All this had happened a year before Crocker was born. The United States had issued an apology and a promise never to spy on North Korea again. Thinking about it now pissed him off. Why do we back away when rogue countries like North Korea act aggressively? He didn’t pretend to understand international politics, but he knew that you couldn’t allow a criminal regime like the one that ruled North Korea to get away with anything without risking a much bigger challenge later. It was one of the laws of the streets he’d learned as a teenager. You couldn’t let a punk insult you in public and walk away. You had to punch him in the mouth.
“What are we going to do about the presses?” Crocker asked when the emergency power finally came on.
Anders blinked and frowned. “We’ll get to that now. Be patient.”
Dawkins sat at the wooden table raking his hand through his thinning hair. He’d been staring at the blank page in his notebook for almost an hour and hadn’t written a single word. If he responded to Dr. Shivan in any way, he’d be revealing himself. There was no question about it. What if Dr. Shivan didn’t exist? What if the note was a ruse by the North Koreans to test him?
Any reply-even “I wish you well but have nothing to say”-could be construed as an act of complicity. And he didn’t want that.
On the other hand, judging from the tone and content of the letter, which he had reread a dozen times, Dawkins believed there was an eighty percent chance that Dr. Shivan was who he said he was. Assuming that was true, the temptation to tell him details about himself so that he could communicate them to U.S. authorities upon his release was very strong. He desperately wanted his government to know where he was, and he wanted his captivity to end. But if the letter was fake, any response would serve to diminish his chances of ever reuniting with his family.
Dawkins wasn’t adept at rational thinking in difficult emotional circumstances. He usually did everything he could to avoid situations like this, and if he failed, he relied on Nan. Now, no matter how he examined the dilemma, the biggest, loudest part of him told him to think about his survival. The safest course was best. His release and return home had to be the paramount goal. The voice in his head argued that he wasn’t only thinking of himself. His return to the States would be good for everyone-him, Nan, Karen, and even his countrymen. If Sung and Chiang-su were doing this of their own volition, they were taking an enormous risk for reasons that weren’t apparent to him. If, on the other hand, they were doing this on the regime’s orders, they were being cruel.
But what did he know about their lives and the political and personal pressures they were under? He hadn’t been aware of Chiang-su’s existence before tonight. And if he had to characterize Sung’s behavior over the many hours they’d spent together, he would have to say gentle and sympathetic. Nothing she had said or done had given him any indication that she harbored any hostility toward him or the United States.
Nor was she naive. Sung had to know that the note put her in danger. He wanted to convince himself that by not responding to Dr. Shivan, he would be doing the best thing for her, too.
But he couldn’t. A quieter, more contemplative part of his psyche wanted to learn more from Dr. Shivan about the underground facility and the state of the North Korean nuclear missile program. It urged him to somehow take advantage of the opportunity offered by Sung and Chiang-su. He spent the rest of the night trying to come up with a plan that would afford him maximum deniability and the greatest chance of success.
In the morning when Sung arrived with his breakfast, he summoned her to the bathroom and turned on the shower. With the water hissing, he said, “Tell Dr. Shivan to call this number…seven, zero, three, seven, one, five, eight, two, eight, seven. Ask to speak to Bird, and tell her where I am.”
Late the following night in a secure room at Naval Amphibious Base in Coronado, CA, Crocker met with James Anders, his assistant Dina Brooke, an analyst from the CIA North Korean desk, and another analyst from FBI Cyber Division.
Anders said, “Everything we discuss here will be preliminary and subject to executive approval, because of the mounting atmosphere of hostility between us and China. I want to talk about that, and I also want us to start looking at possibly launching an op against the printing presses on Ung-do.”
“It’s about time we did something,” remarked Crocker.
Dina Brooke, a very serious young woman with long dark hair and glasses, reviewed the causes of the recent tensions between the two superpowers. Over the past month a dozen cities in the United States had experienced power outages similar to the ones he had witnessed in Las Vegas and Honolulu. All of them had occurred when an unauthorized person or entity hacked into the local power utility’s supervisory control and data acquisition system.
They had done this, the FBI Cyber Division expert explained, by bypassing the local power utilities’ security measures and compromising the Domain Name System (DNS). By changing the mapping between the utilities and the IP addresses of their physical servers, the intruders were able to direct traffic heading for the utilities’ domains to the wrong IP addresses-addresses of servers under their control.
The hackers then fired massive amounts of network traffic at the host, which caused it to become overwhelmed and drop legitimate traffic. Using these protocols and others, they essentially took over the local utilities’ computer systems and directed them to power down the outflow of electricity.
Why the hackers had done this was unclear. Analysts at the FBI and CIA theorized that the people behind the cyberattacks were either operatives of an enemy state or a terrorist organization trying to spread fear throughout the United States.
After hundreds of man-hours of tracking and investigation, the FBI Cyber Division had identified People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Unit 61398 near Shanghai as the likely source of the attacks. Unit 61398 was a viable candidate, the FBI expert explained, because it had been the source of previous hacking attacks on U.S. government agencies and businesses. Since 2000, ninety percent of cyberespionage on the U.S. originated in China.
Public utilities were particularly vulnerable, according to the FBI expert. “All it takes is the right Google search terms to find a way into the systems of U.S. water and power utilities. And this isn’t unusual. Many industrial control systems are hooked up to the Internet. If they don’t change their default passwords and you know the right keywords, you can find their control panels easily.”
When White House officials lodged a formal complaint with the Chinese government, the Chinese responded angrily, in part because they had been experiencing cyberattacks of their own, targeting banks, businesses, and government agencies, including PLA offices and installations. They pointed a finger at the United States and the same top-secret U.S. cyberwar units that had created the computer worm Stuxnet, which had infected the software of at least fourteen industrial sites in Iran, including a uranium-enrichment plant.
This worm, first discovered in June 2010, was an unprecedentedly masterful and malicious piece of code that attacked in three phases. First, it targeted Microsoft Windows machines and networks, repeatedly replicating itself. Then it sought out Siemens Step 7 software, used to program industrial control systems that operate equipment such as centrifuges. Finally, it compromised the programmable logic controllers. The worm’s authors could thus spy on the industrial systems unbeknown to the human operators at the plant and even cause the fast-spinning centrifuges to tear themselves apart.