3 posts tagged “espionage”
You may remember Richard A. Clarke - Washington intelligence insider since the Reagan administration, broke with the Bush administration about the war on terror, wrote the bestselling memoir Against All Enemies. He followed it with a novel, The Scorpion's Gate; not surprisingly, a geopolitical Mideast thriller. Breakpoint is his second novel, and it's something different.
First, I had to get used to Clarke's writing. It's amateurish - stiff, simply drawn characters, dialogue that rings wrong. What keeps you reading is Clarke's insider knowledge, and the unexpected scenarios he keeps springing on you. The novel begins with a terrorist attack on America's internet capability. Seems there are ten little shacks on the Atlantic coast where fiber-optic cables come from Europe and enter our routers and switches, there's no or little security for them, and Clarke's not happy about that. When 7 of the ten go up in truck bombs, the FBI and Homeland Security go into action. Clarke has little confidence in these organizations - "the Keystone Kops... stumbling all over themselves as usual" - and makes his heroes outsider investigators for a Special Projects division in the Intelligence Analysis Center, a small, agile unit instead of a bumbling bureaucracy. So far, so good, if run of the mill. Things begin to get weird, though, when one investigator talks to a scientist, who begins discussing her work in transhumanism.
Breakpoint, which is set five years from now, has one foot firmly set in science fiction, and has more in common with William Gibson or Bruce Sterling than Tom Clancy. Hackers pull off miraculous works of data mining. A Marine unit in the desert is testing exoskeletons to give soldiers superpowers. A global computer science project is on the verge of giving the internet something akin to sentience (shades of Neuromancer!) In an appendix, Clarke lays out what in the book is still theoretical, what's being worked on and what is close to being realized. Clarke's last government job, in the Bush administration, was Special Advisor to the President on Cybersecurity; once more, he knows what he's talking about.
My second book of the week is also on espionage. That's not particularly an interest of mine, I just happen to be on a kick.
Robert Baer spent over 20 years in the CIA, being posted to some of the world's most dangerous trouble spots. His adventures in Beirut, Iraq, Central Asia are eye-opening and cool, with the spycraft and derring-do that good spy fiction can provide. But Baer's larger purpose is to chart what he sees as the demise of his agency. Over the years, he's watched as the CIA has gradually abadoned the practice of running agents in the field, and making contacts with people on the ground. Spy satellites have replaced field agents. An institutional cowardice seems to have taken over, with a don't-rock-the-boat mentality overcoming the will to seek out evildoers. After years in overseas postings, Baer returns to a Washington desk job and uses his position to investigate how things got so bad. At the end, Baer notes that the war against terrorism is a task more suited for intelligence agencies than armies, but America has spent years letting its intelligence apparatus fall apart, and it would take decades to get it back up to speed. Assuming that anyone is trying to improve it.
This is not a book to make you feel good about America's direction. It especially made me consider a different side of the torture debate. Baer thinks that the best intelligence comes from people who have been recruited from the other side, people who want to help America because they believe in it. Making America a torture state seems especially designed to alienate people who might help us. If torture victims are one of sources of intelligence, soon they will be our only source of intelligence.
After this, I think I might want to try some spy fiction, maybe Baer's novel or the new John Le Carre. Or I may take my son's advice and read "Alex Rider: Stormbreaker."
The National Security Agency doesn't get much attention from the press, but according to Keefe, it's the largest intelligence agency in the world. It works in tandem with similar agencies in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, to listen in on the world's satellite, radio, telephone and other communications systems. Keefe walks us through what is known about this system, called Echelon, and introduces us to characters who've come into contact with it: ex-spies, whistleblowers, dogged investigative journalists, politicians who've found out only long after their administrations were over what their intelligence services were up to behind their back. Keeping in mind that the more a source is willing to talk about Echelon, the less they really know about it, Keefe gives a picture of a system far more reaching and embedded in everyday life than you'd imagine.
This is frightening in the Orwellian sense, of course, but also frightening in that the glut of information the NSA has to wade through gets larger and larger, and their ability to find the truly important nuggets that could help our country gets smaller. Maybe. The NSA may have computer programs that can efficiently wade through the mess, or they may not. We're in an age where the line between national security and personal privacy keeps getting redrawn, and this book walks that line.
