picked up. I left messages for him to call me, saying it was urgent. I left the same message at his home and office. So far, I haven't heard from him. Meanwhile, Mike and I checked with the other intel departments. The president's announcement was news to each of them. Only one of them was involved in this cooperative effort with the United Nations.'
'The National Security Agency,' Hood said.
Herbert nodded.
'Which means Mr. Fenwick must have sold the president some bill of goods to convince him they could handle this operation solo.'
Herbert was correct, though in one way the National Security Agency would have been the perfect agency to interface with new intelligence partners. The primary functions of the NSA are in the areas of cryptology and both protecting and collecting signals intelligence. Unlike the CIA and the State Department, the NSA is not authorized to maintain undercover personnel on foreign soil. Thus, they do not generate the kind of knee-jerk paranoia that would make foreign governments nervous about cooperating with them. If the White House was looking for an intel group to pair with the United Nations, the NSA was it. What was surprising, though, was that the president didn't brief the other agencies.
And he should have at least notified Senator Fox. The Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee is directly responsible for approving programs of counter proliferation counterterrorism, counternarcotics, counterintelligence, and covert activities abroad. What the president had proposed certainly fell under their jurisdiction.
But because the NSA does operate independently, and in very specific areas, it's also the least-equipped to organize and oversee a massive undertaking of the kind described by the president. That was the reason Hood didn't believe Lawrence when he announced the initiative at the dinner. It was why a large part of him still didn't believe it.
'Did you talk to Don Roedner about this?' Hood asked. Roedner was the Deputy National Security Adviser, second in command to Fenwick.
'He's with Fenwick, and I couldn't get him on the phone either,' Herbert told him.
'But I did talk to Assistant Deputy National Security Adviser Al Gibbons.
And this is where things get a little weirder. Gibbons said that he was present at an NSA meeting on Sunday afternoon where Fenwick didn't mention a goddamn thing about a cooperative intelligence effort with other nations.'
'Was the president at that meeting?'
'No,' Herbert said.
'But just a few hours later, Penwick called the president and apparently told him that they had an intelligence deal with several foreign governments,' Hood said.
Herbert nodded.
Hood considered that. It was possible that the UN initiative was on a need-to-know basis and that Gibbons wasn't part of that loop. Or maybe there was a bureaucratic struggle between different divisions of the NSA.
That wouldn't have been unprecedented. When Hood first came to Op-Center, he studied the pair of 1997 reports that had effectively authorized the creation of Op- Center. Report 105-24 issued by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and 105-135 published by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence-the two arms of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee--both proclaimed that the intelligence community was extremely top-heavy with 'intramural struggles, waste, and uninformed personnel lacking depth, breadth, and expertise in political, military, and economic analysis,' as the SIC report summed it up. Congressional reports didn't get much rougher than that.
When Op-Center was chartered by act of Congress, Hood's mandate had been to hire the best and the brightest while the CIA and other intelligence groups worked on cleaning house. But the current situation was unusual, even by intelligence community standards, if the NSA's senior staff didn't know what was going on.
'This whole thing just doesn't make sense,' Herbert said.
'Between Op-Center and the CIA, we already have official cooperative intelligence plans with twenty-seven different nations. We have intelligence relationships with eleven other governments unofficially, through connections with high-ranking officials. Military intelligence has their hands in seven other nations. Whoever talked the president into this wants their own discreet, dedicated intelligence line for a reason.'
'Either that, or they wanted to embarrass him,' Hood said.
'What do you mean?'
'Sell him a project, tell him it's been cleared with other agencies and foreign governments, and then have him make a big public stumble.'
'Why?'
'I don't know,' Hood said.
He didn't, but he didn't like where this was leading him. Op-Center had once run a psyops game called Alternate Reality on how to make Saddam Hussein so paranoid that he would turn on his most trusted advisers.
What if a foreign government were doing something like that to the president?
It was a far-fetched idea, but so was the KGB killing a dissident by poking him with a poisoned umbrella, and the CIA attempting to slip Fidel Castro a poison cigar.
Yet these things had happened.
Then there was another option he didn't want to consider:
that it wasn't a foreign government but our own.
It was possible.
