When the phone rang to signal that something was broken, he’d just report it to the day shift. Essentially, his philosophy (if you could call it that) was that the night shift had to end sometime and the day shift had more people. Apparently, however, the day shift had gotten tired of coming in to work every morning to find Frank’s feet up in front of the digital equivalent of a dumpster fire, and so I’d been hired.
For some reason, the agency had decided that it was preferable to bring me in than to let this old guy go. After a couple of weeks of working together, I was convinced that his continued employment had to be the result of some personal connection or favor. To test this hypothesis I tried to draw Frank out, but I only provoked a lecture that went on and on, until suddenly a panicked expression came over his face and he jumped up and said, “I gotta change the tape!”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But Frank was already heading to the gray door at the back of our vault, which opened onto a dingy stairwell that gave direct access to the data center itself.
Going down into a server vault—especially the CIA’s—can be a disorienting experience. You descend into darkness blinking with green and red LEDs like an evil Christmas, vibrating with the whir of the industrial fans cooling the precious rack-mounted machinery to prevent it from melting down. Being there was always a bit dizzying.
Frank stopped by a shabby corner where an old computer took up almost an entire rickety desk. It was something from the early ’90s or even the late ’80s, a computer so ancient that it shouldn’t even have been called a computer. It was more properly a machine, running a miniature tape format that I didn’t recognize.
Next to this machine was a massive safe, which Frank unlocked.
He fussed with the tape that was in the machine, pried it free, and put it in the safe. Then he took another antique tape out of the safe and inserted it into the machine as a replacement, threading it into place. He carefully tapped a few times on the old keyboard—down, down, down, tab, tab, tab. He couldn’t actually see the effect of those keystrokes, because the machine’s monitor no longer worked, but he struck the enter key with confidence.
I couldn’t figure out what was going on. But the itty-bitty tape began to tick-tick-tick and then spin, and Frank grinned with satisfaction.
“This is the most important machine in the building,” he said. “The agency doesn’t trust this digital-technology crap. They don’t trust their own servers. You know they’re always breaking. But when the servers break down, they risk losing what they’re storing, so in order not to lose anything that comes in during the day, they back everything up on tape at night.”
“So you’re doing a storage backup here?”
“A storage backup to tape. The old way. Reliable as a heart attack. Tape hardly ever crashes.”
It was only when Frank repeated this same tape-changing ritual the next night, and the night after that, and on every night we worked together thereafter, that I began to understand why the agency kept him around—and it wasn’t just for his sense of humor. Frank was the only guy willing to stick around between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. who was also old enough to know how to handle that proprietary tape system.
After I found a way to automate most of my own work—writing scripts to automatically update servers and restore lost network connections, mainly—I started having what I came to call a Frank amount of time. Meaning I had all night to do pretty much whatever I wanted. I passed a fair number of hours in long talks with Frank, but I also spent plenty of time online.
Few realize this, but the CIA has its own internet and Web. It has its own kind of Facebook, which allows agents to interact socially; its own type of Wikipedia, which provides agents with information about agency teams, projects, and missions; and its own internal version of Google—actually provided by Google—which allows agents to search this sprawling classified network. For hours and hours every night, this was my education. For the record, as far as I could tell, aliens have never contacted Earth, or at least they haven’t contacted US intelligence.
Here is one thing that the disorganized CIA didn’t quite understand at the time, and that no major American employer outside of Silicon Valley understood, either: The computer guy knows everything, or rather can know everything. The higher up this employee is, and the more systems-level privileges he has, the more access he has to virtually every byte of his employer’s digital existence. Of course, not everyone is curious enough to take advantage of this education, and not everyone is possessed of a sincere curiosity. My forays through the CIA’s systems were natural extensions of my childhood desire to understand how everything works, how the various components of a mechanism fit together into the whole.
With the official title and privileges of a systems administrator, and technical prowess that enabled my clearance to be used to its maximum potential, I was able to satisfy my every informational deficiency and then some. In case you were wondering: Yes, man really did land on the moon. Climate change is real. Chemtrails are not a thing.
On the CIA’s internal news sites, I read top secret dispatches regarding trade talks and coups as they were still unfolding. These agency accounts of events were often very similar to the accounts that would eventually show up on network news, CNN, or Fox days later. The primary differences were merely in the sourcing and the level of detail.
Working at CIA headquarters was a thrill, but it was still only a few hours away from where I’d grown up, which in many ways was a similar environment. I was in my early twenties, and—apart from stints in North Carolina, childhood trips to visit my grandfather at Coast Guard bases where he’d held commands, and my few weeks in the army at Fort Benning—I’d never really left the Beltway.
The excitement and significance of what I was reading both increased my appreciation of the importance of our work and made me feel like I was missing out by just sitting at a workstation. As I read about events happening in Ouagadougou, Kinshasa, and other foreign cities, I realized that I had to serve my country by doing something truly meaningful abroad. Otherwise, I thought, I’d just become a more successful Frank.
After nine months as a systems administrator, I applied for a CIA tech job abroad, and in short order I was accepted.
My last day at CIA headquarters was just a formality. I’d already done all my paperwork and traded in my green badge for a blue. All that was left to do was to sit through another indoctrination and swear an oath of loyalty—not to the government or agency that now employed me directly, but to the US Constitution. I solemnly swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
THIRTEEN
The Count of the Hill
My first orders as a freshly minted officer of the government were to head for the Comfort Inn in Warrenton, Virginia, a sad, dilapidated motel whose primary client was the “State Department,” by which I mean the CIA. It was the worst motel in a town of bad motels, which was probably why the CIA chose it. The Comfort Inn was to be my home for the next six months while I went to the nearby Warrenton Training Center, or, as folks there call it, the Hill.
My fellow “Innmates” and I were discouraged from telling our loved ones where we were staying and what we were doing. I leaned hard into those protocols, rarely heading back to Maryland or even talking to Lindsay on the phone. Anyway, we weren’t allowed to take our phones to school, since class was classified, and we had classes all the time. Warrenton kept most of us too busy to be lonely.
The Hill serves as the heart of the CIA’s field communications network, carefully located just out of nuke range from DC. The salty old techs who worked there liked to say that the CIA could survive losing its headquarters to a catastrophic attack, but it would die if it ever lost Warrenton, and now that the top of the Hill holds two enormous top secret data centers—one of which I later helped construct—I’m inclined to agree.