The Watchers (21 page)

Special Operations commanders were furious at the lawyers for impeding their mission. The Garland facility wasn't going to cut it. Eventually, the analysts there had to destroy their data too. They needed the IDC back in play.

In late September 2000, the Pentagon had cleared the IDC to go back to work for another ninety days. But before the team could ramp up, a new crisis took hold of their attention. On October 12, while USS
Cole
docked in the port of Aden in Yemen, Al Qaeda suicide bombers rammed the ship with a small explosive-laden boat, killing seventeen sailors and wounding thirty-nine. At that moment, U.S. Central Command, which was responsible for military operations in the Middle East, became the IDC's primary customer, and the analysts assisted with the massive investigation of the bombing. For months they'd been working to stop this kind of thing from happening. Now they were working cleanup.

The next year, Kleinsmith left the Army. He'd been planning to take a white-collar job, and now he had more reason than ever. He went to work for Lockheed Martin, another massive defense contractor, heading up an intelligence training program. He figured he could do more good wearing a private-sector badge than a military one. Like so many, he found the pay superior, the hassles fewer, and the work just as rewarding. Maybe even more so.

Some of his analysts stayed, and under a new leader. Keith Alexander, a seasoned military intelligence officer, took over as commander of the Intelligence and Security Command. Alexander was a close friend of Jim Heath, the “mad scientist” of the IDC. The pair had worked together for years; wherever Alexander went, Heath usually followed. Both were fervent evangelists for the transformative power of technology. They would make a formidable team.

The Pentagon chiefs had assured themselves that the IDC's methods were unsound. Their reports to Able Danger certainly weren't actionable. The technology needed more time to evolve. It showed great promise, but so many of the links and connections the analysts had made were just goofy. Terrorist cells in Europe. In the United States. Kleinsmith never doubted that much of what he'd found was misleading, and maybe wrong. But he could never shake the thought of what more he might have found had he only been allowed to look.

Some months later, when the seemingly unthinkable happened, Kleinsmith wasn't at all surprised. As he watched buildings fall and burn, he thought to himself,
So it begins.

And so it did.

I recall that within days of the 9/11 attacks, I addressed the NSA workforce to lay out our mission in a new environment. . . . I tried to comfort. Look on the bright side: Right now a quarter billion Americans wished they had your job. I ended the talk by trying to give perspective. All free peoples have had to balance the demands of liberty with the demands of security. Historically we Americans had planted our flag well down the spectrum toward liberty. Here was our challenge. “We were going to keep America free,” I said, “by making Americans feel safe again.”

We did not want to make a trade-off between security and privacy. It would be no good to solve the security problem and give up the privacy and civil liberties that make our country great.

 

 

 

 

At a quarter to ten on the morning of September 11, 2001, John Poindexter was stuck in traffic. Every morning he followed the same slow crawl from his home in suburban Maryland to his offices at Syntek, in Northern Virginia. He drove down the congested 270 corridor, rolled onto the bustling Beltway that encircled Washington, and then crossed the Potomac over the Chain Bridge, a lushly tree-lined expanse that, at this time of day, bore an unfortunate resemblance to a parking lot.

This was the least favorite part of his day, caught helplessly in the downstream of a chain reaction. Some fender bender, probably miles away and an hour earlier, set off a domino of brake pushers and rubberneckers, disrupting the rush-hour flow for millions of harried commuters. Poindexter blamed highway engineers. He thought they should have lined the roads with sensors to monitor vehicle movements, weather patterns, accidents, all the information motorists needed to plan their route and avoid the hassles. He thought it seemed obvious.

Poindexter liked to drive with the radio off. The lengthy commute gave him plenty of time to think in silence. Genoa was never far from his mind. Half a decade later he was still at work on the elusive crisis management system, as well as on related technologies that for all their initial interest had yet to catch fire among the intelligence agencies. Their methods had not changed, and they continued to resist new ideas. Moving the agencies to change had been an arduous slog, with little success. The world was still noisy. Deafeningly so.

Poindexter's furrowed hands rested on the wheel of a leased Acura Legend. The customary spoils of a retired flag officer had eluded him. No lucrative positions on corporate boards, no six-figure executive salaries at defense contractors, no speaking tours and book deals. Poindexter still worked for a living. His job at Syntek kept him in the game, and it helped pay for his sailing habit. Poindexter kept a forty-two-foot sloop named
Bluebird
moored in Annapolis, not far from the Naval Academy. It was practically criminal not to pass a morning like this on the water. But he kept his eye on the road. He didn't see the smoke cresting on the horizon, just a few miles south.

His cellphone rang. It was Linda.

“Turn on the radio!” she insisted. “They're saying planes flew into the World Trade Center.”

“I'll call you back.”

Poindexter tuned the radio to a news station. He caught a live, on-the-scene interview with an eyewitness to a plane crash. Poindexter presumed that they were talking about the Twin Towers. But then the eyewitness said he'd seen a plane come in low, over the highway, and crash into the Pentagon.

The reporter said he saw smoke and flames pouring out of the building. Poindexter listened for clues about their positions. Based on the vantage point, he surmised they were standing near the Navy annex, on a slight rise that overlooked the Pentagon from across the highway. The plane must have hit near the helicopter landing pad, on the west side of the building
,
he thought. Poindexter knew the spot well. That's where the chief of Naval Operations kept his offices.

Mark, one of Poindexter's five sons, was a Navy commander working on the chief 's staff. He'd graduated from Annapolis in 1985, seven years before his brother Tom. Poindexter had been the CNO's executive assistant in the late seventies and had held ambitions of rising to that highest of uniformed Navy posts. The detour to the White House had changed all that. Poindexter remembered those days as fondly as any of his time in the service. Now the son was following in the father's footsteps.

