Dark Territory (20 page)

Although CentCom oversaw American military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and their neighboring countries, its headquarters were in Tampa, Florida, so Abizaid made frequent trips to Washington. By August, one month into his tenure as its commander, intelligence on insurgents was flowing into Langley and Fort Meade. He could see the “ratlines” of foreign jihadists crossing into Iraq from Syria; he read transcripts of their phone conversations, which were correlated with maps of their precise locations. He wanted to give American soldiers access to this intel, so they could use it on the battlefield.

By this time, Keith Alexander had been promoted to the Army's
deputy chief of staff for intelligence, inside the Pentagon, so he and Abizaid collaborated on the substantive issues and the bureaucratic politics. They found an ideal enabler in General Stanley McChrystal, head of the Joint Special Operations Command. If this new cache of intelligence made its way to the troops in the field, the shadow soldiers of JSOC would be the first troops to get and use it; and McChrystal, a soldier of spooky intensity, was keen to make that happen. All three worked their angles in the Pentagon and the intelligence community, but the main obstacle was Rumsfeld, who still refused to regard the Iraqi rebels as insurgents.

Finally, in January 2004, Abizaid arranged a meeting with President Bush and made the case for launching cyber offensive operations against the insurgents. Bush told his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to put the subject on the agenda for the next NSC meeting. When it came up several days later, the deputies from the intelligence agencies knocked it down with the age-old argument: the intercepts were providing excellent information on the insurgents;
attacking
the source of the information would alert them (and other potential foes who might be watching) that they were being hacked, prompting them to change their codes or toss their cell phones, resulting in a major intelligence loss.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi insurgents were growing stronger, America was losing the war, and Bush was losing patience. Numbed by the resistance to new approaches and doubting that an outside army could make things right in Iraq anyway, Abizaid moved toward the view that, rather than redoubling its efforts, the United States should start getting out.

But then things started to change. Rumsfeld, disenchanted with all the top Army generals, passed over the standing candidates for the vacated post of Army chief of staff and, instead, summoned General Peter Schoomaker out of retirement.

Schoomaker had spent most of his career in Special Forces,
another smack in the face of regular Army. (General Norman Schwarzkopf, the hero of Desert Storm, had spoken for many of his peers when he scoffed at Special Forces as out-of-control “snake eaters.”) McChrystal, who had long known and admired Schoomaker, told him about the ideas that he, Abizaid, and Alexander had been trying to push through. The new chief found them appealing but understood that they needed an advocate high up in the intelligence community. At the start of 2005, Mike Hayden was nearing the end of an unusually long six-year tenure as director of the NSA. Schoomaker urged Rumsfeld to replace him with Alexander.

Seventeen years had passed since an Army officer had run the NSA; in its fifty-three-year history, just three of its directors had been Army generals, compared with seven Air Force generals and five Navy admirals. The pattern had reflected, and stiffened, the agency's resistance to sharing intelligence with field commanders of “small wars,” who tended to be Army officers. Now the United States was fighting a small war, which the sitting president considered a big deal; the Army, as usual, was taking the brunt of the casualties, and Alexander planned to use his new post to help turn the fighting around.

McChrystal had already made breakthroughs in weaving together the disparate strands of intelligence. He'd assumed command of JSOC in September 2003.
That same month, Rumsfeld signed an executive order authorizing JSOC to take military action against al Qaeda anywhere in the world without prior approval of the president or notification of Congress. But McChrystal found himself unable to do much with this infusion of great power: the Pentagon chiefs were cut off from the combatant commands; the combatant commands were cut off from the intelligence agencies. McChrystal saw al Qaeda as a network, each cell's powers enhanced by its ties with other cells; it would take a network to fight a network, and McChrystal set out to build his own. He reached out to the CIA, the services' separate
intelligence bureaus, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the intel officers at CentCom. He prodded them into agreements to share data and imagery from satellites, drones, cell phone intercepts, and landline wiretaps. (When the Bush administration rebuilt the Iraqi phone system after Saddam's ouster, the CIA and NSA were let in to attach some devices.) But to make this happen—to fuse all this information into a coherent database and to transform it into an offensive weapon—he also needed the analytical tools and surveillance technology of the NSA.

