“So,” the President said, “prior to two years ago, we outsourced the safekeeping of the personnel records on every person seeking classified access who ever worked in government service.”
“Yes, Mr. President. Again, OPM stopped working with the firm and we fined them for breach of contract.”
“So the barn door has been shut, but the horses have run off to China.”
“Uh . . . I don’t know about China. Perhaps it was someone else.”
“Pardon my bias. Last time, it was China.”
“It was, indeed. It was found that the OPM did not even maintain a list of which servers, databases, and devices were in its inventory, so it was impossible to protect the data held there.
“Whoever accessed the OPM files, it was during the time the Indian company was working on internal security at the network. The credentials of a contract employee with the correct access were duplicated and these creds were used to create a new user with full admin access.”
Ryan drummed his fingers on the table. “This cache of files has information on everyone who has ever sought classified status. Everyone?”
“Well . . . since, as I said, 1984 to four years ago.”
“I’m no computer expert, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t have this network in ’84.”
“No, Mr. President. At that time this was all on microfiche. In a modernization plan in the nineties, all the microfiche from 1984 on was transferred to the computer files.”
“Terrific.” Ryan thought for a second. “I guess I’m in there.”
The briefer, who was already terrified, went white. “Ah . . . I don’t know. I didn’t look to see if any individuals—”
Ryan said, “It would have been a couple years before, but of course other checks were done on me as I moved up through the ranks at the Agency and then in the executive branch.”
The doctor suddenly seemed slightly more relaxed. “This is just the SF-86 form, along with fingerprints, so if you filled yours out prior, you would not be in there.”
Ryan shrugged. It didn’t really matter, this was one of the largest disasters he’d ever heard of. He looked at the nervous man down the table from him. “Dr. Banks, you aren’t on trial here. I’m royally pissed about all this, but I know better than to shoot the messenger.” He leaned forward a little. “You tend to get less clear messages that way.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Banks said, but he didn’t seem any more at ease. He added, “We have incident-response teams working around the clock to identify who has taken this information, exactly when, and exactly how. We do feel it was a one-time data dump, and we have rescinded all admin access of the system until each person involved can be revetted, but clearly damage has been done in this case.”
Ryan turned to Andy Zilko. “Andy, I’ve seen the numbers. We’ve spent five billion on the National Cybersecurity Protection System to avoid just this sort of event. After the Chinese got into our intelligence network a couple of years back, people who are paid to watch these things assured us it would not happen again.”
Zilko’s unease was as obvious as Dr. Banks’s. “Yes, sir. I can say we have made strides to improve our cyberprotection systems in the past four years.”
“What strides?”
Zilko thought for a moment. “Well . . . since we’re discussing the OPM, for example. The new in-house personnel are in the process of making the security there more robust, but they haven’t been moving as fast as we would have liked.”
Ryan closed his eyes in utter frustration. The majority of his life had involved, in one form or another, dealing with government bureaucracies. He always thought he couldn’t be fazed, no matter the bureaucratic malfeasance. And he was always finding himself to be wrong on this point.
“How many currently holding clearance have been compromised?”
Zilko turned to Banks, who answered the question. “Right now, Mr. President, there are just over four and a half million people holding security clearances. The vast majority of these people would have filled out an SF-86 before the system was breached. I think we could be looking at a number of around four million men and women.”
Ryan said, “More than four million current government employees or contractors could be at risk from this breach. Military officers, elected officials, technical experts, those tasked with guarding our nuclear stockpiles.”
Dr. Banks said, “I’m afraid it is every bit as bad as that, Mr. President. The SF-86 won’t out someone as a CIA employee directly, in fact the CIA uses their own system for classified applications, but many if not most CIA officers had to fill out an SF-86 for their cover job, like working in an embassy with the State Department, or else they were former military or law enforcement with classified access, in which case they would be in there anyway. A top-flight data miner and ID intelligence specialist can look for certain anomalies to see things that don’t add up. You have a guy working in the embassy in Madrid, for example, who is a covered CIA officer. He works as a consular officer, but his SF-86 shows him spending eight years in Naval Intelligence, or serving as an Army Ranger or Green Beret. An interested party is going to determine pretty quickly that this guy is an Agency case officer, and not over in Madrid stamping passports.”
Ryan rubbed his nose under his glasses. “And now it appears Musa al-Matari has this information, as well as others. This is a complete nightmare. Even if we stop al-Matari and all his cell members, even if this misuse of the OPM data is halted, we can never be sure who has all this information that leaked out.”
“That is unfortunately correct, Mr. President.”
