We drove past the monument – the bronze founder of this odd state looked at me grimly from the height of his pedestal. He somehow resembled Churchill. Soon we pulled up at the hotel.
‘This is ‘Sheraton Pretoria Hotel,’ Dick said and gave me his business card. ‘It’s safe here but remember what I told you about. Check in, have some rest and then give me a call. I’ll come myself or send a driver to pick you up. At fourteen hours local time you have a briefing, and at fifteen a meeting with the chief.
I got out of the car, slung the bag over my shoulder, and bent down to the open door.
‘Thank you, Dick.’
He smiled.
‘Get me a drink and we’re even.’
He drove off and I was left alone by the doors of the hotel – a big Victorian building in colonial style, decorated with columns. The shaggy palm trees by the entrance looked to me like severed heads of rastafarians impaled on the curved stakes of the tree trunks.
The flight, the sleepless night, the conversation with Dick – they had all knocked me off my balance. Not that I was exceptionally tired. I could just feel a constant desire to lie down both, during the briefing, which, contrary to my fears, had not had much effect on me, and during my conversation with the chief – the head of the local department of the NSA.
Then I headed to the basement where the equipment was located. The job turned out to be not fairly simple, strictly speaking, just like it always is when it comes to servicing equipment.
I ran tests through the system, checked the versions of the programs and the protective modules – all of which took a few hours. All that time I was thinking about the residents of this unfortunate country, about how they see life, history and what future awaits them, and if everything really was really that bad – I couldn’t believe that Dick hadn’t exaggerated a bit.
Looking at the columns of numbers running across the screens, I suddenly thought that if all of our clever machinery installed here was connected to local communication lines, there is a very simple and easy way to check what is going on in this country.
I entered my access code, and got into the database, where the records of the telephone conversations of individuals under surveillance were located. They were all listed under pseudonyms and numbers. I put the headphones on and randomly clicked on one of the files recorded last year.
The interlocutors were speaking English in a strong local accent and used many words I didn’t know but I got the gist of the conversation. Someone called Ngodila was reporting to an unnamed superior about negotiations with Russians about a purchase of helicopters. I was astonished that the local bandits – and what else could Ngodila and his boss be? – are so rich they can use helicopters as a means of transport, and I won’t even mention the unscrupulousness of Russians, prepared to trade with all kind of scum.
After doing all I had to do in the embassy, I asked the secretary about Dick – I still owed him a drink – but it turned out he had gone away on business. So I went back to the hotel in the company of a taciturn driver, a boy with a square jaw and transparent eyes.
It began to rain. When I got to my room, I headed for a shower straight away, then lay in bed and turned on the TV to see the local news. It was a way of learning more about the country, its inhabitants and seeing the truth of what Dick had told me.
I didn’t pay much attention to the international news, just continuous chatter about economic crisis. But then the news of the South African Republic began – the chronicles of political life, the president’s speech on some national occasion, and preparation for the upcoming football world cup.
Right at the end the broadcaster, a pleasant black woman, announced in a boring voice that the Ministry of Transport of the republic had signed a contract with the American Sikorsky Aircraft corporation for the supply of helicopters to replace the outdated French-made choppers. The delay with the signing of the contract, already discussed a year ago, was linked to former minister Ngodila who used to lobby interests in third world countries to the prejudice of the economic interests of the republic. Ngodila had been dismissed and a criminal case had been opened against him.
A few Sea Kings painted in camouflage colors flew across the screen, then the credits came and an advertisement began.
My sleepiness had vanished. I stood up and saw in the mirror, hanging opposite me, the reflection of a very surprised man…
The second day failed to bring the answers I was looking for. On the contrary, there were even more questions. No, I did spend half a day fiddling with the servers, but curiosity gnawed at me from the inside, like the larvae of the parasitoid wasp eats the caterpillar. I brewed myself some coffee and got into the databases – for the first time ever using my level of access for something that was not work.
I got really interested in the whole story of the helicopters. If I understood it all correctly, there was an ugly scheme showing up. It seemed the agency had been tracking private information about a specific commercial deal in order to use it in the interests of a large American company.
I won’t say my guesses were confirmed one hundred per cent, but after studying the tagged documents it became clear that the NSA doesn’t only work on issues of national security but regularly acquires purely commercial information – in other words commercial espionage.
At the same time, I discovered that our programs are constantly holding at gunpoint the governments of a number of states and this surveillance has been taking place for decades.
Among the countries in which leaders, politicians, ministers, establishments and even ordinary citizens were under permanent wiretapping were Brazil, India, and the UAE, not to mention America’s bugbear countries Russia, China and Iran.
The agency also spied on allies of the United States, including the UK and Germany and Saudi Arabia and Israel. This has come as a shocking revelation for many European politicians, but I remember that back then it didn’t touch me in the least – since nobody had repealed the principle of ‘trust but verify’.
In the case of Russia and China, though not everything was going entirely smoothly. Here in cyberspace, real battles were booming soundlessly. Our programmers had managed, for example, to listen in on the temporary Russian president when he was at the G20 summit in London, while the transcripts of telephone calls and files of electronic correspondence of the Chinese prime minister occupied an archive of folders to a total volume of thirty-six gigabytes.
I tried to look at the contents of some files. At that moment I was motivated purely by curiosity. I was simply interested, for example, in what information the leaders of India and Iran exchanged on 11th September 2001. But a bitter disappointment awaited me. All I could see was a general catalogue. To gain access to the documents themselves or to the media, I had to send a request to the main office in Fort Meade. The data was collated on the server in Pretoria, each quarter was archived and sent to the central database.
This bureaucratised system had one very important up-side, that it completely eliminated the possibility of data leaks – unless of course the members of the head office wanted to organise this leak themselves.