The Merchant of Secrets Page 6

  The next day I returned to the coffee shop across from the dealership. The person who had been diligently working in the service area at the dealership the week before seemed like a good person to connect with. He stood out from the group, and was therefore a potential source of information about it.

  He arrived and stood in line for his coffee I approached him. “Excuse me, “ I said.

  He turned and smiled, recognizing me as a customer at the shop a week before. “May I ask you a couple of questions?”

  He agreed and came to the small round table where I was sitting, anticipating mechanical questions. “How’s your car running?” he asked.

  “How long have you been working at the dealership?” I replied.

  He peered at my face with a puzzled look, “Bout a year.”

  He asked nervously, “Whad’ya want?”

  I removed the work I.D. badge clipped to my belt and hidden underneath a sweater, and showed it to him. He squirmed in his seat. “What can you tell me about the guys who own the shop?”

  “I got nothin’ to tell you,” he said, fidgeting with his paper coffee cup while trying to figure out how to escape from the conversation.

  “Do you know the guy in the white car named Roger?” I asked.

  He replied “I see him come in a lot but I don’t know nothin’ about him”

  “Okay, can you tell me what country “Joe” is from? Pakistan? Afghanistan?”

  He thought “Joe” was from Pakistan or Afghanistan. Then I asked what hours “Joe” works and he told me. I thanked him and slid a $100 bill across the table

  Back at the office, our Deputy Director, Mullaly meanwhile had put an envelope on my desk. When I opened it there was a note inside that read:

  “Roger’s real name is Adnan Qureshi and he was sponsored for membership last year by David Jones. What’s this all about? Call me.” J.M.

  Instead of calling, I took the elevator up one floor to his office on the top floor of our building. During the next hour we discussed my investigation into Mr. Qureshi including the surveillance outside of the gym, the oil changes that were too short to be oil changes, my meeting with Bailey, and the IRS investigation that was stuck for lack of funding. It was a relief to be able to lay it all out to someone whom I could trust and, even better, who was in a position to help move the investigation further. But Mulally cautioned me against doing any further surveillance by myself as we have other people within the company who could do it more effectively. He asked me to stop the surveillance immediately, and I promised that I would. Then Mulally turned off his laptop and grabbed his coat from hook the back of the door. He was getting ready to leave for the evening and asked me to join him for a bite to eat at the place around the corner. This kind of access to the guy at the top was rare, and it didn’t hurt that he was attractive, and he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, so I decided to go for it.

  After dinner with our Deputy Director, I spent the next few hours reading a file on David Jones and found that he had worked in Afghanistan as a contractor for Xcorp International, and was named in a criminal investigation 5 years earlier for his involvement in the drug trade and for trafficking in young women and girls. He was a for-hire cop in Afghanistan; paid a salary of $300,000 per year to train the local police force and to establish order in a war zone. But while in Afghanistan Jones and his disciples became drug dealers and pimps, pocketing millions from their illicit ventures and stashing the money away in foreign banks. The lawlessness in war-torn Afghanistan provided the perfect environment for Jones to assert his control, becoming the kingpin of a world that dehumanized the enemy. His belief that Afghan women and girls belonged to a lesser human order allowed him to conveniently side-step the question of morality, letting him use them as he pleased without compassion. He had convinced himself that they were simply the spoils of war. The witness account on record described Jones “as a man who had no respect for life no matter how young and innocent, and coveted young girls, kidnapped them and forced them to perform sex with him and the other men in his unit.” The witness described a group of men who “perceive children as sexual objects. With no moral boundaries whatsoever they used girls as slaves, trading them back and forth, and rated each young girl’s performance.”

  The other members of his gang were convicted and sent to prison, but mysteriously, David Jones was never convicted and never spent a day in prison. Instead, flush with cash he acquired in Afghanistan, both legal and illegal, he started the PFG Corporation which makes the prototype of a new type of unmanned aircraft that can identify a human target from thousands of feet in the air, confirm the target’s identity and hit the target all within a matter of seconds without the need for human involvement on the ground. It moved faster than Reaper and Predator and could take more pictures.

  During the economic downturn, the Department of Defense decided to cut costs by inviting commercial contractors to competitively bid against the large defense companies for major aircraft contracts, including contracts for helicopters and drones. The D.O.D’s theory was that if commercial enterprises were allowed to compete for the government’s business and the major defense contractors no longer had exclusive rights, the defense contractors would be pressured into making more competitive bids and the prices for armaments would actually go down due to the new competition. Jones capitalized on the opening in the government bidding process to enter his company’s design in a proposal which he sent to the Missile Defense Agency for approval in early 2010.

