Chasm Waxing: A Startup, Cyber-Thriller (20 page)

On ordinary days, the General
by-passed his private elevator. He liked to mingle with his silent,
SIGINT warriors, as he made his way to the Top Deck.

The Ops 2A Building was
next the General’s building. Its exterior looked exactly like Ops
2B. At 11 stories, it was taller and squarer. Somebody once
described the building as a giant Rubik’s cube. Shields felt that
was an apt moniker. One of the many NSA nicknames was
the
‘Puzzle
Palace.’ This name was due to the encryption puzzles the NSA
cracked.

While these
smoky
glass
structures looked
like any other
building,
they were covered
in
copper mesh.
No SIGINT could leak from the building and be scooped up by
adversaries. In actuality, the two buildings were
massive
SCIFs.
Ronald Reagan
dedicated Ops 2A and 2B
in
1986.

Today was not
an ordinary
day.

The General rushed to the
Ops 1 Building, the very first NSA building. It
was constructed
in 1954.
The
three-story
,
A-shaped
building was home to the SIGINT Directorate—the
NSA’s largest Directorate.

Shields dashed up the
stairs to Room 3E099, on the third floor of Ops 1. The automatic
sliding glass doors hissed as they opened, sounding the
Enterprise’s doors in Star Trek.
The
General
briskly
walked over the inlaid
NSOC logo on the
floor
and met Phil. S
econds later,
they both peered over the
shoulders of the Caliphate analyst. It was 3:19 a.m. There were six
minutes left in which to issue verification of the
CRITIC.

Tonight, NSOC was
staffed
with nearly 40 analysts.
Each was tasked with specific areas of responsibility. Waist-high
cubicles separated the various work cells. Fluorescent overhead
lights, arranged in concentric circles, gave the room a blue tint.
The analysts worked around their curved desks to process SIGINT
from around the world. Their computer equipment was state of the
art, just like the video walls that encircled the massive
room.

The Caliphate analyst
said, “Sir, this email was
definitely
sent by Omar’s wife. I’ve
been comparing it to three emails and some hand-written letters
we’ve intercepted in the past five years. All of them are to her
father. I ran a lexical analysis on the email we just
collected. Then, I
compared it
to
our known samples. The program is 96% confident
that the emails were all written by the same author.”

Puzzled, the General asked, “How old
is the A-Mail account?”

“
She created it
yesterday.”

“
Has anyone else in Omar’s
network used A-Mail?”

“
Not to our knowledge,”
replied the analyst. “They mostly use TorMail2.” TorMail2 was an
encrypted email service provider available on the Darknet. The
Darknet was the portion of the Deep Web that was only accessible
with Tor software. “All the other emails we’ve purloined from
Nafisa were TorMail2’s. We were able to read
them
because we exfiltrated
the encryption key from her laptop.”

The General frowned. “So
Nafisa goes and registers a brand new A-Mail account from Dabiq,
even though she’s
demonstrated
previous
knowledge of encryption by the
use of TorMail2? Then she emails her father in Falluja?
I’m
assuming we
intercepted it at the Baghdad telecom center. Something isn’t
right. No one in the Caliphate uses
A-Mail. It
’s totally out of character
for Omar, or anyone in Omar’s circle, to make an error of this
magnitude.”

“
Maybe she just made a
mistake,” said Phil. “Or, she could think that we can’t break
A-Mail’s encryption they initiated after PRISM.” PRISM was a
TOP
SECRET
program leaked to the press by Snowden’s disclosures. PRISM
detailed how the NSA cooperated with nine major Internet companies
to gather SIGINT, even encrypted SIGINT.

Phil continued, “The CEO
of Nucleus made a big deal about their end-to-end, A-Mail
encryption in the press. He assured his users that their privacy
was secure.” Nucleus’
CEO
either didn’t
know
or didn’t want to admit, that the
NSA already had all of Nucleus’ encryption keys. The NSA could
monitor all encrypted A-Mail traffic. US-only A-Mail
traffic
could
be read with a warrant
from
the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance—FISA—court. The FISA court granted warrants to the NSA
over 97% of the time.

“
I don’t know why she sent
an A-Mail,” said the Caliphate analyst. “But, I do know that the
intercept
was sent
by the same person that emailed these verified
intercepts. And that’s Nafisa Omar.

“
Look, here’s one of the
email intercepts from four years ago.
Her
dad was also the recipient.
You can see the same structure, even in Arabic. Now, look at it
translated. She uses the same word for her dad,
‘
abee,
’
which means, ‘my
dad
.’ She writes it again and again, in
both emails. She employs the
exact
same
vocabulary, sentence structure,
indentation, and punctuation. Her description of Dabiq is dead
on.”

Another analyst in the
Caliphate cell spoke up.
“Sir,
while he’s been trying to
validate the message, I’ve been looking at what it tells us. As you
know, Dabiq is a
tiny
town. I ran a
qeo
-query
on
the area, incorporating a list
of known SIM cards. Right in this house…”—
the
analyst pointed at the
satellite image on his screen—“is
a SIM
card. We
associated this SIM card with
Omar
10
months ago.” SIM stood for subscriber identity module.
SIM
cards
assigned ownership of a
cell
phone
for billing records.

An embedded CIA analyst
spoke next. “General, I’ve got a Marauder over the area. Here’s the
house.” The analyst pointed to his monitor with the Marauder feed.
“You can also see that there’s a small cluster of other homes,
right here.” Marauders were stealth, turbofan aerial drones that
replaced Predators and Reapers. Although they were called drones,
each drone was manned by two people—
a drone pilot and a sensor operator
.