That's where Alexander came in.

As Keith Alexander took over Fort Meade, on August 1, 2005, his predecessor, Mike Hayden, stepped down, seething with suspicion.

A few years earlier, when Alexander was running the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, the two men had clashed in a dragged-out struggle for turf and power, leaving Hayden with a bitter taste, a shudder of distrust, about every aspect and activity of the new man in charge.

From the moment Alexander assumed command at Fort Belvoir, he was determined to transform the place from an administrative center—narrowly charged with providing signals intelligence to Army units, subordinate to both the Army chief of staff and the NSA director—into a peer command, engaged in operations, specifically in the war on terror.

In his earlier post as CentCom's intelligence chief, Alexander had helped develop new analytic tools that processed massive quantities of data and parsed them for patterns and connections. He thought the technique—tracing telephone and email links (A was talking to B, who was talking to C, and on and on)—could help track down terrorists and unravel their networks. And it could serve as Alexander's entrée to the intelligence world's upper echelon.

But he needed to feed his software with data—and the place that had the data was the NSA. He asked Hayden to share it; Hayden turned him down. The databases were the agency's crown jewels, the product of decades of investments in collection technology, computers, and human capital. But Hayden's resistance wasn't just a matter of turf protection. For years, other rival intelligence agencies had sought access to Fort Meade's databases, in order to run some experiment or pursue an agenda of their own. But SIGINT analysis was an esoteric specialty; raw data could sire erroneous, even dangerous, conclusions if placed in untrained hands. And what Alexander wanted to do with the data—“traffic analysis,” as NSA hands called it—was particularly prone to this tendency. Coincidences weren't proof of causation; a shared point of contact—say, a phone number that a few suspicious people happened to call—wasn't proof of a network, much less a conspiracy.

Fort Belvoir had a particularly flaky record of pushing precisely these sorts of flimsy connections. In 1999, two years before Alexander arrived, his predecessor, Major General Robert Noonan, had set up a special office called the Land Information Warfare Activity, soon changed to the Information Dominance Center. One of its experiments was to see whether a computer program could automatically detect patterns in data on the Internet—specifically, patterns indicating foreign penetration into American research and development programs.

Art Money, the assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications, and intelligence, had funded the experiment, and, when it was finished, he and John Hamre, the deputy secretary of defense, went to Belvoir for a briefing. Noonan displayed a vast scroll of images and charts, showing President Clinton, former secretary of defense William Perry, and Microsoft CEO Bill Gates posing with Chinese officials: the inference seemed to be that China had infiltrated the highest ranks of American government and industry.

Hamre was outraged, especially since the briefing had already been shown to a few Republicans in Congress. Noonan tried to defend the program, saying that it wasn't meant as an intelligence analysis but rather as a sort of science-fair project, showing the technology's possibilities. Hamre wasn't amused; he shut the project down.

The architect of the project was Belvoir's chief technology adviser, a civilian engineer named James Heath. Intense, self-confident, and extremely introverted (when he talked with colleagues, he didn't look down at their shoes, he looked down at
his own
shoes), Heath was fanatical about the potential of tracking connections in big data—specifically what would later be called “metadata.”

Hamre's slam might have meant the end of
some
careers, but Heath stayed on and, when Alexander took command of Fort Belvoir in early 2001, his fortunes revived. The two had known each other since the mid-1990s, when Alexander commanded the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Heath was his science adviser. They were working on “data visualization” software even then, and Alexander was impressed with Heath's acumen and single-mindedness. Heath's workmates, even the friendly ones, referred to him as Alexander's “mad scientist.”

One of Mike Hayden's concerns about Alexander's request for raw NSA data was that Heath would be the one running the data. This was another reason why Hayden denied the request.

