The Merchant of Secrets (12 page)

“One more thing,”
Mulally
added, “are you turning up any evidence of involvement by North Korea?”

Bailey and I looked at each
other,
we were taken back by the question which seemed so out of context.  “No”
we replied in unison. (We later learned from Colin that North Korea had just
launched a major cyber-attack against South Korea. It meant that the enemy in
the North was gaining cyber warfare skills at a rate previously unsuspected by
our analysts who covered that region.)

“Okay, keep plugging away at the wires from China, we
want to know much has been wired in the past year to that account in Kabul, I
want to get an idea of how big this thing is”.

Bailey replied, ‘We’ll keep working on it sir.”

“Good, just keep me in touch, there are still too many
gaps and not enough solid evidence.”

“Yes sir,” we replied, watching
Mulally
and
Flumm
walk
away.

CHAPTER 16

Keisha came over to later in the week to join Bailey and
me for lunch and to talk about
Mulally’s
request that
we find out how much money had been wired from China to Kabul. We couldn’t rule
out that some money might be in other bank accounts we still weren’t aware of.
Keisha and I slid into a wooden booth at a local restaurant and ordered diet
coke and macaroni and cheese. Bailey arrived a few minutes later.  I broke
in with a question about North Korea because of
Mulally’s
remarks at our previous meeting.

‘Keisha, what’s going on in North Korea?
Mulally
was asking me about it at a meeting.”

“Nothing unusual,” she shrugged.

“Well what about their rockets and the nuclear program,
how are we handling that?”

 “Any third rate country has rockets Caroline,” she
said dismissively before letting a faint smile cross her lips.

‘What about the long range missiles?” I asked.

Keisha broke out in a laugh. “They’re guided missiles………”

I continued, “They’re guided missiles so……..they’re not
autonomous rockets. They run off of radios based in North Korea and signals are
uploaded onto North Korean satellites…….”

Keisha laughed again.

“
Ahhhh
…I get it….we control
their satellites and therefore control their guided missiles…”

Keisha remained silent.

“Okay, very interesting, I didn’t know that. So they can’t launch anything.”

“Sure they can launch something,” Keisha corrected me.

I replied, “But we’ll control the missiles when they’re
airborne and force them to drop into the ocean? The Navy probably controls the
North Korean satellites from our ships located off of the Korean Peninsula.”

Keisha had this magical way of leading people to figure
things out on their own.

She directed conversation back to our investigation.
 “Okay, so here’s where we think we are with Project Hades Drone. Stolen
Top Secret information from Jones was illegally being taken to China and in
turn the Chinese were paying money to
Qureshi’s
brother.  Presuming that the Chinese were getting designs of advanced
weapon systems to copy, that leaves us with a huge national defense issue.”

 I added my speculation “And they can copy the
designs to manufacture in their own factories.  U.S. technology worth
billions of dollars is being stolen.  
The  measly
millions in payoff money to a middleman like
Qureshi
and a spy like Jones is a bargain in exchange  for the billions  of
 Chinese Yuan  they’ll amass  by copying the U.S. advanced
weapon systems, and selling parts of those systems to Iran and North Korea, not
to mention that acquiring a high level of technology  would enhance their
own power globally,  especially in the Pacific Rim where rights to
the  lucrative South China Sea are in play.”

Bailey shook her head and laughed. “I’d better get a
promotion after this project.”  She had deserved a promotion long ago, but
this was out of her comfort zone.  

Keisha continued, “We’ve got to find what information
Jones is selling. It must be advanced, high quality stuff if there are so many
people involved in getting it to Beijing.” Keisha was right. Beijing wouldn’t
spend the time or the money on some low level weapon system that they could
build themselves. It would have to be something really advanced, cutting edge.

“Let’s backtrack a minute. How do we know that Jones
isn’t selling PFG drones to China?” Keisha asked.

“Because they were never produced, just a prototype,” I
said.

“But with the money he’s getting from Shanghai, I bet he
could produce a couple of drones. Do you think he’s going to manufacture the
weapons and sell them overseas?” Keisha asked.

“He’ll do anything to keep the company going,” Bailey
said, “It’s worth a fortune to him. If he can hold out until he gets a Pentagon
contract he’ll make millions. How much do you think a DOD contract would be
worth?"

“Ballpark, five billion dollars over a ten year period,”
Keisha replied.

“If he wants to sell PFG drones overseas, I bet he’ll be
manufacturing them overseas as well. It would be prohibitively difficult to
manufacture aircraft here and ship them to an overseas client without detection
by at least one federal agency,” I said.

“He could manufacture the parts here, and ship them piece
by piece to be assembled in the buyer’s country,” Bailey suggested.

