@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex (5 page)

The surge was slow-going and confusing at first. Stasio's bosses at Taji seemed not to know what to do with this sudden rush of new soldiers. But Stasio and a fellow analyst from Fort Lewis reverted to their training. They set up shop in an old munitions warehouse and got in touch with the units they'd replaced, who had already gone back home and were working in the intelligence center at Fort Lewis. They became one of his “reachback” points. Stasio connected to them via a secure computer network, and then he plugged in to the national intelligence databases, which were now swimming in new data. The massive surveillance dragnet being placed over Iraq was producing new signals, new leads. Finally, he could emulate Lester from
The Wire.

Stasio began by building network diagrams of the fighters in the area, using their cell phone signals to connect members to one another and help determine their location. He fed those reports back to Fort Lewis, then pulled more data from the national sets. At the same time, the team in Fort Lewis would go to work on big-picture reports. What was the tribal makeup of the region in which Taji was situated? Who was loyal to whom? Where could the US forces exert some leverage and try to break alliances, turn one group against another, or persuade others to come over to their side?

The Iraqi cell phone network was a potential intelligence gold mine. Cell phone contracts were among the first business deals struck in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was driven from power. Wireless was cheaper than wired communications, and cell phones were proliferating. By September 2004, only eighteen months into the US occupation, the NSA had developed a secret technique that US special operations forces called “the find,” which allowed them to locate a cell phone even when it was switched off.
Members of one special operations unit estimated years later that they found thousands of new targets this way, including members of al-Qaeda's branch in Iraq.

The NSA had access to foreign telecommunications networks through agreements struck with the United States–based carriers that operated them. These companies were paid handsomely—each receiving tens of millions of dollars annually, according to one former company executive—to give the spy agencies privileged access to their networks and the data coursing through them. Some of the carriers were partially owned by foreign investors. In exchange for the federal government granting the company a license to operate in the United States, they had to sign a contract that guaranteed US intelligence agencies uninterrupted access to the networks, so that phone calls could be logged and recorded. One agreement, with Level 3 Communications, even included a “kill switch” provision, stating that if ever directed by the US government, the company must be able to immediately sever all communications traveling through its undersea cables into the United States. This was a protective measure, meant to block the network from delivering malicious software or traffic in the event of a cyber attack.

In some cases a foreign communication could be intercepted from inside the United States. (In fact, this kind of capture was routine for e-mail traffic, much of which flowed through United States–based cables and routers.) When the NSA didn't have permission to tap a line, it simply stole the communications. In a revealing article for a trade magazine in 2005, an ex-marine turned intelligence agency contractor noted that cell phones and wireless technology were the means by which hundreds of millions of people around the world were accessing the Internet. “This trend presents an unprecedented exploitation opportunity for allied forces with the means to collect packets moving through the airwaves,” he wrote.
“Western intelligence assets have the capability to monitor these services by setting up rogue access points and conducting targeted war-driving collections and site survey analyses. Wireless collections provide the unique opportunity of conducting operations without host nation cooperation.”

Translation: wireless communications networks were a spy's dream. And the dream was coming true in Iraq.

 

Stasio knew nothing of the fateful meeting in the Oval Office or President Bush's decision. But he would soon see its fruits. With access to the telecommunications networks running in and out of Iraq, the NSA began scooping up and storing every phone call, text message, and e-mail sent in and out of the country. It was a key pillar of the new strategy: collect all the data, then use it to map out the networks of terrorists and insurgents.

The enemies' phones also became tracking devices. Signals emitted by the cell phone itself could be plotted on a map. Few places in Iraq needed this kind of precise, tactical intelligence more than Taji, the base where Stasio had been assigned. A key supply road, known as Route Tampa, ran through the base and north toward Balad in the Sunni Triangle. Tampa was the most important artery for delivering cargo and fuel to US forces, and it was a prime target for insurgents. American soldiers nicknamed it IED Alley.

Stasio drew maps of Route Tampa, dividing it into sections based on reports of insurgent activity. He drew network diagrams that, combined with reports from human spies or US troop patrols, showed where in the area IED cells were most active. He could flag certain zones as especially risky and try to predict where, based on previous attacks, the insurgents were likely to go next. He cross-referenced the bombings based on the type of device used. Did it employ a timer, or was it set off by a nearby attacker using a remote trigger? If the latter, the attacker was likely to be in the area after his device went off. Stasio kept track of what type of artillery rounds were used in some IEDs, in hopes that he could trace the source of the bomb makers' materiel.

Stasio systematically mapped out the bomber networks. And then other soldiers systematically destroyed them. Armed with the new tactical intelligence, American patrols would take down entire bombing networks in one night. They targeted not just the top man in the cell, but his designated number two, and then the third and fourth man in the order of succession. Three platoons were assigned to focus on IED networks using the intelligence that Stasio and his colleagues were providing. The Raiders were now in the man-hunting business.

Stasio and his team were also able to trace the funding sources of their enemies and discover tribal chiefs who were aiding the attackers. (Other former officials said that money also came from corrupt Iraqi officials.) Over the next fifteen months they took 450 insurgents off the battlefield. They only had to kill two, who shot back. The rest were taken prisoner and interrogated. The information they provided was shared with intelligence officers across the country. By the time Stasio was ordered to leave Taji for a new mission, IED attacks in the area had decreased by 90 percent. Route Tampa was safe.

