“They got it all?”
Jack's voice turned to acid. “Care to check the translation?”
“Go see Olson.”
“On the way.”
Forty minutes later, Ryan and Clark breezed into the outer office of Lieutenant General Ronald Olson, Director of the National Security Agency. Located at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Washington and Baltimore, it had the atmosphere of another Alcatraz, but without the pleasant view of San Francisco Bay. The main building was surrounded by a double fence patrolled by dogs at night — something even CIA didn't bother with, considering it overly theatrical — as physical evidence of their mania for security. NSA's job was to make and break ciphers, to record and interpret every bit of electronic noise on the planet. Jack left his driver reading a Newsweek as he strode into the top-floor office of the man who ran this particular outfit which was several times the size of CIA.
“Ron, you got one big problem.”
“What, exactly?”
Jack handed over the NIITAKA dispatch. “I've warned you about this.”
“When did this go out?”
“Seventy-two hours ago.”
“Out of Foggy Bottom, right?”
“Correct. It was read in Moscow precisely eight hours later.”
“Meaning that someone in State might have leaked it, and their embassy could have sent it over by satellite,” Olson said. “Or it could have leaked from a cipher clerk or any one of fifty foreign-service officers…”
“Or it could mean that they've broken the whole encoding system.”
“STRIPE is secure, Jack.”
“Ron, why haven't you just expanded TAPDANCE?”
“Get me the funding and I will.”
“This agent has warned us before that they've penetrated our cipher systems. They're reading our mail, Ron, and this is a pretty good piece of evidence.”
The General stood his ground. “It's equivocal and you know it.”
“Well, our guy is saying that he wants personal assurance from the Director that we haven't, don't, and will never use comm links to transmit his material. As proof of that necessity, he sends us this, which he got at some significant hazard to his own ass.” Jack paused. “How many people use this system?”
“STRIPE is exclusively for the State Department. Similar systems are used by the Defense Department. More or less the same machine, slightly different keying systems. The Navy especially likes it. It's very user-friendly,” Olson said.
“General, we've had the random-pad technology available for over three years. Your first version, TAPDANCE, used tape cassettes. We're moving over to CD-ROM. It works, it's easy to use. We'll have our systems up and running in another couple of weeks.”
“And you want us to copy it?”
“Looks sensible to me.”
“You know what my people will say if we copy a system from CIA?” Olson asked.
“God damn it! We stole the idea from you, remember?”
“Jack, we're working on something similar, easier to use, little bit more secure. There are problems, but my back-room boys are almost ready to try it out.”
Almost ready, Ryan thought. That means anywhere from three months to three years.
“General, I'm putting you on official notice. We have indications that your communications links are compromised.”
“And?”
“And I will make that report to Congress and the President as well.”
“It's much more likely that there's someone at State who leaked this. Further, it is possible that you're the victim of disinformation. What does this agent give us?” the NSA Director asked.
“Some very useful material — us and Japan.”
“But nothing on the Soviet Union?”
Jack hesitated before answering, but there was no question of Olson's loyalty. Or his intelligence. “Correct.”
“And you're saying that you're certain this isn't a false-flag operation? I repeat — certain?”
“You know better than that, Ron. What's certain in this business?”
“Before I request a couple hundred million dollars” worth of funding, I need something better than this. It's happened before, and we've done it, too — if the other side has something you can't break, get them to change it. Make it appear that they're penetrated.'
“That might have been true fifty years ago, but not anymore.”
“Repeat, I need better evidence before I go to see Trent. We can't slap something together as quickly as you can with MERCURY. We have to make thousands of the goddamned things. Supporting that is complex and costly as hell. I need hard evidence before I stick my neck out that far.”
“Fair enough, General. I've had my say.”
“Jack, we'll look into it. I have a tiger team that does that, and I'll have them examining the problem tomorrow morning. I appreciate your concern. We're friends, remember?”
“Sorry, Ron. Long hours.”
“Maybe you need some time off. You look tired.”
“That's what everybody tells me.”
Ryan's next stop was at the FBI.
“I heard,” Dan Murray said. “That bad?”
“I think so. Ron Olson isn't so sure.” Jack didn't have to explain. Of all the possible disasters for a government to face, short of war, none was worse than leaky communications links. Literally everything depended on secure methods of moving information from one place to another. Wars had been won and lost on the basis of a single message that had been leaked to the other side. One of America's most stunning foreign-policy coups, the Washington Naval Treaty, had been the direct result of the State Department's ability to read the cipher traffic between all of the participating diplomats and their governments. A government that had no secrets could not function.
“Well, there's the Walkers, Pelton, the others…” Murray observed. The KGB had been remarkably successful at recruiting people within the American communications agencies. Cipher clerks held the most sensitive jobs in the embassies, but were so poorly paid and regarded that they were still called “clerks,” not even “technicians.” Some resented that. Some resented it enough that they had decided that they could make money from what they knew. They all learned eventually that intelligence agencies pay poorly (except for CIA, which rewarded treason with real money), but by then it was always too late to turn back. From Walker the Russians had learned how American cipher machines were designed and how their keying systems worked. The basics of the cipher machines hadn't really changed all that much in the preceding ten years. Improved technology had made them more efficient and much more reliable than their stepping-switch and pin-disc ancestors, but they all worked on a mathematical area called Complexity Theory, which had been developed by telephone engineers sixty years earlier to predict the working of large switching systems. And the Russians had some of the best mathematical theorists in the world. It was believed by many that knowledge of the structure of cipher machines might enable a really clever mathematician to crack a whole system. Had some unknown Russian made a theoretical breakthrough? If so…
“We have to assume there are more we haven't caught. Add that to their technical expertise, and I'm really worried.”
“Doesn't affect the Bureau directly, thank God.” Most of the FBI encrypted communications were voice links, and though they could be broken, the data recovered was both too time-sensitive and further disguised by the use of code-names and slang that mostly concealed what agents were up to. Besides which, the opposition had real limits on how many things they could examine.
“Can you have your people do some scratching around?”
“Oh, yeah. You're going up the chain on this?”
“I think I have to, Dan.”
