Mission Compromised (11 page)

 

What Newman didn't know, and what Dr. Simon Harrod didn't tell him, was that the Marine had been selected for this assignment
based on a very sophisticated screening process that had begun twenty-one days earlier, on November 8, the “off-year” election day. The Republicans had won in a landslide, seizing control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in forty years and sending the White House into the political equivalent of shell shock. Late on election night, the President had called Harrod and summoned him to a rare 8:00 A.M. meeting in the Oval Office.

The meeting lasted only a half hour, and when it was over, Harrod returned to his own office down the hall and summoned Arnold Granish, the man who had installed and now operated the high-powered computer system that was euphemistically known as the White House database, or WHDB. Granish and eleven bright young technicians were toiling in Room 208 of the Old Executive Office Building. The facility had been constructed during the Reagan administration as a crisis management center—a totally secure, TEMPEST-protected complex—meaning that it was electronic-emission-proof. Nobody outside the space could monitor any electronic device being used inside. This space, with its sophisticated equipment, was where Vice President George Bush had directed the planning for the Grenada rescue mission (dubbed Operation Urgent Fury) in October 1983. Though a person walking down the corridor wouldn't know it, the complex occupied nearly the whole south side of the OEOB's second floor.

Harrod had earlier ordered the Reagan-era equipment removed and the very best new, high-speed equipment installed by CompCo, one of the new tech-giants on the President's “major donor list.” But the WHDB equipment and the personnel who ran the machinery were far more than an information management system for the executive office of the President. The WHDB facility was actually designed to reach into every possible civilian and government computerized record
system in the U.S. and even some overseas—normally the purview of only the National Security Agency. And like the people who worked at NSA, Arnie Granish and all of his “data dinks” had been subjected to a rigorous background investigation. Their loyalty to the President and his goals was unquestioned.

Early on the morning of November 9, the thirty-four-year-old Granish, clad in a black sweatshirt and jeans, his ponytail pulled back with a rubber band, was sitting in the office of the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States. The rest of the West Wing was as quiet as a tomb—things usually didn't begin to happen until 9:30 or 10:00 on a good day. Granish figured that given the results of the election the day before, the rest of the place might never get going this day.

Harrod looked over his notes and silently appraised the skinny little man who sat across from him; he then shrugged and decided to press on. The President wanted to rebound from this defeat, and Granish was the key to doing so.

“Arnold, I have a crash project for you. I want you to set aside everything else you're working on and focus on a personnel matter.”

“OK. Who do you want me to get the dirt on this time—the guys who won yesterday?” replied Granish, who had perfected the art of finding vulnerabilities in political opponents and potential donors.

“No, it's not that kind of project. I'm looking for a very special person to head up a sensitive assignment for the President. I want you to start with a detailed search of all government and open-source databases for any current or recent government employee who has lost a family member or a loved one in an act of foreign perpetrated violence or terrorism. Once you have identified that ‘universe,' bring it to me and we'll go from there.”

Granish looked up from the notes he was making on the back of an envelope that he'd pulled from the pocket of his jeans, “When I set the parameters of the search, how recent is ‘recent' when it comes to government employment?”

“Make it the last three years,” replied Harrod.

“Do they have to be American citizens?”

“Yes,” said Harrod.

“Do you want the usual info on these people?” asked Granish.

“Yes, again,” said Harrod. “How long will it take?”

“Don't know,” said the computer expert, standing and heading for the door. “I'll get it to you as soon as I can. Do you want these people to know we're looking at them?”

“No, absolutely not.”

“It'll take a little longer then,” Granish said as he exited without asking to take his leave.

It took less than thirty hours for Granish and his team—working around the clock in the WHDB—to search all government personnel records: Lexis-Nexis, Database-Tech, Choicepoint, CDB Info-Tech, D&B, AP, UPI, Reuters, FBIS, and the Transunion databases. They ended up with the names, social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, bank accounts, driver's licenses, marital and medical records, vehicle registrations, insurance claims, court proceedings, and credit records on 2,317 Americans who met the basic criteria established by Harrod.

The National Security Advisor then had Granish purge the list of all who did not have a current or recent security clearance. The pool of “eligibles” was reduced to 487.

The “data dinks” on the second floor of the OEOB were then told to screen this smaller list and eliminate anyone who was not a current
or former member of the armed forces; federal, state, or local law enforcement; or one of the intelligence services. This cut the “universe” down to 102. After that they were directed to eliminate all those younger than thirty and older than forty and any who were not in superb physical and medical condition; there were sixteen men and five women remaining. The entire database search had taken just four days.

Harrod then told the FBI and CIA to send him their top specialists in human behavior. When they arrived, he swore them to secrecy and put them to work in a cubbyhole office next to his in the West Wing of the White House where he could keep an eye on them.

The FBI sent Dr. Robert Davies, their chief “profiler.” The CIA dispatched Dr. Eugenia Prados, their top in-house psychiatrist and expert on foreign leaders.