But Alexander fought back. Soft-spoken, charming, even humorous in an awkward way that cloaked his aggressive ambition, he mounted a major lobbying campaign to get the data. He told anyone and everyone with any power or influence, especially on Capitol Hill and in the Pentagon, that he and his team at Fort Belvoir had developed powerful software for tracking down terrorists in a transformative way but that Michael Hayden was blocking progress and withholding data for parochial reasons.

Of course, Hayden had his own contacts, and he started to hear
reports of this Army two-star's machinations. One of his sources even told him that Alexander was knocking on doors at the Justice Department, asking about the ways of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which authorized warrants for intercepts of suspected agents and spies inside U.S. borders. This was NSA territory, and no one else had any business—legally, politically, or otherwise—sniffing around it.

Hayden started referring to Alexander as “the Nike swoosh,” after the sneaker brand's logo (a fleet, curved line), which carried the slogan “Just do it”—a fitting summary, he thought, of Alexander's MO.

But Alexander won over Rumsfeld, who didn't much like Hayden and was well disposed to the argument that the NSA was too slow. Hayden read the handwriting on the wall and, in June 2001, worked out an arrangement to share certain databases with Fort Belvoir. The mutual distrust persisted: Alexander suspected that Hayden wasn't giving him all the good data; Hayden suspected that Alexander wasn't stripping the data of personal information about Americans who would unavoidably get caught up in the surveillance, as the law required.
^I
In the end, the analytical tools that Alexander and Heath had so touted neither turned up new angles nor unveiled any terrorists. Hayden and Alexander both failed to detect signs of the September 11 attack.

Now, four years after 9/11, following a brief term as the Army's top intelligence officer in the Pentagon, Alexander was taking over the palace at Fort Meade, taking possession of the databases—and bringing along Heath as his scientific adviser.

In his opening months on the job, Alexander had no time to push ahead with his metadata agenda. The top priority was the war in Iraq, which, for him, meant loosening the traditional strictures on NSA assets, putting SIGINT teams in regular contact with commanders on the ground, and tasking TAO—the elite hackers in the Office of Tailored Access Operations—to address the specific, the
tailored
, needs of General McChrystal's Special Forces in their fight against the insurgents.

He also had to repair some damage within NSA.

One week before Alexander arrived at Fort Meade, William Black, Hayden's deputy for the previous five years, pulled the plug on Trailblazer, the agency's gargantuan outsourced project to monitor, intercept, and sift communications from the digital global network.

Trailblazer had consumed $1.2 billion of the agency's budget since the start of the decade, and it had proved to be a disaster: a fount of corporate mismanagement, cost overruns, and—more to the point, as Alexander saw it—conceptual wrongheadedness. It was a monolithic system, built around massive computers to capture and process the deluge of digital data. The problem was that the design was too simple. Mathematical brute force worked in the era of analog signals intelligence, when an entire conversation or fax transmission spilled through the same wire or radio burst; but digital data streamed through cyberspace in packets, breaking up into tiny pieces, each of which traveled the fastest possible route before reassembling at the intended destination. It was no longer enough to collect signals from sensors out in the field, then process the data at headquarters: there were too many signals, racing too quickly through too many servers and networks. Trailblazer could be “scaled up” only so far, before the oceans of data overwhelmed it. Sensors had to process the information, and integrate it with the feed from other sensors, in
real time
.

Alexander's first task, then, was to replace Trailblazer—in other words, to devise a whole new approach to SIGINT for the digital age. His predecessors of the last decade had faced the same challenge, though less urgently. Ken Minihan possessed the vision, but lacked the managerial skills; Mike Hayden had the managerial acumen, but succumbed to the presumed expertise of outside contractors, who led him down a costly path to nowhere. Alexander was the first NSA director who understood the
technology
at the center of the enterprise, who could talk with the SIGINT operators, TAO hackers, and Information Assurance analysts on their own level. He was, at heart, one of them: more a computer geek than a policy maven. He would spend hours down on the floor with his fellow geeks, discussing the problems, the possible approaches, the solutions—so much so that his top aides installed more computers in his office on the building's eighth deck, so he could work on his beloved technical puzzles without spending too much time away from the broader issues and agendas that he needed to address as director.