The Merchant of Secrets (8 page)

He arrived and stood in line for his coffee I approached
him.  “Excuse me,
“ I
said.

He turned and smiled, recognizing me as a customer at the
shop a week before. “May I ask you a couple of questions?”

He agreed and came to the small round table where I was
sitting, anticipating mechanical questions. “How’s your car running?” he asked.

“How long have you been working at the dealership?” I
replied.

He peered at my face with a puzzled look, “
Bout  a
year.”

He asked nervously, “
Whad’ya
want?”

I removed the work I.D. badge clipped to my belt and
hidden underneath a sweater, and showed it to him. He squirmed in his seat.
“What can you tell me about the guys who own the shop?”

“I got
nothin
’ to tell you,” he
said, fidgeting with his paper coffee cup while trying to figure out how to
escape from the conversation.  

“Do you know the guy in the white car named Roger?” I
asked.

He replied “I see him come in a lot but
I don’t know
nothin
’ about him
”

“Okay, can you tell me what country “Joe” is from?
Pakistan? Afghanistan?”

He thought “Joe” was from Pakistan or Afghanistan. Then I
asked what hours “Joe” works and he told me. I thanked him and slid a $100 bill
across the table

Back at the office, our Deputy Director,
Mullaly
meanwhile had put an envelope on my desk. When I
opened it there was a note inside that read:

“Roger’s real name is Adnan
Qureshi
and he was sponsored for membership last year by
David Jones. What’s this all about? Call me.”
J.M.

Instead of calling, I took the elevator up one floor to
his office on the top floor of our building. During the next hour we discussed
my investigation into Mr.
Qureshi
including the
surveillance outside of the gym, the oil changes that were too short to be oil
changes, my meeting with Bailey, and the IRS investigation that was stuck for
lack of funding. It was a relief to be able to lay it all out to someone whom I
could trust and, even better, who was in a position to help move the
investigation further.  But
Mulally
cautioned me against doing any further surveillance by myself as we have other
people within the company who could do it more effectively. He asked me to stop
the surveillance immediately, and I promised that I would. Then
Mulally
 turned
off his laptop and grabbed his coat from hook the back of
the door. He was getting ready to leave for the evening and asked me to join
him for a bite to eat at the place around the corner. This kind of access to
the guy at the top was rare, and it didn’t hurt that he was attractive, and he
wasn’t wearing a wedding band, so I decided to go for it.

After dinner with our Deputy Director, I spent the next
few hours reading a file on David Jones and found that he had worked in
Afghanistan as a contractor for
Xcorp
International,
and was named in a criminal investigation 5 years earlier for his involvement
in the drug trade and for trafficking in young women and girls. He was a
for-hire cop in Afghanistan; paid a salary of
  $
300,000
per year to train the local police force and to establish order in a war zone.
But while in
Afghanistan  Jones
and his disciples
 became drug dealers and pimps, pocketing millions from their illicit
ventures and stashing the money away in foreign banks. The lawlessness in
war-torn Afghanistan provided the perfect environment for Jones to assert his
control, becoming the kingpin of a world that dehumanized the enemy.  His
belief that Afghan women and girls belonged to a lesser human order allowed him
to conveniently side-step the question of morality, letting him use them as he
pleased without compassion.  He had convinced himself that they were
simply the spoils of war.  The witness account on record described Jones
“as a man who had no respect for life no matter how young and innocent, and
coveted young
girls,
kidnapped them and forced them to
perform sex with him and the other men in his unit.” The witness described a
group of men who “perceive children as sexual objects.  With no moral
boundaries whatsoever they used girls as slaves, trading them back and forth,
and rated each young girl’s performance.”

The other members of his gang were convicted and sent to
prison, but mysteriously, David Jones was never convicted and never spent a day
in prison. Instead, flush with cash he acquired in Afghanistan, both legal and
illegal, he started the PFG Corporation which makes the prototype of a new type
of unmanned aircraft that can identify a human target from thousands of feet in
the air, confirm the target’s identity and hit the target all within a matter
of seconds without the need for human involvement on the ground. It moved
faster than Reaper and Predator and could take more pictures.

During the economic downturn, the
Department of Defense decided to cut costs by inviting commercial contractors
to competitively bid against the large defense companies for major aircraft
contracts, including contracts for helicopters and drones. The D.O.D’s theory
was that if commercial enterprises were allowed to compete for the government’s
business and the major defense contractors no longer had exclusive rights, the
defense contractors would be pressured into making more competitive bids and
the prices for armaments would actually go down due to the new competition.
Jones capitalized on the opening in the government bidding process to enter his
company’s design in a proposal which he sent to the Missile Defense Agency for
approval in early 2010.

The drone program had been
gaining in popularity after the 2008 financial crisis because of its relatively
low cost and high efficiency. But while the budget crisis pushed drones to the
forefront of the US tactical aircraft arsenal, so did Abu
Gharib
.
The public outcry over advanced interrogation techniques, waterboarding in
particular, at black sites in Egypt, Poland, and Abu
Gharib
,
left the C.I.A. feeling that it’s capabilities for extracting human
intelligence were diminished and it turned to an electronic substitute; drones,
to plug the gap.  Downloaded information was vastly more reliable than the
mutterings of a prisoner who had been subjected to days of torture. Unmanned
aircraft vehicles served the U.S. well as a platform for intelligence
gathering, especially in remote locations like the desert or the rugged terrain
of Afghanistan where human assets would not have been successful.  

