Dead or Alive (26 page)

The National Counterterrorism Center, which had until 2004 been named the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and was now known to its employees as Liberty Crossing, sits nestled in the quiet suburbs of McLean in northern Fairfax County, Virginia. Composed of a whole lot of glass and gray concrete, it was more James Bond than CIA drab, something that had taken Mary Pat some time to get used to. Still, the walls were blast-resistant and the windows bulletproof, rated to stop sustained .50-caliber rounds. Of course, if things ever went so far south that bad guys were taking potshots at the building with a .50-cal, they would likely have bigger problems to worry about. All in all, though, despite the NCTC’s six-story exterior being a tad conspicuous for her taste, she had to admit it was a damned nice place to come to work every day. The on-site restaurant was top-notch, too, which drew Ed to Liberty Crossing every Wednesday for their standing lunch date.

She held up her ID for the perusal of the guard, who studied it carefully, matching it against both her face and the access sheet on his clipboard. Night had fully fallen, and in the bushes she could hear the croaking of frogs.

After a long ten seconds the guard nodded to her, clicked off his flashlight, and waved her through. She waited for the barrier to come up, then pulled through the checkpoint and into the parking lot. The security procedure she’d just undergone was the same for every employee at the NCTC, at all hours, every day, from the lowest-grade analyst to the director himself. The fact that she was the number two at Liberty Crossing was immaterial to the security guards, who seemed to develop amnesia for faces and vehicles and names within seconds of their passing through the checkpoint. It was not a good idea to get friendly with the guards. They were paid to be suspicious, and they took the onus seriously. Nor were they known for their sense of humor. The whole thing vaguely reminded Mary Pat of the
Seinfeld
“Soup Nazi” episode: step forward, place your order, step right, pay, take soup, leave. In this case it was pull forward, show badge, speak only if spoken to, wait for nod, then pull ahead. Deviate at your peril.

It was a hassle sometimes, especially on days when she had gotten a late start and wasn’t able to make her usual Starbucks pit stop, but Mary Pat wasn’t about to complain. What they did was important, and woe be the idiot who thought otherwise. In fact, a few morons had over the years made the mistake of taking lightly what the guards did—usually some jackass trying to do a rolling stop and quick badge-flash—and had gotten a weapons-drawn, police-style felony stop for their trouble. A few had even made the mistake of later complaining about the treatment. Not many of those still had jobs at Liberty Crossing.

She pulled into her personal parking space, which was separated from the rest by only a special hash mark on the curb. More security: Names were personal details, and personal details were potential tools for bad guys. Again, not a likely scenario, but here it wasn’t about odds but rather comprehensiveness. Control what you can, because there’s a hell of a lot you can’t.

She walked through the lobby and made her way to the heart of the NCTC and her “office,” as it were, the operations center. While the rest of the NCTC was all warm wood furniture and pleasant earth-toned carpeting, the operations center was something straight out of the television show
24
—an oft-joked-about subject here.

At ten thousand square feet, the operations center was dominated by a handful of wall-sized display screens, on which were projected the hot threat or incident or raw data of the minute or hour—given the NCTC’s mission as an intelligence clearinghouse, it was more often than not the former.

Dozens of computer workstations with ergonomic keyboards and multiple wraparound flat-screen LCD monitors manned by analysts from the CIA, FBI, and NSA filled the center space, and at either end sat a raised and glassed-in watch center, one for the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, one for the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. In any given calendar day the NCTC could see upward of ten thousand cables come across its electronic desk, any one of which could be a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that, if left unassembled, could cost American lives. Most pieces turned out to be trivial, but all were analyzed with equal care.

Part of the problem was translators, or a lack thereof. A good chunk of the data they looked at every day came to them raw, in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, or any of a half-dozen other dialects that were just different enough from their root language to require a specialist translator, which were hard enough to find themselves, let alone translators who could pass the kind of vetting necessary to work at the NCTC. Add to that the sheer volume of traffic the operations center saw and you got a recipe for data overload. They’d developed a pigeonhole program for categorizing incoming intercepts so high-priority stuff got reviewed first, but that was more art than science; often they found important nuggets only after they’d filtered down through the system, having lost their relevance and context along the way.

