The Watchers (49 page)

McConnell told Cheney he was honored to be considered for the DNI job. But he wanted some time to think about it. He was about to have a big family gathering. Would it be okay to give an answer after Christmas?

“Fine,” Cheney said.

When McConnell had polled his friends and his wife the two recent times he was offered an administration job, they'd all had the same advice—
don't
take it. He would have had limited ability to be effective, they said. But this new offer came at an extraordinary moment. McConnell had heard that his longtime friend, retired Air Force general James Clapper, was coming back to the Pentagon as Bob Gates's intelligence chief. Clapper was one of the most seasoned military intelligence officers in the country. He'd run the Defense Intelligence Agency as well as the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency, a client of Booz Allen that specialized in the production of highly detailed maps and ran a constellation of imagery satellites. McConnell called Clapper, whose nomination hadn't yet been announced. They compared notes. Was this the right time to come back? Could they make a difference, get real work done and put the community back on track? McConnell wondered if he should talk to Gates before he made a decision. “
Absolutely
you need to talk to Gates,” Clapper said. “Do you have the number for Cables?”

Cables was a kind of superswitchboard that could connect callers to the defense secretary anywhere in the world. McConnell said he probably had the number somewhere, but Clapper gave it to him so he didn't have to waste any time looking.

McConnell identified himself to the operator as a former NSA director, and said that the administration had offered him the intelligence director's position. “I need to speak to your boss,” McConnell said.

Moments later Gates called back from aboard his airplane as he flew out of Baghdad. He already knew that McConnell would be offered the post.

“You're supportive of my nomination?” McConnell asked.

“Yes,” Gates replied.

McConnell had a list of goals. He thought that the intelligence culture needed to be reformed for the modern age of asymmetric threats. He wanted to update the key executive order, 12333, to make it clear that the DNI was the new leader of the community and had specific authorities. And McConnell thought that surveillance law needed an overhaul. “If I take the job, will you assist me in getting things done?” he asked. Gates assured McConnell that he would.

That was all he needed to hear. The proverbial stars had aligned. Gates at the Pentagon, ready to help. Clapper coming back. Hayden, a former NSA director and a friend now in charge at the CIA. It was a rare moment to serve, and to put the grown-ups back in charge. McConnell called Steve Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, and accepted the nomination.

Bush made the formal announcement in early January, and McConnell was sworn in six and a half weeks later. The morning of the ceremony, held at the DNI's headquarters on an air base outside downtown Washington, McConnell looked out on a sea of familiar faces. There in the front row was Gates. Hayden sat next to him. Like a lot of intelligence graybeards across Washington on that February morning, they had a reason to smile: One of their own was back in charge.

 

McConnell spent the first few months on the job getting adjusted to the hours. He was up at four in the morning, usually six days a week, sometimes seven. He held a round of meetings with senior staff, warm-ups for the president's daily intelligence briefing that began around seven or eight o'clock. Bush was unusually demanding. Many of his predecessors had taken their daily briefing from someone lower on the totem pole, leaving the chiefs to focus on the business of actually running their organizations. But Bush liked McConnell with him in the Oval every day, as his emissary and his eyes and ears. McConnell found that in order to focus on the items that had brought him back to government in the first place—the management and reshaping of the intelligence community—he had to work until ten or eleven o'clock each night. But he got up to speed, just as he had during the first Gulf War. McConnell learned to master the dual-hatted nature of the job—president's intelligence chief and CEO of American spy craft.

One day in May 2007, McConnell found himself in the Oval Office once again. It was a packed house, with most of the administration's senior national security leadership present. Bush and Cheney were there, as were Gates, Hadley, Fran Townsend, the NSA director, Keith Alexander, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, among others. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the growing insurgency in Iraq, which was racking up casualties at an alarming rate. McConnell wanted to get Bush's permission to use a particularly modern weapon on the insurgents, one that he had come to admire and fear.

Information operations, or IO in the parlance of its practitioners, was digital combat, a form of physical and psychological attack. It was something McConnell had become well acquainted with during his four-year tenure at the NSA. He had set up an information warfare unit at the agency to specialize in attacking and manipulating an adversary's computer systems. IO encompassed a range of tactics, including targeted hacking to knock out electrical power stations and command centers; scrambling of vital battlefield communications and coordinates; even the falsification of information in an adversary's own databases. Disinformation, deception, and denial were the tools of this thoroughly modern warfare. Now, more than a decade after he'd helped the NSA perfect the technologies, he wanted to use them in Iraq.

Since the American invasion Iraq was becoming a wireless nation. Cellular phone licenses were among the first contracts issued by the provisional government. McConnell had gone to Iraq the previous month, and he knew that the insurgents had shown remarkable deftness in communicating with disposable mobile phones. They also used the Internet to spread propaganda videos featuring grisly beheadings and footage of roadside bombings. The insurgents' entire campaign to rid Iraq of American forces was supported by an information network. McConnell wanted to penetrate it, and to use it against the insurgency.

McConnell explained the principles of information warfare to the president. There was something called “computer network exploitation.” This involved stealing and manipulating an enemy's data, and the NSA traditionally handled that function. Then there were outright “computer network attacks,” hacking into a system and disrupting or disabling its ability to function. That also fell to the Defense Department, which commanded a little-publicized task force to conduct what the Pentagon benignly referred to as “global network operations.” Taken together these two pillars formed the bulk of offensive operations in cyberspace.

