Support and Defend (10 page)

E
THAN
R
OSS SPENT
the entire afternoon piddling around his office, doing everything within his power to portray relaxed confidence. Normally this wouldn’t be hard to manage—it was his default state of being, after all—but since the meeting in the conference room this morning, his world had been knocked off-kilter and he could do little more than sit quietly with a distracted gaze on his face.

At lunch the talk in the dining room had been, not surprisingly, on the data breach. Ethan remained quiet while most of the rest of his colleagues speculated that some IT geek had accessed the files and then covered it up, either because he’d screwed up in the first place or, just maybe, because he was spooking for a foreign power.

Ethan’s only comment on the subject was a hope that his poly didn’t interfere with either the staff meeting in the West Wing on Thursday afternoon or his appointment to get his teeth cleaned on Friday afternoon. He forced out the words, knowing he’d look guilty as hell if he didn’t bitch about the intrusion along with everyone else.

He’d attended a directors’ meeting just after lunch, and he’d strolled with other staffers to a conference room on the north side of the Eisenhower Building, their voices echoing up the ornate marble corridor as the topic of conversation remained on the investigation. At the meeting there was more small talk about what most of the staff saw as the FBI’s heavy handed encroachment of the NSC, but Ethan said little. He only thumbed through pages of a briefing booklet he’d been working on, and did his best not to show any signs of concern.

By mid-afternoon he was back at his desk; in front of him was a print out of a letter he’d written requisitioning a paper on popular opinion in Jordan of the new U.S. ambassador. It was something to get his mind off his situation—busywork.

Except it wasn’t working.

Every time someone passed his office he felt a tightening in his stomach, and his hands, already dry and papery, burned at the palms. He had visions of G’s like that Albright character he’d seen this morning marching into his office, storming around his desk, and telling him to stand up and put his hands behind his back.

Ethan felt nauseated about the possibility his breach could be uncovered, but more than this, he was disoriented. He knew he had done everything right. His breach
should
have gone undetected.

What the hell went wrong?

I
T IS SAID THERE
are four major motivations for committing espionage, and in the intelligence realm the collective is abbreviated as MICE: money, ideology, compromise, ego. In Ethan’s case, money and compromise were not relevant. His mother was wealthy and she shared her largesse with her adult son, and Ethan had no real skeletons in his closet that could have led to his being compromised.

Instead, his motives could be best characterized as a combination of one part ideology and four parts ego. To those very few who really knew him, this would come as no great surprise, because Ethan Ross was somewhat opinionated, but he was most definitely a narcissist, and if these predilections were built into him by nature, his nurture certainly did nothing to help him overcome them.

Ethan’s parents, like all parents everywhere, were convinced their child was brilliant and special. Unlike most parents, their conviction was confirmed by outsiders when, at the age of four, young Ethan earned a Very Superior classification on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale IQ test. After this verification of his excellence, he became the family prodigy and was forever after treated as such. He was placed in the best schools, tutored in math and science and language, and told regularly that he’d have a future not just of importance but of power, as well.

Ethan grew up like a member of royalty, living first among socialist Europe’s upper class when his parents were in government and education abroad, then as the child of tenured professors in academia here in the U.S. His parents’ core political beliefs in the strength, power, and certitude of UN resolutions, multinational peace treaties, and international law ensured that Ethan was brought up with the conviction that a benevolent governing class should rule over those incapable of making decisions for themselves.

And Ethan was raised as an heir apparent to this ruling class. He thought nothing of the fact both the vice president of France and one of the Belgian princesses were close family friends. He skied in Zermatt and beached in Monaco, and the home in Georgetown Heights where he spent his teenage years was in the same cul-de-sac as homes owned by a senator, three ambassadors, a Pulitzer-winning playwright, and one of the best-known national television anchors.

Even before he left home to pursue an Ivy League education, he was introduced to world leaders at parties as a future secretary of state, or even as a future President, and Ethan Ross grew into manhood believing his own hype.

At Yale he studied with an eye toward the family business, diplomacy, so he majored in international affairs, but like many his age, he’d developed a passion for computers as a teen, and his keen intellect advanced his love for technology to a level far beyond most. He sought a minor in computer science at Yale, much to the chagrin of his parents. They thought it pedestrian of him to spend so much time with his head in the minutiae of computers instead of on the big macro issues that would lead to the betterment of society. His father called computer scientists nothing more than glorified blue-collar workers. His mother treated his obsession as a fad and a fancy, as if he was spending his time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of what he actually was doing, learning Linux-based programming and developing his own software.

But he did well at Yale in both of his chosen disciplines, and then, to his parents’ everlasting relief, he attended Harvard’s Kennedy School to focus exclusively on statecraft.

After university he took a job with the Department of State in the Foreign Service. He spent the bulk of his twenties in consular affairs, but where most foreign service officers had to do their time in the lower rung of consular postings like Djibouti, Haiti, or El Salvador, Ethan Ross’s family pedigree and a few calls from senators who were good friends of Mom and Dad steered him away from the hardship areas, and instead his three foreign postings were at three of the diplomatic corps’ most sought-after locations; Vienna, Amsterdam, and Paris.

At age twenty-eight he left State to work in the democratic presidential administration as a junior foreign policy adviser. Soon he had his eye on a position under the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but the job prospect fell through, so he moved laterally from the White House into the National Security Council to acquire some practical training under his belt before taking the next high-ranking United Nations post that came along.

But his career path hit speed bumps when his personality clashed with both hawkish NSC staffers with military backgrounds as well members of the new Republican administration in power, and with his darkening prospects came the darkening mood common with those who feel their work beneath their abilities and their talents unappreciated. Staffers he considered inferior took plum UN postings, while Ethan stayed at his desk in the Eisenhower Building, watching his life pass him by.

By his early thirties, Ethan’s narcissism was on full display. His self-confidence had morphed into cockiness, and then finally what a few in his department considered unbridled arrogance. In his third year in his position at NSC he had become indignant about what he considered his small role in the U.S. diplomatic realm, and this, partnered with his feelings of superiority, made his working relationship with many of his colleagues particularly icy.

All that said, no one had any suspicions he was responsible for passing secrets.

E
THAN
R
OSS’S FIRST FORAY
into the nebulous world of intelligence trafficking began aboveboard, when he was selected by the deputy director of the Middle East region to pass a small piece of information on background to an acquaintance, a reporter at
Politico
.

Authorized government leaks are a common tool in state craft. Officials speaking on background to a friendly reporter often relay an item of coveted information, careful to secure a promise from the reporter that he or she understands no attribution should go along with the nugget.

Ethan’s leaked item to
Politico
made the paper the next day. It wasn’t interesting enough to extend beyond the Beltway or even outside the conference rooms around downtown D.C. and Foggy Bottom, but he appreciated the laserlike impact of the well-timed chat with a compliant member of the fourth estate.

After this successful tipoff to his
Politico
acquaintance, he was used by NSC staff on other occasions to pass further items of interest, most of which amounted to little more than gossip.

But Ethan began to get a taste for it. A feel for how to leverage secure information for low-risk impact, and a hunger for the feeling of power that came from pushing policy through his own actions.

It was his ego, ultimately, that convinced him he didn’t really
need
supervisory approval for his disclosures, he was more than competent to make the decision what to spill himself. And it was his ideology that gave him the desire to drop specific bits of intelligence to the media. He believed U.S. foreign policy had become too meddlesome and overbearing since the new administration had come to power. He saw too many violations of international law under the guise of national security, too many American soldiers and spies working together with too many foreign soldiers and spies. The institutions he truly believed in—the International Court of Justice, the United Nations, and other large world institutions—could never flourish as long as world powers like America continued to act in the shadows to tip the scales in their own favor.

Ethan had the means and the motive to make small gestures to combat such imperial overreach. But he knew he could no longer use the reporter at
Politico
for unauthorized disclosures, because it would be only a matter of time before Ethan was outed as the conduit of the intelligence.

He needed to find himself a new cutout.

He first learned of the International Transparency Project after reading an article translated from
Der Spiegel
. The German magazine produced a series of investigative reports into the U.S. military-industrial complex and its purchase of weapons of war from German companies such as Diehl BGT Defence and Atlas Elektronik. Using confidential memoranda from inside the companies,
Der Spiegel
revealed precise budgets, specific weapons capabilities, and exact delivery dates. As evidence, they showed the leaked e-mails between the defense contractors and the U.S. Department of Defense.

The ITP was credited in the article for finding and then protecting the whistleblower who passed the intelligence to
Der Spiegel
, though ITP made no formal announcement itself.

This was but one of many “gets” attributed by the ITP over the next few months, and the more Ethan looked into them, the more he liked what he saw. He was fascinated by the anonymous nature of the organization, the impressive list of successes ascribed to them, though he was skeptical at first of the claims that the organization kept whistleblowers safe through encryption that even the American National Security Agency could not hack.

Still, Ethan had to admit, the Project seemed to be getting things done.

He learned more about the ITP in an award-winning documentary film with the sanctimonious title
The Future of Truth
. The movie portrayed the loose consortium of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, and ethical hackers (the film used the laudatory term “hacktivists”) as a group of citizen world police, a league of idealists who were the last line of defense between corrupt national governments and the common man.

Around this time, Ross was in Berlin for a NATO conference and he saw, just by chance, that the director and producer of
The Future of Truth
would be speaking at the nearby Berlinische Galerie about her film and her time documenting the work of the ITP. On the spur of the moment, Ethan walked over to the event. As an American government employee with TS security clearance, this could have raised a red flag had anyone known about it, but he simply bought a ticket to the gallery and slipped into the back of the room as the filmmaker gave her presentation.

The director’s name was Gianna Bertoli, she was a fortyfive-year-old Italian who’d learned filmmaking at UC Berkeley and spoke perfect English. She talked at length about the ITP, fawning over both the integrity and the technical prowess of the organization. The one skeptical reporter in the room asked her about rumors of foreign sponsorship of the group, but Bertoli dismissed the allegation out of hand, saying in the year she spent researching and filming her documentary, she never once caught even a hint the Project was anything more than a wellmeaning cadre of egalitarians who were sponsored by wealthy progressives, mostly in the United States and Europe. Ethan was as impressed with Bertoli as he was with the subject of her film, and by the end of the evening he decided he would reach out to the ITP.

Ross contacted the organization via their website using Cryptocat messaging, and within weeks he and Harland Banfield were meeting face-to-face in a greasy-spoon diner in Chantilly, Virginia. It was Ross’s idea to meet in person. He had no intention of passing intelligence off to another country, and he had to at least entertain the possibility the website and the film were all part of some elaborate false-flag scheme to get American government employees to reveal secrets to the Chinese or the Russians. But by meeting with Banfield face-toface, and by looking into his past history and affiliations, he satisfied himself that the Project was just what it claimed to be: a clandestine clearinghouse where whistleblowers could share information in safety with journalists.

D
URING THAT FIRST MEETING,
Banfield was on guard much the same as Ross. He had worked sources since before the man in front of him had been born, he knew better than to press this confidant and intelligence NSC staffer for information. Instead, he let Ross talk about his philosophy, and his desire to work in the shadows against policies he disagreed with. Banfield listened quietly and carefully, and he took note of the fact Ross had some grievances against his coworkers who did not appreciate him and an administration that did not share his worldview or beliefs about international law.

Banfield had been around the block a few times, especially with whistleblowers, and although he loved them for the product they passed, he didn’t hold the individuals themselves in much regard. Ross, in Banfield’s estimation, was full of grandiose ideas about diplomacy and politics. Some of them the veteran newsman actually agreed with, but as he sat there quietly in the diner listening to Ross talk, it occurred to him if this handsome young man did someday run for political office, Banfield wouldn’t vote for him.

The guy was a pompous-assed narcissist.

Still, Harlan Banfield said all the right things and he told Ethan Ross he hoped they could work together to make right some of the current administration’s many wrongs.

There was little risk to Banfield in this endeavor. He knew no one was ever prosecuted in the United States for publishing classified data, only for leaking it. Even though Banfield would serve as a channel for the intelligence breaches and not as a publisher himself, he was a respected member of the fourth estate, and because of this he knew he was safe. Ross wasn’t there to entrap him, although he still might have been a government plant, and this could have been a ploy to get Banfield to reveal himself as the ITP’s U.S. liaison. There was little Banfield could have done to prevent this, but if he were outed by the U.S. government, he couldn’t be arrested. He would simply pass the baton to someone else and end his formal relationship with the Project.

At their first meeting, Ross handed Banfield a single typewritten sheet of paper in a plastic bag. The paper wasn’t an original document, it was instead a piece of classified intelligence Ross had typed himself, and the bag was to keep his fingerprints off it during transport.

This first leak was small; it was his notes of a transcript of a top-secret NSA SIGINT intercept between two executives of an Israeli bank. In their conversation they went into some detail about their practice of not lending to commercial accounts that had supported a candidate in the Labor Party.

Ross provided no documentary proof this conversation ever took place, but Banfield promised to get the intelligence to the right person to have an effect.

More than a month after he passed on the information, Ethan received a secure e-mail from Banfield. Attached was a short article from that day’s copy of
Haaretz
, an Israeli left-of-center daily, exposing the bank and its politically motivated lending practices. The executives denied the charge, but they were equivocal, obviously because they didn’t know what information
Haaretz
had managed to uncover.

Banfield followed up the link with a note.

“Good job! No smoking gun, but the bank is on notice, and the eyes of the world are upon them!”

Harlan was stroking his ego, this Ethan could plainly see, but Ethan did feel a jolt of power nevertheless, a confirmation of his ability to effect outcomes. His own disclosure had made a positive difference. Not in any great way, but he felt the risk had been minimal, and very much worth the reward.

The
Haaretz
article became a proof of concept. Ethan Ross was now an ITP whistleblower. Ross and the ITP were a perfect match. Neither was in it for any fame or notoriety, and both felt they knew better than the U.S. government what should be classified and what should be revealed to the world.

His early successes as a whistleblower were impressive. He slipped Banfield information about a CIA/Mossad operation to discredit an outspoken opponent of the U.S.-backed government in Jordan, and this led to harsh criticism of the policy in the world press. Next he outed a Cayman Islands registered enterprise that was, in actuality, a front company set up by the Mossad to pay off journalists in Latin America who ran stories promoting Israeli business interests. This revelation created a minor firestorm in Argentina as a right-of-center television station was exposed as a shill for a foreign power and the leftist government revoked its license.

For more than a year Ethan continued in this vein with the Project. Every two months or so he’d either meet Banfield in person for a chat or forward something via the encrypted e-mail. The process was going well for both parties, and although Ross remained frustrated by what he saw as his stalled career in government, he truly believed he now possessed more real power than even those with the dedicated parking spaces at the Eisenhower Building.

Then Ethan learned about the U.S. involvement, a few years earlier, in the Israeli attack on the Turkish ship SS
Ardahan
taking part in the Gaza peace flotilla. He had sat in on a morning meeting with some White House staffers, CIA execs, and senior military advisers. The subject was funding for political opposition parties in Lebanon, something Ethan knew quite a bit about. He was there to quietly advocate for pushing U.S. dollars to a UN program to educate Palestinian refugees through a Hezbollah-supported organization, but his position wasn’t getting much traction. One of the CIA men made an offhand remark about the secondary benefits of direct CIA funding of some of the smaller Lebanese factions in areas where the Palestinian camps were located. A White House staffer seconded this line, adding, “We saw how beneficial it can be to have people inside the camps during the so-called Gaza peace flotilla attack. Beneficial for us as well as the Mossad.” Immediately one of the CIA execs put a hand up and reminded the staffer that not everyone in the room was cleared for that code-word operation. The staffer apologized sheepishly— these things happened—and the conversation moved on.

Ross spent the rest of the meeting wondering what the hell the staffer was talking about. He knew nothing of any CIA involvement in the Mossad attack on the SS
Ardahan
—an event that dominated the news cycle for more than a week and nearly brought the Middle East to the brink of war—but he damn well planned on finding out. When he got back to his desk, it took Ethan only minutes to find the relevant data about the CIA involvement in the affair. The primary documents were located in a code-word-access database on Intelink-TS, but Ethan was able to gain access to a brief summarizing the operation with his SCI access.

The CIA had an informant on the boat, the informant had a CIA sat phone, and the CIA passed Mossad all the tactical intelligence necessary to take the ship. They did this not by giving primary access to the source via the sat phone. No, they kept their informant’s identity secret to the Israelis. Instead, a CIA officer with military experience met with the Shayetet 13 commandos on the day of the raid and gave them all the details of the armed Palestinians on the Turkish-flagged freighter.

After the raid, Tel Aviv went out of its way to stress that the U.S. had not been involved in the operation. Ethan bought the line, and now he realized he’d been tricked.

Ethan fumed. The simple knowledge that the CIA had passed the intel to the Israeli commandos before they dropped down to the boat and started shooting peace activists made him furious.

He’d gone into government service to follow in his mother’s footsteps and make the world a better place, not to bolster a hegemonic America by helping its shills around the globe kill peace activists.

There was no turning back now. Ethan decided to act.

He passed his limited and unsubstantiated information in an e-mail to Banfield, who promised to get it to
The Guardian
.

Ethan woke each morning to check the website of
The Guardian
for any news about the flotilla raid. After a week of nothing, he received a Cryptocat chat request from Banfield. The older journalist told Ethan
The Guardian
dismissed Ethan’s tip because he’d provided nothing to substantiate such an incendiary charge.

Ross was furious the British paper did not publish on his anonymous assertions alone.

Banfield did what he could to calm Ethan in the chat, saying the SS
Ardahan
allegation had simply proved to be too much for
The Guardian
to swallow without proof. He then helpfully suggested that if Ethan could somehow safely get documentary evidence, then they could pass this along and get some real traction for the intel.

Ethan thought it over, enjoying the mental challenge of devising a plan to leak the information without getting caught. He knew if he downloaded the documents off of Intelink-TS, it would leave a digital fingerprint of his doing so. As soon as the news came out about the U.S. involvement in the
Ardahan
attack, computer security officials at CIA would be able to track the user who accessed the information and moved it from the database portion of the network to the file-sharing portion of the network, a necessary step for items downloaded to pass through. Even if he just printed out the files, he’d still leave a trail.

The more Ethan wrestled with the problem, the more his ego told him he
had
to come up with a solution. He decided to resurrect his interest in computers to try to find a way to cover his tracks to get the documents he needed.

He began spending his evenings studying computer science with vigor, reading everything he could about the security of the systems on which he worked every day. At work he pestered IT employees with made-up problems involving his logons and access, careful to adopt a constant look of confusion and bewilderment on his face so everything they explained was explained two or even three times.

He volunteered for projects that required him to have his access levels temporarily boosted so he could use the networks in the building that gave him some access, via JWICS, to deeper regions of the classified CIA databases.

But Ethan soon came to the realization that despite his incredible intellect, there was just too much even he did not know. The problem, as he saw it, wasn’t his intelligence; rather, it was that there existed no way for a man in his position to delve any deeper into the inner workings of computer security without raising eyebrows.

Then Ross found a serendipitous answer to this problem— her name was Eve.