Linda rang again. “Mark called,” she told her husband. “He said that he's safe.” Linda was confused. “Why is he calling?”

She hadn't heard the news about the Pentagon yet. Poindexter explained what had happened. Then they remembered that Mark had no reason to be anywhere near the Pentagon that morning. The staff had cleared out for temporary quarters while their offices were renovated. Some part of the Pentagon was always getting a face-lift. This time it was Mark's. He was safe.

Poindexter's relief quickly faded, washed away by the bitter swell of frustration he'd felt that predawn morning of October 23, 1983. Another sudden phone call had delivered the news that he found all too predictable. It was happening again.

He pushed on toward the office. The radio was now reporting that both of the Twin Towers were ablaze. He stayed tuned for the rest of the trip.

The morning commute was still his thinking time, and Poindexter wondered if the intelligence community ever had considered terrorists using commercial airplanes as weapons. He could imagine the plot from beginning to end, and he ticked off the list of discrete actions one would have to take in order to enter the country, slip past airport security, and commandeer a jetliner. Purchase a plane ticket, for sure. Probably rent a car. Find shelter. Did the hijackers rent a hotel room? When did they get here? Did they live here for weeks? Months? Did they know one another? Whom did they call? How did they get money? What did they buy? Phone calls. E-mails. Credit card purchases. Money transfers. The digital footprints of a mass attack lined up in his mind, and he could walk them backward, all the way to the day, time, and place where these people first set foot on U.S. soil. The start of their mission.

Poindexter arrived at Syntek and found his colleagues huddled silently around a television in the conference room. One of the towers had fallen already. A smoky apparition hung next to its burning twin. Debris and people fell away from a fiery scar cut into the upper floors, belching jet-black smoke from an insatiable furnace. The unmistakable white radio antenna, rooted defiantly atop the building, seemed to reach upward for clean air, like the proud mast of a ship. Below, all fire, thick with madness. But above, all quiet. And blue.

The mast stayed fixed. Strong. And then, as if cut loose from its moorings, it started to float. To bob and roll. It looked like the whole top of the building might sail away, just break clear of the fire and drift to safety.

But then a gush of ash from below. The snare of gravity. And the mast slipped down. It became an outstretched arm, extending shoulder to fingertip as it reached for some tiny bit of sky, something to cling to before disappearing in the cascading black.

The building peeled away and evaporated into a billion flickering bits of glass and paper, metal and steel that shimmered in the bright sun, emitting indecipherable messages as they fell to the ground. They rose again in a pale torrent of ash, turning everyone in its path into raceless, sexless phantoms. Poindexter watched. The signals. The seeds of the undoing. They were in there. And out there.

 

Television images from Lower Manhattan showed dazed pedestrians covered from head to toe in a ghostly film of powdery debris. In appearance and demeanor, they resembled those dust-coated survivors from Beirut nearly twenty years earlier, as they struggled to comprehend what had happened and what they should do next. Across Washington millions of workers and tourists retreated via the only mode of transportation still functioning dependably—their feet. Government agencies sent their employees home. Soldiers wielding automatic rifles cordoned off whole blocks of the downtown area and directed human traffic via the wide streets and avenues that ran north into Maryland and south to the Virginia suburbs. Amid frantic news reports of a fire on the National Mall, a car bomb in front of the State Department, and another plane heading for Washington, the Secret Service evacuated the White House. Agents screamed at the crowd to run, take off your shoes if you have to, but run, as fast as you can.

At Syntek, most of the staff gathered their personal belongings and headed for home, unsure when they might return. But Poindexter stayed. As he had on that October morning eighteen years earlier, when the world spun so wildly around him, he went to work.

In 1983, Poindexter was one of the few men in the country with a laptop computer, encrypted phone line, and data connection in his home. Now the cellphone in his pocket packed more computing power than the GRiD Compass he'd kept locked up in his basement. Technology had become ubiquitous. Invisible. And for most, an afterthought.

The spy agencies had been reluctant to adopt Poindexter's Genoa system, or some of the newer tools from his workshop that he thought showed real promise. But their indifference was not directed just at him. The agencies spent secret billions on systems to
collect
data—plucking signals out of the air, snapping photos from hundreds of miles above the earth—but a comparatively paltry sum trying to make sense of it all. This had been their problem two decades ago, and nothing had changed. The world around them had evolved. But the system—that slippery, bureaucratic nemesis that Poindexter had tried to defeat, and that ultimately bested him—had stayed the same.

Around town that morning and afternoon, the kindred spirits of Poindexter's tribe lamented their perceived personal failures. As Erik Kleinsmith watched the towers fall, the seeming inevitability of the moment could not assuage his profound regret. Mary McCarthy would not forgive herself, then and years later, for not finding the right signal in that ceaseless chatter that crossed her desk in the summer of 2001. Poindexter stewed privately, looking for a channel to vent his annoyance. He recalled a meeting years earlier with a senior intelligence official who'd dismissed the forecasting powers of the Genoa system. His comments struck Poindexter now with forehead-slapping ferocity: “John, all I want to know is, on the morning after, who knew what, when.”

That time had passed.

Poindexter sat at his desk watching an old world fade around him. He'd weathered enough crises to know what came next: the mad reshufflings of agencies; the blue ribbon committees; the recriminations. “Nothing will ever be the same,” people would say. And they'd be right. But there were constants. And for a student of crisis, one was never so true: From chaos comes opportunity.

People would say that the world changed on September 11. But for Poindexter, as buildings and bodies burned, the world became a much clearer place.