  The drone program had been gaining in popularity after the 2008 financial crisis because of its relatively low cost and high efficiency. But while the budget crisis pushed drones to the forefront of the US tactical aircraft arsenal, so did Abu Gharib. The public outcry over advanced interrogation techniques, waterboarding in particular, at black sites in Egypt, Poland, and Abu Gharib, left the C.I.A. feeling that it’s capabilities for extracting human intelligence were diminished and it turned to an electronic substitute; drones, to plug the gap. Downloaded information was vastly more reliable than the mutterings of a prisoner who had been subjected to days of torture. Unmanned aircraft vehicles served the U.S. well as a platform for intelligence gathering, especially in remote locations like the desert or the rugged terrain of Afghanistan where human assets would not have been successful.

  “IED’s”, short for improvised electronic devices, were yet another reason for the increasing popularity of drones. The cheaply constructed bombs hidden in containers, lying on roads and stuffed into the clothing of suicide bombers were wreaking havoc on our military forces deployed in Afghanistan. By pulling our ground troops and replacing them with U.A.V.’s-drones, the military capabilities were expanded beyond the limits imposed by the I.E.D. infested ground war. So the Department of Defense pulled our ground troops out of Afghanistan and ratcheted- up the aerial reconnaissance and attacks using drones

  Jones, ready to capitalize on the opportunity approached investment banks to help finance the production of the drones in a hangar to be located somewhere in Texas. The plan was to take the company public once the lucrative contract with the Pentagon had been signed. He had houses in West Palm Beach, and in Virginia. He may have had many others but they weren’t listed.

  I was eager to get back to Keisha’s office in Maryland to run Qureshi and Jones’ email addresses through a new pilot program that could scan massive amounts of digital media within seconds. The program could pull his received, sent and deleted emails, but also recover any images. It could also allow me to trace messages to the servers from which incoming email had been received or sent, anywhere in the world. It was an intelligence goldmine.

  CHAPTER 12

  Apparently Todd had alerted the guards at Ft. Meade, because when I pulled up the guard at the front began asking questions about my purpose for being there,who I was to meet, and on and on as if I were a stranger or worse, a criminal. I gave up and turned my car around, heading for our headquarters in McLean. Driving down route 123, I too
k a left at the red brick gatehouse where the guard waived me into the compound without question. I drove into the parking lot to the left and parked my car, then walked to the next guard gate located inside the compound to surrender my car keys to the guards behind the desk. I had no explicit authority allowing me to be there and if Mulally knew, he would’ve been exceptionally angry.

  The guards looked at me and said “Okay, we’ll drive your car around for a while, is that okay with you?” Then they broke out in laughter, and said “We’re just kidding!” The lighthearted playfulness was distracting me although I knew it was just a reaction to their boredom at sitting at a front desk most of the day.

  Once inside the main building according to the rules of protocol I was escorted by a security guard to my destination. It’s the same procedure in every secure location except the one in which I was authorized to appear daily to work. The guard led me down a long hallway to the office of someone I barely knew; some older man who used to work with my father 20 years ago and who probably would not appreciate the intrusion. As the escort and I arrived outside his office we could see him talking on the phone so the escort left me there waiting for him in the doorway. He was engrossed in his conversation and therefore didn’t notice me at all which created an opportunity to turn around and disappear in the direction of the Counter Terrorism Center which had been created in the mid 1980’s. The people in that unit were still absorbing the damage done by the bombing of Camp Chapman in Afghanistan where some of their best Taliban specialists were killed just a few months before.

  Agents were approaching from the opposite direction in the hallway, clearly not recognizing me as a coworker who belonged in the building. I kept calm and turned my face toward the wall of paintings of “Wild “ Bill Donovan, Walter Bedell Smith, Allen Dulles, George Bush, Stansfield Turner so the agents could no longer see my face. As they walked past I had goose bumps from the close call but I believed in what I was doing to my core and willing to take risks without fully weighing the consequences. Further down the corridor the doors were locked but a metal pad was attached to the wall so I unclipped my badge from my belt and swiped it. The doors slowly swung open. Once inside the lab I used my passcode assigned by the RRR security company to log in.

  The new pilot program at the US Cyber command was also accessible here in McLean. Downloading Qureshi’s emails onto an encrypted portable drive I saw the foreign protocol identifying the location of the servers of the incoming and outgoing email. The majority of the emails were to the worrisome destinations of Tehran, Shanghai, and Kabul.

  I wanted to stay and continue looking for files but I had pushed my luck far enough so I logged off and walked out, closing the door behind me. When I exited the room, outside in the hallway the area suddenly didn’t look familiar, it was confusing. On the wall to the left bulletin boards hung from the walls but they weren’t there before. On the right there were restrooms which weren’t there before either. I darted down a third hallway, straight ahead but that dead ended at the company gift shop, with t-shirts in the display window that read “my favorite spook”. There must have been 2 doors in the database room, I had entered through one and left through another and now had gotten lost in a maze. Trying not to appear lost and out of breath I dashed down another hallway and was looking out the window trying to navigate a way to an exit when one of the guards took notice of my wanderings and stopped me. I was foolishly tempted to make a run for it and may have done just that except that there was a pleasant smile on the guard’s face. He wasn’t suspicious, assuming instead that he’d come across a registered visitor who’d become lost and escorted me all the way back to the entrance from which I had entered the building. Disaster averted.