“IED’s”, short for improvised electronic devices, were
yet another reason for the increasing popularity of drones. The cheaply
constructed bombs hidden in containers, lying on roads and stuffed into the
clothing of suicide bombers were wreaking havoc on our military forces deployed
in Afghanistan. By pulling our ground troops and replacing them with
U.A.V.’s-drones, the military capabilities were expanded beyond the limits
imposed by the I.E.D. infested ground war. So the Department of Defense pulled
our ground troops out of Afghanistan and ratcheted- up the aerial
reconnaissance and attacks using drones

Jones, ready to capitalize on the opportunity approached
investment banks to help finance the production of the drones in a hangar to be
located somewhere in Texas. The plan was to take the company public once the
lucrative contract with the Pentagon had been signed. He had houses in West
Palm Beach, and in Virginia. He may have had many others but they weren’t
listed.

I was eager to get back to Keisha’s office in Maryland to
run
Qureshi
and Jones’ email addresses through a new
pilot program that could scan massive amounts of digital media within seconds.
The program could pull his received, sent and deleted emails, but also recover
any images. It could also allow me to trace messages to the servers from which
incoming email had been received or sent, anywhere in the world. It was an
intelligence goldmine.

CHAPTER 12

Apparently Todd had alerted the guards at Ft. Meade,
because  when I pulled up  the guard at the front  began asking
questions about my purpose for being
there,who
I was
to meet, and on and on as if I were a stranger or worse, a criminal. I gave up
and turned my car around, heading for our headquarters in McLean. Driving down
route 123, I took a left at the red brick gatehouse where the guard waived me
into the compound without question. I drove into the parking lot to the left
and parked my car, then walked to the next guard gate located inside the
compound to surrender my car keys to the guards behind the desk. I had no
explicit authority allowing me to be there and if
Mulally
knew, he would’ve been exceptionally angry.
 

The guards looked at me and said “Okay, we’ll drive your
car around for a while, is that okay with you?” Then they broke out in
laughter, and said “We’re just kidding!” The lighthearted playfulness was
distracting me although I knew it was just a reaction to their boredom at
sitting at a front desk most of the day.

Once inside the main building according to the rules of
protocol I was escorted by a security guard to my destination. It’s the same
procedure in every secure location except the one in which I was authorized to
appear daily to work.  The guard led me down a long hallway to the office
of someone I barely knew; some older man who used to work with my father 20
years ago and who probably would not appreciate the intrusion. As the escort
and I arrived outside his office we could see him talking on the phone so the
escort left me there waiting for him in the doorway. He was engrossed in his
conversation and therefore didn’t notice me at all which created an opportunity
to turn around and disappear in the direction of the Counter Terrorism Center
which had been created in the mid 1980’s. The people in that unit were still
absorbing the damage done by the bombing of Camp Chapman in Afghanistan where
some of their best Taliban specialists were killed just a few months before.

Agents were approaching from the opposite direction in
the hallway, clearly not recognizing me as a coworker who belonged in the
building. I kept calm and turned my face toward the wall of  paintings
of  “Wild “ Bill Donovan, Walter
Bedell
Smith,
Allen Dulles, George Bush,
Stansfield
Turner so the
 agents  could no longer see my face. As they walked past I had goose
bumps from the close call but I believed in what I was doing to my core and
willing to take risks without fully weighing the consequences.  Further
down the corridor the doors were locked but a metal pad was attached to the
wall so I unclipped my badge from my belt and swiped it. The doors slowly swung
open. Once inside the lab I used my passcode assigned by the RRR security
company to log in.  

The new pilot program at the US Cyber command was also
accessible here in McLean. Downloading
Qureshi’s
emails onto an encrypted portable drive I saw the foreign protocol identifying
the location of the servers of the incoming and outgoing email. The majority of
the emails were to the worrisome destinations of Tehran, Shanghai, and Kabul.
 

 I wanted to stay and continue looking for files but
I had pushed my luck far enough so I logged off and walked out, closing the
door behind me.  When I exited the room, outside in the hallway the area
suddenly didn’t look familiar, it was confusing. On the wall to the left
bulletin boards hung from the walls but they weren’t there before. On the right
there were restrooms which weren’t there before either. I darted down a third
hallway, straight ahead but that dead ended at the company gift shop, with
t-shirts in the display window that read “my favorite spook”. There must have been
2 doors in the database room, I had entered through one and left through
another and now had gotten lost in a maze. Trying not to appear lost and out of
breath I dashed down another hallway and was looking out the window trying to
navigate a way to an exit when one of the guards took notice of my wanderings
and stopped me. I was foolishly tempted to make a run for it and may have done
just that except that there was a pleasant smile on the guard’s face.  He
wasn’t suspicious, assuming instead that he’d come across a registered visitor
who’d become lost and escorted me all the way back to the entrance from which I
had entered the building. Disaster averted.

Back at the Pentagon, Boots was spending the week
preoccupied with putting together research for General X’s upcoming meeting at
the White House on the need to recognize Cyber Space as a “Fourth Domain” along
with Air, Land and Sea, and allocate a portion of the national budget
accordingly.  The budgeting process in Congress was stuck in the last century
while the greatest and most persistent threats to the security of the United
States had changed. The greatest threats became   attacks on our
networks, including the White House Communication system and the communications
systems that control the drones and missiles.  Financial networks had been
repeatedly hacked, including some of the largest banks in the U.S.A. It was
time to let the attackers know that the United States wasn’t going to stand by
and let this happen anymore.  In a huge policy shift, cyber warfare was
going to be defined on the same level as conventional warfare and therefore the
United States had the legal authority to respond militarily to attacks on our
secure networks. It was a dangerous
policy  as
what kind of cybercrime would constitute an “act of war” had not yet been
defined  and was left wide open for interpretation.  The President
needn’t explicitly inform Congress anymore before taking action that in every
literal aspect was the equivalent of declaring war.  Greatly flawed as the
policy was though, many believed it was in the best interest of our national
security.