Ryan said, “We need the best in the business telling us how to mitigate this damn disaster. We owe that to the people who work for us or have worked for us in the past. That’s for tomorrow. For today . . . today we find the people using the intelligence to target our people, and we stop them.
“Mary Pat, we need to develop a full-spectrum counterintelligence plan to deal with this. All government employees and contractors are, at this point, potential human targets,” Ryan said. “It’s been made abundantly clear to a few of them. General Caldwell, for example. This needs to be communicated to every last one of those affected. Now.”
“Under way as we speak, Mr. President. As DNI, I can take the lead on this and integrate everyone we need to integrate to get the word out.”
DHS Secretary Zilko raised his hand. “Mr. President. I do want to stress that the breach happened during the previous administration.”
Ryan felt the boiling heat on his face, but he didn’t let his anger overtake him. He pointed at Zilko. “I don’t ever want to hear you say that again about this or any other crisis. We aren’t here to cover our asses. We’re here to serve the United States of America. For four damn years people in this administration have known that a company in India had access to sensitive material. Just because we didn’t know they took it is no reason to pat ourselves on the back. Just because you didn’t know personally, people you are responsible for did. And just because I didn’t know personally, I am responsible for you.”
Zilko looked away. Softly he said, “Of course, Mr. President.”
Ryan moved his pointed finger around the room. Everyone, even Mary Pat and Dan, got the finger and the intense eyes that came with it. “Everyone in here needs to take responsibility for finding our way out of this debacle. We need to accept that we bear significant responsibility for these deaths and injuries, because despite any excuses we might think we have, this all happened on our watch. Maybe not the initial breach, but the fallout from it.
“Now . . . let me explain what is going to happen. We will find Musa al-Matari, we will discover who was responsible for the breach and take them off the game board, and only then, when this is over, I will ask for a stack of resignation letters on my desk. Ladies and gentlemen, we owed our bravest citizens better than we gave them. We’ll f
ix it going forward, but I want a full accounting of the past.”
Ryan stood and stormed out of the room, as angry as he’d ever been in his life. America was endangered by innumerable outside threats. He had long ago learned to accept this. But he’d never been able to come to terms with the amount of self-inflicted damage the nation incurred because of poor job performance and those who did not take threats seriously.
40
Gavin Biery had been given access to the complete hard drive of Vadim Rechkov’s computer, via a two-party authenticated link sent to him by a DoJ computer forensics investigator, on orders from Attorney General Dan Murray. When Gavin clicked on the link and entered the password proffered by his contact at the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, he opened a window on one of his laptops that perfectly mirrored Rechkov’s own computer. It had been set up this way so various DoJ analysts, FBI agents, the NSA, and other personnel involved with the federal investigation into the Rechkov attack on Naval Commander Scott Hagen could look at the data at the same time from multiple nodes.
A quick look at Rechkov’s computer’s history had shown Gavin that the young man was a habitual visitor of Reddit, a website of message boards where different links from around the Web were shared and discussed and voted on. A key feature of the site was that thriving niche communities of people with similar interests formed in very specific subreddits, each its own discussion forum with its own discussion topic. The complete website history of Rechkov wasn’t available from looking at his hard drive; Gavin could look back only a few weeks into the man’s online past, but he saw Rechkov had visited Reddit some 160 times in just that period.
Gavin scanned back to the earliest date in the time window that fell after Rechkov’s history appeared on the computer and before he would have left on his cross-country drive to attempt the assassination of Scott Hagen. He clicked on one of Rechkov’s Reddit sessions to find his username, and then he used another laptop to log in to the same subreddit online, using a profile he’d created to navigate around. He then typed in Rechkov’s username, TheSlavnyKid.
Simply by typing in this handle and clicking on “Overview” he could see every subreddit that Vadim Rechkov had contributed to for the eight years he had been a member of the website.
Eight years, Gavin noted. The Russian had been surfing these discussion groups since he was fifteen.
—
Jack returned to the office, showered, and changed into casual attire. When he entered the conference room he had been sharing with Gavin, the older man showed him what he had been doing. The two men sat together while Gavin navigated around Rechkov’s entire Reddit history. The young Russian had visited hundreds of subreddits over the years, involving very specific matters related to obtaining a student visa in the United States, jobs in the technology industry, jobs in computer science, money problems, and then, recently and of particular interest to Gavin and Jack, last year’s battle of the Baltic.
Even this one subreddit had nearly 2,900 posts in all, and nearly 500 post interactions from Vadim Rechkov, aka TheSlavnyKid, himself.
Jack said, “That’s a lot for us to go through, but the attack on Hagen was weeks ago. Surely to God the DoJ investigators are all over this by now.”
