Power Play (6 page)

It was odd, but the United States even spied on itself. The signal, which had gone to the US Navy’s chief of naval operations on the fourth floor of the Pentagon, had already been intercepted by the NSA. Jimmy’s staff had read it before the Navy Department even saw it.

Jimmy himself had immediately logged its importance, the clue being that it came from the first sea lord, the former submarine commander who was slated to become Great Britain’s next ambassador to Washington. Captain Ramshawe knew that too, before they even told the queen of England. Which slotted in perfectly with the US military chief’s desire for “full-spectrum dominance”—land, sea, air, space, information, and presumably the celestial world above.

No wonder his workplace was known in the trade as Crypto City, or, less reverently, “No Such Agency,” staffed by thirty-two thousand people who denied its very existence.

Britain’s hands-on national security partner made its headquarters on 350 acres of Maryland, fifteen miles southwest of Baltimore, its location being very deliberately clear of Washington, in case the nation’s capital was ever hit by a nuclear bomb. The political hub of the United States was judged dispensable in an emergency. The National Security Agency was not.

Which is why Crypto City, with its thirty-two miles of roads and twenty thousand parking spaces, represents one of the largest municipalities in the state of Maryland but does not appear on any map.

The specially constructed exit ramp off the southbound lane of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is hidden from view by cunningly constructed earth hills and thick trees. Once off the ramp, the employees hit a labyrinth of barbed-wire fences, razor wire, huge rocks placed close together, and heavy concrete barriers.

No one can see the motion detectors and the hydraulically raised an-titruck devices. Closed-circuit television cameras sweep the entire area, and there are warnings everywhere forbidding anyone from taking photographs or notes.

Commandos in black paramilitary uniforms armed with submachine guns are seconds away from any area. America’s National Security Agency is probably the only place in the entire United States where an illegal intruder could, more or less, be shot on sight. The NSA’s supremely trained SWAT teams are an all-seeing force, with information fed into their own HQ from one hundred fixed watch posts manned by the agency’s own police officers.

Behind this ironclad, merciless security lies a strange and surreal place, like nowhere else on earth, where the greatest body of international military
secrets ever assembled by any organization in history is contained. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, Crypto City has also become the world’s preeminent and most advanced spying operation.

There are almost seventy buildings, offices, laboratories, warehouses, factories, and living quarters. The people who work here do so in absolute secrecy. Most of them will live and die without ever mentioning even to relatives, wives, and children precisely what they do on behalf of the nation.

Every aspect of life inside the perimeters is coded. Even the Christmas party is called something else. No one living anywhere near the vast Fort Meade complex has the slightest idea what happens inside the barricades. When the Maryland county officials placed a rubber cord on the road to try to ascertain the volume of traffic entering the complex, armed guards appeared as if by magic and sliced it into several pieces. Crypto City answers to no one.

The OPS 2B building is a vast rectangle of black glass, and, inside, it contains a huge black granite wall. The great seal of the National Security Agency, twelve feet by eight feet, is carved into the stone, and above, written in solid-gold inlay, are the words
They Served in Silence.
Below, in the eight columns of the Memorial Wall, are the names of almost 160 military and civilian personnel who gave their lives in the line of duty.

The black granite is polished so workers can see their own reflections. This is deliberate, designed to remind them starkly that they too serve, in silence, precisely the same cause as those who died for it.

Personnel usually confirm they work for the Department of Defense. But no one is on record specifying their various areas of collecting and analyzing foreign communications and intelligence. Inside those razor-wire barriers, among the greatest collection of supercomputers the world has ever seen (or, rather, not seen), there are state-of-the-art systems, designed to raise the roof at the slightest suggestion of a cyberspace hacker trying to gain entry to any US government system.

Nothing in Crypto City is quite what it seems. The outside structures actually shield the real building, which lies inside the shell, protected by thick bulletproof material, six inches of sound-numbing space with a copper screen designed to lock in every possible sound, conversation, and signal.

That copper screen is constructed around almost every area of the entire complex, rendering the whole place acoustically impregnable. The aim of America’s NSA is to vacuum up every last particle of electronic
information on this planet, and far beyond, but not to allow one single atom of its own sounds to escape to the outside world.

There are reputed to be a thousand listening stations on US territory worldwide, almost every one of them hooked up to Fort Meade. But there are also six hundred similar US operations all over the world.

The main one stands in the UK, on the Royal Air Force Base at Menwith Hill Station, in the Yorkshire Dales near Harrogate, approximately two hundred miles north from where Admiral John Young sat with the first sea lord in Admiralty Arch, which guards London’s Trafalgar Square.

Like Fort Meade, Menwith Hill irritates the life out of know-nothing left-wingers. The station stands in 545 acres of North Yorkshire and is the largest electronic listening station on earth. On its campus there are more than twenty-three giant Radomes, which look like enormous golf balls. Hidden inside these space-age Titleists are antennas intercepting the world’s naval and military signals.

The Menwith Hill technicians form the world’s largest spy base, with a vast special area confined to Russia. The entire operation is run by the National Security Agency under the command of the US Air Force’s 421st Airbase Group.

Menwith Hill, nestling in the folds of the Yorkshire Dales, has the strongest possible links not only to the US satellites but also to Buckley, the secretive 3,300-acre USAF base in Colorado, home of the 460th Space Wing, the missile-warning, space-tracking front line of the US military. In the Rocky Mountains near Denver, it, too, displays the gigantic golf balls, linking it to England’s Yorkshire Dales.

The Menwith Hill listening station has been under US control since 1954, when the Western world was under the control of the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Sir Winston Churchill, neither of whom believed the Russians could be trusted a yard.

The Texas-born president ensured the Menwith Hill Station answered to no American law, and Churchill absolved it from British law. Also, to this day, it appears on no maps, the largest town in England subjected to this omission. Those, by the way, are three more issues that seriously brass off the lefties.

