The Watchers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ACT ONE

  CHAPTER 1 - FIRST STRIKE

  CHAPTER 2 - KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

  CHAPTER 3 - AND HE SHALL PURIFY

  CHAPTER 4 - UNODIR

  ACT TWO

  CHAPTER 5 - A CONSTANT TENSION

  CHAPTER 6 - THE GENOA PROJECT

  CHAPTER 7 - THE NEXT GENERATION

  CHAPTER 8 - THE CHINA EXPERIMENT

  CHAPTER 9 - ABLE DANGER

  CHAPTER 10 - “YOU GUYS WILL GO TO JAIL”

  ACT THREE

  CHAPTER 11 - ECHO

  CHAPTER 12 - A NEW MANHATTAN PROJECT

  CHAPTER 13 - THE BAG

  CHAPTER 14 - ALL HANDS ON DECK

  CHAPTER 15 - CALL TO ARMS

  CHAPTER 16 - FEED THE BAG

  CHAPTER 17 - SHIPS PASSING IN THE NIGHT

  CHAPTER 18 - FULL STEAM AHEAD

  CHAPTER 19 - THE UNRAVELING

  CHAPTER 20 - GOING BLACK

  ACT FOUR

  CHAPTER 21 - BASKETBALL

  CHAPTER 22 - RESURRECTION

  CHAPTER 23 - THE BREAKTHROUGH

  CHAPTER 24 - EXPOSED

  CHAPTER 25 - REASONABLE BELIEFS

  CHAPTER 26 - BETRAYAL

  CHAPTER 27 - BOJINKA II

  CHAPTER 28 - INHERIT THE WINDS

  CHAPTER 29 - ASCENSION

  CHAPTER 30 - RENEGADE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Shane Harris, 2010

  All rights reserved

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Harris, Shane.

  The watchers : the rise of America’s surveillance state / Shane Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19574-1

  1. Terrorism—United States—Prevention—History. 2. National security—United States. 3. Intelligence service—United States. I. Title.

  HV6432.H.325’1630973—dc22 2009037205

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For my grandmother, Bettiann Kinney,

  who taught me to tell stories

  INTRODUCTION

  To me, 9/11 never felt like the beginning of a story. Nor the ending. It always felt like the middle.

  I woke up on September 11, 2001, far from the center of the action—in a quiet hotel room in Palm Springs. I’d been working at a magazine in Washington, D.C., for nine months, writing about the information technology business in the federal government. I’d planned my first real vacation for mid-September. On Day 2, I awoke to an urgent phone call from a friend back home, who insisted that I turn on the television.

  It’s the reporter’s instinct to write and talk about what he can see, or about what he knows to be true. But as the television came into focus, the stunned silence from news broadcasters told me that no one could explain the enormity of what we all were watching. The South Tower of the World Trade Center had fallen. The North Tower was burning. The Pentagon had been hit. My friend was standing on the roof of a building in northwest Washington, watching the smoke rise over the Potomac River. The attack, I learned later, was almost finished. I had jumped into the story midstream.

  I returned to Washington the day the federal government authorized commercial aircraft to fly again. Back at the magazine my editor instructed me to figure out how what I wrote about every day connected to this new, rapidly developing narrative. I spent the next six years figuring that out, and one more writing this book.

  One of the first themes to emerge from the 9/11 attacks soon became a familiar refrain: The government had failed to “connect the dots” about terrorism, specifically the Al Qaeda network. It wasn’t widely known that some of the 9/11 hijackers were already on terrorist watch lists when they entered the United States. Mysterious phone calls intercepted on September 10, which hinted at the next day’s calamity, weren’t translated in time to be of any use. No one—no system—had gathered all the pieces of the puzzle and put them together.

  Because I’d been writing about how government agencies acquired and then used information technology, I understood the bureaucracy’s language. Those elusive “dots” were actually data. They were discrete pieces of information that intelligence, law enforcement, and security agencies either hadn’t shared with one another or had failed to collect in the first place. My technology beat quickly became an intelligence beat. And that’s when I became acquainted with a group of people who had painfully understood what I had only suspected. This story didn’t begin on 9/11. And it wouldn’t end there.

  I call them the Watchers. They are a little-known and little-understood band of mavericks who’ve spent most of their careers working in the intelligence and national security agencies of the government. They are united by a common conviction: They believe they could have stopped the 2001 attacks if they had only been allowed to try.

