The Watchers (65 page)

300
Poindexter read the paper and found it both flawed and misguided:
Interview with Poindexter.

301
The paper was only ten pages long, but it was a watershed:
The paper, “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining,” was published by the Cato Institute on December 11, 2006, at
www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6784
.

301
Jonas's admiration for Poindexter never dimmed:
Interview with Jonas in 2008.

302
“probably the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of the Second World War”:
British home secretary John Reid's comments were reported by the
Guardian
in “Anti-terror Critics Just Don't Get It, Says Reid,” published on August 10, 2006.

302
Agents kept close watch on Ali:
The British government presented the narrative of their investigation at Ali's trial. Other excellent sources of UK reporting include BBC News, which published a helpful and detailed summary called “Airlines Plot: The Allegations” on its Web site during the trial in 2008. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also provided detailed coverage of the plot and the trial. In particular, see the article “Montreal, Toronto Flights Targeted in Alleged British Bomb Plot” that it published on April 3, 2008, on its Web site. Also see the analysis of
Times
(London) reporters Sean O'Neill and Michael Evans, “How the Plan Was Put Together: Little Did Ahmed Ali and His Cohorts Know That They Were under Round-the-Clock Surveillance While Plotting Their Attacks,” published on September 9, 2008.

303
Undercover officers observed Ali as he paid cash for a £138,000 flat:
See “Terror Mastermind Abdulla Ahmed Ali Guilty of Bombing Plot,” by Nico Hines,
Times
(London), September 8, 2008.

303
Back in Washington, senior intelligence and security officials had been watching developments across the pond since late June:
In 2009, I interviewed Fran Townsend and Michael Jackson, the former deputy homeland security secretary, about the planes bombing plot. I conducted multiple interviews with Jackson on the subject.

Jackson told me that throughout late June and all of July it wasn't clear that the suspects were targeting airliners. “There was some concern” of that, Jackson said, but he noted that given past bombings in the UK, authorities had reason to suspect the individuals under surveillance might target the ground transportation system, or build a car bomb.

306
Keith Alexander, the NSA director, had been giving daily briefings at the White House that summer:
Interview with Townsend.

306
Townsend thought the intelligence advanced the government's understanding of the plot:
Ibid.

307
Jackson sketched out the first notions of a passenger-profiling system:
Interview with Jackson in 2008.

308
Jackson and others could see this was potentially as big a plot as the United States had faced since 9/11:
Ibid.

308
Precisely what prompted the Brits to make their move on August 10 would remain a subject of speculation:
Jackson declined to say whether the surveillance of Ali checking flight timetables was the signal that told investigators that this was an aviation-centered attack. But there were “clear and multiple reinforcing data streams” that indicated this, he said. Jackson informed Kip Hawley, the director of the Transportation Security Agency, of a threat to airliners two days before the surveillance at the Internet café occurred. The record as expressed in news reports and in evidence at trial shows that Ali's visit to the café signaled to investigators that the plot had progressed into a definite targeting stage.

310
After the British tipped off the Americans, the NSA was able to intercept e-mails that Ali sent to an apparent terrorist minder in Pakistan, an Al Qaeda operative named Rashid Rauf:
See my piece “E-mails Help Convict Would-Be Bombers,” published in
National Journal's
blog Tech Daily Dose, on September 9, 2009.

312
Ali, who denied the breadth of the plot at his trial, nevertheless admitted that he at least planned to set off a bomb in Heathrow Airport:
On September 8, 2008, Ali and two other men were found guilty of conspiracy to murder. One man was found not guilty, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on four others. For a concise wrap-up of the verdicts, see Hines's London
Times
article, noted above.

312
U.S. law enforcement officers arrested seven men in Florida on the dubious charge that they were plotting to blow up the Sears Tower:
The first trial in the case ended in December 2007 with the acquittal of one defendant, Lyglenson Lemorin. The jury deadlocked on the other six defendants, Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Rotschild Augustine, Burson Augustin, and Naudimar Herrera. After a second trial in 2008, the jury also failed to reach verdicts. Finally, in May 2009, Herrera was acquitted; Augustine, Phanor, and Augustin were convicted on two counts of providing material support to a terrorist organization; Abraham was convicted on three charges; and Batiste was convicted on four charges. He was the only defendant to be convicted of all the charges that made up the government's indictment. For a complete synopsis of the case, see “Five Convicted in Plot to Blow up Sears Tower,” by Damien Cave and Carmen Gentile in
New York Times
, May 12, 2009.

316
a team that had formed to run Homeland Security's ADVISE program and build a working prototype huddled at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory:
The detailed notes and minutes of this meeting were provided to me by a private-sector source who asked not to be identified. I had been aware of the ADVISE program for some time in the course of my reporting on intelligence and homeland security. Also see the Homeland Security Department inspector general's report on the program, “ADVISE Could Support Intelligence Analysis More Effectively,” released July 2, 2007. OIG-07-56.
www.dhs.gov/xoig/assets/mgmtrpts/OIG_07-56_JUn07.pdf
.

316
Steve Dennis, a technology official from Homeland Security, offered up the history of the program:
This narrative is contained in the aforementioned document from the private-sector source.

