The Watchers (20 page)

 

 

 

 

Kleinsmith and the team worked from the dark early morning until they couldn't keep their eyes open. They'd spent February of 2000 peeling back layers of a digital onion, and they were amazed at what they found. New connections. New leads. New sources. They couldn't possibly vet it all. In addition to the signals in Michigan, the team had picked up intelligence on other potential terrorist cells—one in New York, another in Florida.

Kleinsmith was vaguely aware that lawyers well beyond his pay grade had been fretting over the collection of information about U.S. persons. But he had no idea just how high the concern had reached. The Pentagon's top lawyers had weighed in. Even the attorney general. The only higher legal authority was the president.

The IDC was pulling in thousands of names with every harvest. Once again, the names of prominent politicians were in the mix. The analysts had to be reined in. In May, about three months after the team had started work on Able Danger, Colonel Tony Gentry, the top lawyer for the Intelligence and Security Command, had paid Kleinsmith a visit. He found him in his office just off the IDC's main floor. Gentry said that he wanted to deliver a message personally. Kleinsmith had never found Gentry especially unsympathetic to what the analysts were trying to do. But as a rule, when the lawyer showed up, it wasn't to deliver happy news.

Kleinsmith had a ninety-day window to delete all the data his team had collected in support of Able Danger, Gentry said. And not ninety days from now—the clock had started back in February, with the first data harvest. Kleinsmith knew the rules. Army regulations, per DOD 5140-R. And who knows how many other laws he risked breaking. Unless Kleinsmith could verify that U.S. persons information embedded in his work had legitimate value, then it had to go. That included not only the harvest but the link charts, the Parentage records, and any other products the team had created.

Ninety days. Kleinsmith counted backward in his head. He guessed that he had about ten days left. Ten days to separate the few dozen bad guys from tens of thousands of the good guys. Ten days to make sense of the often insensate. Ten days to unlock Al Qaeda. He couldn't do it.

Gentry wanted to impress upon Kleinsmith what he already understood—that he and his team were personally bound to follow the rules. “Remember,” Gentry said, in an easy tone that suggested he might be half-joking, “delete this stuff, or you guys will go to jail!”

This was the most direct warning the IDC had received, but it wasn't the first. In recent weeks lower-level lawyers had showed up to “remind” the analysts about privacy rules. They asked them to sit through a privacy briefing that they'd heard so many times by now they could probably give it themselves. The lawyers had wanted to send a message and to cover themselves.

They had also set new restrictions on what the IDC could do with its harvested data. Anytime the analysts came upon a potential U.S. person, they had to stop work and call a lawyer. The Pentagon feared that the names of Americans would get passed on to Special Operations, or end up in reports circulated throughout the intelligence community. The privacy protections reached levels of absurdity when the analysts started tacking Post-it notes over the names and faces of individuals who appeared in the link charts.

The pressure had mounted on the analysts before Gentry delivered the ultimatum. The constant briefings. The lawyers standing over their shoulders. One of the analysts came to Kleinsmith in desperation, demanding that she be let off the team. They were trying to do a job. They would go to jail for that?

Kleinsmith had pleaded his case to lawyers with his command, Special Operations, and the Defense Department. The restrictions were stifling. “You might as well assign a lawyer to sit behind every one of us!” he vented. Colonel James Gibbons, Kleinsmith's boss, had tried to run interference. The IDC's raison d'être was to support troops in the field. The Able Danger mission was vital, and obviously Special Operations thought so. Kleinsmith and his team had built something that didn't exist anywhere else, Gibbons told the lawyers. “You're asking us to take this race car and drive it around the track at twenty-five miles per hour. We might as well get out and walk.”

 

As ten days turned into one, Kleinsmith assessed his options. He pulled one of the analysts into his office. Were they really going to destroy everything? They might get authorization to start again for another ninety days. In that case, reharvesting the information was easy enough. But they weren't sure they could re-create all the products, the charts and reports that showed Al Qaeda's global footprint. This was the preliminary blueprint for the campaign plan. If they deleted it, it would be gone forever.

The pair discussed conveniently forgetting to destroy everything. Maybe a few essential files could be left behind. Or perhaps they could send as much raw data as possible to the Able Danger team now, then delete the rest tomorrow. But the truly useful sets were too big to send in an e-mail. And besides, Special Operations headquarters didn't have the analytic tools. Even if they had pieces of the harvest, they couldn't make much use of it.

Kleinsmith wondered if they should just copy as much as possible onto portable hard drives, and then hide them. But ultimately, his inner Boy Scout prevailed. He would follow the rules. He consoled himself that he really had no choice.

They divided the work. Kleinsmith deleted all the files on the IDC's main system—the raw intelligence from Internet page harvests, as well as intelligence reports and messages, along with the analytic reports contained in Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint slides, and link charts. Point. Click. Delete. All the folders, and everything in them, disappeared.

Kleinsmith's partner collected all the removable hard drives and electronically wiped them clean. She also gathered up all of the hard copies of the analysis lying around the office and put them into burn bags, which were collected later and incinerated.

Kleinsmith never thought it would come to this. He honestly believed that the IDC could work through the legal nettles with the command lawyers. But every day he pushed to get over one hurdle, only to find another in his path. He felt thrown into a fight with his hands glued together. The day he spent destroying months of work was just the latest in a string of agonies.