  The Watchers know better than anyone that the signals of terrorism were out there, waiting to be detected in a sea of noise. They have spent the past quarter century working to perfect a system that can make sense of all that noise. For them the attacks of 9/11 resonated on a particularly haunting level. They’d been expecting this moment, had worked hard to prevent it, and when it happened, they felt emboldened, and entitled, to act.

  The Watchers are not always who they seem to be. First and foremost, they consider themselves patriots, and they are convinced that the future of national security depends on detecting and preempting attacks before they occur. But they are also the archi
tects of secretive surveillance programs, watch lists, and “data mining” regimes that operate largely unchecked, and sift through innocent people’s everyday electronic transactions in search of tell-tale clues. The Watchers are both guardians and spies, protectors of security and renegades of the law. They make no apologies for their preferred path to security, which many leaders of American intelligence have long shunned as the gateway to a police state. That critique is nothing new to them. The Watchers have been fighting their own establishment for as long as they’ve been fighting terrorists, since the first salvo of a new era in war.

  It was October 23, 1983, when a suicide truck bomber set off twelve thousand pounds of explosives in the lobby of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. That’s where this story begins. The attack on the Marines, who were deployed as part of an international peacekeeping mission, introduced Americans to the concept of “suicide bombing” by religious extremists. That term has woven itself into our popular lexicon, but a quarter century ago this style of attack was something new and—true to form—terrifying. It was preceded by a suicide attack on the American embassy in Beirut. Taken together they form the starting point in a war fought largely in shadow, one that saw its bloodiest turn in the events of September 11, 2001, and continues to play out toward an uncertain end.

  Unlike any war in American history, this one has been driven almost entirely by the covert gathering and use of intelligence, represented in the form of those ever illusive dots. And unlike most of the nation’s wars, the casualties are not always counted in those killed and wounded. The rule of law, as well as our decidedly modern notions of privacy, are confronted in this fight, because in order to detect the signs of the next assault, the Watchers believe that they must be prepared to watch everyone and the seemingly benign things they do every day. What they buy. Whom they call. Where they travel. The 9/11 attacks confirmed the Watchers’ deeply held conviction that surveillance and aggressive analysis of information offer the best hope of preventing the next attack. The plot was executed by a small number of men who had assimilated into American life and slipped through the cracks of a cold war intelligence system that was designed to confront nation-states, not rogue actors. The attackers used the tools of modern communications and an open society to their advantage and pulled off their murderous rampage under the Watchers’ noses.

  The Watchers insist that they are defenders of civil liberties and a core of enshrined values and rights that distinguish the United States among great nations. But on that score, many people see an inherent contradiction. How can they propose to extend a net of largely unchecked government surveillance and proclaim themselves the guardians of constitutional virtues and personal privacy? It’s a fair question. In seeking to answer it I discerned a much more complicated and compelling story than what has been told so far.

  After years of reporting marked by hundreds of interviews with authorities on terrorism, technology, and the law, I came to know the Watchers. I covered some of them as a journalist when they held senior positions in government. A number of them I came to call friends, which posed a considerable challenge whenever I had to write unflattering things about their lives, their ideas, and their actions. It is never easy to disappoint people whom you’ve come to respect. But I chose to tell their stories, including the parts they’d rather forget, because these people are the faces behind the “war on terror.” They are human, and far more complex and confusing than the caricatures some have painted of them. Until we understand the Watchers, and the goals they pursue, I don’t think that we can confront the conflict between security and liberty that lies at the heart of this war.

  The Watchers have had their debate already, and they’ve made their choices. I cannot say that I agree with all of their conclusions, any more than I condone the extraordinary breaches of public trust that some of them have committed in the pursuit of their goals. But I have sat with them. I have listened to them. And I have watched them. After all that, I have arrived at this alarming realization: We are witnessing the rise of an American surveillance state. I use that phrase with some trepidation, because it conjures up images of the Stasi in East Germany, and I think that overstates the situation. Our system of government is not imperiled. The Constitution is not on the verge of dissolution. In that respect, the most strident civil libertarians among us have either missed what’s really happening or have chosen to ignore it. At the same time, many of our national leaders—the very same architects of this new apparatus—have understated the basic risks it poses to how we communicate, move about, and conduct commerce without fear that our ordinary behavior will attract extraordinary and unwanted attention from the government. The surveillance state is an amalgam of laws, technology, and culture in which the government’s default position is to collect information about people on a massive scale for the broadly defined purpose of protecting national security. Saving the country from disaster is a laudable and necessary goal, but the means of achieving it are often ill-conceived and poorly controlled. Preventing the abuse, misuse, and misdirection of deeply revealing personal information has become a secondary concern to gathering and hoarding it.