  Back at the Pentagon, Boots was spending the week preoccupied with putting together research for General X’s upcoming meeting at the White House on the need to recognize Cyber Space as a “Fourth Domain” along with Air, Land and Sea, and allocate a portion of the national budget accordingly. The budgeting process in Congress was stuck in the last century while the greatest and most persistent threats to the security of the United States had changed. The greatest threats became attacks on our networks, including the White House Communication system and the communications systems that control the drones and missiles. Financial networks had been repeatedly hacked, including some of the largest banks in the U.S.A. It was time to let the attackers know that the United States wasn’t going to stand by and let this happen anymore. In a huge policy shift, cyber warfare was going to be defined on the same level as conventional warfare and therefore the United States had the legal authority to respond militarily to attacks on our secure networks. It was a dangerous policy as what kind of cybercrime would constitute an “act of war” had not yet been defined and was left wide open for interpretation. The President needn’t explicitly inform Congress anymore before taking action that in every literal aspect was the equivalent of declaring war. Greatly flawed as the policy was though, many believed it was in the best interest of our national security.

  Cyber-attacks in 2010 grew at the shocking rate of about 50% over the prior year, and were projected to be the greatest threat was to our national defense with China being the primary source of the attacks. Beijing brushed aside any suggestion that they were attacking American targets and any U.S. attempts to hold Beijing accountable were met with Beijing’s attempt to redirect the blame onto rogue groups within China or groups they claimed were “pretending” to be Chinese. This was ludicrous of course. Our analysts regard Beijing’s gaming of the issue as nonsense from a government that sponsors cyber espionage against the U.S.. and builds spy schools to train more cyber attackers for the future. Whereas rogue groups of hackers typically break into banks or other easy targets for monetary incentive, the billions of attacks we receive each month were too numerous, too sophisticated and required too much equipment to have been launched without the backing of an entire government.

  As traditional intelligence gathering techniques were gradually superseded by high tech alternatives our enemy’s inducements to hack our Top Secret networks multiplied dramatically. Foreign intelligence agencies have changed the way they attack US military information systems; instead of going after government networks as they did just a few years ago they refocused their efforts to the companies that supply material and services to the government, believing that the major defense contractors don’t safeguard their networks as carefully as the government agencies like the CIA, the FBI and the DIA. They believe that the private sector is more lax about security than the government and is therefore an easier target.

  The increasing use of drones controlled remotely by pilots in the U.S. invited even more risk. American drones could be reprogrammed to attack friendly targets even within our own country unless the pilots on the ground catch them in time and destroy the unmanned vehicles before they caused harm. Incidents of illegal access to the networks were increasing at an alarming rate. Although defense contractors and government agencies stand guardian over these networks while the oblivious American public sleeps, the live streaming video from the drones in flight back down to the operational facilities in the U.S. are sometimes accessed by groups hostile to Americans.

  Congress and The Senate had been too slow to recognize the reality of 21st century warfare, and now General X was trying to package that reality in non-technical, layman’s terms, and deliver it to the President.

  CHAPTER 13

  When I arrived back at the office Todd again immediately summoned me to the security department and led me to a conference room where six men were sitting around a table. He told me to have a seat but I declined and chose to remain standing with my back against the wall scanning the six faces, when suddenly I recognized the face of Dave Jones who was sitting next to Todd. At first he seemed oddly amiable like someone you might trust to marry your sister without any hint of the cold, calculating monster he had proven himself to be. I knew right away I was in big trouble. Perspiration beg
an to gather on my forehead as the blood started to drain from my face. Of the six men at the table four of them were peering at me simultaneously like onlookers to a show or a crowd gathered for an execution or something. I knew the amiable face of the murderous Jones concealed beneath its surface a demonic disposition and an appetite for violence which his victims in Afghanistan knew all too well. Looking at him became something akin to being forced to witness a violent crime; I couldn’t separate the face in front of me from the mental image of the torture of children I had read about in the reports, despite all my efforts to the contrary. I looked away, recognizing this as a pivotal moment in my life, a moment of awakening when my opinion on torture, waterboarding or any other type, had changed at least for this one case, at least for this one person. For David Jones any type of torture would have been okay. And if there’s one case, surely there’d be another? Within seconds of first coming into the room and into the presence of this monster, he had already altered me. Mullaly was curiously absent. Flumm was absent too. So was Colin. I wondered if they knew about this, but Flumm, Colin and Mullaly had chosen not to attend for reasons I would discover later. Jones was relaxed in his chair, smiling with his left arm slung comfortably over the back of the chair while Todd was wearing reflective glasses that obscured his eyes. The others, the onlookers, appeared as though they hadn’t bathed in a week.

  “I invited your boss to this meeting today but he elected not to come,” Todd said, smiling at his perceived advantage to finally get his victim alone and unguarded.