The translator problem was just one side of the same coin, Mary Pat believed. Coming from the collection side of CIA, she knew human assets were what really made the intelligence world turn, and developing assets in Arab-centric countries had proven a tough nut to crack. The sad truth was that the CIA had in the decade leading up to 9/11 let agent recruitment slip down its list of priorities. Technical collection—satellites, audio intercepts, and data mining—was easy and sexy, and could, within certain parameters, produce great results, but old hands like Mary Pat had long ago learned that most intelligence battles were won and lost on the strength of HUMINT—human intelligence, i.e., agents and the case officers who ran them.

Langley’s crop of case officers had grown in relative leaps and bounds over the last seven years, but they still had a long way to go, especially in countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, where religion, ancient rivalries, and cut-throat politics made the recruitment of reliable agents a daunting task.

As visually impressive as the operations center was—even to a veteran like Mary Pat—she knew the real triumph of the place was an intangible that would be lost on the casual observer: cooperation. For decades the albatross around the U.S. intelligence community’s neck was at best a crippling lack of cross-pollination and at worst overt internecine warfare, most notably between the two agencies tasked with keeping the country safe from terrorist attacks. But as the TV pundits and Beltway pols had pointed out ad nauseam, the events of 9/11 had changed everything, including how the U.S. intelligence community went about the business of keeping America safe. For Mary Pat and many intelligence professionals, 9/11 hadn’t been so much a surprise as it had been a sad confirmation of what they’d long suspected: The U.S. government hadn’t been taking seriously enough the threat of terrorism, and not just in the few years leading up to 9/11 but perhaps as far back as the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the Taliban and the mujahideen—then convenient but ideologically incompatible allies—had shown what determined but woefully outnumbered and outgunned fighters could accomplish against one of only two superpowers on the planet. For many—the Foleys and Jack Ryan included—the war in Afghanistan had been a preview of sorts, a movie they feared would be played out against the West once the mujahideen had finished with the Soviets. Effective as the CIA’s alliance with the mujahideen had been, the relationship had been tenuous at best, always overshadowed by the chasm between Western culture and sharia law, by radical Islamic fundamentalism and Christianity. The question, born from the Arabic proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” became “How soon would the friendship end?” For Mary Pat the answer had been simple: the moment the last Soviet soldier left Afghan soil. And depending on who was writing the history, she had been either dead-on right or nearly so. Either way, by the mid- to late ’80s the Taliban, the mujahideen, and eventually the Emir’s URC had turned their scornful and now battle-tested eyes toward the West.

What’s done is done,
Mary Pat thought, looking over the balcony railing at the operations center. Whatever tragedy it had taken to get them here, the U.S. intelligence community was more on its game than it had been since the early days of the Cold War, and the NCTC was owed a lion’s share of the credit. Staffed as it was by analysts from virtually every branch of the intelligence world who sat side by side seven days a week twenty-four hours a day, cooperation was now the rule rather than the exception.

She made her way down the stairs and through the rows of workstations, nodding at colleagues as she went, until she reached the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Waiting for her inside were two men and a woman: her boss and the director of the NCTC, Ben Margolin; the Chief of Operations, Janet Cummings; and John Turnbull, the head of Acre Station, the joint task force dedicated to tracking down, capturing, or killing the Emir and the leadership of the URC. The frown on Turnbull’s face told Mary Pat all was not rosy at Acre Station.

“Am I late?” Mary Pat asked, and took a seat. Beyond the glass wall, the staff of the operations center silently went about its business. Like virtually every conference room at Liberty Crossing, the Counterterrorism Center was an EM tank—isolated from virtually all electromagnetic emissions, both inbound and outbound, save encrypted data streams.

“No, we’re early,” Margolin said. “The package is on its way down.”

“And?”

“We missed him,” Turnbull grumbled.

“Was he ever there?”

“Hard to say.” This from Operations Chief Janet Cummings. “We’ve got product from the raid, but how good we don’t know. Somebody was there—probably a higher-up—but beyond that ...”