  I was surprised to find how well some of the Watchers understand this dangerous imbalance and how hard they’ve worked to correct it. But I was also disturbed to learn how few people in power have listened to them and heeded their warnings.

  This book is the fullest, most honest, and ultimately most empathetic account I can give of the Watchers’ stories, one that most people haven’t heard. It’s in large part the story of how a handful of men and women struggled to build a system that could detect the signals of an impending disaster. But I found that for all their toil, for all the money, time, and political will they have spent, the Watchers have become very good at collecting dots and not very good at connecting them. That should trouble them as much as it does the rest of us.

  This book is the product of many years of reporting, reading, and research. But most important, it is directly informed by long interviews with most of the principal figures herein. With remarkably few exceptions, the people featured on these pages agreed to sit down with me for multiple sessions, often lasting several hours. They were all on the record—that is, everything that they said to me they were willing to see attributed to them on the page. I am indebted to them for their time and their patience. But most of all, I thank them for their candor. It is a terrible thing, I should think, to subject oneself to the probing, often impertinent questions of a stranger who offers you nothing in return but the potential for notoriety. Having not been acquainted with the sharp end of a journalist’s interrogatory, I can imagine only that the experience was at times uncomfortable and unsatisfying.

  But having done this kind of thing for many years now, I also understand that people long to be heard. They want to tell their stories. In the course of my interviews I was offering these people some measure of relief and affirmation. I have no doubt that some of them approached our sessions as a chance to shape history in a flattering light. But I can also assure the reader that I offered no assurances about how the story would finally turn out to anyone I interviewed. They are reading this for the first time too.

  Many of the people in this book provided me with extraordinary access to their personal time, and to their professional records, notes, and memories. One deserves particular mention. I had written about John Poindexter during his tenure at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s high-tech research and development unit. Following the 9/11 attacks he established DARPA’s Information Awareness Office (IAO), which managed an ambitious and extraordinarily controversial set of programs that aimed to detect the weak signals of a terrorist plot by mining ordinary electronic transactions, such as credit card purchases and airline reservations. Poindexter left his position in 2003 amid a storm of consternation about the nature of the program and the fact that he, of all people, had been put in charge of it. In a previous tour in government Poindexter was
a leading figure in the Iran-Contra affair, which for a time threatened to topple Ronald Reagan’s presidency. He’d been accused of lying to Congress and the American people about a covert intelligence operation in Nicaragua and a secret arms-for-hostages swap with Iran.

  Poindexter and I met in 2004, a few months after he left the Defense Department. He walked up to me at a conference at Syracuse University, where we’d both been invited to speak, and introduced himself by apologizing; he’d been unable to grant my multiple interview requests because the Pentagon had forbidden him to talk to the press. I told Poindexter that there was still a lot to talk about, and that I’d like to write a profile of him now that he had returned to private life. He agreed, and we conducted a series of two-hour interviews that culminated in a brief portrait for Government Executive magazine, where I was employed at the time. In our first meeting Poindexter asked me if I entertained any ambitions to write a book. I said yes and, to his credit, he did not suspend the interview.

  We stayed in touch over the years, and in 2008 we began the first of fourteen long interviews about his life and his central role in this story. It begins, as does this book, in the wake of the Beirut attacks in 1983. Poindexter was the deputy national security adviser to the president, and from his perch at the White House he launched a systematic reorganization of the national security bureaucracy for a new “war against terrorism,” as the administration called it. Poindexter oversaw or directed operations that formed the foundation of a national counterterrorism strategy, something the United States had never had. His primary ambition was to harness information in order to predict crises, and this quest has animated him ever since. After leaving government, he continued the pursuit for several years as a government adviser. He had no plans to return to government until the attacks of 9/11. This book is in large measure the story of how Poindexter, the godfather of the Watchers, has shaped the war on terror and in the process helped to redefine our definitions of privacy and security. I know that he will not like everything he reads here. But I also know that he will find truth. Of all the people I interviewed, he gave the most. He asked for nothing in return.