A few days later, we were in class when a frontoffice secretary came in and declared that unpaid overtime would no longer be required, and, effective in two weeks, we were all being moved to a much nicer hotel. I remember the giddy pride with which she announced, “A Hampton Inn!”
I had only a day or so to revel in my glory before class was interrupted again. This time, the head of the school was at the door, summoning me back to his office. There, waiting in the school head’s office, was the director of the Field Service Group—the school head’s boss, the boss of nearly everyone on the TISO career track, the boss whose boss I’d emailed. He was exceptionally cordial, which unnerved me.
I tried to keep a calm exterior, but inside I was sweating. The head of the school began our chat by reiterating how the issues the class had brought to light were in the process of being resolved. His superior cut him off. “But why we’re here is not to talk about that. Why we’re here is to talk about insubordination and the chain of command.”
If he’d slapped me, I would’ve been less shocked.
The CIA was quite different from the other civilian agencies, he said, even if, on paper, the regulations insisted it wasn’t. And in an agency that did such important work, there was nothing more important than the chain of command.
I pointed out that I’d tried the chain of command and been failed by it. Which was precisely the last thing I should have been explaining to the chain of command itself, personified just across a desk from me.
The head of the school just stared at his shoes and occasionally glanced out the window.
“Listen,” his boss said. “Ed, I’m not here to file a ‘hurt feelings report.’ Relax. I recognize that you’re a talented guy, and we’ve gone around and talked to all of your instructors, and they say you’re talented and sharp. Even volunteered for the war zone. That’s something we appreciate. We want you here, but we need to know that we can count on you. You’ve got to understand that there’s a system here. Sometimes we’ve all got to put up with things we don’t like because the mission comes first, and we can’t complete that mission if every guy on the team is second-guessing.” He paused, swallowed, and said, “Nowhere is this more true than in the desert. A lot of things happen out in the desert, and I’m not sure that we’re at a stage yet where I’m comfortable you’ll know how to handle them.”
In other words, I wasn’t getting the SRD posting I’d so coveted.
This was their gotcha, their retaliation. No one besides me—and I mean no one—had put down SRD, or any other active combat situation for that matter, as their first or second or even third choice on their dream sheets. Everyone else had prioritized all sweet European vacation-stations with windmills and bicycles, where you rarely hear explosions.
Almost perversely, they now gave me one of these assignments. They gave me Geneva. They punished me by giving me what I’d never asked for, but what everybody else had wanted.
FOURTEEN
Geneva
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written in 1818, is largely set in Geneva, the bustling, neat, clean, clockwork-organized Swiss city where I now made my home. I read it at night during the long, lonely months I spent by myself before Lindsay moved over to join me, stretched out on a bare mattress in the living room of the comically fancy, comically vast, but still almost entirely unfurnished apartment that the embassy was paying for.
In the Intelligence Community, the “Frankenstein effect” is widely cited: situations in which decisions intended to advance American interests end up harming them irreparably. In Geneva, in the same landscape where Mary Shelley’s monster ran amok, America was busy creating a network that would eventually take on a life and mission of its own and wreak havoc on the lives of its creators—mine very much included. The CIA station in the American embassy in Geneva was one of the prime European laboratories of this decades-long experiment.
The CIA is the primary American intelligence agency dedicated to HUMINT (human intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of interpersonal contact—person to person, face-to-face. In other words, when you think of traditional undercover spy missions in movies, you’re thinking of HUMINT (with lots of embellishment, of course). This differs from SIGINT (signals intelligence), or covert intelligence gathering by means of intercepted communications. Though the COs (case officers) who specialized in HUMINT had a general distrust of digital technology, they certainly understood how useful it could be.
To serve as a technical field officer among these people was to be as much a cultural ambassador as an expert adviser. On Monday, a CO might ask my advice on how to set up a covert online communications channel with a potential turncoat they were afraid to spook. On Tuesday, another CO might introduce me to someone they’d say was a “specialist” in from Washington—though this was in fact the same CO from the day before, now testing out a disguise that I’m still embarrassed to say I didn’t suspect in the least, though I suppose that was the point. On Wednesday, I might be asked how best to destroy after transmitting (the technological version of burn after reading) a disc of customer records that a CO had managed to purchase from a crooked Swisscom employee. On Thursday, I might have to write up and transmit security violation reports on COs, documenting minor infractions like forgetting to lock the door to a vault when they’d gone to the bathroom. (I once had to write up myself for exactly the same mistake.) Come Friday, the chief of operations might call me into his office and ask me if, “hypothetically speaking,” headquarters could send over an infected thumb drive that could be used by “someone” to hack the computers used by delegates to the United Nations, whose main building was just up the street. Did I think there was much of a chance of this “someone” being caught?
I didn’t, and they weren’t.
During my time in the field, the field was rapidly changing. The agency was increasingly adamant that COs enter the new millennium, and technical field officers like myself were tasked with helping them do that in addition to all of our other duties. We put them online, and they put up with us.
The notoriously slow and meticulous methods of traditional spycraft certainly had their successes. But with the world’s deepest secrets now stored on computers, which were more often than not connected to the open internet, it was only logical that America’s intelligence agencies would want to use those very same connections to steal them.
Before the advent of the internet, if an agency wanted to gain access to a target’s computer, it had to recruit a person, or what spies call an “asset,” who had physical access to it. But this new world of “digital network intelligence” meant that physical access was almost never required. An agent now could just send the target a message, such as an email, with attachments or links that unleashed malware (an evil program) that would allow the agency to surveil not just the target’s computer but its entire network. Given this innovation, the CIA’s HUMINT would be dedicated to the identification of targets of interest, and SIGINT would take care of the rest.
That, at least, was the hope. But as intelligence increasingly became “cyberintelligence,” old concerns also had to be updated to the new medium of the internet. For example: how to research a target while remaining anonymous online.
Normally when you go online, your request for any website travels from your computer more or less directly to the server that hosts your final destination—the website you’re trying to visit. At every stop along the way, however, your request cheerfully announces exactly where on the internet it came from and exactly where on the internet it’s going, thanks to identifiers called source and destination headers, which you can think of as the address information on a postcard. Because of these headers, your internet browsing can easily be identified as yours by, among others, webmasters, network administrators, and foreign intelligence services.