Chapter 4
Skip Ross received the report of ‘FriendWatch’ from the NSA like every Monday morning.
A Texan from Dallas, he had graduated in Law at the University of Texas during the aftermath of September 11th and he had chosen to give up a career as a lawyer to join civil service. His first assignment had been to serve as the legal manager of the team that developed ‘FaceFinder’, the system that took pictures of all foreigners entering the US and compared them in real time with the suspect image databases of all US security agencies. It was a big success and as soon as US allies heard about it, they had made a quiet but very persistent request to get it as well and now several versions were being used in at least half a dozen other countries.
Skip had insisted to use it to scan US citizens too, but the amount of data to be correlated first and the arrival of the Obama administration, put an end to these plans. The software was still checking all foreigners entering the US but required a legal warrant to be applied to US citizens without any criminal record.
He was now serving as deputy director of the Special Investigation Section of the Homeland Security in Washington, D.C.. His job was to lead the cooperation with the NSA for all the electronic intelligence that his colleagues at the Department of Defense were gathering, on matters that may affect US security.
The report he was reading was the reason for his last promotion. Back in 2007, when he was still the head of the New York Border Control Agency, he had persuaded the NSA to develop a software that would automatically scan all calls, mail and internet logs of every individual who worked in sensitive areas regarding border control.
The list initially contained all airport and port authority employees, US immigration and customs officers, and foreign embassy and consulate employees but quickly grew to include all those who were somehow connected to the travel and transportation business, among them airline reservation teams.
By 2009, Skip had identified the sayanim of the Mossad working in the sector but he decided it was not worth disrupting. Although sending information to a foreign secret service was against the law, Skip knew that this was not necessarily against US interests, and after all his system was not completely in line with the rules either.
So, instead, he decided to refine the software to get a better understanding of what and who the sayanim were after.
In many cases, he found they were tracking the same suspects, in other cases the request was a single check that did not allow further follow up. However, the case he had in front this morning was a long, repetitive pattern of queries that identified the target.
For some reason, the Mossad was tracking Sean Ewals, a young US citizen who visited Israel regularly and whose profile did not reveal anything suspicious.
He thought about the alternatives.
Either the Mossad was spying on Ewals or Ewals was working for them. In both cases, Skip should report his finding to FBI, which was in charge of the counterintelligence within the US.
Skip decided to do a full scan of Sean’s electronic correspondence, for which the Special Operations section of Homeland Security did not need any legal warrant. The holiday season was around the corner, and he would receive the analysis at the beginning of 2011, the year marking the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
He stopped, leaned back in his chair, and looked out of the window; allowing himself a quick appraisal for the last decade. He knew his country was safer now, and he had played an important role in it. He felt proud that he had earned the power to track his fellow citizens’ lives for the good of his great nation. There was no reason not to continue in this manner.
The report about Sean landed on his desk in mid-January. The graph highlighted his personal and business connections with different color codes. The man was a complete workaholic, without a private life except for his girlfriend in Singapore whom he regularly visited once a month. None of the connections belonged to any suspect, and this was a good sign, although more than a third of them were abroad and could be hiding secrets.
All the companies Sean was involved with looked spotless, also. A couple of them had some open litigations with the IRS, but after a quick look Skip saw it was only the Californian way of trying to hide income behind complex stock compensation schemes; just normal business.
The field of activity was much more interesting. All the companies Sean was investing in, were active in anti-aging drug research. Skip could hardly understand the report, however the summary was clear enough; all of these companies were working on a new generation of drugs that could extend average life span up to one hundred and twenty years.
The complete list counted twelve companies with a direct investment from Sean that, together with their subcontractors and business partners, added up to a total of fifty-two enterprises. Eighteen were located overseas, spread out between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.
There were only two Israeli companies, and according to the relationship graph they provided key components to the two core companies.
The Israelis had probably figured out what the whole deal was about and were now trying to get more information to launch a third company. The winner of this race was in to get huge financial rewards and political clout. And Skip knew that his job was to now make sure the winner would be a US company.
That was enough to push him to take action, so he immediately setup a meeting with the head of the operations service. He needed a detailed secret inspection of Sean’s house to make sure it was not already under surveillance. He did not go through the seven-hundred page appendix, missing the fact that there was no document dating before 2005.
The inspection was carried out in February, during one of Sean’s frequent trips abroad and it did not reveal anything abnormal. The house had not been bugged and it did not contain anything unusual except a set of unmarked drugs, in all likelihood the samples being produced at one of the companies. One box, with some pills inside and a T stamped over it, was kept in the bathroom and it looked like Sean was testing it on himself.
Meanwhile, ‘FriendWatch’ reports showed that the sayanim had been tracking every movement of Sean for the past three months and Skip was about to call him for a formal warning when he discovered that one of the known Mossad agents on the East Coast flew with him to Paris.
This completely threw Skip off track.
Maybe Sean was a spy or, worse, a traitor selling industrial secrets to Israel. He needed more time and information to come to a decision. For the moment he reclassified Sean’s case as a potential threat and put him on the highest level possible of electronic surveillance.
From now on, all his calls and mail would be recorded, analyzed, and stored, and his home discreetly searched at least once a month.