The National Security Advisor gave these two experts in human behavior the complete personnel and medical files of the twenty-one individuals who had been selected by Granish's database search. Harrod also gave them the detailed FBI interview reports on what others had said about them when they had been “vetted” for security clearances and told the two “shrinks” that they were to give him the top five candidates for a sensitive job. He didn't tell them what the job was, only the qualities for which he was looking:

“From this group of twenty-one, I want you to identify the top five persons who meet the following criteria: he or she must be intelligent, fearless, a risk taker, but not foolhardy. I am looking for an individual, and maybe a deputy, who is smart, creative, innovative—someone who can think outside of the box but who will still follow orders. I want the top person to be someone who has a Type A work ethic, a multitasker—someone who can juggle a lot of things happening at once and who can still get the primary task at hand accomplished. The top
candidate for this position should probably have a high anger quotient that can be directed by a competent superior.” And even though he wasn't used to working with such people, Harrod added one other criterion: “This ought to be a person who can't be compromised because of an integrity or moral problem.”

On November 23, after ten days of perusing all the data, the two doctors were in agreement. Of the twenty-one candidates, the person who best matched Harrod's criteria was a Marine major: Peter J. Newman.

 

 

“What is it I would have to do to avenge my brother, Dr. Harrod?” Newman countered.

That's when the National Security Advisor knew he had his man. But he decided to ease into it gently.

“Newman, what you will be doing is orchestrating the most sensitive covert actions against America's adversaries that have ever been undertaken.” He paused. Newman appeared to be deep in thought.

“Excuse me, Dr. Harrod, but I thought that this kind of action was the mission of the CIA, or the SEALs, or Delta units like the one my brother commanded in Mogadishu.”

“I'm not talking about special forces operations that are conducted by the military. They still have their job to do. The missions you'll be heading up are those that our active duty military units aren't allowed to undertake through the normal chain of command because of various restrictions—including Executive Order 12333.”

Like all military and intelligence officers since 1975, Newman was familiar with EO-12333—the presidential directive specifically forbidding the assassination of any foreign leaders, be they civilian, military,
or even criminal drug lords or heads of terrorist organizations. “This is a
legal
authorization that gets us past that one,” Harrod said, a plume of cigar smoke rising above his head. The National Security Advisor deliberately didn't mention the handful of other laws and congressional prohibitions that would also apply to what was being contemplated.

But then the Marine asked the question anyway: “How about the CIA?”

Harrod paused before answering. He didn't want to scare off the number-one candidate for this assignment, but he realized that the man sitting across the table from him was smart enough to figure it out in short order anyway. The elections twenty-one days earlier meant that in January the Republicans would be in charge of every committee not only in the Senate but now in the U.S. House of Representatives as well. That meant that both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence would be controlled by people who had enormous animus toward this President. Worse yet, the heads of the committee staffs—the people who did all the work and who made all the trouble—were now going to be picked by the opposing party.

And Harrod knew, just as surely as the sun was going to rise in the east tomorrow morning, that with “those people” in charge on “the Hill,” there was absolutely no way they would get congressional consent for a Covert Action Finding to do what the President wanted done. He decided to tell Newman the truth—but not all of it.

“Look,” said the National Security Advisor, his heavy jowls hanging over his wrinkled shirt collar, “ever since the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987, it has been a requirement that before covert activities can be undertaken by the CIA, the intelligence committees have to approve a Presidential Finding. If you don't know it already, the Hill leaks like a
sieve. If we submit a Finding to go after the people who killed your brother, it will leak before the CIA can even gear up to do what needs to be done.”

What he didn't tell Newman was that one of the first actions of the present administration was to dismantle nearly all of the CIA's clandestine services. What little covert action capability the agency retained was now nearly all engaged in counterterrorism intelligence collection and a handful of operatives trying to keep track of Russian nuclear weapons. Other than that, the CIA—for all practical purposes—was out of the “spy business.”

“Well then,” said Newman, “it sounds to me like what you are asking me to do is against the law.”

“No, it isn't,” replied Harrod, speaking slowly again. “We have something going for us that those cowboys Reagan, Poindexter, North, and that crowd didn't have. They were off on their own. Nobody on planet Earth backed what the U.S. was doing in Central America back then. From the top down, the Reagan White House acted as though the rest of the international community didn't matter—that the U.S. could do whatever it pleased, anywhere it wanted.

“Look at the arrogance of that administration, sending ten thousand Marines and our soldiers to invade the peaceful little island of Grenada. Nobody believed that those medical students were in any danger. And how Reagan kept from being impeached when those 250 Marines were killed in Beirut in '83 is beyond me.”

“It was 241,” corrected Newman. He knew. He had been there. Newman had been a captain then, dispatched with a ten-man team from Second Force Reconnaissance Company to Lebanon to establish covert locations from which to adjust air strikes and naval gunfire from the battleship USS
New Jersey.

“Whatever,” said Harrod carelessly. “The point is, Reagan and those loose cannons on the deck of state seriously damaged U.S. prestige with their attitude of superiority. If it hadn't been for Thatcher—sitting there on her duff at 10 Downing Street, still licking her wounds from the Falklands—those international adventurers wouldn't have had a friend in the world.”

The National Security Advisor was back in his Harvard classroom as he continued his lecture, barely pausing for a breath. “Things are different today. This President talks about a global village—and he's right. That's why the rest of the world leaders admire him so much. He knows we just can't go our own way. It's a new era. We have global trade, global communications, and global security interests. It really is a new world order.