“
Alright,” said the
General. “I’m sure this SIGINT is
valid
. Send out confirmation of the
CRITIC.” It was 3:23 a.m.

Now the question was, what was POTUS
going to do about this validated CRITIC?

*

Within 30 minutes, General
Shields was on a secure teleconference with POTUS, the DCIA, and
other senior military leaders. The
top
military
brass
included the Admiral in
command of the Joint Special Operations Command—JSOC. JSOC was
pronounced, ‘J-Sock.’

JSOC tracked and
eliminated terrorist cells worldwide. JSOC, at the behest of the
CIA, was the lead organization in charge of the kill/ capture
mission for Osama Bin Laden. Like the NSA, JSOC and the CIA were
involved in significant turf battles. The Admiral told the
President that he had a Delta Force on standby to kill/
capture
Omar.
However, he recommended waiting for at least 48 hours. He wanted to
gather more intelligence.

The DCIA, Walt Black, was
much more aggressive. He wanted to act now. He tried to convince
POTUS to approve a
night-time
, kill or capture raid
on
the house. He
emphasized the word
capture
.

“
Mr. President, I’ve got a
CIA strike team that can snatch Omar, tonight. The moon is waning,
so we’re dealing with low levels of ambient light. The weather
is
perfect for air
operations;
there’s not a cloud in the
sky. After Omar is secured, the assault team can gather computers,
laptops, and cell phones. Then, we can whisk him to a black site
and interrogate the son-of-a-bitch. Omar is full of
vital
information.
Look,
these guys are the junior varsity of terrorists.
They’re untrained, unsophisticated, religious thugs.
This won’t
be a
difficult mission.”

General Shields completely disagreed
with the DCIA’s assessment of the Caliphate and his recommendation
of a human strike team. The JSOC Commander voiced support for the
General’s position.

“
Walt, you guys just don’t
get the Caliphate. You can’t explain why this JV team has been
growing so fast, for over eight years. You can’t explain why they
continue to attract foreign fighters from all over the
world,
even after
our bombs and missile strikes. You’ve got almost
no one inside the organization.”

“
Walt, they’ve controlled
large swaths of Syria and Iraq for nearly a decade. That’s because
they’re the police, military, and government for disenfranchised
Sunnis. Given a choice between the Shia-led, Iraqi government in
Baghdad, or the Caliphate; the Sunnis choose the Caliphate. Think
how messed up that is! Sunnis would rather have the Caliphate, than
their
own
government?

“
The Syrian government
won’t take care of the Sunnis. The Iraqi government won’t take care
of the Sunnis. But the Caliphate will. They provide services and
protection. They build schools, mosques, and hospitals. They don’t
round up Sunnis and throw them into prisons without
charges.

“
That’s more than the
Shiite governments of Iran and Syria were doing for the Sunnis. Now
don’t get me wrong, these guys are
diabolical
murderers and gangsters.
But
you
have to understand why the Sunnis protect them.

“
Moreover, their social
media propaganda machine is incredibly
efficient
at attracting recruits
from all over the world. To their volunteers, the Caliphate offers
a
seventh-century
utopia. ‘Come, join the Caliphate. Get paid to
serve God. Find a sex slave. We have them from nine years on up.
Kill infidels. Be a part of history.’

“
Money, sex, and power
offered to a generation of pissed off young men? We can’t kill them
fast enough. For every
Jihadi
we kill, another foreign fighter
sneaks across the border and enlists. That’s not just in Syria and
Iraq. As you know, the Caliphate views itself as a state
without
borders
. It has members fighting in Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Yemen, and throughout Africa. You’d better take them a lot
more seriously.

The DCIA told Shield’s he didn’t need
a lecture on the Caliphate from DIRNSA.

“
Walt, you know me well.
And you know how much it pains me to say this. If ever there was a
mission designed for a drone strike—this is it. We can do it
immediately. What’s to say that Omar doesn’t leave the house today,
and go someplace else before your
nighttime
raid? We all know that this
is not Omar’s primary headquarters. He won’t be here
long.”

Omar was on the kill list
approved by POTUS. They had three pieces of SIGNIT; the email, the
SIM card location, and eyes on the target, via the Marauder. Drone
strikes only required two pieces of
intelligence,
if the subject was on the
approved list.
Ideally,
one piece of information would be
HUMINT—information from spies or informants.

But the CIA had almost no
HUMINT on the Caliphate.
Nearly
every kill decision performed on
the Caliphate
was based
exclusively
on NSA generated SIGNIT,
especially SIM cards.
Essentially
, missiles targeted SIM
cards. Whoever was
near
the SIM card would die.

Advocating a drone
strike
was particularly
hard
for General Shields. If there was
anything stronger than the General’s hatred of CIA Director Black,
it was the CIA with a bevy of lethally armed drones.

As a member of the Air
Force, the General could never understand why the CIA was allowed
to operate their
own
private air force. And today’s drones were
becoming ever more sophisticated ISR platforms, designed to pick up
SIGINT. SIGINT was clearly the NSA’s job. Intelligence collection
was also the main reason for the CIA’s turf battles with JSOC. The
General argued with anyone who would listen. The CIA’s job was
human intelligence—HUMINT, not SIGINT. Under his
breath,
the
General said, “This is
exactly
why I need SWARM.”