The Watchers (15 page)

Weldon called Tenet after receiving urgent calls to his office from contacts in the Russian Duma. NATO bombs and missiles had started falling on Yugoslavia two weeks earlier. The world had been waiting for Western intervention while thousands of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo were being murdered or displaced by the marauding Yugoslav army. Now the Clinton administration wanted those soldiers out of Kosovo, and they were prepared to topple Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević to do it.

That put the Russians on edge. “We've got a real problem,” Weldon's contacts fretted. Moscow was suspicious of Clinton's real intent in bombing YUGOSLAV civilian and military targets. Did he want to oust MiloÅ¡ević or to extend America's sphere of influence? It was hard to tell.

“What do you want me to do?” Weldon asked.

He should convince President Clinton that Russia could help end the war and get Milošević out, the Russians said. They intended to go to Belgrade to meet with the besieged leader. Weldon should come as the United States' representative.

This wasn't a public relations stunt, they promised. They would take Weldon, and any other congressmen who wanted to join him, to a refugee camp, so they could see for themselves the human suffering Milošević had caused. They also would intercede with the government to get it to release three American soldiers captured near the border with Macedonia. And the Russians assured Weldon they would set up a meeting with Milošević himself at a future date, to persuade him to step down.

Weldon was surprised that the Russians could offer so much. How would they deliver? The Russians replied that they had a man in Belgrade. A close personal friend of Milošević who could convince the president to end the war, with certain commitments.

“Who is he?” Weldon asked. His name was Dragomir Karic.

Weldon had never heard of him. Where had the Russians found this guy? And how did he know Milošević? If anyone
should
know, it was the CIA. “I don't know who this guy Karic is,” Weldon told Tenet over the phone. “The Russians are convinced he can give us information that will allow us to get MiloÅ¡ević to agree to our terms. Can you tell me something about him?” Tenet said he'd look into it.

Weldon liked to kick the CIA in the ass, but he told himself it was tough love. He wanted the agency to succeed, thought they had to. But he had to keep them honest. A dogged proponent of missile defense, like many of his fellow Republicans, Weldon once walked out on a closed-door briefing by CIA officials who had told him there was little risk that China or North Korea would fire off a ballistic missile at a U.S. city. Weldon claimed to have his own intelligence sources and firmly believed such an attack was not only plausible but imminent.

The CIA's assessment, contained in a National Intelligence Estimate, infuriated the congressman, and he publicly vented his appraisal of the secret document: “The NIE is the most outrageous politicization of an intelligence document that I've seen in the 10 years I've been in Washington,” he told a reporter. Weldon was a master of rhetoric, and hyperbole was a favorite device. Tenet, himself a former Capitol Hill staffer, was used to handling men like Weldon, but he could test one's patience.

Tenet called Weldon back the next day, with little to report. His analysts had dug up a few sentences of information. “We think he's tied in with corruption in Russia,” Tenet concluded. The same could be said for thousands of others, none of whom wanted to sit down with a congressional delegation. Useless, Weldon thought.

Weldon ran Karic's name up the flagpole with State Department officials, who were likewise at a loss. Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary, warned Weldon not to meet with him in Belgrade. “We don't know who this person is,” he cautioned. “He'll just use you.”

But Weldon had set his mind to the task. He gathered a delegation of ten members, evenly divided between the two parties, and arranged for a flight. Weldon granted Talbott's request not to go to Belgrade by selecting an alternate meeting spot in Vienna.

Weldon still hadn't vetted Karic, a man who, for all the Russians' vouchsafing, had appeared with alarming suddenness. The CIA predictably had failed him. But Weldon had a plan B. He picked up the phone again, but this time he called his own sources.

 

When Erik Kleinsmith got the request from Weldon's office to draw up a profile on the enigmatic Karic, he didn't expect it to be an onerous task. The electronic sleuth with the Boy Scout demeanor had cracked much harder cases.

Kleinsmith recently had been assigned to the Information Dominance Center at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, just outside Washington. Weldon had become acquainted with the futuristic outfit during his relentless oversight of the intelligence community. He was enamored of the IDC's unconventional methods, and its people.

The IDC was a haven for computer-geeks-turned-soldiers like Kleinsmith. He and his civilian colleagues had wanted to ride on the bleeding edge of technology, and the IDC didn't disappoint; with its flat-panel screens, sleek surfaces, and mission commander chair in the center of the room, they could imagine they worked on the set of a science-fiction movie.

Kleinsmith and his fellow analysts were engaged in a dizzying array of secretive military operations. Much of their work involved tracking cyber attackers who relentlessly tried to penetrate military systems and steal secrets. The analysts had developed methods of tracking and tracing these bandits across cyberspace and, if need be, sending some digital fire their way in the form of a computer virus or an assault on their network. The IDC also practiced the dark art of information operations—the spread of lies, misinformation, and other forms of propaganda to make an adversary act contrary to his own best interests.

Kleinsmith was the chief of intelligence for the Land Information Warfare Activity, a subgroup of the larger Intelligence and Security Command. The IDC operated under LIWA's umbrella. Nestled deep within layers of acronyms, Kleinsmith suffered little outside interference. In the military bureaucracy, the lower one flew beneath the radar, the freer he could operate. Kleinsmith managed two dozen officers, soldiers, and civilian intelligence analysts. The IDC was their home base.