Occasionally, there are futile protests about the very existence of the mysterious Yorkshire spy base, silent behind its razor-wire fences. Questions are
asked and answers demanded concerning this little patch of the United States among some of northern England’s most glorious countryside. But no answers have ever been forthcoming. Its secrets are still classified. Less is known about Menwith Hill than any other military operation in Europe.

Menwith Hill, self-sufficient, even owning its own excellent elementary and high school for the offspring of its personnel, continues—unaccountable, beyond the law, sensationally efficient, and the eavesdropping jewel in the crown of America’s National Security Agency in faraway Maryland, south of the Mason-Dixon line.

When the signal came in, alerting US Intelligence about the probability of a Russian submarine in the Minch Channel, a thousand lines of communication began to function. And none more urgent than the one from Crypto City to North Yorkshire placing everyone on high alert for an underwater escape, a Russian submarine not heading north through the GIUK Gap but going home, probably south into the Med and steaming on to one of the Black Sea submarine bases—perhaps with sensitive UK-US intelligence gathered up on its electronic intercept antenna.

A northward escape was out of the question at this time of year, the port of Murmansk being more or less ice bound and the White Sea frozen solid. But the sub-chasing networks of the West were stirring themselves for the first time in many years, really since the Cold War ended, and all because of a lost trawler.

There were some hefty ripples left on the surface of the North Atlantic after the
Misty
descended into the endless silence of her grave. And they stretched from Stornoway to central London, from the Admiralty to Fort Meade, and then to North Yorkshire and on to the Rocky Mountains. Whoever authorized that Russian ship into British waters would need a convincing explanation because many hitherto relaxed military minds were now on a very definite high alert.

 

Rani Ben Adan had been recalled south to Moscow from the frozen lands of the Karelian Republic at just a few hours’ notice. He sat in a windowless,
white-walled basement, in the presence of two “cultural attachés.” They were lean, hard men with swarthy skin, dark stubble, and wary eyes. Neither wore jackets, which left their shoulder holsters exposed on their white shirts. Loaded service revolvers were there for anyone to see.

Rani knew them both well. They were ex–Israeli Air Force colonels whose identities were still classified even within the Mossad, where they now served. Rani knew them only as Andre and Marc. He also knew that Andre was a fighter pilot in the 2006 Lebanon War and almost certainly commanded the air strike when the IAF destroyed fifty-nine Iranian-supplied missile launchers in thirty-four minutes.

Both men had, apparently, taken part the following September in Operation Orchard when the IAF launched a massive strike on a Syrian nuclear reactor and completely destroyed it. Marc’s background was even more obscure than Andre’s, but word was, inside the Mossad, he had commanded a top secret raid on a convoy of trucks in Sudan in January 2009. It had been headed for Egypt with weapons for Gaza until Marc’s air wing obliterated it.

But the strongest unconfirmed rumor was that both men had played command roles in the devastating October 2016 Israeli destruction of Iran’s main nuclear plants in the mountains of Qom and Natanz—a military attack that has never been even remotely explained, or indeed been a cause for any nation to become unduly irate. Except perhaps for Russia, whose fabled S-300 missile defensive system was comprehensively shattered by the Israeli fighter-bombers.

In the ensuing couple of years, Russia, while seething, had never uttered one public statement about the strike against their friends the ayatollahs. And Israel had neither confirmed nor denied any involvement in the action. The entire subject of Iran’s nuclear capability had gone extremely quiet, and the government in Tehran had ceased to mention the exalted possibility of “wiping Israel off the map.”

Yet the significance of that sensational raid—whoever conducted it—had continued into the year 2018. The Mossad’s absolute dislike of Russia had never abated—not since the old Soviet Union warhorses armed and then rearmed the Syrians for their murderous bombardment of the Holy Land in the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

In private moments, Andre and Marc had answered a few questions for Rani Ben Adan, who was himself, of course, one of the most revered Israeli
battle commanders ever to serve. In the sound-swept security of that very basement operations room, deep in the heart of Moscow, Marc had reasoned, “If I can’t trust the decorated Special Forces nephew of Bren Adan, then who is there in this world for me?”

He remembered the assault on Iran’s nuclear factories as if it had been yesterday. He remembered the bright moon in the small hours of Thursday, October 6, 2016—the date chosen to mark the forty-third anniversary of the infamous October day when Egypt’s Third Army stormed across the Suez Canal and attacked the Israeli nation at prayer.

He remembered the words of the Israeli commanders as the pilots prepared to embark their lethal long-range, heavy-payload fighter-bombers for the journey to Iran:
Tonight you must remember who we are and the endless threats we face. You must attack with all of your courage—because in the end no one will help us. Tonight, as ever, we fight alone—the nation of Israel counts on you alone. Please, God, go with you.

There were tears in Marc’s eyes when he recalled the scene, the howl of the jet engines as Israel’s air wings climbed into the night skies—the F-15 Strike Eagles and heavily modified F-161 Sufas with their unprecedented long-range capability and supreme radar tracking for ground targets. The runway lights were glinting on the bright-blue Star of David painted in white circles on each aircraft’s wing.

He remembered leading the first attack formation as they hurtled west down the runway, out over the dark waters of the Med, and then banked hard right, back over Israeli territory, before opening the afterburners and flying high and fast over the Golan Heights and across sleeping Syria.

Colonel Andre had led the second wing of sixteen fighter-bombers, completing the thirty-two-aircraft armada, which represented the cream of the world’s largest air force outside of the United States. Bringing up the rear were two slower and separate observer aircraft, plus four of Israel’s brand-new squadron of Lockheed Martin F35B stealth and Joint Strike Fighters, with their instant VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) ability.