The Merchant of Secrets

CHAPTER 1

The greatest vulnerability in the
United States defense and intelligence organizations is its satellite networks.
These Top Secret networks are the vital
 
links that run all of the defense and intelligence communication and
machinery including battlefield command and control, guided missile systems,
homeland warning systems, and spy drones that give us visibility into the
nuclear proliferation in Iran and elsewhere.
 

In 2010 in response to a 2008
incident at an army base in the Middle East, and a wave of new cyber-attacks
that eclipsed Al-Qaeda in terms of the level of
  threat
to the United States, a new U.S. Cyber command was assembled at Ft. Meade,
Maryland to coordinate an effort to protect  networks against foreign
intelligence agencies seeking unauthorized access to Top Secret files. In the
spring of 2011 the President named Cyberspace the Fourth Battlefield Domain,
alongside Air, Land and Sea. At about the same time, and a short distance from
the White House, Lockheed Martin Corporation which manufactures US warplanes
and missiles was illegally accessed and top secret designs of future defense
programs were stolen.

One
day  at
the US base
camp located in the Middle East, a soldier awoke, and logged into his
government issued computer designated for classified material. He inserted a
flash drive into the laptop unaware that the flash drive had been loaded with
malware from a foreign intelligence service. Within seconds the virus raced
through the army network destroying highly sophisticated software running the
satellite communications which, from thousands of feet into space, identified
enemy positions and communicated those positions to the troops in the field.
The command and control system was knocked out leaving the troops, some as
young as eighteen and nineteen years old, dislocated and not knowing where the
enemy was; operating blind in hostile environment.

CHAPTER 2

About 8:30 in the morning on a bright, sunny December day,
I was stuck in heavy traffic sipping a piping- hot cup of coffee and mentally
editing a few paragraphs of The National Counterintelligence Executive’s Report
on cyber spying written late the night before. It needed
 
rewriting
to correct errors made when the combination of stress and
fatigue had overwhelmed the author’s better judgment in the early hours of the
morning.  The holiday brew was just the perfect temperature, filling the
car with a delicious aroma as I sat at a traffic light, completely lost in
thought.  The annual cost of cyber-attacks was skyrocketing surpassing all
other forms of attack to become the greatest single threat to our national
security. Attacks on our “national infrastructure”, electrical grids and water
systems, was causing panic within the intelligence
community
 and
we were  lobbying the President for more money to raise
the level of funding to match the level of threat. My job was to identify and
react to attacks on government and civilian networks which in December 2010,
included the “Poison Ivy “virus, invented by a Chinese hacker and made
available on the internet for anyone with a grudge and mediocre talents to
wield against the U.S.. The jolt of caffeine was just beginning to take effect
when my phone rang on the passenger seat beside me. 

To be quietly content while stuck in
a
traffic
would seem strange to most people, but normalcy even if it means
being stuck on a highway at 8 a.m., is a prize to be coveted whether or not the
other drivers sharing the road saw it that way. To be alive, healthy and free
and driving in a car to work is a privilege that comes with a heavy price.
Thousands of people like me, by the nature of our commitment to our country
 immerse ourselves in a world  of darkness every day  to
 bear the burdens of our national security like a  cross upon our
shoulders, to protect our right  to do  normal things, like getting
stuck in a darn traffic jam on our way to work. So I didn’t mind at all.

 I placed the cup of caffeinated bliss in my cup
holder, before stretching my right arm to grab the   phone now
ringing off of the passenger seat.   It’s was Sara’s number lit-up in
green. Sara was an old friend from back home in Illinois. Years had passed with
little communication from her except when she ran into some sort of trouble
with a boyfriend, or missed a flight, or some other personal crisis like
hearing noises in her apartment that she thought were a burglar. I was late for
work and hoping that this time it wouldn’t take long.

“Hi Sara, how are you?” 

“It’s Taylor,” she replied in a wisp of a voice.  

 “What’s up with Taylor?” I asked.

“He’s in the hospital.”   

“Is he okay?”

“No….he’s dead,” she said.

 “He had an accident on the ski slopes.  He’d
been drinking with his friends then decided to go back up for more skiing…….”
 Her voice began to tremble at first, but quickly gave way to wails of
despair
interrupted  by
short gasps to get air
into her lungs.  It would be impossible to get the story out of her now.
The sounds
of  her
grief-stricken voice
resonating through the phone gave clear indication that there was only one
thing to do; I took  a day off from work and headed immediately  to
New York.

“I’ll be there this afternoon,” I declared, “just relax.”

Mulling over logistics would have taken too much time, so
I drove directly to Union Station in the center of Washington D.C. and caught
the next train to New York City. Sara was untested at coping with any sort of
human tragedy and now, as she was face-to-face with death for the very first
time, I worried about her ability to deal with the blow. There was no way of
knowing how deep the pain was for her or what harm she might bring herself to
assuage it, so to be on the safe side I decided to  just show up at her
door.

Penn Station in New York was dirty, ugly and jam-packed
with hoards of holiday travelers    pushing their way through
the crowd so that they could lay claim to a seat on their train before somebody
else grabbed it. The
frenzied  masses
knocked me
back and forth until I reached the exit door and was able to escape the madness
for a breath of fresh air. Outside, the streets were buzzing with bumper to
bumper traffic, street vendors, and constructions workers, all of which were
over shadowed
  by
the enormous billboards and
skyscrapers towering above. How different New York is from Washington. Yellow
taxis
swarmed  around
the train station so I
signaled to one with an arm extended, and the kindly Indian driver took me
uptown, to Sara’s building on 60
^th
  street.

