Gavin had been told of the events in Indonesia and the tragic fallout of those events.
“What did Foley say?” Gavin asked, picking at his orange.
“She’s agreed to bring us into this informally.”
Jack squeezed his fists in satisfaction. “That’s great, Gerry. Thank you.”
Gavin Biery added, “It sounds like an interesting puzzle. But what do you mean, informally?”
“There are those at NSA and other places who know what our analysts have pulled off in the past.” When Gavin raised an eyebrow, Gerry clarified quickly, “Not just our analysts, our tech side as well. That thing that happened with China a few years back, specifically.”
Gavin nodded. “Yes, I sort of saved the world on that one, didn’t I?”
“You did,” Jack said quickly. “You saved us all. Gerry, you were saying?”
“Dan Murray is having a package of details sent over regarding the widespread intelligence leak that has come to light in the past couple of weeks. It should be on our server by now. You guys can see all the data they have on it. If you happen to find something, we’ll let Murray or Foley know.”
Gavin Biery said, “You told me about the thing involving the poor CIA officer in Minsk. But what’s the scope of the breach?”
“From what I heard from Mary Pat, at this point, nobody knows how deep and wide this goes. They are getting burned by new compromises every couple of days.”
Gavin asked, “Could this, in some way, be related to that thing the Chinese did a couple of years ago? Remember, they got onto JWICS.” Early in President Ryan’s latest term, Chinese computer hackers accessed intel from the U.S. intelligence community’s Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System. It had compromised communications between America’s spies and created a brief moment of panic around the IC. Fortunately for all, The Campus, led by MIT-trained genius Gavin Biery, had located the culprit of the hack and ended the crisis.
Gerry said, “That was the first question I asked. Mary Pat said this situation couldn’t possibly be related to that intrusion. This breach has compromised people at DoJ, the State Department, the U.S. Navy, and the CIA. Most of them are men and women with identities that would have no reason to be transmitted in JWICS comms.”
Jack said, “How could it just be one breach, then? All those branches and services you mentioned. They don’t pass classified intel on the same network. On top of that, those different networks have to be viewed in SCIFs.” A SCIF was a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secure location designated for the storage and processing of classified information.
Gavin said nothing, which was a surprise to Jack, because he always seemed to be ready with some sort of an answer. The man was brilliant, he was arguably the most important person in the entire Campus, and he’d be the first to let others know.
Gerry noticed Gavin looking off into space. “Gavin, is something wrong?”
“Just processing Ryan’s question. I’d like to look at the specs of this leak, or at least what the DoJ has managed to discern from the compromises you mentioned. Jack and I will put our heads together and try to work out how the intel was obtained. How many cases are we going to be looking at?”
“DoJ isn’t even certain of that. There is the Kincaid incident, plus the FBI officers who first responded to Jakarta in response to it, a CIA officer detained in Iran, and a U.S. Navy commander targeted with what looks like specific information, but it might not have been anything classified.”
Jack said, “So either three or four.”
“That they know of. These are the incidents that have come to light in the past couple of weeks, but there could have been others, or there yet might be more to this.”
As he said this, Gerry’s secretary’s voice came over his phone’s speaker. “Director Hendley? AG Murray for you.”
The director of The Campus knew the attorney general was one of the busiest people in the world this morning, so he snatched the phone off the cradle quickly. “Hi, Dan.”
Jack and Gavin looked on while Gerry listened to his caller for a few moments.
He said, “Yes, I saw it.” Then, “How certain are you?”
When he hung up the phone a minute later, he looked to the two men in front of him. “Sigonella, Italy, this morning. The terrorists had access to specific intelligence regarding their targets. Dan says this might be part of the same ongoing and unknown intelligence leak.”
Gavin mumbled, “The hits just keep on coming.”
“I guess we’d better get started,” Jack said.
Gerry looked at Jack now. “I know this is very personal to you, because of what happened after Jakarta the other day.”
Jack nodded. “It is personal. And that will help me focus on it. It won’t be a distraction to my work.”
Gerry looked him over a few seconds. “That’s all I wanted to hear. Thank you both. Let me know if you need anything at all from me. One call to Dan or Mary Pat or Jay, and I might be able to get you more information or resources.”
Hours later, Jack and Gavin were deeply engrossed in the intel sent over from DoJ on their secure laptops. They were seated on opposite sides of a long table in a third-floor conference room, and did little more than read through what was known about each incident and what had been done to date to find out how the information on the victims might have been obtained by bad actors.
Early on they decided to split their evaluation and analysis. Gavin would focus on the work that had been done in the countercyber realm, digging into the investigation to date on possible hacks or unauthorized data access that might involve all the compromised parties.
Jack, on the other hand, focused his attention on all non-cyber-related investigation avenues. Human spies, insider threats, unauthorized sharing of intelligence through friendly liaison relationships the U.S. intel community had with other nations, anything that might have been either accidental or deliberate that could have put these targeted men and women’s names out into the open.
As he read through the incidents again, Jack tried to figure out just what had to be known about each person involved in order to make them a target. He found this the more interesting part of the problem. It seemed to him that someone had worked very hard to tailor the intelligence to the targeting of these specific individuals.
The Scott Hagen incident was the first, and then a CIA NOC officer who had been arrested in Iran after entering the country.
The Iranians had claimed on state-run TV that they had proof the man’s name was Collier and that he had been in the American spy service for eleven years. The CIA had discerned, through sources and methods not shared in the files sent to The Campus, that the Iranians had used a fingerprint reader to determine Stuart Collier worked for the CIA.
This was curious to Ryan. He couldn’t imagine any accidental scenario where a CIA officer’s fingerprint was exposed in a way Iran might get hold of it.
As he and Gavin toiled through the afternoon, Jack sent some queries to analysts in-house, and Gavin reached out to some other personnel in his information technology section.
On Gavin’s side of the equation, he learned the work the NSA had done evaluating the chance that some classified network had been breached was preliminary; they’d been looking into this as a potential intelligence breach for only a few days, but so far they’d found no evidence of new, successful cyberattacks on the U.S. government that could have led to this information getting out.
The two men took a lunch break in the midafternoon. Gavin picked at a salad he’d brought from home, while Jack ate a grilled chicken sandwich ordered in from a nearby deli.