316
KSP stood for Knowledge System Prototype, a major initiative under way at the signals agency:
The KSP was described to me by the private-sector source as well as in an e-mail from an NSA employee. For more descriptions of the KSP, see the Defense Department's “Joint Transformation Roadmap,” published on January 21, 2004. This publicly available document was prepared by the U.S. Joint Forces Command for the director of the Office of Force Transformation at the Pentagon.
www.ndu.edu/library/docs/jt-transf-roadmap2004.pdf
. “Force transformation” was the top policy initiative of Donald Rumsfeld when he was secretary of defense.

317
Known as the Threat and Vulnerability Information System, it included a “threat mapper”:
A description of the system is contained in the testimony of Charles McQueary, the undersecretary for science and technology at the Homeland Security Department, before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security on March 2, 2004.

317
Toward the end of the discussion someone noted that Poindexter's old TIA network was testing components for the ADVISE system:
The reference in the notes of the September 2005 meeting on the ADVISE program is to the RDEC.

317
Poindexter had trouble keeping up with all the ersatz programs that rode his wake:
Interview with Poindexter.

318
Jeff Stewart sensed that this new whirlwind of corporate information was something to be embraced:
I interviewed Stewart in 2008 about Monitor110, his concept, and his work forming the start-up. It received some attention in the financial press as well. See “Monitor 110 Brings Blog Intelligence to Wall Street,” by Richard Koman in
Silicon Valley Watcher
, September 21, 2006. A helpful chronology was also written by Roger Ehrenberg, an investor in Monitor110, on his blog Information Arbitrage. Called “Monitor110: A Post Mortem,” it was posted on July 18, 2008, and contained background on how Ehrenberg met Stewart and what they hoped the technology would be able to do.

320
inside the intelligence community people knew that Stewart's creation had the same core that the Livermore lab had sold to Homeland Security to build ADVISE. The BAG was at the heart of Monitor110:
This is based on an interview with the private-sector source, as well as the internal NSA e-mail, which specifically discussed ADVISE and Monitor110.

Unless otherwise noted statements, thoughts, and actions attributed in this chapter to Mike McConnell come from interviews I conducted with him in 2009. I also covered McConnell throughout his tenure as director of National Intelligence, from February 2007 to January 2009. See “The Return of the Grown-Ups,” published in
National Journal
on January 13, 2007; “The Boys Are Back in Town” in the April 2007 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute's journal
Proceedings
; and “Clearing Barriers,”
Government Executive
magazine, May 7, 2007.

322
the rewards of a seven-figure salary ahead:
The
Wall Street Journal
reported that in 2007 McConnell was earning $2 million a year. See Siobhan Gorman's “McConnell to Return to Booz Allen,” January 27, 2009.

322
Bush was convinced that certain career employees, particularly at the CIA, had tried to sabotage his reelection bid in 2004:
This was conveyed to me by a former administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

322
McConnell was widely seen as a professional and a nonpartisan:
I wrote about McConnell's return to government for
National Journal, Proceedings,
and
Government Executive
. See above.

323
Rumsfeld, long distrustful of the CIA, was setting up a covert human intelligence apparatus that reported through the Defense Department chain of command:
Intelligence experts presumed that after Rumsfeld left office his successor, Bob Gates, would curtail these activities. See my article “Rolling Back Pentagon Spies,”
National Journal,
March 9, 2007.

325
McConnell spent the first few months on the job getting adjusted to the hours:
McConnell described his daily routine in a speech at the Excellence in Government conference in Washington on April 4, 2007;
http://odni.gov/speeches/20070404_speech.pdf
. This was his first major public address, and he chose to lead off by telling the audience how grueling his new hours were. McConnell often cited the physical and time demands of the job when he spoke publicly. Transcripts of all McConnell's major speeches are available at the Web site of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

325
Bush liked McConnell with him in the Oval every day, as his emissary and his eyes and ears:
Bush made no secret of his desire to keep his intelligence directors close. It was well known to journalists covering the White House and the intelligence community that McConnell was in the Oval Office almost every day, personally delivering the president's intelligence briefing.

326
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:
Interview with McConnell in 2009 and two former senior administration officials in 2008; both former officials were in the Oval Office during the meeting. They asked not to be identified.

Lawrence Wright of
The New Yorker
also wrote about this meeting in his profile of McConnell, “The Spymaster,” published on January 21, 2008.

326
McConnell explained the principles of information warfare to the president:
Interview with McConnell and aforementioned former administration officials.

327
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:
I wrote about this in a piece for
National Journal
titled “China's Cyber Militia,” published on May 31, 2008. Sources for these and other allegations about Chinese cyber activities include Joel Brenner, who was then the government's head of counterintelligence; Tim Bennett, the former president of a trade group called the Cyber Security Industry Alliance; and a network forensics expert who works for intelligence and law enforcement agencies and asked not to be identified. A CIA official, Tom Donohue, had said publicly that cyberhackers had seized the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and had demanded a ransom. And in a speech at the White House on May 29, 2009, President Barack Obama acknowledged, “We know that cyber intruders have probed our electrical grid and that in other countries cyber attacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.” This was the first time that a U.S. president had admitted that the nation's electrical grid had been penetrated over the network.

327
Bush was impressed. He gave McConnell the go-ahead to begin an information operation in Iraq:
Interview with McConnell and one of the previously mentioned former senior administration officials present at the Oval Office meeting.

327
The information operation was credited as one of the most successful aspects of the “surge”:
The aforementioned administration official confirmed that this operation was used during the surge. McConnell didn't address that point.

327
he was also visibly unnerved by the vulnerabilities that McConnell had just described:
Interviews with previously mentioned former officials; also, see Wright's account in
The New Yorker
.