The Watchers (4 page)

They made a handy pair. McFarlane assumed the political aspects of the job, advising the president and working with Congress, a task that Poindexter was happy to avoid, since he held American lawmakers in about as high esteem as he did pirates. Poindexter handled the back office, managing the NSC staff with precision and, everyone seemed to agree, genuine affability. He liked the staff, and they respected him. He expected no more or less than their loyalty and devotion. But not just to him—to the system that served the president. At this moment, it was revving up for crisis mode.

Poindexter got out of bed and descended the staircase of his modest two-story Colonial, careful not to wake his wife, Linda, and their sleeping sons. He opened a small door just off the kitchen. Another set of stairs took him to the basement, where he kept a private set of rooms—an electronics shop and a home office. He bent down, spun the combination lock on a government-issued two-drawer safe, and pulled out a new “laptop” computer, called the GRiD Compass, which he'd rigged up with an encrypted data connection to the White House.

At about ten thousand dollars apiece, the Compass's only significant customer was the U.S. government. It had purchased the machines for space-shuttle astronauts and Special Forces troops, who appreciated that the rugged apparatus wouldn't break when they jumped out of a plane with it. Poindexter, an engineer by training, was impressed with the machine; its designers included a British engineer who went on to design the first computer mouse for Apple and a Cornell electrical engineering graduate who later invented two handheld computers, the Palm Pilot and the Treo.

Poindexter set the heavy device on a table he'd built into the wall and opened its clamshell case. The orange monochrome screen glowed, and the forty-seven-year-old sailor donned his large Navy-issued trifocals, which had gold aviator frames. He'd requested the midrange lenses especially for looking at computer screens, which he found himself doing a lot lately. Poindexter had designed his office like a secure facility. He augmented the usual phone line with encrypted voice and data connections. An intricate panel of wires hung on the wall of the electronics shop, just behind the office. Telephone repair-men stared at the setup in slack-jawed amazement on the rare occasions Poindexter summoned them to the house.

At the White House the staff was likely in a frenzy. But here, in darkened serenity, Poindexter went to work. He checked message traffic on a new electronic mail system called PROFS Notes, which he'd talked IBM into letting the NSC staff try out. Poindexter had grown tired of playing telephone tag and chasing people down at the office. The e-mail system was quite a timesaver and such a hit that eventually all White House staffers got access.

Poindexter had been brought to the White House to bring the place into the technology age. In June 1981, Dick Allen, Reagan's first national security adviser, gave Poindexter the intimidating task of upgrading the Situation Room, which was, despite popular notions, a technological backwater that lacked many of the basic necessities for keeping the president in touch with the world. Poindexter, then a military assistant, eagerly assumed the position and made great strides in little time. The Situation Room was outfitted with modern communications equipment. And now he was putting the finishing touches on the new $14 million Crisis Management Center, a technological outpost in the Old Executive Office Building, the imposing Second Empire- style building next to the White House where the NSC staff kept their offices. Poindexter had installed videoconferencing systems, large screens on the walls, and links to the systems that ran diplomatic, military, and intelligence cable traffic.

This new nerve center—combining the Situation Room and the Crisis Management Center—represented a generational leap for the White House, and it was the kind of work for which Poindexter had shown an early inclination. Just prior to graduating first in his class from the academy, he was tapped by the Navy for an elite new technology and engineering program, launched as a reaction to Sputnik. Poindexter, with four other midshipmen, was offered a free ride to any doctoral program that would admit him, and in keeping with his track record he aimed for the top—the nuclear physics program at Cal Tech. He had no particular background in the subject, but he was fascinated by the inner workings of complicated things. And when the civilian leading the scholars program concluded Poindexter would never meet the admissions requirements, much less keep up with the other students, he was convinced it was the right program for him.

He sailed through, despite one hiccup with a particularly challenging course in classical mechanics, a basic requirement for the program but a field for which Poindexter had received no training at the academy. After discovering early on that he was in danger of failing the course, he piled up all the books he'd have to read on the floor next to his desk. He put what he knew on top and worked his way down to the unknown, through three feet of texts. He finished the course with a B. A year later he was studying gamma rays alongside a German scientist who won the 1961 Nobel Prize in physics.

In 1966, Poindexter joined yet another cadre of elites that set him on his trajectory to the White House—Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's “Whiz Kids.” McNamara hand-selected geniuses from the nation's top universities, corporations, and think tanks and deployed them throughout the Pentagon bureaucracy. The Whiz Kids had a mandate to infuse the system with new thinking. Technology, economics, metrics-driven management. These were the tools and saviors of a new military, and the keys, so McNamara thought, to winning the war in Vietnam—the generals and admirals be damned. Poindexter landed in the aptly named Systems Analysis division where, under the guidance of another prize-winning scholar, he and his new colleagues set to work trying to understand problems whose complexity was surpassed only by their grimness: the causes and consequence of a nuclear war, or the survivability of a land battle with the Soviets. Its disciples called it “the science of war.” And Poindexter approached it with the same systematic determination and faith as he did a three-foot stack of physics books.

Poindexter hadn't anticipated that the rest of the White House staff wouldn't share his discipline. When he arrived the entire crisis management apparatus was in shambles. He often remarked to friends that the White House was like a ship at sea without a map. Across the government, crisis management fared no better. The president and his cabinet, the decision makers in government, were ill served by the intelligence agencies and the military, he felt. Reagan had not run as a foreign policy president, and yet the most significant challenges of his first term came from abroad. Beyond the horizon, an array of threats lined up—the Soviets, socialists in Latin America, and now suicidal fanatics.