“So really, you think this guy could be selling drones to
the Taliban, Iran, Syria… you name it.
To kill our troops in
the field?
  Shit I want this guy’s ass!” Keisha replied slamming
her fist on the table. She was never one for subtlety. “I know Mr.
Mulally
wants you to trace the money flows, but from the Department
of Defense point of view, our top priority is to find out what the Hell he’s
selling!” Keisha couldn’t bear to eat her lunch now, she was too upset. “See
you guys later, I’m going to the Pentagon to talk with some people about this
sociopath, drone maker and his personal banker.
If I were one
of those Afghan women?
I would have cut his balls off with a
pocket-knife!” She grabbed her jacket and stomped out of the restaurant.

Bailey and I finished eating and returned to the office.

 I was still on the payroll at work and had to
account for my time, so
Mulally
gave me a project that I could put on a time sheet as The Hades Project was a
secret project that couldn’t be documented on a payroll record.  I was
assigned some of the type of work I was originally hired to do. It seemed we
had a new big problem with hackers using shortened URLs for a link which would
conceal the true identity of the website. In the new cloak and dagger world of
cyber-espionage this was like a 1950’s era spy hiding in a trench coat and
sunglasses except the spies were in our own homes.  The unsuspecting
public was too casual in their use of abbreviated URL’s.  Shortened URL’s
became frequently used in the Twitter environment where abbreviations had
become particularly prevalent, then it caught on in other applications and now
we had a big problem on our hands. With a shortened URL it’s more difficult to
tell whether a link will take you to a trustworthy website or alternatively, to
a potentially malicious site. So people will click on these abbreviated links
leading them into a threatening situation more readily than if the whole
address were on the screen. It was causing us headaches, as if we didn’t have
enough already. So I had system clean-up work to do. To minimize future
problems I drafted a memo to send to government contractors and federal
agencies suggesting that they include in their official security policy a
provision making it
a  security
violation to open
a shortened, or abbreviated URL.  I also attached the links to the
websites that can lengthen URL’s so that email recipients could check a link
before opening it.  In the memo I also advised against opening links
received in emails like notifications from stores announcing a sale or of a new
product, or from social websites saying that a message was waiting on their
social page. “Always type the link yourself in the browser window,” I
said.  I copied it onto
Mulally’s
email (with his permission) and pushed it out to dozens of people in defense
and intelligence. Then I reminded them that security precautions that they use
at work should also be used on their smartphones. Hackers show no preference in
the type of device they target; as long as they can access the network, they
don’t care.

 
Mulally
called.
  He wanted to set up another meeting with
Keisha and Bailey, at the same time and same place as the prior meeting.

Mulally
entered as before but without
Flumm
on
this particular day.
He was mellow in a sophisticated way, rarely
budging from a stoic facial expression that left you guessing what he was
thinking.  He had come with more information from our surveillance team
but wanted to talk to us about Pakistan and the need to tread lightly in our
investigation of
Qureshi
. Historically the U.S. and
Pakistan had very bad relations after Pakistan developed the nuclear bomb. The
international community was very worried because the Pakistani nuclear sites
weren’t adequately guarded and this created a dangerous environment for
everybody. But after September 11, 2001 the relationship with Pakistan changed.
We needed Pakistan to help us defeat al-Qaeda so we offered money in exchange
for cooperation in the hunt for those responsible for the bombings in New York
and at the Pentagon, as well as the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
 U.S. –Pakistani relations had come along way and we didn’t want to upset
them by accusing a Pakistani national,
Qureshi
, of
wrongdoing until we were absolutely certain that we had all necessary evidence.

Then he pondered aloud the opportunities lost with Iran.
“After 9-11 the Iranians were willing to work with us in catching Al-Qaeda
operatives seeking shelter in their country. Al-Qaeda was of a group of Sunni
extremist and Iranians are Shiites, so Iranians were helping us capture them and
they detain them in Iranian prisons including many members of the Bin Laden
family.  If we had done things differently
eight
..nine
..
ten
years ago we
would have a completely different relationship with Iran now. We should never
have demonized them. That served no purpose.”
Mulally
then returned to talking about the investigation after that brief lesson on
diplomacy.

Joe had booked another flight to China, presumably to
take the next shipment of stolen classified information. 

“Sir, what about picking up Joe at the
airport when tries to board the flight, and grab the bag full of information?
We could catch him in the act.”

“Not that easy, Caroline.
I took
a peek inside Jones’ gym bag while Jones was on the treadmill. There was
nothing illegal in the bag, just a stack of brochures from trade shows.
Photos of F-22’s and other material.
Granted, there’s too
much information made available out there at these trade shows and on the
internet and he shouldn’t be allowed to take that stuff out of the States but
the fact is that there’s nothing we can do about it.”