a massive scale for the broadly defined purpose of protecting national security. Saving the country from disaster is a laudable and necessary goal, but the means of achieving it are often ill-conceived and poorly controlled. Preventing the abuse, misuse, and misdirection of deeply revealing personal information has become a secondary concern to gathering and hoarding it.

I was surprised to find how well some of the Watchers understand this dangerous imbalance and how hard they've worked to correct it. But I was also disturbed to learn how few people in power have listened to them and heeded their warnings.

This book is the fullest, most honest, and ultimately most empathetic account I can give of the Watchers' stories, one that most people haven't heard. It's in large part the story of how a handful of men and women struggled to build a system that could detect the signals of an impending disaster. But I found that for all their toil, for all the money, time, and political will they have spent, the Watchers have become very good at collecting dots and not very good at
connecting
them. That should trouble them as much as it does the rest of us.

 

 

 

This book is the product of many years of reporting, reading, and research. But most important, it is directly informed by long interviews with most of the principal figures herein. With remarkably few exceptions, the people featured on these pages agreed to sit down with me for multiple sessions, often lasting several hours. They were all on the record—that is, everything that they said to me they were willing to see attributed to them on the page. I am indebted to them for their time and their patience. But most of all, I thank them for their candor. It is a terrible thing, I should think, to subject oneself to the probing, often impertinent questions of a stranger who offers you nothing in return but the potential for notoriety. Having not been acquainted with the sharp end of a journalist's interrogatory, I can imagine only that the experience was at times uncomfortable and unsatisfying.

But having done this kind of thing for many years now, I also understand that people long to be heard. They want to tell their stories. In the course of my interviews I was offering these people some measure of relief and affirmation. I have no doubt that some of them approached our sessions as a chance to shape history in a flattering light. But I can also assure the reader that I offered no assurances about how the story would finally turn out to anyone I interviewed. They are reading this for the first time too.

Many of the people in this book provided me with extraordinary access to their personal time, and to their professional records, notes, and memories. One deserves particular mention. I had written about John Poindexter during his tenure at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's high-tech research and development unit. Following the 9/11 attacks he established DARPA's Information Awareness Office (IAO), which managed an ambitious and extraordinarily controversial set of programs that aimed to detect the weak signals of a terrorist plot by mining ordinary electronic transactions, such as credit card purchases and airline reservations. Poindexter left his position in 2003 amid a storm of consternation about the nature of the program and the fact that he, of all people, had been put in charge of it. In a previous tour in government Poindexter was a leading figure in the Iran-Contra affair, which for a time threatened to topple Ronald Reagan's presidency. He'd been accused of lying to Congress and the American people about a covert intelligence operation in Nicaragua and a secret arms-for-hostages swap with Iran.

Poindexter and I met in 2004, a few months after he left the Defense Department. He walked up to me at a conference at Syracuse University, where we'd both been invited to speak, and introduced himself by apologizing; he'd been unable to grant my multiple interview requests because the Pentagon had forbidden him to talk to the press. I told Poindexter that there was still a lot to talk about, and that I'd like to write a profile of him now that he had returned to private life. He agreed, and we conducted a series of two-hour interviews that culminated in a brief portrait for
Government Executive
magazine, where I was employed at the time. In our first meeting Poindexter asked me if I entertained any ambitions to write a book. I said yes and, to his credit, he did not suspend the interview.

We stayed in touch over the years, and in 2008 we began the first of fourteen long interviews about his life and his central role in this story. It begins, as does this book, in the wake of the Beirut attacks in 1983. Poindexter was the deputy national security adviser to the president, and from his perch at the White House he launched a systematic reorganization of the national security bureaucracy for a new “war against terrorism,” as the administration called it. Poindexter oversaw or directed operations that formed the foundation of a national counterterrorism strategy, something the United States had never had. His primary ambition was to harness information in order to predict crises, and this quest has animated him ever since. After leaving government, he continued the pursuit for several years as a government adviser. He had no plans to return to government until the attacks of 9/11. This book is in large measure the story of how Poindexter, the godfather of the Watchers, has shaped the war on terror and in the process helped to redefine our definitions of privacy and security. I know that he will not like everything he reads here. But I also know that he will find truth. Of all the people I interviewed, he gave the most. He asked for nothing in return.

I am also indebted to the other key figures in this story who consented to multiple long interviews. Rather than acknowledging them individually, I will note that this story would not be as complete and as accurate without their participation. None of the principal figures whom I interviewed agreed to anything less than an on-the-record discussion. The records of our interviews are noted at the end of the book.

Finally, there were some key sources of information and insight who would not—and in some cases, could not—agree to be cited directly. In those cases I have done my best to give the reader some sense of the importance of these participants, and of the particular information about which they have direct knowledge. I thank them too for their contributions and their time.

 

 

 

 

This is a mistake,
Erik Kleinsmith told himself as he stared at the computer and placed his finger on the delete button.
We shouldn't do this.

