The Watchers Read online

  I am also indebted to the other key figures in this story who consented to multiple long interviews. Rather than acknowledging them individually, I will note that this story would not be as complete and as accurate without their participation. None of the principal figures whom I interviewed agreed to anything less than an on-the-record discussion. The records of our interviews are noted at the end of the book.

  Finally, there were some key sources of information and insight who would not—and in some cases, could not—agree to be cited directly. In those cases I have done my best to give the reader some sense of the importance of these participants, and of the particular information about which they have direct knowledge. I thank them too for their contributions and their time.

  PROLOGUE

  This is a mistake, Erik Kleinsmith told himself as he stared at the computer and placed his finger on the delete button. We shouldn’t do this.

  He’d been agonizing over his orders. He considered disobeying them. He could make copies of all the data, send them off in the mail before anyone knew what happened. He could still delete all the copies on his hard drive, but the backups would be safe. There would be a record. No one could say they hadn’t tried, that they hadn’t warned people.

  Kleinsmith hadn’t been sleeping much the past three months. He’d started his work in February 2000, when the officers from Special Operations Command showed up at his office. They’d heard about some of his exploits. The earnest thirty-five-year-old Army major had drawn attention to himself as the leader of an innovative, some said renegade, band of intelligence analysts. They worked in a secure facility at the Army’s Information Dominance Center, a futuristic-looking office space in the headquarters of the Army Intelligence Command at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Kleinsmith had his own office next to the IDC’s main floor, which had been designed by a Hollywood visual effects artist to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise. With wall-mounted computer panels and a captain’s chair in the center of the room, the IDC was meant to inspire the kind of futuristic confidence conveyed by the Star Trek franchise.

  Kleinsmith was a geek, no doubt about it. He’d been working miracles of a sort, using untested data-mining technologies to reveal connections between the Chinese government and American defense contractors. Kleinsmith and his team had uncovered a potential spy network in the United States. Word had gotten around the military brass, and now Special Forces had a job for him. They wanted Kleinsmith to map the global network of a shadowy and largely unknown terrorist group called Al Qaeda.

  Its assassins literally had burst onto the international scene less than two years earlier, simultaneously destroying the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The suicide bombers had killed more than 220 people, the most brazen assault on U.S. interests since the attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983.

  Working under the code name Able Danger, Kleinsmith compiled an enormous digital dossier on the terrorist outfit. The volume was extraordinary for its size—2.5 terabytes, equal to about one-tenth of all printed pages held by the Library of Congress—but more so for its intelligence significance: Kleinsmith had mapped Al Qaeda’s global footprint. He had diagrammed how its members were related, how they moved money, and where they had placed operatives. Kleinsmith showed military commanders and intelligence chiefs where to hit the network, how to dismantle it, how to annihilate it. This was priceless information but also an alarm bell—the intelligence showed that Al Qaeda had established a presence inside the United States, and signs pointed to an imminent attack.

  With his neat brown hair and wide eyes, Kleinsmith exuded a boyish honesty bordering on gullibility. He could pass for a simple functionary. But, in truth, Kleinsmith was a nonconformist spy. He had used technological expertise combined with a detective’s penchant for hunches to produce meaningful insights, while the graybeards of intelligence at the CIA and in the Pentagon had come up empty-handed. The Army wanted to find Al Qaeda’s leaders, to capture or kill them. Kleinsmith believed he could show them how.

  That’s when he ran into his present troubles. Rather than relying on classified intelligence databases, which were often scant on details and hopelessly fragmentary, Kleinsmith had created his Al Qaeda map with data drawn from the Internet, home to a bounty of chatter and observations about terrorists and holy war. He cast a digital net over thousands of Web sites, chat rooms, and bulletin boards. Then he used graphing and modeling programs to turn the raw data into three-dimensional, topographic maps. These tools displayed seemingly random data as a series of peaks and valleys that showed how people, places, and events were connected. Peaks near each other signaled a connection in the data underlying them. A series of peaks signaled that Kleinsmith should take a closer look. He liked to call this visual approach to information “intelligence on steroids.” Kleinsmith’s methods were years ahead of those favored by most intelligence analysts and spymasters, who were inherently suspicious of the promise of technology and jealously guarded their prized human sources in the field.

  Few outside Kleinsmith’s chain of command knew what he had discovered about terrorists in America or what secrets he and his analysts had stored in their data banks. They also didn’t know that the team had collected information on thousands of American citizens—including prominent government officials and politicians—during their massive data sweeps. On the Internet, intelligence about enemies mingled with the names of innocents. Good guys and bad were all in the same mix, and there was as yet no effective way to sort it all out.

  Army lawyers had put him on notice: under military regulations Kleinsmith could only store his intelligence for ninety days if it contained references to U.S. persons. At the end of that brief period, everything had to go. Even the inadvertent capture of such information amounted to domestic spying. Kleinsmith could go to jail.

  As he stared at his computer terminal, Kleinsmith ached at the thought of what he was about to do. This is terrible.

