The Director: A Novel (2 page)

The audience was listening, even the geekiest kids with the spikiest hair. Weber could tell because they had stopped looking at their devices and were watching him.

“I didn’t like what was happening,” Weber said. And then he told the story that most of them knew, which was the reason, really, why they had come to hear him—about how he had protested the government’s surveillance orders, at first in secret, and then in litigation that made its way through the courts, and then by working with members of Congress and finally by refusing outright to comply with what his lawyers told him were illegal orders and daring the government to shut his company down, all while he was a member of the Intelligence Advisory Board. He said they could fire him from that position, too, in addition to closing his business, but he wouldn’t quit voluntarily. In the end, they didn’t do either.

Weber looked at James Morris as he began the last part of his speech, about intelligence. He saw that the young man was smiling and nodding. There was a sparkle in his eyes, and his mouth was open slightly. It was a look you sometimes see in a church when believers are moved, or at a concert when listeners get lost in the flow of the notes.

“I have tried to help my country in every lawful way I could,” Weber said. “I have tried to help the CIA, NSA and FBI do their jobs. I have served on one of the most sensitive oversight boards in the government. I will keep those secrets, and I would say yes tomorrow if someone asked me to help with proper activities. But I will not do things that are unconstitutional. I can’t run my business in a country that controls information. I’d rather shut it down. As you know if you’ve been reading the news, we’re winning that fight. And I think that now, maybe, people are realizing that security and liberty aren’t at war with each other . . . because in America, you can’t have one without the other.”

The DEF CON audience loved the speech. People stood and clapped so loudly that it embarrassed Weber. When he was finished, a man in a suit came up to him from the wings and presented his card. He said he worked for Timothy O’Keefe, the national security adviser. He said Weber had given a great speech that put into words what the president believed. He asked if he could share a video of the speech with his colleagues at the White House, and Weber said of course, it was for anyone who wanted to listen. The man asked if perhaps Weber might be willing to join O’Keefe for lunch sometime soon to discuss how the administration might chart a new path in intelligence.

Weber was flattered. But he was a businessman, not a politician. He always worried when people were too friendly. That meant that they would come looking for something down the line.

Morris was waiting outside the Green Room. He stood unobtrusively apart from the crowd that had gathered to congratulate Weber, or give him business cards, or otherwise ingratiate themselves. It was only when Weber was finally alone that the younger man approached him.

“That was a hell of a speech,” said Morris.

“People at your agency wouldn’t like it. They’d feel threatened.”

Morris smiled, an inward, almost coy look of someone who had a new secret.

“Too bad for them,” he said. “Let me show you what the hackers are up to.”

They walked the halls for several more hours, meeting people, drinking beer and talking about technology. As the evening progressed, they moved deeper into the convention space. Eventually they came to a large hall in the back, where they heard hundreds of people shouting, “Don’t fuck it up!”

Weber was curious; he moved toward the hall and in through the door. A packed house of very drunk-looking people was screaming at contestants on stage, who were trying to answer geeky questions about computer hacking and technology. Some of the contestants had their shirts off, men and a few women, bare skin. Out in the audience, people were bouncing a huge rubber ball from aisle to aisle, shouting and chugging down more beer, while onstage a woman in a black bra and garter belt was vamping around the contestants.

“What’s this all about?” asked Weber, wide-eyed as he watched the fracas.

“It’s Hacker Jeopardy,” explained Morris. “It features free beer and a woman named Miss Kitty with a big paddle. It’s humiliate or be humiliated.”

“That’s the hacker ethos, I take it,” said Weber. “Humiliate or be humiliated.”

“Yes, sir.” Morris nodded. “I won this game three years running. Now they won’t let me play.”

Another hour of wandering, and Weber had seen enough. He bought dinner for Morris and himself at Nobu, back at Caesar’s Palace. The young man was talking faster now, pumped by all that he had seen, and Weber couldn’t track everything he was saying.

“Do they let you do your thing at the agency?” Weber asked as he was paying the bill. He was relaxed after his speech, enjoying his day of slumming in the hacker world.