He'd been agonizing over his orders. He considered disobeying them. He could make copies of all the data, send them off in the mail before anyone knew what happened. He could still delete all the copies on his hard drive, but the backups would be safe. There would be a record. No one could say they hadn't tried, that they hadn't warned people.

Kleinsmith hadn't been sleeping much the past three months. He'd started his work in February 2000, when the officers from Special Operations Command showed up at his office. They'd heard about some of his exploits. The earnest thirty-five-year-old Army major had drawn attention to himself as the leader of an innovative, some said renegade, band of intelligence analysts. They worked in a secure facility at the Army's Information Dominance Center, a futuristic-looking office space in the headquarters of the Army Intelligence Command at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Kleinsmith had his own office next to the IDC's main floor, which had been designed by a Hollywood visual effects artist to mimic the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
. With wall-mounted computer panels and a captain's chair in the center of the room, the IDC was meant to inspire the kind of futuristic confidence conveyed by the
Star Trek
franchise.

Kleinsmith was a geek, no doubt about it. He'd been working miracles of a sort, using untested data-mining technologies to reveal connections between the Chinese government and American defense contractors. Kleinsmith and his team had uncovered a potential spy network in the United States. Word had gotten around the military brass, and now Special Forces had a job for him. They wanted Kleinsmith to map the global network of a shadowy and largely unknown terrorist group called Al Qaeda.

Its assassins literally had burst onto the international scene less than two years earlier, simultaneously destroying the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The suicide bombers had killed more than 220 people, the most brazen assault on U.S. interests since the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.

Working under the code name Able Danger, Kleinsmith compiled an enormous digital dossier on the terrorist outfit. The volume was extraordinary for its size—2.5 terabytes, equal to about one-tenth of all printed pages held by the Library of Congress—but more so for its intelligence significance: Kleinsmith had mapped Al Qaeda's global footprint. He had diagrammed how its members were related, how they moved money, and where they had placed operatives. Kleinsmith showed military commanders and intelligence chiefs where to hit the network, how to dismantle it, how to annihilate it. This was priceless information but also an alarm bell—the intelligence showed that Al Qaeda had established a presence inside the United States, and signs pointed to an imminent attack.

With his neat brown hair and wide eyes, Kleinsmith exuded a boyish honesty bordering on gullibility. He could pass for a simple functionary. But, in truth, Kleinsmith was a nonconformist spy. He had used technological expertise combined with a detective's penchant for hunches to produce meaningful insights, while the graybeards of intelligence at the CIA and in the Pentagon had come up empty-handed. The Army wanted to find Al Qaeda's leaders, to capture or kill them. Kleinsmith believed he could show them how.

That's when he ran into his present troubles. Rather than relying on classified intelligence databases, which were often scant on details and hopelessly fragmentary, Kleinsmith had created his Al Qaeda map with data drawn from the Internet, home to a bounty of chatter and observations about terrorists and holy war. He cast a digital net over thousands of Web sites, chat rooms, and bulletin boards. Then he used graphing and modeling programs to turn the raw data into three-dimensional, topographic maps. These tools displayed seemingly random data as a series of peaks and valleys that showed how people, places, and events were connected. Peaks near each other signaled a connection in the data underlying them. A series of peaks signaled that Kleinsmith should take a closer look. He liked to call this visual approach to information “intelligence on steroids.” Kleinsmith's methods were years ahead of those favored by most intelligence analysts and spymasters, who were inherently suspicious of the promise of technology and jealously guarded their prized human sources in the field.

Few outside Kleinsmith's chain of command knew what he had discovered about terrorists in America or what secrets he and his analysts had stored in their data banks. They also didn't know that the team had collected information on thousands of American citizens—including prominent government officials and politicians—during their massive data sweeps. On the Internet, intelligence about enemies mingled with the names of innocents. Good guys and bad were all in the same mix, and there was as yet no effective way to sort it all out.

Army lawyers had put him on notice: under military regulations Kleinsmith could only store his intelligence for ninety days if it contained references to U.S. persons. At the end of that brief period, everything had to go. Even the inadvertent capture of such information amounted to domestic spying. Kleinsmith could go to jail.

As he stared at his computer terminal, Kleinsmith ached at the thought of what he was about to do.
This is terrible
.

He pulled up some relevant files on his hard drive, hovered over them with his cursor, and selected the whole lot. Then he pushed the delete key. Kleinsmith did this for all the files on his computer, until he'd eradicated everything related to Able Danger. It took less than half an hour to destroy what he'd spent three months building. The blueprint of global terrorism vanished into the electronic ether.

A small group of senior officials believed that they alone knew what was right. They viewed knowledge of their actions by others in the Government as a threat to their objectives.

—“
Report of the Congressional Committees
Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,
”
November 1987

Those who question us now owe the country an explanation of how they would have acted differently given the stakes, the opportunities, and the dangers.