McConnell didn't only explain the tactics of information warfare, he told Bush why they worked. Cyberattacks targeted the devices that were most essential to a nation's survival and prosperity—phones, computers, and data networks—but also systems that ran critical infrastructures over the Internet. Electrical stations, dams, and air traffic control were all vulnerable to electronic attack. The U.S. government and many large corporations knew firsthand what havoc a cyberattack could cause to this interconnected system. Their networks had been penetrated by hackers in the past several years at an alarming rate. Secrets had been stolen. Operations disturbed. Intelligence officials had collected evidence that they believed showed hackers based in China, working on behalf of the People's Liberation Army, had wormed their way into the systems that ran electrical generators and the power grid in the United States. The Iraq insurgency depended on a functioning global information network just as the Americans did. And because the system was vulnerable, so were the insurgents who used it.

Bush was impressed. He gave McConnell the go-ahead to begin an information operation in Iraq, the details of which would remain one of the most closely guarded secrets in the military and intelligence communities. As the plan unfolded in the coming months officials credited it with helping U.S. forces track and kill insurgents by compromising their basic communications tools and, in some instances, turning those tools against them. The information operation was credited as one of the most successful aspects of the “surge” Bush ordered in a last-ditch effort to stave off a civil war.

Bush was impressed by the power of these new tactics, but he was also visibly unnerved by the vulnerabilities that McConnell had just described. If the insurgents were this exposed, what about the United States? These phone systems are vulnerable? the president asked. He pointed to the secure phone that sat on his desk. Someone could hack into
that
?

Bush looked around the room at his trusted advisers.
Well . . . yes,
they appeared to say. McConnell certainly knew that. At the NSA he'd helped develop the techniques for cracking other nations' phones. He turned to the president and said, “If the capability to exploit a communications device exists, we have to assume that our enemies either have it or are trying to develop it.”

It was a rude awakening for the commander in chief. Bush, like his predecessors, had never really taken network security seriously because no one had broken through to him as dramatically as McConnell just had. Almost a quarter century had passed since John Poindexter wrote a presidential directive appointing a new official to protect government information, and the system was more vulnerable than ever. McConnell had come into the Oval Office ready to talk about offensive tactics. But suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, he had a rare chance to educate the president about the third and final pillar of information warfare: “computer network defense.”

Ever since leaving the NSA in 1996, McConnell had been thinking about how computer attackers, whether nation-states, terrorists, or criminals for hire, could effectively bring down major U.S. infrastructures or corporations. At Booz Allen he had built a cybersecurity practice that paid particular attention to the financial sector. Working with officials from the New York Stock Exchange, McConnell developed a report on network vulnerabilities that might allow hackers to break into major banks and then steal or—worse, he thought—alter data, so that the entire system of trust and assurance upon which the U.S. economy rested would be eviscerated. McConnell delivered the report to the government; officials found it so revealing that they decided to classify it lest it give ambitious hackers any bright ideas.

McConnell could see that the president was ready to hear the worst about how poor America's cyberdefenses really were. He turned to Bush and said, “If the 9/11 perpetrators had focused on a single U.S. bank through cyberattack, and it had been successful, it would have had an order of magnitude greater impact on the U.S. economy than the physical attack.”

Bush looked shocked, and he seemed incredulous. He turned to Paulson, the secretary of the treasury and the former chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs. “Is this true, Hank?” Bush asked. Paulson assured him that it was. In fact, he said, his worst fear at Goldman was that some intruder could manipulate the data of a major financial institution so that no one could be sure it was accurate. That could utterly destroy trust and confidence upon which the entire U.S. economy depended. (A year and a half later Paulson would preside over an economic catastrophe that came not at the hands of hackers but of incautious lenders, borrowers, and bond traders, whose faulty assumptions about risk and reward nearly caused the financial system to melt down.)

Bush stood up from his chair. “This is our competitive advantage for the next seventy to a hundred years,” he said to the room. “Certainly we have to do what's necessary to protect it.” Bush turned to his intelligence director. “McConnell, you brought this in here. You've got thirty days to develop a plan. We'll do another Manhattan Project if we need to.”

McConnell had an idea where to start. The Defense Department had managed to secure its internal networks by limiting their connections to the public Internet, down to a mere eighteen gateways, McConnell explained. His old agency, the NSA, had an “exploit capability” that it used to find malicious signals emitted by viruses and worms that foreign hackers launched against computers in the United States. The trick was distinguishing those threatening signals from the harmless information that sped around the globe. The NSA knew how to find those signals in the noise, he explained. The agency could start looking for foreign threats to American utilities, electrical stations, and financial organizations coming through those eighteen gateways used by the Defense Department and then block them. Cyberanalysts had developed tools and techniques for warfare that now could be brought to bear for civilian defense. The NSA could work in cooperation with another Defense Department agency that had statutory authority to protect military networks, and also with the Homeland Security Department, which was the only department legally allowed to work with U.S. companies and utilities to set up cyberdefenses. Homeland Security lacked the resident cyberexpertise and political clout to do the job effectively. The NSA would provide the technical assistance to the department, McConnell said. As long as the NSA wasn't officially in the lead, and was monitoring attacks coming in from abroad, then it was operating within its legal limits.

McConnell knew the political dangers and how the headline news of a bold, new cyberinitiative would play: “NSA spies monitoring U.S. computers for hackers.” The smell test stank already. McConnell believed that despite Americans' love of spy novels and James Bond movies, they mostly associated intelligence with duplicity and dirty dealings. And lately they associated it particularly with illegal surveillance. People seemed to think that intelligence was something nice to have in a crisis but not something to sustain, he thought. The Berlin Wall had come down in November 1989, and by the next month Washington was full of talk about a peace dividend. The intelligence budgets were slashed in the 1990s. Staff pruned back. The system had atrophied
,
McConnell thought. He decided that it was his job to build it back up.