Before I go any further, I should note that I still owe that English class autobiographical statement. The older I get, the heavier it weighs on me, and yet writing it hasn’t gotten any easier.
It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal disclosures” in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to instill in its workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality. You train yourself to be inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary house; you drive the most ordinary car; you wear the same ordinary clothes as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the ordinary, is your cover.
An autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux. This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is not a statement but a pledge—a pledge to the principles they value and to the vision of the person they hope to become.
I’d enrolled in community college to save myself time after a setback, not because I intended to continue with my higher education. But I’d made a pledge to myself that I’d at least complete my high school degree. One weekend I drove out to a public school near Baltimore to take the last test I’d ever take for the state of Maryland: the exam for the General Education Development (GED) degree, which the US government recognizes as the standard equivalent to a high school diploma.
I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied the two years of schooling that I still owed to the state just by taking a two-day exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying true to my word.
SEVEN
9/11
From the age of sixteen, I was pretty much living on my own. With my mother throwing herself into her work, I often had the condo to myself. I set my own schedule, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I was responsible for everything but paying the bills.
I had a white Honda Civic and drove it all over. My life became a circuit, tracing a route between home, college, and my friends, particularly a new group that I’d met in Japanese class. Most of these friends were aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed with anime. As our friendships deepened, so, too, did my familiarity with anime genres.
One of my new friends—I’ll call her Mae—was much older, at a comfortably adult twenty-five. She was something of an idol to the rest of us, as a published artist and avid cosplayer. She was my Japanese conversation partner and, I was impressed to find out, also ran a successful Web-design business.
That’s how I became a freelancer: I started working as a Web designer for a girl I met in class. I was a quick learner, and in a company of two, you’ve got to be able to do everything. We worked out of her house, a two-story town house that she shared with her husband, a neat and clever man whom I’ll call Norm.
The town house was located on base at Fort Meade, where Norm worked as an air force linguist assigned to the NSA. It’s nearly inconceivable now, but at the time, Fort Meade was almost entirely accessible to anyone. It wasn’t all barricades and checkpoints trapped in barbed wire like it is today. I could just drive onto the army base housing the world’s most secretive intelligence agency in my ’92 Civic, windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate and show ID.
Mae was strikingly canny, working twice as hard as her peers to make her business a success. She parlayed her illustration skills into logo design and offered basic branding services. As for my work, the methods and coding were simple enough for me to pick up on the fly, and although they could be brutally repetitive, I wasn’t complaining.
Still, about a year into my job, I realized I had to plan for my future. Most job listings and contracts for advanced work were beginning to require that applicants be officially accredited by major tech companies like IBM and Cisco in the use and service of their products. The certification credentials were being adopted as industry standard almost as quickly as the industry could invent them. An A+ certification meant that you were able to service and repair computers. A Net+ certification meant that you were able to handle some basic networking. But these were just ways to become the guy who worked the help desk. The best pieces of paper were grouped under the Microsoft Certified Professional series. The most advanced certification, the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, or MCSE, was the brass ring, the guaranteed meal ticket.
In terms of technical know-how, the MCSE wasn’t the easiest to get, but it also didn’t require what most self-respecting hackers would consider unicorn genius, either. In terms of time and money, the commitment was considerable. I had to take seven separate tests, which cost 150 dollars each, and pay something like eighteen thousand dollars in tuition to Johns Hopkins University for the full battery of prep classes. True to form, I didn’t finish the classes, opting instead to go straight to the testing after I felt I’d had enough. Unfortunately, Hopkins didn’t give refunds. With payments looming on my tuition loan, I asked Mae to give me more hours. She agreed and told me to start coming in at 9:00 a.m. It was an early start time, especially for a freelancer, which was why I was running late on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001.
I was speeding down Route 32 under a beautiful Microsoft-blue sky, trying not to get caught by any speed traps. My window was down, and my hand was riding the wind—it felt like a lucky day. I had the talk radio cranked and was waiting for the news to switch to the traffic.
Just as I was about to take a shortcut into Fort Meade, an update broke through about a plane crash in New York City.
When Mae came to her door, I followed her up the stairs to the cramped office next to her bedroom. There wasn’t much to it: just our two desks side by side, a drawing table for her art, and a cage for her squirrels. Though I was slightly distracted by the news, we had work to do. I forced myself to focus on the task at hand. I was just opening the project’s files when the phone rang.
Mae picked up. “What? Really?”
Because we were sitting so close together, I could hear her husband’s voice. And he was yelling.
Mae’s expression turned to alarm, and she loaded a news site on her computer. I was reading the site’s report about a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, when Mae said, “Okay. Wow. Okay,” and hung up.
She turned to me. “A second plane just hit the other tower.” Until that moment, I’d thought it had been an accident.
Mae said, “Norm thinks they’re going to close the base.”
“Like, the gates?” I said. “Seriously?”
The scale of what had happened had yet to hit me. I was thinking about my commute.
“Norm said you should go home. He doesn’t want you to get stuck.”
I sighed and saved the work I’d barely started. Just when I got up to leave, the phone rang again, and this time the conversation was even shorter. Mae was pale.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
The Pentagon, the headquarters of the Department of Defense, had been attacked.
Pandemonium, chaos: our most ancient forms of terror. For as long as I live, I’ll remember retracing my way up the road past the NSA’s headquarters. At the moment of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the staff of the National Security Agency was abandoning its work by the thousands, and I was swept up in the flood.
NSA director Michael Hayden issued the order to evacuate before most of the country even knew what had happened. Later, the NSA and the CIA—which also evacuated all but a skeleton crew from its own headquarters at Langley in McLean, Virginia, on 9/11—would explain the evacuations by citing a concern that one of the agencies might potentially, possibly, perhaps be the target of the fourth and last hijacked airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, rather than the White House or Capitol.