The Watchers (44 page)

Rockefeller had limited time for questioning, and he wasn't getting anywhere with Hayden. He turned to Mueller, the FBI director. What was there to another
New York Times
article, he asked, about FBI agents being inundated by thousands of leads from the NSA, most of which turned out to be dead ends? Was the intelligence that Hayden had provided all that useful?

“We get a number of leads from the NSA from a number of programs, including the program that's under discussion today,” Mueller said, widening the aperture of the lens. Unlike Gonzales, Mueller acknowledged that there was more to the agency's surveillance than this one sliver. “And I can say that leads from that program have been valuable in identifying would-be terrorists in the United States, individuals who were providing material support to terrorists.”

Mueller had backed Hayden up on that score. But was
all
this intelligence valuable, in the aggregate? Hardly, according to the FBI director. “Most leads that we get, whether it be from NSA or overseas from the CIA, ultimately turn out not to be valid or worthwhile,” Mueller said. “But in our view, any lead from any source, any legitimate source, is a lead that has to be pursued, and we pursue each and every one of them.”

Senator Ron Wyden, Poindexter's old nemesis, was up next. He wanted to know what happened to the information the NSA collected on Americans who turned out to have nothing to do with terrorism. Were there restrictions on its use?

Again, Negroponte awkwardly replied. “Whether you're talking about one program or another with respect to NSA, those programs are under the strictest possible oversight,” he said. “General Hayden may want to amplify.”

Negroponte was treading water.

“Mr. Director, that answer isn't good enough for me,” Wyden shot back, before Hayden could intercede. “That answer is, essentially, ‘Trust us. The Congress and the public just have to trust us.' And Ronald Reagan put it very well. He said, ‘Trust, but verify.' ”

Hayden snuck in a few lines of support, once again averring, as he had at the Press Club, that the NSA had “lawfully acquired signals intelligence.”

Wyden reminded Hayden that they'd discussed before how there were “virtually no rules on data mining” and that they could continue that discussion another time. Wyden moved on, but his next question came as a surprise.

“Mr. Director,” he said, turning to Negroponte, “is it correct that when John Poindexter's program, Operation Total Information Awareness, was closed that several of Mr. Poindexter's projects were moved to various intelligence agencies?”

Negroponte seemed stunned, as if he didn't understand how the discussion had shifted so suddenly from the NSA to Poindexter. He offered only a sentence in reply. “I don't know the answer to that question.”

“Do any of the other panel members know this?” Wyden asked. “I and others on this panel led the effort to close it. We want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else. Can anyone answer that? Mr. Mueller?”

“I have no knowledge of that, sir,” Mueller replied.

The room waited. And then Hayden leaned forward.

“Senator, I'd like to answer you in closed session.”

 

Soon the secret was out. Later that month the first press account detailing TIA's transfer to the National Security Agency research shop appeared in
National Journal
, a nonpartisan Washington political magazine. The programs had moved, and their funding sources remained intact. As recently as October 2005 SAIC had won a $3.7 million contract for more work under Topsail, the new name for Genoa II.

The story quoted Tom Armour, one of Poindexter's former program managers, who said that the NSA unit absorbing TIA had pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. “That's, in fact, what the interest is,” Armour said. When TIA was still funded openly, its program managers and researchers had “good coordination” with their counterparts at the NSA shop and discussed one another's work on a regular basis, Armour said.

There was still one more step in the intricate dance between TIA and the National Security Agency. Its research unit was about to get a change in name and management. The Advanced Research and Development Activity would now report to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. There it would be known as the Disruptive Technology Office, an allusion to a term of art for any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, upended established procedures.

John Poindexter's vision would soon be in the hands of John Negroponte. But not for very long. He too was on his way out. Within a year another, much closer ally of Poindexter's, and a true believer in TIA, would take over as the nation's top spy.

 

If 2005 had been a year of revelations, then 2006 was the time for retribution. Leaks about sensitive and classified intelligence programs sprang up across the government. Bush administration officials were outraged, and they were particularly aggrieved by secrets about the war on terror emanating from CIA headquarters.

The new director, Porter Goss, tried to round up the leakers by interrogating his own employees. Longtime officials were given polygraphs. The director wanted to know who was talking to reporters.

“Do you have any contact with journalists?” one interrogator asked a thirty-year intelligence officer working at the agency.

“Well, sure,” he replied. “I just talked to one last week. Do you want his number?”

In fact, some senior officials were not only encouraged to reach out to the press but were told to, in order to defend agency policies. Where was this line of questioning going to get Goss? some of them wondered. Was he looking for leakers? Or for political detractors?

Perhaps both. Amid the internal probes Goss imposed new, tighter restrictions on the books, articles, and opinion pieces published by former employees who were still working for the agency under contract. They had always had to submit their work to a publications review board, which was supposed to ensure their writing didn't contain any classified information. But the new rules amounted to an unprecedented “appropriateness” test. The goal was not just to stop leaks but to suppress political criticism of the administration and the agency.

Relations between the CIA and the White House had soured when invading U.S. forces in Iraq failed to find any chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons stockpiles, as George Tenet had said they would. Careerists at the agency thought that Goss had been sent to clean house and to whip them into shape.