When they finished, Kleinsmith phoned Philpot to tell him what they'd done. He seemed not to believe it at first. Like Kleinsmith, he had thought they might navigate the legal channels. But he knew the odds, and so he'd been crafting a backup plan in case the IDC was pulled off Able Danger. The analysis would move to a private facility, an intelligence operations center owned and operated by Raytheon in Garland, Texas. Raytheon was a titan of the Beltway. The company ran so many military and intelligence programs that it might as well have been a federal agency. Among its tens of thousands of employees were former high-ranking officials and a cadre of program managers, all with the necessary security clearances for the job. The company also had its own suite of analytic tools. Able Danger could try to replicate the IDC in Texas.

Kleinsmith's life returned to what passed for normal before Special Ops had shown up. A few weeks after he ended his work, he hopped a flight to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, to teach a class for military intelligence officers. While changing planes in Dallas, he ran into two senior officers from Special Operations Command. These were the men up the chain who ultimately ran Able Danger and were responsible for presenting a campaign plan. They'd both been visiting the Raytheon facility in Garland and were on their way back to command headquarters in Florida.

One of the men, Major General Geoffrey Lambert, confronted Kleinsmith. He ran policy and plans for Special Operations Command, and he demanded to know if it was true what he'd heard, that Kleinsmith personally had made the decision to destroy the analysis.

Kleinsmith confirmed that he had, and Lambert proceeded to chew his ass in the middle of the terminal, as dozens of curious passengers walked by.

Kleinsmith pleaded. He knew Lambert was upset. So was he. But he was following orders. “I was directed to either delete the data or go to jail!”

Lambert had heard enough. He gave Kleinsmith a piercing parting glance, then carried on with his fellow officer, as if Kleinsmith were no longer there.

Kleinsmith went home that night to his wife, two-and-a-half-year-old son, and month-old baby girl, crushed by the realization of what he'd done.
We failed them
, he thought. He knew that for certain now.

A year passed. A new administration took over. Special Operations commanders remained on edge trying to track the elusive Al Qaeda network. And they weren't alone. Back in the White House, Dick Clarke and the other career NSC staffers had been working furiously, and now they were in panic mode.

In the spring and summer of 2001, intelligence reports on bin Laden and Al Qaeda were coming faster than ever, but with no corresponding rise in clarity. The National Security Agency and the CIA, among others, reported an increase in “chatter,” coded communications among terrorists. There was a plot in the offing, but no one could say where or when it would happen.

Mary McCarthy was fielding the daily barrage of chatter. She had moved into the top intelligence job on the NSC staff in 1998. Whatever she could do to help John Poindexter and his Genoa project find a home had to wait now. Every day McCarthy and her colleagues sat in their offices scratching their heads and pounding on tables, trying to make sense of the alarming traffic they saw.
What is it that fits?
she asked herself.
What is it that matters?

McCarthy wished that someone was arranging these pieces of data somewhere, scrubbing them, looking at what they all meant. Heading into the summer, the FBI was being led on wild-goose chases and goat ropes by hard-to-trust sources, whose information often turned out to be bogus. At one point the bureau got spun up over rumors of an attack on shopping malls; it turned out to be baseless.

Signals were everywhere. But the noise was deafening. Genoa was still too young and unproven a system to run against the problem. And Able Danger was guarded so closely that no one in McCarthy's office, or anyone on the NSC staff, knew that a team of Army analysts was living the same nightmare as them.
What are they up to?
McCarthy asked herself as she puzzled over the vague terrorist intelligence.
What could it be?
Looking back on that time years later, she thought it was crazy that the NSC staff had worked so unsystematically.

In June 2001, the intelligence community issued a warning that a major Al Qaeda attack would occur within the next several weeks. Officials weren't sure where but suspected that the target might be in Saudi Arabia. Clarke and his colleagues on the NSC staff asked whether Al Qaeda might strike within the United States. Intelligence officials replied that they couldn't rule it out.

Clarke held a meeting in his office during which CIA officials briefed domestic law enforcement agencies about the possibility of an attack in America. Representatives from the immigration service, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Customs Bureau, and the Coast Guard attended. And so did FBI agents, who agreed with the CIA's assessment that there was now a high probability of a major terrorist attack.

That summer was also a tumultuous period of transition. George W. Bush had taken office only six months earlier. McCarthy, as part of the professional staff, agreed to stay on board temporarily. But as she prepared to head back to the CIA, she worked up a memo for the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. She wanted to document the lessons she had learned in her years at the White House and to suggest changes that would improve the intelligence process, changes that Rice, by dint of her position, might be able to effect.

McCarthy asked Poindexter whether he had any advice for Rice, one adviser to another. He had one suggestion, which McCarthy included in the memo: The national security adviser should have one deputy who focused on nothing but strategic and long-term approaches to improve the national security process. The big-idea person. Ideally, he, or she, would be technologically oriented and would have the political backing to bend people to his will. The strength of Goliath and the wisdom of Solomon, in a perfect world. But failing that, just a position that was freed from the day-to-day grind that kept so many eyes off the horizon.

McCarthy submitted her memo; Rice never replied. McCarthy returned to the CIA later, in August 2001.

 

Kleinsmith tried not to think much about Able Danger. He hoped that the team could start up again, and at that rarified level of officialdom that had so disappointed him, talks were under way.