Читать книгу The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War - Thomas Mitchell M. - Страница 10

To: [Recipients withheld]

From: FRANK KOZA, Def Chief of Staff (Regional Targets)

CIV/NSA Sent on Jan 31 2003 0:16

Subject: Reflections of Iraq Debate/Votes at UN-RT Actions + Potential for Related Contributions

Importance: HIGH

Top Secret//COMINT//X1

All,

As you’ve likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how [to] membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq …

IT BEGAN IN the wee hours of the morning at the National Security Agency’s National Security Operations Center not all that far from Washington, DC, where Frank Koza, chief of the Regional Targets group, sat composing a highly secret message. Aside from the usual Intelspeak, his message was straightforward and to the point. It was addressed to his counterparts at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, England.

Koza’s e-mail was very much in keeping with the business of the NSA, an enterprise little understood by most of the American public, who are much more familiar with the CIA and the FBI, often in the news for questionable management and various commissions and omissions and, less often, for jobs well done. It is the NSA that seems the most obscure, most mysterious of the intelligence agencies.

By design, the NSA remains in the shadows, hidden behind a wall of security in Maryland. Its work is beyond top secret, beyond imagination. A city unto itself, it excludes the outside world and likely could survive comfortably if the rest of civilization vanished in the blink of an eye. It is unbuggable and impenetrable. It stores more secret information than all other hush-hush data collectors combined. Its technical capabilities are mind-boggling and imply that private international communication, by whatever means, is not private at all.

Koza’s addressee is similarly not as well known worldwide as its more glamorous sister agencies, MI5 and MI6, popularized by British fiction. GCHQ is infinitely more secret, with far greater resources than its intelligence siblings. To those knowledgeable about intelligence matters, GCHQ has an impressive significance by virtue of inheritance. Its predecessor was the historic Government Codes and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where the British broke the infamous German Enigma code during World War II. Now, five thousand staff on the GCHQ payroll speak and listen in 107 different languages every hour of every day. This morning, thousands of miles from Koza’s desk, one of them, Katharine Gun, would be reading in English.

Coincidentally, this same day, 31 January 2003, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, announced the selection of GCHQ veteran David Pepper to replace Sir Francis Richards as director of the agency. Pepper, with an impressive intelligence background, would assume his new position in April, just in time to inherit the Koza problem.

Also on this same day, then US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice would attend a highly secret and decidedly bizarre meeting in the Oval Office with George W. Bush and Tony Blair, where the topic of conversation would have much to do with what was now taking place at the NSA.

More than o ne reliable source concludes that the message from Koza was Rice’s inspiration. However, a former NSA officer puts his money on Vice President Dick Cheney, for whom desired ends and means for getting there are sometimes considered to be in conflict with the law. The view of unnamed US intelligence officers suggests a team inspiration from Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, along with George Tenet, then CIA chief, and USAF Gen. Michael Hayden, then NSA chief.

Seen as directly complicit in the 31 January fiasco, Hayden has been alleged in the past to be somewhat careless about complying with various laws governing surveillance of individuals. It is true that the four-star general has fiercely disputed such allegations. He has described the NSA’s lawyers as being careful about ensuring the lawfulness of the agency’s actions ‘out of a heartfelt, principled view that NSA operations had to be consistent with bedrock legal protections’.[1] And, later, that ‘Everything that the agency has done has been lawful.’[2]

That seems not to have been the case on 31 January 2003.

Hayden, who has spoken so definitively in defending the NSA’s compliance with the law, has spoken with equal conviction about other aspects of the secrecy business. One statement in particular, uniquely related to this story, seems especially disconcerting: ‘I’m not too uncomfortable with a society that makes its bogeymen secrecy and power … making secrecy and power the bogeymen of political culture, that’s not a bad society.’[3]

In the end, Frank Koza’s message sent from the agency headed by Hayden was all about secrecy and power, about using illegal means to gain power over a small group of suddenly important individuals and nations.

This very day a bogeyman, a monstrous American bogeyman, was about to saunter into Katharine Gun’s office and fire up her computer screen. The question was, what to do with him?