I never learned what the company’s acronym stood for, or even if it stood for anything. Technically speaking, COMSO would be my employer, but I never worked a single day at a COMSO office, or at a BAE Systems office, and few contractors ever would. I only worked at CIA headquarters.
In fact, I only ever visited the COMSO office, which was in Greenbelt, Maryland, maybe two or three times in my life. One of these was when I went down there to negotiate my salary and sign some paperwork. After the negotiations ended, a man held out his hand and, as I shook it, introduced himself to me as my “manager.” He went on to explain that the title was just a formality, and that I’d be taking my orders directly from the CIA. “If all goes well,” he said, “we’ll never meet again.”
In the spy movies and TV shows, when someone tells you something like that, it usually means that you’re about to go on a dangerous mission and might die. But in real spy life it just means “Congratulations on the job.” By the time I was out the door, I’m sure he’d already forgotten my face.
TWELVE
Indoc
You know that one set-up shot that’s in pretty much every spy movie and TV show that’s subtitled CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia? And then the camera moves through the marble lobby with the wall of stars and the floor with the agency’s seal? Well, Langley is the site’s historical name, which the agency prefers Hollywood to use; CIA HQ is officially in McLean, Virginia; and nobody really comes through that lobby except VIPs or outsiders on a tour.
That building is the OHB, the Old Headquarters Building. The building where almost everybody who works at the CIA enters is far less glamorous: the NHB, the New Headquarters Building. My first day was one of the very few I spent there in daylight. That said, I spent most of the day underground—in a grimy, cinder block–walled room with all the charm of a nuclear fallout shelter and the acrid smell of government bleach.
“So this is the Deep State,” one guy said, and almost everybody laughed. We were all computer dudes—and yes, almost uniformly dudes. Some were tattooed and pierced, or bore evidence of having removed their piercings for the big day. One still had punky streaks of dye in his hair. Almost all wore contractor badges, as green and crisp as new hundred-dollar bills.
This session was the first stage in our transformation. It was called the Indoc, or Indoctrination, and its entire point was to convince us that we were the elite, that we were special. We had been chosen to learn the mysteries of state and the truths that the rest of the country—and, at times, even its Congress and courts—couldn’t handle.
Being indoctrinated into the IC, like becoming expert at technology, has powerful psychological effects. All of a sudden you have access to the story behind the story, the hidden histories of well-known, or supposedly well-known, events. Also, all of a sudden you have not just the license but the obligation to lie, conceal, and mislead. This creates a sense of tribalism, which can lead many to believe that their primary allegiance is to the institution and not to the rule of law.
I wasn’t thinking any of these thoughts at my Indoc session, of course. Instead, I was just trying to keep myself awake. The presenters instructed us on basic operational security practices: Don’t tell anyone who you work for. Don’t leave sensitive materials unattended. Don’t bring your highly insecure cell phone into the highly secure office—or talk on it about work, ever. Don’t wear your Hi, I work for the CIA badge to the mall.
Finally, the room darkened, the PowerPoint presentation was fired up, and faces appeared on a screen. Everyone in the room sat upright. These were the faces, we were told, of former agents and contractors who had failed to follow the rules. The people on the screen, it was implied, were now in basements even worse than this one, and some would be there until they died.
All in all, this was an effective presentation.
I’m told that in the years since my career ended, this parade of horribles has been expanded to include an additional category: people of principle, whistleblowers in the public interest. I can only hope that the twentysomethings sitting there today are struck by the government’s conflation of selling secrets to the enemy and disclosing them to journalists when my face pops up on the screen.
My team’s task was to manage the vast majority of the CIA servers in the continental United States—the enormous halls of expensive “big iron” computers that comprised the agency’s internal networks and databases, all of its systems that transmitted, received, and stored intelligence. Many of the agency’s most important servers were situated on-site. Half of them were in the NHB, where my team was located; the other half were in the nearby OHB. They were set up on opposite sides of their respective buildings, so that if one side was blown up, we wouldn’t lose too many machines. My team was one of the few at the agency permitted to actually lay hands on the servers that processed and stored the agency’s most important secrets. We were likely the only team with access to log in to nearly all of them.
After a few weeks familiarizing myself with the systems on the day shift, I moved to nights—6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m.—when the rest of the agency was pretty much dead.
At night, especially between, say, 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., the CIA was empty and lifeless, a vast and haunted complex with a postapocalyptic feel. All the escalators were stopped, and you had to walk them like stairs. Only half the elevators were working, and the pinging sounds they made, which were barely audible during the bustle of daytime, now sounded alarmingly loud. The agency had recently committed to a new eco-friendly energy-saving policy and installed motion-sensitive overhead lights: The lights would switch on when you approached, so that you felt followed, and your footsteps would echo endlessly.
For twelve hours each night, three days on and two days off, I sat in the secure office (or “vault,” as they’re called in the CIA) beyond the help desk, among the twenty desks each bearing two or three computer terminals reserved for the systems administrators who kept the CIA’s global network online. Regardless of how fancy that might sound, the job itself was basically waiting for catastrophe to happen. The problems generally weren’t too difficult to solve. The moment something went wrong, I had to log in to try to fix it remotely. If I couldn’t, I had to physically descend into the data center hidden a floor below my own in the New Headquarters Building—or walk the eerie half mile through the connecting tunnel over to the data center in the Old Headquarters Building—and tinker around with the machinery itself.
My partner in this task—the only other person responsible for the nocturnal functioning of the CIA’s entire server architecture—was a guy I’m going to call Frank. He was an exceptional personality in every sense. He was a fiftysomething been-there-done-that ex-navy radio operator.
I have to say, when I first met Frank, I thought, Imagine if my entire life were like the nights I spent at CASL. Because, to put it bluntly, Frank did hardly any work at all. At least, that was the impression he liked to project. He enjoyed telling me, and everyone else, that he didn’t really know anything about computing and didn’t understand why they’d put him on such an important team. By his own account, all he’d done at work for the better part of the last decade was sit around and read books, though sometimes he’d also play games of solitaire—with a real deck of cards, not on the computer, of course. Sometimes he’d just pace all night.