“Nine dead,” Turnbull said.

“Prisoners?”

“Started with two, but during the exfil the team was am-bushed and they lost one; lost the second when their LZ took an RPG. Lost some Rangers, too.”

“Ah, shit.”

Ah shit, indeed,
Mary Pat thought. The Rangers would, of course, be mourning the loss of one of their own, but these guys were the best of the best; consequently, they took the hazards simply as part of the job. They were consummate professionals, but whereas their civilian counterparts might know how to unclog a drain or rewire a house or build a skyscraper, Rangers specialized in something completely different: killing bad guys.

“The team leader”—Cummings paused to check her file—“Sergeant Driscoll, was wounded, but he made it. According to Driscoll’s after-action report, the prisoner stood up during the firefight. On purpose.”

“Christ,” Mary Pat muttered. They’d seen that before with URC soldiers, preferring death over capture. Whether that was born of pride or an unwillingness to risk talking during interrogation was a point of heated debate in the intelligence and military communities.

“The second one tried to make a break for it when the helo went down. They dropped him.”

“Well, not exactly a dry hole,” Turnbull said, “but not the result we wanted.”

The problem hadn’t been the radio transmission, of that Mary Pat was certain. She’d read both the raw data and the analysis. Somebody had been transmitting from that cave using recognized URC plain-speak code packets. One of the words—
Lotus
—is something they’d seen before, both in asset debriefs from case officers and in NSA Driftnet intercepts, but what it meant no one had been able to determine.

They’d long suspected the URC had gone old school for its encrypted communications, employing onetime pads, essentially a point-to-point protocol where only the sender and receiver had the pad required to decrypt the message. The system was ancient, dating back to the Roman Empire, but reliable and, provided the pads were in fact fully randomized, nearly impossible to break unless you got your hands on a pad. On a Tuesday, say, Bad Guy A would send a series of key words—
dog, cabbage, chair
—to Bad Guy B, who, using his own pad, would convert the words to their alphanumeric value, so
dog
would translate into 4, 15, and 7, which in turn would translate into a different word altogether. Special Forces teams in Afghanistan had in raids captured a number of onetime pads, but none were current, and so far neither the CIA nor the NSA had been able to glean a pattern from which they might extrapolate a key.

There were downsides to the system, however. First, it was cumbersome. For it to work properly, senders and receivers had to be working on the same physical pads, switching to a new one at the same intervals, the more often the better, which in turn required couriers to move between Bad Guy A and Bad Guy B. Whereas the CIA had Acre Station dedicated to hunting down the Emir, the FBI had a working group called Clownfish, dedicated to intercepting a URC courier.

The big question, Mary Pat knew, was: What had prompted whoever had been living in the cave to bug out shortly before the team hit the ground? Dumb coincidence or something more? She doubted it was human error; Rangers were too good for that. She had, in fact, read the after-action report earlier that day, and in addition to a broken wheel suffered by the team’s CO and Driscoll’s own injury, the op had been costly: two dead and two wounded. All that for a dry hole.

Barring coincidence, the most likely culprit was word of mouth. Rare was the day a helo could lift off from bases in either Pakistan or Afghanistan without a URC soldier or sympathizer taking note and making a call, a problem that had partially been solved by Special Forces teams making short, random hops around the countryside in the hours and days leading up to an op as well as using offset waypoints en route to the target, both of which helped keep prying eyes guessing. The rugged and unforgiving terrain made this problematic, though, as did the weather, which often made certain routes impassable. Just as Alexander the Great’s Army and the Soviets after them had learned, the geography of Central Asia was a foe unto itself.
And an unconquerable one at that,
Mary Pat thought. You either learned to live with it or work around it, or you failed. Hell, both Napoléon and Hitler had learned that lesson—albeit belatedly—each during a bold, if ill-advised, wintertime invasion of Russia. Of course, each of them had been certain of a quick victory, long before the snow started flying. And, hell, in Russia the land was nice and flat. Add mountains to the mix . . . Well, you’ve got Central Asia.