  He pulled up some relevant files on his hard drive, hovered over them with his cursor, and selected the whole lot. Then he pushed the delete key. Kleinsmith did this for all the files on his computer, until he’d eradicated everything related to Able Danger. It took less than half an hour to destroy what he’d spent three months building. The blueprint of global terrorism vanished into the electronic ether.

  ACT ONE

  A small group of senior officials believed that they alone knew what was right. They viewed knowledge of their actions by others in the Government as a threat to their objectives.

  —“Report of the Congressional Committees

  Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,” November 1987

  Those who question us now owe the country an explanation of how they would have acted differently given the stakes, the opportunities, and the dangers.

  —National Security Adviser John Poindexter, in a 1986

  Wall Street Journal editorial defending the Reagan

  administration’s decision to trade arms for hostages

  in Iran, published one day before he resigned

  CHAPTER 1

  FIRST STRIKE

  OCTOBER 23, 1983

  The sun dawned about a quarter after six on Sunday. Most of the Marines were still asleep. A few who were up and moving about the compound noticed a yellow truck outside the concertina wire that guarded the perimeter. It was a Mercedes-Benz stake-bed, a workhorse used to carry heavy cargo. Before anyone could figure out why it was there, the truck picked up speed and crashed through the fence.

  A sentry in one of the two guard posts nearby turned in time to see the truck heading straight for the Marines’ barracks. He grabbed his unloaded M16 and reached for a magazine of ammunition. The truck sped through an open gate, swerved around a sewer pipe, and aimed for the small sergeant-of-the-guard post stationed at the entrance to the hulking concrete building.

  That guard was facing the lobby and heard the roaring truck behind him. He turned, and he thought for a moment, “What’s that truck
doing inside the perimeter?” An instant later he was sprinting through the building to another entrance on the far side.

  “Hit the deck!” he yelled. “Hit the deck!” He glanced back over his shoulder and watched the truck flatten his post before crashing into the lobby. It halted there. One or two seconds passed, and then the guard saw a bright orange and yellow flash. Then he realized he was flying through the air.

  First Lieutenant Glenn Dolphin awoke to the barks of an early-rising Arkansas captain. He exhorted the roomful of exhausted men to join him at the barracks gym for a workout before reveille. They were splayed out on cots set up in the parking bay of an old fire department building. Dolphin looked over. The guy worked out constantly, and he thought he looked like a million bucks. But it was Sunday, the one day Dolphin could sleep in. The only Marines up now were jogging the perimeter, enjoying the rare morning quiet. The rest would stroll down later to the chow tent, where the cooks set up an omelet station on Sundays. Dolphin had been on duty in the Combat Operations Center until midnight and had been looking forward to the extra rest. Fuck it, he thought, eyeing the energetic captain. Dolphin rolled over in his cot to steal a few more minutes’ sleep.

  Dolphin had been encamped with the Twenty-fourth Marine Amphibious Unit at the Beirut International Airport for seven months now, ostensibly as part of an international peacekeeping force. Only two days earlier, the Marines had held another memorial service, the fifth in two months. Alan Soiffert, a twenty-five-year-old staff sergeant from Nashua, New Hampshire, had taken a sniper round in the chest as he patrolled the airport perimeter in his Jeep. The vehicle flipped over, and Soiffert bled onto the hard, dry ground. He was the first Jewish Marine to die in Lebanon. A rabbi had come in especially for the memorial.

  Beirut, a religiously diverse cradle of antiquity and once the glittering cultural and economic heart of the Levant, seemed on an irreversible descent into hell since the Marines arrived. They’d taken persistent rocket and artillery attacks in recent weeks from Muslim Druze militia redoubts in the Shuf Mountains, which overlooked the city. The Americans had first come ashore the previous June, evacuating U.S. citizens in the wake of an Israeli invasion. The Israeli Defense Force had launched a massive campaign against Palestinian militants, who had long since turned a politically disorganized and factional Lebanon into their lawless launchpad for attacks into Israel. It took only three days for the Israelis to reach the outskirts of Beirut. There, they hooked up with Christian Lebanese militia opposed to the Palestinians. Two weeks later the forces rolled into the town of Alayh, killing a dozen Druze soldiers. The next day the Christian militia first entered the Shuf, sparking long and terrible artillery battles with their Muslim enemies. Lebanon, which had teetered for so many years on the brink of civil war, careered over the edge.

  To halt the outbreak of regional war, the United States joined a multinational force with France and Italy and managed to get fifteen thousand armed Palestinian and Syrian forces out of the capital. The Syrians dominated Lebanese politics and had hobbled the country and its government during six years of occupation. But the American-led peace was fitful. Syrian operatives assassinated the young, Christian president-elect. The Israelis then seized West Beirut and for two days stood by as the Christian militia exacted revenge, slaughtering untold hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in a pair of refugee camps.

  Dolphin’s Unit descended into the bedlam on November 3, 1982. They staked their ground at the airport, wedging themselves between Israeli positions and the heavily populated areas of Beirut. The relative calm fractured five months later, when someone slammed a bomb-laden truck into the lobby of the U.S. embassy. The suicide attacker killed sixty-three people, including most of the CIA station in Beirut. After that, the notion that the Americans were in Beirut on a peacekeeping mission struck the twelve hundred Marines as absurd.

  Rather than pushing out into the craggy Shuf, which hid the snipers and artillery batteries, the Marines sheltered in place on the south side of the airport. They built makeshift bunkers out of sandbags, which cast long shadows on the vast, open expanse of dirt and asphalt, providing easy marks for gunmen. The Marines’ rules of engagement, handed down from the Pentagon, said they must maintain a noncombat presence—that meant no heavily fortified bunkers, nothing more than concertina wire to mark their compound, and, in what struck so many of the men as sheer madness, no loaded weapons. Beirut was teeming with agitated, gun-toting boys enamored of the radical Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, whose dark eyes peered from posters plastered around the city. The few men who’d gone on limited patrols in town came back with stories of ominous black hands painted on buildings, the sign that its residents had been marked for death. They watched young boys stare menacingly at the Stars and Stripes patches sewn on the peacekeepers’ sleeves. The Marines were trapped in what Time magazine, in a story about Soiffert’s death, had called “the fratricidal quagmire that is Lebanon.”

  Dolphin was twenty-five, but he felt old. The wind and sand had beaten the shine off his skin and dulled his red hair. He’d been wondering if his unit’s reinforcements might arrive by Thanksgiving or Christmas. The sun still low in the sky, he started to fall back to sleep on his cot.

  Dolphin felt a wave of pressure before he actually heard the explosion. He and the other Marines were lying next to six huge metal doors. They flew off their frames and away from the building as daylight flooded into the parking bay.

  Dolphin saw the doors slow down in midair, and then careen back toward him, sucked in by a vacuum created in the blast. One door clipped him on the back. Then he heard the boom, so loud he couldn’t have imagined it before that moment. Everything in the bay that wasn’t nailed down flew up in a maelstrom of shrapnel. A skylight at the top edge of the building shattered, and glass rained on the Marines.

  The open-air lobby of the barracks, known to the Marines as the battalion landing team headquarters, or BLT, was surrounded by food storage areas, weight machines, and an armory cache. The first, second, and third floors held the Marines’ quarters. Its central location on the airport grounds made it the perfect distribution hub for water, rations, and supplies, and its roof offered 360-degree panoramic views and a platform for radio antennae. But more than that, this former-office-building-turned-fortress had obviously withstood the punishment of war. It had played host to a line of foreign invaders—first the Palestinians, then the Syrians, and later the Israelis, who had turned it into a field hospital during the invasion. When the Marines took over, the BLT was a bombed-out, battle-scarred shell of a building. The second, third, and fourth floors, once encased in plate-glass windows, looked now like rows of broken teeth. The holes were patched with plywood and scrap cloth from sandbags, and makeshift screens of plastic sheets flapped in the wind. The elevator shafts had been burned out. But for all that, the decrepit, Brutalist monstrosity was still standing. The damned thing had not been moved, and so the Marines naturally gravitated to it.

  The racket of a Mercedes truck crashing into the building surely woke some of the men. But for a few seconds before the driver detonated his cargo, the truck sat still and quiet in the lobby. The blast severed the base of the building, a set of upright concrete columns measuring fifteen feet in circumference and reinforced with iron rods nearly two inches thick. The BLT’s most prominent design feature, an open courtyard that extended from the lobby up to the roof, captured the blast like gas in a bottle, and intensified its force.

  The entire structure rose into the air. The top of the building exploded upward in a V shape, like two great arms stretched up to the sky. The BLT hung for a moment in midair, then fell back in on itself, crushed downward, and poured into a crater nine feet deep.

  Blood dripped off Dolphin’s back. He walked over the glass-covered floor and made his way outside. He saw pieces of concrete falling from the sky. At least half a minute had passed since he’d heard the blast.

  He ran to the Combat Operations Center located next to his sleep
ing quarters. This was his default duty station during Condition One, a basewide emergency. Another communications officer was pulling himself up off the floor; the blast had thrown him from his chair and separated his shoulder. Long cracks ran up the wall of the COC. Dolphin could see daylight through them.

  The Marines on duty scurried to reassemble the radios littering the floor. Something must have landed on us, Dolphin thought to himself. Something huge. Rumors had circulated that the Soviets were supplying the Syrian military with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Could someone have nuked the base? Was that what this was?

  “I can’t raise the BLT,” a young corporal called out. “I can’t get them to pick up the phone.”

  A staff sergeant flew into the room. “The BLT is gone!” he yelled. “It’s gone!”

  Dolphin was confused. Did they deploy? Maybe they’re going out after whatever hit us, he thought. Then a third man came in, a major, reporting that the building itself was gone.

  Dolphin went outside. First he saw the smoke. And then Marines, walking around in circles, some of them with almost all their clothes blown off. On a few men Dolphin could make out only the standard-issue red exercise shorts the Marines wore during workouts. Everyone was covered from head to toe in a gray powder, as if he’d rolled in it. Facial features, hair color, race—everything was obscured under the ghostly cover of pulverized concrete.