On the tenth floor, I rang the bell, and waited for the
sound of slippers to pad across the floor. When the door opened her gaunt face
slowly emerged from the darkened apartment, then immediately recoiled back into
the semi-dark, as she drew-up her hand
  to
shield
her bloodshot eyes from the burst of unwanted light coming in from hallway.
 Through her tee shirt and flannel pajama pants, I could see
that  she
was waif- thin. It seemed that she hadn’t
eaten in days. Without a word Sara turned her back as if nobody had been at the
door to silently shuffle back across the room and to sink into the comfort of a
large overstuffed sofa where she had been nestled since early that morning. She
curled-up in the fetal position and hugged a pillow tightly, too aggrieved to
be consoled by anyone, including her friend standing at the doorway who had
taken the train from Washington.  A faint slow melody was coming from
Sara’s laptop, and like a warm blanket it comforted her and gave relief from
the heavy silence in the apartment.  She was trying to deal with the pain
the best she could but seemed completely disconnected from her surroundings,
preferring
instead  to
find refuge in an ethereal
place out of reach of the pain which mercilessly pursued her. An inordinate
stillness so unlike New York had befallen the apartment and the darkened room
echoed a profound sadness.   

In the kitchen I helped myself to a glass of wine from an
already opened bottle and began washing her dishes.  A few minutes later
Sara lumbered into the kitchen and with rivers of tears streaking down her face
she tried to explain the chronology of events that led to Taylor’s death, but
her jumbled narrative was hard to follow. Taylor had gone to Vermont for a week
of skiing with friends and at the end of a good day on the slopes the friends
gathered  in
a restaurant at the base of the mountain
to unwind over a meal and drinks, but Taylor wasn’t hungry so he only drank,
and didn’t eat anything. A couple of shots of whiskey and a couple of beers
later, Taylor returned to the mountain to get in a few more runs before
nightfall would descend on the slopes  and the ski patrol would close the
ski lift for the evening, but while racing down the mountain at a speed which
normally was within his ability to manage, this time Taylor’s skis hit a patch
of ice so that instead of turning back toward the center of the slope as he had
wanted them to do, they failed to turn beneath his feet. Careening off of the
edge of the run he struggled in vain to cushion his fall with his arms and to
protect his head but his body slammed into a tree with a violent force
fracturing his skull and
dropping  him
to the
ground. By the time the ski patrol arrived to help him he was unresponsive. The
lethal combination of alcohol and speed took Taylor’s life that night.

When Sara finished telling the story of her husband’s
death, she let out a long sigh of emotional exhaustion and deflated into her
chair while grabbing a tissue from a box on the table to wipe away the water
gathering in her swollen eyes. We sat in silence for a pensive moment while I
struggled to find something to say that might be of comfort but words were too
hard to find for someone who had lost the man of her life so soon, at the age
of thirty-four. I begged her to
come  stay
with
me in Washington D.C. 
believing
that a change of
scenery would do her good. She hung her head and smiled at the thought of
staying in my small apartment.

“Thanks, but I want to just get through the next few
days,” she said, and smiled appreciatively.

“I know,” I replied, “but I’m concerned about you, and
don’t want you to be so far away.” I was speaking from the heart. She wrapped
her arms around me in a hug and said, “I’ll think about it.”

While Sara and I were sipping our glasses of wine, my
office mate called to inform me that someone had set himself on fire in
Tunisia. The “Arab Spring” was taking flight.

It had been important to be there for Sara in her hour of
need, and I very much wanted to stay longer but the developments in the Middle
East required me to return to work by Monday. I had to go back anyway, the army
was eager for us to complete our network integration evaluations, so that
weaknesses in the army’s system architecture could be found and analyzed. We
were fighting multiple cyber spying wars with limited resources.  It
wasn’t enough to protect and defend our systems; we also had to locate and
identify the hackers then document our findings for the State Department so
they could confront the foreign governments sponsoring the attacks. So duty
called.

CHAPTER 3

It was about 7:00pm and Colin was hanging around the
administrative assistant’s desk when he heard me rounding the corner.  
“Hey Caroline, where have you been all day?
Taking on the
world?” he joked as he turned to see me.

“Yes that’s it. Me against the world,” I responded
sarcastically.

“Hey really, you can tell me,” he teased.

“You know I can’t Colin,” I replied.

“Okay, I’ll coax it out of you over drinks.”

 “I need to check my email and phone messages, I’ll
be right out.” Colin was never boring, so I decided to go with him.

 “Hurry-up, I’ll meet you in the lobby” he said,
wrapping his jacket around him and zipping it up in defense against the chilly
air outside.  The brutish building constructed in cement and steel was one
of over 30 Top Secret facilities built around the Washington D.C. area since
September 11, 2001.  The driveway into the compound and leading up to the
building was built with a strong curve to break the speed of any suicide bomber
trying to ram the building at high speed. Huge cement blockades lined the
sidewalk of the entrance to block a vehicular attack. Outside of each glass
door there was a metal plate in ground that would rise up at the push of a
security officer’s button, to prevent someone unwanted from entering through
the door. Laser scanners emitting a green light electronically paroled the
inside of the lobby while cameras were hidden in the structure from floor to
ceiling. The first floor was all one-way security glass enabling someone inside
the building to look out but making it impossible to look in.

My email inbox was full, stuffed with messages mostly
about the protests rolling through Tunisia, nuclear scientists in Iran, and
drone strikes in Pakistan. After a quick glance I logged- off and locked the
door.