Goss was shaking up Langley, for sure. Although he was a former CIA clandestine officer and longtime chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Goss was still an outsider. When he took over he brought along his Capitol Hill staff, rankling the old-timers. Some senior officials chose to resign rather than work under the new chief and his flock of “Gosslings.”

Goss weathered a storm of leaks directed at him from many of those longtime employees turned disgruntled former employees. Still, the leaks about intelligence programs were his top concern. And Goss was particularly incensed by one that led to a story in the
Washington Post
.

In November 2005, more than a month before the NSA surveillance story broke, the
Post
revealed a global network of CIA-run prisons in foreign countries where the agency held certain terrorists the government thought had especially useful insights into Al Qaeda planning. These so-called black sites kept the suspects out of reach of the U.S. justice system and under the thumb of CIA interrogators.

Senior operations officials, the people using the intelligence gleaned from interrogations to target and kill other terrorists, were devastated by the leak. They thought the prisons were an invaluable resource, and now they'd probably have to be shuttered. The
Post
story also put on ice a plan to open a new, more sophisticated prison that the agency had built from the ground up in a friendly country.

Goss was incensed. He would send a message: Leak and you will be punished.

Goss's investigation of the prisons story led him to a longtime agency employee and an old friend of Poindexter's: Mary McCarthy, his chief advocate on the Clinton National Security Council staff. Now in her early sixties, McCarthy was back at the CIA, working in the inspector general's office and looking forward to retirement. She was also preparing for a new career, having recently graduated from law school. McCarthy passed the bar and planned to go into practice.

She'd already signed all the paperwork to leave the agency officially at the end of April 2006. But less than two weeks before her departure date McCarthy was fired and escorted off the premises.

Goss sent a commniqué to agency employees, never naming McCarthy but announcing that he'd found the leak: “A CIA officer has acknowledged having unauthorized discussions with the media, in which the officer knowingly and willfully shared classified intelligence, including operational information. I terminated that officer's employment with the CIA.”

The first part was true. McCarthy had been in touch with journalists, most of whom she had known during her days at the White House. And technically that was a violation of the CIA's rules. But it was unprecedented to fire an employee over unauthorized contacts, particularly one so senior. McCarthy also thought Goss's move was petty, since she was already on her way out the door. Responding to Goss's second allegation, which was far more serious, McCarthy adamantly denied that she was the source of the information in the
Post
story. Friends and former associates said as much in the press on her behalf. The real reasons for her dismissal were more vindictive.

McCarthy's job in the inspector general's office was to oversee a criminal probe into the CIA's terrorist interrogation. From that perch she was privy to extraordinary information about what the agency was doing and what its intentions were as it subjected detainees to grueling physical and mental abuse. McCarthy was an analyst, not an operator. She came from the brainy side of the agency. That immediately put her at odds with those, like Goss, who had spent their careers in the field fighting bad guys.

What McCarthy learned in the course of her investigation made her a target. In June 2005 a senior CIA official had told senators in a classified hearing that the agency didn't break any laws or treaties banning the cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of the detainees. McCarthy thought that was patently false. She also believed that a senior CIA official hadn't given the full account of the agency's policy for handling detainees in a February 2005 appearance before the House Intelligence Committee. McCarthy also feared that agency officials would successfully bury the truth about the interrogation program. Officials were misleading Congress, probably breaking the law, and were prepared to cover it up. McCarthy was a Democrat. An unapologetic critic of the president. And she'd admitted talking to reporters. She was the perfect sacrifice.

A few days after McCarthy's dismissal she met her old friend Poindexter for lunch at the Tower Oaks Lodge, a robustly appointed establishment with hunting memorabilia hanging from the walls. Conveniently, it was just a short drive from Poindexter's house. (He'd finally given up fighting traffic, and these days he asked people to come to him.)

McCarthy told Poindexter she was not the source of that prisons story. She didn't even know where the prisons were located. The
Post
reporter had found out, but the paper had agreed not to disclose the names of the host countries in Eastern Europe after the administration said it could disrupt counterterrorism operations there and invite retribution. McCarthy insisted that CIA officials knew that she didn't have the information.

She wasn't sure, but McCarthy suspected that Goss's lieutenants had been telling reporters that she was the leaker. She knew Goss from her days in the White House and when he was on the Hill, but she told Poindexter she had no idea what Goss's people had told him.

Few things mattered to Poindexter more than loyalty. To a person. To an institution. To an idea. Poindexter had been on his boat,
Bluebird
, when several colleagues e-mailed him the first news reports alleging McCarthy was the source of the black prisons exposé. He never thought for a minute that the accusations were true.

Poindexter knew that McCarthy was a Democrat. And that she was a civil libertarian. And McCarthy knew full well Poindexter's colorful history running covert intelligence operations in foreign countries. But their political differences had never divided them from a shared sense of mission. They had come too far together. It would have been easy for Poindexter to accept the line of his party, take the CIA director at his word, and indict McCarthy as a treacherous leak. But he never considered it. A friend needed him, and he didn't turn away.