Poindexter wanted the system to predict those surprises. And when crisis bloomed, to control it. He thought he was getting a handle on things. But sitting there in the early-morning dark, reading the first reports on the mayhem and devastation in Beirut, he knew the system had failed.

Poindexter was not angry. He was not morose. He was annoyed.
We should have seen this coming,
he told himself.

 

The signals of a major terrorist attack on the Marines in Beirut had gone unnoticed by almost everyone in a position to stop them. Since May, U.S. intelligence agencies had received more than one hundred warnings of car bombs in Lebanon. Each one was regarded as part of the background noise in war-torn Beirut. The military chain of command was regularly briefed about the widening threat to the Marines. But then, in Beirut, people were always making threats. The Pentagon never allowed the Marines to take more defensive positions and had essentially turned them into sitting ducks.

Underneath the constant warnings lay a discernible sequence of events that led to the assault at the airport. After the embassy attack in the spring, FBI forensic investigators discovered that the bombers had laden their explosives with ordinary pressurized gas bottles, which magnified the force of the blast. Oxygen, propane, and similar gas canisters were simple to obtain almost anywhere in the world, the FBI noted in its final report. The fact that terrorists had not only set their sights on U.S. targets but were enhancing conventional explosives with everyday materials was never made known to the military commanders in Beirut. That's because the FBI never disseminated its report; it stayed locked within the CIA and the State Department.

The most fateful signal came in late September. The National Security Agency, which intercepted radio and satellite communications around the globe, snatched a message from the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security to the Iranian ambassador in Syria. The ministry ordered the ambassador to get in touch with a man named Hussein Musawi, the head of an Islamic terrorist group called Amal. Musawi was to turn his sights on the multinational forces in Lebanon and was ordered to mount a “spectacular action against the United States Marines.”

The Beirut airport was the only place to launch such a spectacular attack. The NSA intercept was the clearest indication yet that the Marines sat in the crosshairs. But owing to the cumbersome military chain of command and an inexplicable failure to grasp the “spectacular” urgency, the message wasn't delivered to senior military officials until two days after the bombing. Only then did the chief of naval intelligence notify his superiors in the Pentagon that the NSA was sitting on what one official later called a “twenty-four-karat gold document.” A bona fide warning, unnoticed. The missed signal foreshadowed another overlooked phone call placed on September 10, 2001. It warned, in Arabic, that “tomorrow is zero hour,” and it wasn't translated by the NSA until September 12.

If there was a national security system at work in Beirut or in Washington, it hadn't shown itself. The government had no way of capturing information and making it available to those who could discern its importance. The NSC staff was the closest thing to an information traffic cop, and Poindexter and his colleagues struggled to control and understand the data swirling around them. But time and again a recalcitrant bureaucracy foiled their best efforts. The Pentagon refused to let the NSC staff have direct access to generals and field commanders. The State Department jealously guarded access to ambassadors and embassies. And the intelligence community was caught up in its own internecine battles.

Someone had to wrest control, Poindexter thought.

As dawn approached, he reached McFarlane on a secure phone kept in the president's golf cart. He'd briefed Reagan, who absorbed the news quietly, sitting in his pajamas and silk bathrobe. Most of the Marines had been asleep in the BLT when it was hit. Reagan understood that the loss of life would reach catastrophic levels, and that identifying the dead would be difficult if any of them had removed their dog tags before bunking down for the night.

“What does he want to do?” Poindexter asked.

“Hit them back,” McFarlane replied.

Reagan and his traveling team prepared to head back to the White House, where the press would soon be gathering. Poindexter got up from his desk; it was time to go in. There would be an all-hands meeting in the Situation Room. The defense secretary, the secretary of state, the CIA director. They'd gather around a long oak table in a surprisingly cramped room and try to figure out what the hell had happened.

As sure as he was that this disaster could have been prevented, Poindexter was certain of something else. This was just the beginning.

 

 

 

 

When he was a young man, John Poindexter hunted goblins.

It was the winter of 1958. The newly commissioned ensign had received his first billet out of Annapolis with a new antisubmarine warfare unit named Task Force Alpha. Aboard an aging, cramped, and leaky World War II destroyer he prowled the icy North Atlantic, perfecting techniques to hunt Russian subs. It was Poindexter's inaugural cruise, the first step in the Navy's long grooming ritual for its future leaders.

Sub hunters called their Russian quarry “goblins” because they seemed to creep out of nowhere, ugly and terrifying, and then slip back into the cold darkness. Missile-loaded Russian boats were said to pop up off the East Coast at least once a week. As quickly as they surfaced, they disappeared. The Navy estimated that the Russians had amassed a fleet of five hundred subs, ten times as many as the Nazi U-boats that had roamed the open oceans at the dawn of World War II.

Task Force Alpha comprised a new line of continental defense—detecting the unique sound waves emitted by a submarine in the vast and cacophonous expanse of the deep. Submarines were designed to approach by stealth, and antisubmarine warfare tactics were among the most complex and dangerous in the Navy, demanding a finely tuned mix of engineering, cunning, and intuition.

Poindexter was assigned to the Operations Department of USS
Holder,
a rickety 220-ton World War II destroyer that leaked in the rain, which seemed to fall incessantly during the unforgiving Atlantic winter. Poindexter spent much of his time on the bridge or in the combat information center, concocting new sub-tracking devices and methods. Task Force Alpha was under the command of Admiral John Thach, a revered combat innovator who'd spent thirty-five years at sea and logged six thousand flying hours. In the Pacific Theater he patented a two-plane dog-fighting technique, dubbed the Thach Weave, which helped the Navy's bulky fighters overcome their more maneuverable Japanese adversaries. Thach's new cold war command had earned him a cover profile in
Time
in which he elegantly described the daunting and exquisite craft of detecting a signal in a sea of noise: