500 Days (18 page)

While he was uninvolved, he added, he had learned secrets that the United States was trying to keep hidden. “According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S. government has stated, but the Bush administration does not want the panic to spread.”

To identify the perpetrators, the Americans needed to look inside its own country at the scores of armed groups capable of the operation. Or at Russia. Or Israel. Or India. Or Serbia.

“Then you cannot forget the American Jews,” he said, “who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want revenge.”

Of course, he went on, the attacks could also have been launched by the country’s own intelligence agencies, which had been seeking new adversaries since the fall of the Soviet Union. Orchestrating such murderous violence would help them get more money from the administration.

Whoever the culprit might be, he said, it wasn’t al-Qaeda.

“We are not hostile to the United States,” he said. “We are against the system.”

The reporter asked about the efforts to block al-Qaeda’s bank accounts.

“Freezing of accounts will not make any difference,” bin Laden replied. “With the grace of Allah, al Qaeda has more than three such alternative financial systems, which are all separate and totally independent from each other.”

•  •  •  

Once the
Ummat
interview with bin Laden was published, a unit at the CIA obtained and rapidly translated it. The statements were bizarre. Bin Laden says that he has access to secret information about the death toll from the strike? That al-Qaeda was not hostile to the United States? And most astonishing, that Islam would have forbidden the 9/11 operation? Bin Laden had orchestrated this assault; at some point, probably soon, he would have to confess al-Qaeda’s role, if only to demonstrate the group’s power. After proclaiming that the Koran forbade the attack? What would he say then?

There could be no doubt. Bin Laden did not just have a psychopathic personality. He was insane.

•  •  •  

A group of lawyers gathered for a briefing from the Pentagon in the sitting area of Alberto Gonzalez’s office. Jim Haynes, the Defense Department’s general counsel, described elements of the military’s capabilities that would be available for the coming war.

Haynes looked across the coffee table, where Gonzales sat in silence in his wing chair. It was a Gonzales trademark—listening sphinxlike to a presentation and voicing his opinion only after the speaker finished. On either side of Haynes were Addington and Flanigan, who had emerged as the key team in dealing with the legal issues of the administration’s antiterror strategy.

There were complexities limiting the NSA’s ability to intercept and report communications among radical Islamists, including rules involving mobile phones and calls into the United States, Haynes said. That was serious, since
the intelligence agencies already knew that sleeper cells were inside the country, even if all of them could not yet be identified.

For several minutes, Addington and Flanigan quizzed Haynes about the technical abilities for electronic surveillance.

“If we know these conversations are taking place, why can’t we just listen to them?” Flanigan asked. “Why can’t the NSA ‘big ear’ be turned to follow the individuals we can identify as al-Qaeda operatives, regardless of where they are, regardless of whether these conversations are occurring within the U.S. or across international borders?”

These people were the enemy, Flanigan said, and they were hiding among the country’s own citizens. There was intelligence that a second wave of attacks was coming. Why couldn’t the government use every resource at its disposal to hunt them down, rather than just waiting for the next bloodletting?

Neither Haynes nor Gonzales responded. Addington sat back in his chair, a faraway look on his face. After months of working together, his colleagues knew that this was Addington’s body language signaling he was deep in thought.

Finally, Addington looked at Flanigan.

“You may have hit on something that’s worth thinking about,” he said.

•  •  •  

The idea rocketed through Washington’s corridors of power.

Addington approached Cheney with the concept—the NSA’s authority had to be beefed up to help find terrorists in the United States. Sure, under the present rules, applications for electronic surveillance could be filed to secret courts that handled national security issues, set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA.

But that law was from 1978, long before cell and satellite phones, the Internet, and e-mail. Al-Qaeda operatives were using those technologies, Addington said, in ways that moved faster than FISA could keep up.

The terrorists purchased disposable cell phones, made calls, then tossed them out. They signed up for e-mail services with Web-based providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail, sent a few messages, then deleted the accounts. The calls and e-mails flowed into the United States unimpeded and, too often, unknown. There was no wire to tap—killers were exploiting a virtual world of communications, and the government wasn’t using its best resources to stop them. FISA was not flexible or nimble enough to deal with the change. The law, Addington argued, had become a suicide pact.

It struck Cheney as inconceivable that al-Qaeda had not already placed
other terrorists inside the country to launch a second—and perhaps a third or fourth—wave of attacks. He had recently heard about the al-Qaeda operative named Moussaoui who had been arrested in Minnesota. Was he supposed to join in the 9/11 hijackings, or was he part of the next strike?

Cheney contacted Tenet. Could the NSA, he asked, do more against terrorism? Tenet said he would run the question by Michael Hayden, director of the intelligence agency.

Hayden’s reply was brief: Under current law, the NSA’s hands were tied. The agency was doing all it could.

“What might you do with more authority?” Tenet asked.

“Let me put together some information on what would be operationally useful and technologically feasible,” Hayden said.

The security agency assembled the material, and Hayden shared it with Tenet. Then they traveled to the White House to present Cheney with the new, classified proposals.

•  •  •  

The NSA plan was elegant in its theoretical simplicity, awesome in its technological cunning, and terrifying in its potential for abuse. At its essence, the ambitious new blueprint would give the agency unprecedented surveillance powers in the hunt for terrorists.

Already, enormous volumes of data about al-Qaeda were sprinkled throughout the government—names of operatives and sympathizers plus their relatives and friends, locations where they hid, phone numbers they called, as well as contributors and organizations in the group’s financial network. Webs of interconnections—some obvious, some almost undetectable—linked these bits of data in ways that allowed intelligence analysts to perceive the skeletal framework of al-Qaeda’s operations. That was how American intelligence had learned about a terrorist summit in Kuala Lumpur the previous year, by listening in on a phone in Sana’a that had been monitored since 1998. The tiniest morsel of information—records of just two calls, placed from East Africa to a number in Yemen before and after the embassy bombings—had been culled from a flood of data flowing through the NSA, establishing a slender but unmistakable tie between the phone and al-Qaeda.

Sometimes, though, the effort to pursue those leads hit legal roadblocks. The NSA was barred from domestic spying; it could not use its technology to track down someone inside the country who was known to be preparing to bomb Los Angeles. Even if the agency was listening to bin Laden himself in Canada, it had
to shut down its monitoring if he crossed the bridge into Buffalo. At that point, the FBI took over. To continue electronic surveillance inside the United States, the bureau had to obtain a FISA warrant from a special national security court and could do so only for intelligence-gathering purposes. Investigators also had to establish in their warrant application that the people to be monitored were agents of a foreign power, a term that had been traditionally interpreted as another government. Members of the administration were painfully aware that none of those standards would have applied to the hijackers—or most other al-Qaeda members.

The new plan could change everything, constituting the most dramatic expansion of the NSA’s power and authority in the agency’s forty-nine-year history.

Tracking calls from what NSA analysts called “dirty numbers” could be conducted without triggering a warrant requirement, regardless of whether they were placed to people in the United States. The agency, the CIA, and the FBI had obtained an array of such numbers, both independently and from foreign intelligence services, including those of Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and even Yemen. All of those were entered into one massive data set at NSA.

If a call from a dirty number went to one phone, then another, then another before finally reaching the United States, the NSA could monitor the conversations at each point. With the agency in hot pursuit, it could continue listening to calls from the American phones connected to the dirty numbers, even if they were placed to others in the United States. At that point the FBI could be brought in to seek a FISA warrant so that the assorted American phone lines linked to the original number could be monitored.

The standards for what constituted “an American person” under FISA would be changed, removing some investigative impediments to the NSA’s work. A suspected terrorist—or someone tied to a terrorist—could no longer trigger a warrant requirement simply by standing on American soil. Monitoring United States citizens or resident aliens overseas would no longer—if they could be linked to terrorism—require a warrant. Charities or companies based in the United States and suspected of terrorist ties would no longer be defined as “an American person” and afforded Fourth Amendment protections.

Moreover, a previously forbidden tactic known as “reverse targeting” would be allowed in certain circumstances. In the past, relatives or friends of a known terrorist could not be monitored if they lived in the United States unless
evidence had been discovered showing their own involvement with groups like al-Qaeda. So, if the terrorist telephoned them from another country, the NSA would have to intercept the call from his side. As part of the new plan, the NSA could conduct electronic surveillance of the family or friends in the United States, in hopes of picking up an overseas call from the call from the terrorist.

The techniques and abilities to monitor e-mails would change, too. For years, there was a perceived difficulty in e-mail interception—digital data flowing through the Internet is broken up into smaller packets of information, which then can be routed anywhere in the world. An al-Qaeda member in Kabul could e-mail another in Kandahar, but the packets might travel through Internet connections in America. That posed a theoretical problem under FISA: the data racing through American Internet systems could be deemed as being within the United States, setting off the need to go to a FISA court. The proposed NSA plan of action would ignore these technical intricacies and instead focus solely on the location of the sender and recipient of the e-mail.

There were two methods of e-mail monitoring. The most simplistic involved the direct interception of a message to and from an account linked by other intelligence to an al-Qaeda member. The second method involved deeper scrutiny. Connections between a suspect e-mail address and others—accounts that both sent and received messages there, whether in the United States or not—would be examined. At that point, a more detailed level of analysis would be applied, creating something of a ripple effect. The suspect e-mail address would lead to a second, the second to the accounts it contacted.

It was largely impossible to analyze so much information—upward of six petabytes, or six quadrillion bytes, of digital records every month—on a message-by-message basis. Instead, the NSA had to conduct broader analysis of a massive data set pulled together from an array of sources, starting with almost four billion public documents collected from thousands of easily accessed databases: property and airplane ownership records; boat and car registrations; phone numbers throughout the country; terrorist watch lists, and more. All those details would be melded with certain data from commercial sources; other government information, such as flight information from the FAA, could potentially be thrown into the mix.

This would be added to other materials that were not readily available, such as communications records held by telephone and broadband companies. The NSA would urge the corporations to share logs showing all calls to and from phones, including the time and length of the conversation, as well as details of
e-mails showing when they were sent, to what accounts, and subject lines; for the most part, the contents would not be reviewed without a warrant.

This data set posed its own set of risks. It would not be composed solely of records from terrorists; rather, details of the activities of millions of Americans would be included. Rules would be in place to ensure that no one snooped on individual information contained in this vast data bank. The NSA would have no authority to pull up, say, some American’s e-mail account out of curiosity. Anyone violating this ban could potentially be committing a crime, just as an unauthorized IRS employee sneaking a peek at an individual tax return could be cited for wrongdoing. But the stricture was largely theoretical; sifting through the metadata to isolate a single individual’s records would be an almost impossible—and pointless—undertaking.

Instead, the NSA would use a larger process known as “Knowledge Discovery in Databases”—or KDD—to clean, select, integrate, and analyze the data. In essence, the ocean of information could be mined, not for the purpose of spying on any individual American but for creating a model the NSA could analyze to discern anomalies that could in turn reveal the path to a terrorist cell.