Gideon's Spies полностью

The decision to mount Operation Condor came when Frank Koza, a senior analyst in NSA, had sent his counterpart in GCHQ an e-mail asking for a surveillance “surge” against key members of the UN Security Council. Koza asked for “the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy makers an edge.” His request was marked “Top Secret/COMINT/XI.” The “XI” coding signified the request must never be declassified. It must stay Top Secret. However, a copy of the message somehow later found its way to GCHQ translator Katherine Gun. She passed it to an intermediary, who gave it to the British journalist Yvonne Ridley, who had achieved fame after being freed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and became a strong supporter of the antiwar movement. She, in turn, passed the memo to a journalist on London’s Observer. Gun was arrested under Britain’s Official Secrets Act; later, the case was dropped.

On that February day, the focus in GCHQ, NSA, MI6, and the CIA was spying on Aznar. The operation would be run out of Menwith Hill using NSA’s ECHELON system’s program called the Dictionary: its computers can target specific telephone numbers, words, and voiceprints, and includes “Tempest,” which deciphers individual voices from laser beams directed at windows to read vibrations generated by people speaking. A segment of Aznar’s voice was fed into the Dictionary computers, which were programmed to track every word Aznar and his key officials spoke in relation to Iraq anywhere in the world. Information obtained was downloaded to the Menwith Hill computers. Interlinked banks of computers decoded and analyzed the data and fed it down a secure line to GCHQ, where the material was turned into transcripts marked “Highly Classified.” These were then sent to John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee. From there they were hand carried the short distance to Downing Street in buff-coloured files each with the bold Cross of Saint George on their covers, an open indication of Scarlett’s patriotism. To reach Blair, the intelligence supremo had to frequently step over the toys of Leo, the prime minister’s youngest son, who often used the floor of Downing Street as a playground. Copies were sent via NSA to George Bush. For both politicians they became the prime source for judging the mood of Aznar and his officials. After the war it emerged that Aznar had remained consistent in his support. It would cost him his post as prime minister in Spain’s next election.

In the closing weeks of 2005, Meir Dagan opened a staff meeting with what Sergei Kondrashov, a retired KGB chief of counterintelligence, had said, that if the KGB had been forced to chose between what a Russian mole in the U.S. administration reported and a subscription to The New York Times, he would believe the newspaper any day. Dagan reminded them that until Porter Goss became the CIA director, the agency evaluated intelligence reports on a simple scale: ABCD for the reliability of the source and 1234 for how accurate the information was. A1 meant the source was unchallengeable and the information unquestioningly true. B2 indicated the source was good, and the intelligence was very probably true. Category D4 meant the source was totally unreliable and the information demonstrably false. Dagan had paused and said that Goss had spoken to a number of his deputy directors who admitted they had rarely seen A1 and only a small number of D4s. The great majority of reports crossing their desks were designated C3—the source had been reliable in the past and so his information was possibly true. Dagan had looked around the conference table and said that logically this meant a usually reliable source was sometimes also unreliable and the information described as possibly true could just as well be untrue. He reminded them that for Mossad good intelligence was always required to contain the caveat as Saint Paul glimpsed heaven—“through a glass, darkly.” It was an indication of how Mossad must continue to face threats as the world became a global village and the demands made on an intelligence service grew daily. Gone were the clear divisions between the Soviet Union and the West. Terrorism, international money laundering, ruthless dictators, and ethnic conflicts had all changed the traditional role of spying and counterintelligence. In the desperate hunt for information to combat the new targets, intelligence services had been forced to operate in unfamiliar areas.