“Not really. They’re scared of me. What I do is subversive, by definition. It doesn’t have boundaries. It cuts across directorates. They don’t like that.”

“But that’s what the CIA is for, right?” said Weber. “It’s their job to be in the space that other people can’t get to. If you can knock on the front door, then send the State Department.”

“Yes, sir. But these people are scared of the future. They aren’t sure how to live in an open world. For most of them, the clock is still stuck at 1989. For some of them, it’s still 1945. Their big event every year is the OSS Dinner. I mean, that’s sad. They act like it’s still a social club.”

Weber listened to what the young man said. It worried him. Despite his private battles with the government over the past few years, he wanted a strong intelligence agency.

“How does it get fixed?” he asked.

“Honestly? People could start by doing what you said today, trying to think about what a modern American intelligence agency would look like. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but the CIA operates like a second-rate copy of MI6. We’re un-American.”

Weber looked at his watch. This last comment made him nervous. He had let Morris get tipsy, and now he was going too far.

“I should crash,” he said. “I have an early flight back to Seattle tomorrow. This was an eye-opener. I’m grateful to whoever made the arrangements.”

“Thank my deputy, Dr. Ariel Weiss. She’s the person in my geek shop who gets things done.”

“Well, tell Dr. Weiss that she’s a superstar.”

Morris nodded, but he wasn’t quite ready to let Weber go.

“You know what?” he said, leaning toward Weber, his eyes swimming behind those thick glasses. “I hate working for stupid people. It offends me. That’s why we need a new director.”

Morris reached his hand into the pocket of his hoodie and then extended it and shook Weber’s hand. In his palm was the medallion of the Information Operations Center, with the center’s name along the lower circumference and “Central Intelligence Agency” around the top. On the face of the coin was a blue bald eagle atop a globe formed of zeroes and ones. Above the eagle’s head were the words “Stealth,” “Knowledge” and “Innovation,” above them a large silver key.

Morris let the coin slip from his palm into Weber’s as they shook hands.

Weber took the gift. He studied Morris, reticent and opaque as he withdrew his hand and retreated back behind his black-framed spectacles. Weber’s eyes fell to the coin, gleaming gold, silver and blue, topped by that big, mysterious key. It was the first moment in which he thought seriously about the possibility of running the CIA, and the idea grew to become a passion in the months ahead—until one October morning, fifteen months later, it became a fact.

James Morris spent one more day in Las Vegas. He wanted to see an old friend from Stanford named Ramona Kyle. She was speaking at DEF CON, too, on civil liberties and the Internet. Morris sat in the audience for her talk. She spoke so fast, the other panelists had trouble keeping up with her. She was a wiry, intense woman, a passionate intelligence packed into a tiny frame. Her hair was tumbling red curls, like Orphan Annie.

When it came time for questions, several attendees with neat haircuts asked about investments. She was something of a cult figure in the venture capital world. She had joined a fund out of Stanford, and discovered start-ups in Budapest, Mumbai, São Paolo, Santiago—all the places, she liked to say, that produced chess champions and didn’t have their own investment banks yet. Sometimes she created the companies on her own, bringing people together in a coffee shop in Rio or a bar in Dubai. Eventually she started her own venture fund, and the money flowed so fast she stopped counting it—and started thinking about more serious things.

Kyle had a knack for making money, and people wanted to know her secrets even at this hacker’s conference. But she waved off business questions. They bored her. She wanted to talk about the surveillance state, the threat to liberties, the new information order of the world.

A questioner asked her if it was true what was rumored in the chat rooms, that she was the biggest secret funder of WikiLeaks.

“Are you a cop?” responded Kyle. “Next question.”

When the panel was over, she handed out cards with the name of an organization she had recently founded, called Too Many Secrets. It took its name from the rearranged anagram of “Setec Astronomy,” which was a puzzle at the denouement of the classic hacker movie
Sneakers.
The organization didn’t have a phone number or email address, but if Kyle met someone interesting, she wrote down her contact information in a tiny, precise hand.