A sudden and dramatic success like that could not go unnoticed for long. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, visited Taji and told the brigade they were needed farther north in Baquba, at Forward Operating Base Warhorse, in the restive Diyala Province. They arrived in October 2007. Baquba was a midsize, ethnically diverse city. Stasio, who a month earlier had been promoted to captain, knew it had been the scene of fierce fighting in close, urban quarters. Tracking insurgents and terrorists hiding among civilians posed a much tougher challenge than finding bomb makers along a single stretch of road.

But the new intelligence machine was built for just this type of work. And in Baquba it went into overdrive.

Stasio and his team went from taking out cells of fighters to taking out entire networks of them. They found the man responsible for building many of the suicide vests that terrorists used, tracking him down to his workshop. When the troops kicked open the door, they found a woman being fitted with her lethal garment. The bomb maker and the would-be bomber were arrested.

The team uncovered a cache of several thousand explosively formed projectiles, the largest they'd ever seen in Iraq. EFPs were designed to be fired at a distance and to penetrate the armored vehicles—the ones that soldiers drove to protect them from traditional roadside bombs. The EFPs were hidden in a compartment under an unassuming-looking house. Stasio and his analysts discovered that a foreign national was training people in Iraq to make the deadly projectiles. He too was arrested.

Stasio was just a young officer. But in his new role as an analyst, he had to understand where the bombs were, who was making them, and who was financing the production. Every time his boss went into a meeting with a sheikh or local leader, Stasio had to brief him on the political backstory, the complexities of the interlocking and sometimes interchangeable alliances that US sources hoped to exploit in their effort to win more “hearts and minds” among Iraqis.

Never in war, as far as he knew, had such a low-ranking officer been required to know so much tactical and strategic information, to understand not just the battlefield on which he fought but the geopolitical realities of the war. Usually that kind of analysis was done by a guy with stars on his shoulders.

His fellow officers kidded him: “Bob, did you brief the president today?”

He took it as a compliment.

 

Stasio was just one member of a vast hacking enterprise, the vanguard of a new cyber war. After Bush gave his order, daily strikes in Iraq were being carried about by a hybrid military and intelligence unit that brought together soldiers and spies. Their center of operations was a concrete hangar at the Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, which had once housed Iraqi fighter jets.
Most of the planes here now were unmanned drones. Their pilots worked alongside NSA hackers, FBI cyber forensics investigators, and special operations forces—the military's elite commando squads. They all broke off into clusters, working with a seamless, almost organic precision. The hackers stole information from the enemy's electronic devices and passed it to the analysts, who drew up target lists for the troops. As they went off on raids, the drone pilots watched overhead, giving eye-in-the-sky warning to the troops on the ground, thanks to sophisticated cameras and other sensors developed by the CIA. Sometimes the drone pilots themselves made the kill with a missile shot.

When an attack was finished, the troops gathered more intelligence from the site or from the fighters they captured—cell phones, laptop computers, thumb drives, address books, scraps of paper called “pocket litter” that might contain nothing more than a name, a phone number, or a physical or e-mail address. The troops brought the information back to the base and gave it to the analysts, who fed it into their databases and used data-mining software to look for connections to other fighters either in custody or at large. They paid close attention to how the fighters were getting money for their operations, including sources outside Iraq—in Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

Every day the unit netted between ten and twenty fighters. Whole terrorist networks were illuminated in this way, by US forces who were starting to think and act like their enemy. They structured themselves not in vertical hierarchies but in networks, each member responding to conditions on the ground. They were making it up as they went along, and creating a new kind of warfare.

The NSA had already built the infrastructure to tap into communications networks. After the 9/11 attacks, the agency set up new listening posts and collection points to monitor cyberspace for terrorist phone calls, e-mails, and other digital communications. Many of these new access points were inside the offices and switching stations of the United States' major telecom network carriers. Analysts tracking a particular insurgent's cell phone could see when it was logged on to the network. The analysts relayed that information to troops on the ground, who intercepted the wireless signal. (Aircraft and satellites were also used to grab the signal if ground forces weren't close by.) All that data was quickly collated to locate the target, down to the exact street, building, and even apartment from which he was calling or texting.

To the casual visitor at the intelligence fusion center in Balad, it might seem to house an unlikely crew. Contract analysts sporting nonregulation ponytails worked alongside squared-away soldiers and officers dressed in combat fatigues. But if he looked up at the huge computer screens suspended from the ceiling of the hangar, which were streaming surveillance video from drones, and then glanced down to the civilian-military teams pecking away at laptops and speaking to one another in a shorthand apparently all their own, he would realize he was standing inside a war room.

 

There was another pillar to the new intelligence strategy. In addition to collecting all electronic communications in Iraq, and using it to pinpoint the location of fighters and financiers, the NSA began to manipulate the methods of communications themselves—the insurgents' phones and computers—just the scenario Mike McConnell had described to President Bush.

The US hackers sent fake text messages to insurgent fighters and roadside bombers. The messages would tell the recipient, in effect, “Meet at this street corner to plan the next attack,” or “Go to this point on a road and plant your device.” When the fighter got there, he'd be greeted by US troops, or perhaps the business end of a Hellfire missile fired from a drone aircraft thousands of feet above.

The hackers and analysts at the NSA, working with forces on the ground in Iraq, infiltrated al-Qaeda's network of websites and servers, which the Americans called Obelisk. This was effectively al-Qaeda's corporate intranet. The terrorists published propaganda videos to Obelisk, as well as marching orders and plans for waging holy war. They even posted mundane administrative materials, including expense accounts and personnel memos. Obelisk was the insurgency's command-and-control system. And once inside, NSA hackers implanted malicious software in jihadi forums, tricking readers into clicking on links that installed spyware on their computers. Obelisk gave the spies access to al-Qaeda's secrets, and the means to infiltrate its ranks.