Read Online Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael V. Hayden
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family was going through such a checkpoint to get to our quarters.
The state of Maryland worked very hard to protect us, particularly our buildings near Route 50, which they eventually rerouted. We also pumped up CONFIRM, the system that recorded the badge swipes of people entering and leaving our facilities. Now such data would be kept off-site. In the event of catastrophic destruction, we could at least determine who was and was not in our buildings.
But this had to be about more than protecting our physical plant or even our personnel. We also had to protect our digital infrastructure and our intellectual property. What would the nation do if we lost our computer complex or our source code to a determined attacker?
We never wanted to have to answer that question, so we set out to build an alternative facility where much of this would be preserved. We got a boost from Congressman David Obey from Wisconsin, who earmarked money to preserve our supercomputing capacity. It was no accident that the congressman was from Wisconsin, where our Cray computers were built. It was still a very good idea. But we also knew that preserving our supercomputing capacity was not enough. We had to preserve our assets from end to end. The challenge was how to duplicate NSA. Quickly.
We hurried to set up an alternative site, a physically separate complex that allowed us to replicate about 80 percent of NSA’s capability with about 20 percent of its capacity. That wasn’t a perfect world, but at least it preserved us against catastrophic failure. We decrypted our first message at the new facility in late September 2003. For us it felt a little like driving the golden spike at Promontory Summit in 1869. It let us breathe a little easier.
We had one final option to exercise for continuity of operations. As we approached one holiday season with a particularly high quotient of background terrorist chatter, I called David Pepper of GCHQ to tell him that in the event of catastrophic loss at Fort Meade, we would entrust the management of the US SIGINT system to him and to our seniorrepresentative in London. The long pause on the other end of the secure line betrayed both the gravity of the threat and the enormous burden I was imposing on a friend.
• • •
W HILE WE WERE WORKING the present and preparing for the future, Congress wanted to question us about the past and how the 9/11 attack could have happened. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees organized themselves into something called the Joint Inquiry Commission (JIC) and began to hold hearings, both open and closed. This was the beginning of a wave of inquiries (the 9/11 Commission, the WMD Commission, and later, similar looks at CIA interrogations) that burned up big chunks of time for some of the intelligence community’s best people.
The big open hearing for the JIC was in October 2002, where George Tenet, FBI director Bob Mueller, and I were at the witness table together. It was an all-day event, and there was later a
Time
magazine cover photo of all three of us with our right hands in the air being sworn in.
It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. The chairmen, Congressman Porter Goss and Senator Pat Roberts, kept a pretty tight rein on things. In the hearing I admitted that, sadly, NSA had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack and that we were challenged by a global telecommunications revolution. We had competed successfully with the Soviets. “Now we had to keep pace with a global telecommunications revolution, probably the most dramatic revolution in human communications since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.” And we weren’t doing very well.
I complained that our resources and people had been cut by about a third in the preceding decade, the same decade when “mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million, an increase of nearly fifty times. . . . Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million, an increase of over ninety
The state of Maryland worked very hard to protect us, particularly our buildings near Route 50, which they eventually rerouted. We also pumped up CONFIRM, the system that recorded the badge swipes of people entering and leaving our facilities. Now such data would be kept off-site. In the event of catastrophic destruction, we could at least determine who was and was not in our buildings.
But this had to be about more than protecting our physical plant or even our personnel. We also had to protect our digital infrastructure and our intellectual property. What would the nation do if we lost our computer complex or our source code to a determined attacker?
We never wanted to have to answer that question, so we set out to build an alternative facility where much of this would be preserved. We got a boost from Congressman David Obey from Wisconsin, who earmarked money to preserve our supercomputing capacity. It was no accident that the congressman was from Wisconsin, where our Cray computers were built. It was still a very good idea. But we also knew that preserving our supercomputing capacity was not enough. We had to preserve our assets from end to end. The challenge was how to duplicate NSA. Quickly.
We hurried to set up an alternative site, a physically separate complex that allowed us to replicate about 80 percent of NSA’s capability with about 20 percent of its capacity. That wasn’t a perfect world, but at least it preserved us against catastrophic failure. We decrypted our first message at the new facility in late September 2003. For us it felt a little like driving the golden spike at Promontory Summit in 1869. It let us breathe a little easier.
We had one final option to exercise for continuity of operations. As we approached one holiday season with a particularly high quotient of background terrorist chatter, I called David Pepper of GCHQ to tell him that in the event of catastrophic loss at Fort Meade, we would entrust the management of the US SIGINT system to him and to our seniorrepresentative in London. The long pause on the other end of the secure line betrayed both the gravity of the threat and the enormous burden I was imposing on a friend.
• • •
W HILE WE WERE WORKING the present and preparing for the future, Congress wanted to question us about the past and how the 9/11 attack could have happened. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees organized themselves into something called the Joint Inquiry Commission (JIC) and began to hold hearings, both open and closed. This was the beginning of a wave of inquiries (the 9/11 Commission, the WMD Commission, and later, similar looks at CIA interrogations) that burned up big chunks of time for some of the intelligence community’s best people.
The big open hearing for the JIC was in October 2002, where George Tenet, FBI director Bob Mueller, and I were at the witness table together. It was an all-day event, and there was later a
Time
magazine cover photo of all three of us with our right hands in the air being sworn in.
It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. The chairmen, Congressman Porter Goss and Senator Pat Roberts, kept a pretty tight rein on things. In the hearing I admitted that, sadly, NSA had no prior knowledge of the 9/11 attack and that we were challenged by a global telecommunications revolution. We had competed successfully with the Soviets. “Now we had to keep pace with a global telecommunications revolution, probably the most dramatic revolution in human communications since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type.” And we weren’t doing very well.
I complained that our resources and people had been cut by about a third in the preceding decade, the same decade when “mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million, an increase of nearly fifty times. . . . Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million, an increase of over ninety
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