The analysts had a square-peg mind-set that the Army intelligence bureaucracy often rejected. Kleinsmith and his colleagues didn't always fit in, and they liked that. Their analytic methods relied heavily on information technology “tools,” specially designed computer programs that processed vast amounts of electronic data and revealed connections among people, places, and activities that the human eye and mind often missed. The tools took the heavy lifting out of analysis, a tradecraft that had never kept up with the technological revolution. The IDC was a laboratory, and it attracted not just analysts but engineers looking to test the limits of the state of the art. Chief among them was a technologist named James Heath, who'd spent his career in the dark corners of the intelligence community crafting new surveillance and mining tools. He had visions of a master intelligence database, a collection of all the information known to all the agencies, held in one place that could be mined, sifted, and prodded. The IDC gave him a home base, and a testing facility. Kleinsmith and his peers saw Heath as a kind of “mad scientist,” and they were often thrilled to work with him. People like this were so rare in the intelligence community.

The IDC relished testing new tools, putting them through their paces on real missions. Some broke under the strain. Some proved indispensable assets in the IDC's arsenal. The place was infused with a passion for the unconventional. And a hefty dose of competitiveness.

Kleinsmith enjoyed taking on tasks that befuddled the big agencies like the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. They had an army of analysts and infinitely larger budgets than his scrappy outfit. But they didn't have his willingness to use new tools and methods, to take risks. Instead, other analysts adhered to an outdated tradecraft: read everything you can on a subject, become the expert, file everything you know away, and when someone comes looking for an answer, lecture them and intimidate them with all you seem to know. At least that's how Kleinsmith saw it.

Kleinsmith's immediate bosses had evangelized for the IDC's impressive capabilities. Some of the marketing was based in reality; a good bit of it was exaggerated. Still, the center was earning a reputation as a place to go when you needed to get things done quickly. Kleinsmith and his cohort of high-speed visionaries were cut from the same cloth as Poindexter and McCarthy. Although they'd never met each other, their mutual ambition linked them. Even their physical environs shared a pedigree—the former Hollywood designer from Disney Imagineering who designed one of Poindexter's demonstration spaces for the Genoa project also designed the IDC. It mimicked one of his recent projects—the set for the fifth film in the
Star Trek
franchise.

Kleinsmith knew the Karic job would be pretty easy. Some quick research, mostly of “open sources” on the Internet like news articles. Then he'd package up a report and send it back to Weldon. It didn't require any detailed analysis; just organizing whatever information was available. And Kleinsmith could provide it faster; since the IDC was not classified in military parlance as a “producer” of intelligence, he could cut through layers of bureaucracy that slowed down other agencies. People could come to Kleinsmith directly to get answers. That also meant that whatever he sent back wasn't vetted according to community standards. But most of Kleinsmith's customers, including Weldon, could have cared less.

 

A day after he placed the call to the IDC, Weldon received its take on Karic. While the CIA had come up with a paragraph, Kleinsmith and his team produced an eight-page dossier.

The unofficial document claimed that not only was Karic tied to Milošević, but the men's wives and their siblings all were good friends. It said that Karic had four brothers, who owned one of the largest banking systems in Yugoslavia, employing some sixty thousand people. The bank had tried to finance the sale of an SA-10 missile system to Russia, the IDC discovered.

And that wasn't the half of it. The dossier also alleged that one of the Karic brothers had financed Milošević's election, that the house Milošević lived in belonged to the Karic boys, and that their wives were best friends with Milošević's wife. The IDC analysts said that they found all of this in the open source—information available to anyone with an Internet connection.

After reading the document, Weldon was convinced that Dragomir Karic and his siblings were the closest people in Yugoslavia to the embattled president. He was the genuine article, just as the Russians had promised. Armed with what he judged a thorough profile, Weldon and his fellow Congress members boarded a military plane for Vienna.

The delegation met for two days in a hotel with Karic and Weldon's Russian friends. Karic called Milošević several times on a portable phone. As the Americans and Russians negotiated a framework for compromise—which called for the release of prisoners and an international peacekeeping force—Karic relayed the details to Milošević. He agreed to the terms, on the condition that the delegation travel to Belgrade and meet with him in person. Karic said he'd provide the bus.

The American congressmen delighted over the possible end to the war—and the accompanying headlines in newspapers back home. Weldon called the State Department's Operations Center, raising the number three man at the department, Thomas Pickering, the former ambassador to Russia. He was unenthused.

Pickering still couldn't believe that Karic had the credibility to make these promises. The presence of the Russian delegation must have fueled speculation in the department that Moscow wanted to embarrass the Clinton administration. They would broker a deal with Congress instead. Force the White House to concede by releasing POWs as a sign of good faith. Pickering admonished Weldon that Karic was not to be trusted and that the delegation must not go to Belgrade.

Weldon relayed Pickering's misgivings, and Karic was incensed. “You just blew it!” he fumed to Weldon. They could have ended the war, he said. Some of the congressmen insisted they would still go to MiloÅ¡ević on their own, but Weldon forbid it.

Dejected, Weldon and his bipartisan gang got back on their plane. They would never know if Karic was the man the Russians claimed, the man that the IDC averred he was. The answer remained hidden as the plane lifted off from Vienna.

 

A few weeks after his return to Washington, Weldon's office got a phone call from the FBI. A couple of agents wanted to debrief him about Karic and his brothers.

“Fine,” Weldon told his staff. “Set it up for next Monday.” The congressman headed back to his home district for a scheduled visit. A few days later he received an emergency page from his staff, asking him to call the CIA's congressional liaison office immediately.