Ramona Kyle didn’t go out of her way for most people, but Morris was an exception. For years after they graduated she had stayed in touch, mostly at meetings for high-tech eccentrics. She had messaged him a few weeks before the Las Vegas gathering, suggesting that they meet for drinks after her talk. She proposed a bar called Peppermill in the north strip of Las Vegas, a seedy cowboy-hooker part of town where nobody would recognize either of them.

The place was nearly empty. In the center of the bar was a fire pit surrounded by unoccupied pink couches. Kyle was sitting in a dark corner in the back drinking pomegranate juice, no ice. She looked like a homeless girl: tiny body, rag-doll clothes, red hair still wet from a shower after the speech.

Morris sat down next to her on the banquette. At Stanford, he had momentarily wanted to sleep with Ramona Kyle, back when she was anorexic and pure brain energy. Now that she was healthier, she wasn’t quite as sexy. As he moved closer to her, she disappeared deeper into the shadows of the booth.

“Did you take precautions?” she asked.

“Of course. I took two cabs and a bus.”

“They are out of control,” she said. “You have to be careful.”

“Stop worrying,” said Morris. “I’m here.”

1

WASHINGTON

Graham Weber’s new colleagues
thought that he was joking when he said at his first staff meeting that he wanted to remove the statue of William J. Donovan from the lobby. The old-timers, who weren’t really that old but were cynical bastards nonetheless, assumed that he wouldn’t actually do it. Donovan was the company founder, for heaven’s sake. The statue of him, square-legged with one hand resting on his belt, handsome as a bronze god, ready to win World War II all by himself, had been in the lobby since Allen Dulles built the damn building. You couldn’t just get rid of it.

But the new director was serious. He said the agency had to join the twenty-first century, and that change began with symbols. The senior staff who were assembled in the seventh-floor conference room rolled their eyes, but nobody said anything. They figured they would give the new man enough rope to hang himself. Somebody leaked the story to the
Washington Post
the next day, which seemed to amuse the director and also reinforced his judgment about how messed up the place was. To everyone’s amazement, he went ahead and removed the iconic figure of “Wild Bill” from its place by the left front door. An announcement said the statue was being removed temporarily for cleaning, but the days passed, and the spot where the pedestal had stood remained a discolored piece of empty floor.

The Central Intelligence Agency behaves in some ways like a prep school. Senior staff members made up nicknames for Weber behind his back that first week, as if he were a new teacher, such as Webfoot, Web-head and, for good measure, Moneybags. Men and women joined in the hazing; it was an equal-opportunity workplace when it came to malcontents. The director didn’t appear to care. His actual childhood nickname had been Rocky, but nobody had called him that in years. He thought about bringing it back. The more the old boys and girls tried to rough him up, the more confident he became about his mission to fix what he had called, at that first meeting with his staff, the most disoriented agency in the government. Nobody disagreed with that, by the way. How could they? It was true.

Weber was described in newspaper profiles as a “change agent,” which was what thoughtful people (meaning a half dozen leading newspaper columnists) thought the agency needed. The CIA was battered and bruised. It needed new blood, and Weber seemed like a man who might be able to turn things around. He had made his name in business by buying a mediocre communications company and leveraging it to purchase broadband spectrum that nobody else wanted. He had gotten rich, like so many thousands of others, but what made him different was that he had stood up to the government when it mattered. People in the intelligence community had trusted him, so when he said no about surveillance policy, it changed people’s minds.

He looked too healthy to be CIA director: He had that sandy blond hair, prominent chin and cheekbones and those ice-blue eyes. It was a boyish face, with strands of hair that flopped across the forehead, and cheeks that colored easily when he blushed or had too much to drink, but he didn’t do either very often. You might have taken him for a Scandinavian, maybe a Swede, who grew up in North Dakota: He had that solid, contained look of the northern plains that doesn’t give anything away. He was actually German-Irish, from the suburbs of Pittsburgh, originally. He had migrated from there into the borderless land of ambition and money and had lived mostly on airplanes. And now he worked in Langley, Virginia, though some of the corridor gossips predicted he wouldn’t last very long.