Gavin said, “A special court order is needed to go through a suspect’s social media, and it has to be done a certain way so as not to abuse the civil rights of any innocents he was in communication with. I’d say DoJ techs have looked into some of these pages here, but they wouldn’t have dug down deep into the other user profiles like you and I are going to do.”
Jack said, “You think he might have used this vector to make initial contact with whoever offered up the intel on Scott Hagen?”
Gavin said, “I’ve spent the past hour looking through his website history, and I can say this: Unless the entity who breached the OPM just happened to be a personal friend of Vadim Rechkov’s, which I see as very unlikely, then it’s a good bet Rechkov was approached through Reddit, specifically through this five-month-long string of posts about the Baltic. He didn’t interact with anyone else on the subject online that I can see. How about you start going through his conversations here, and I’m going to keep looking through his hard drive to see if I can find anything else that might be relevant?”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “So I read five hundred or so posts, write down the usernames of everyone he came in contact with, and look for clues that someone was offering him intel about killing Hagen. Is that it?”
Gavin shrugged. “You’re an analyst. Analyze.”
“Right.”
Jack started with Rechkov’s first offering in the subreddit discussion about the Baltic conflict. Under the username TheSlavnyKid, he wrote a diatribe of more than 2,500 words that claimed his brother Stepan was one of the victims of the illegal American naval attack on the Russian submarine Kazan, which had come to the Baltic only to defend Kaliningrad from NATO aggression. The post was an angry screed against America, to be sure, but Jack found the writing itself to be lucid and the young man’s conclusions thought-out, even relatively convincing. Not to Jack, he was positive his father had done what needed to be done in the Baltic, but at least to anyone reading it whose mind wasn’t already made up on the matter of who was at fault during Russia’s attack into Lithuania from Kaliningrad and Belarus.
Rechkov wasn’t a native English speaker, but he conveyed his message well. Jack could feel the agony in the words of the twenty-three-year-old Russian studying in America, the very nation he blamed for his brother’s death. He talked at length about his relationship with his older brother, their love of fishing in the lakes and streams in their rural home near Slavny, and also his brother’s complete lack of interest in politics and international affairs.
Stepan died doing his job. He didn’t start the fight and had no personal beef with America at all. Therefore, Vadim Rechkov held America responsible for his brother Stepan’s murder.
Jack could have argued back that the thousands of men and women killed by Russian sea, air, and land forces during the Baltic War sure as hell didn’t start the fight, either, but arguing with a grieving young man would have been senseless.
And anyway, Vadim had died in a Mexican restaurant in New Jersey.
What Jack did not see in this first lengthy post was any personal vow that Vadim Rechkov would exact retribution for his brother’s death on anyone, much less the commander of the USS James Greer. No, although Vadim Rechkov was very clearly angry, more than anything, he seemed inconsolably sad.
Jack took the time to glance at the dozens of comments below this initial post by Rechkov; he read expressions of sympathy, expressions of agreement with the sentiments voiced against the USA, as well as posts from a significant number of those who said Stepan Rechkov got what he deserved for fighting for an evil power. There were even a few trolls who hoped Vadim’s dead brother suffered mightily before his death.
Jack knew well that people with poor character, when allowed to hide behind a pseudonym and shout in others’ faces without showing their own, had a tendency to be jackasses.
Next he moved to TheSlavnyKid’s responses to individual threads of the conversation; he continued the discussions, the arguments, and echoed the angry sentiments of others.
But as time went on, in further postings under the same subreddit, Jack noticed a change in the writing, a deepening of the invective, a militancy that wasn’t there in posts written just weeks earlier.
Jack realized he was watching someone descend into a state of absolute rage, perhaps even into the early throes of madness, consumed by anger and impotence. He talked about failing out of school, drinking himself to sleep, moving from his nice apartment to a dump when he could no longer make rent, and he placed blame for everything back to an ASROC missile that was fired at 3:23 a.m. local time from the deck of the USS James Greer.
The more Jack re
ad, the more weeks that passed in the life of this subreddit, the more obvious it was that the life of Vadim Rechkov was falling apart.
And then it happened. Some three and a half months after his first posting in the subreddit, which itself came just ten days after the sinking of the Russian submarine, Vadim Rechkov declared in a post that he would gladly give his own life for the chance to end the life of the man or woman who pressed the button to fire the weapons that sank his brother’s vessel.
Jack presumed the person who fired the missile was likely some junior officer or perhaps an enlisted sailor; surely Commander Hagen wasn’t the one who fired the shot itself, but of key importance was that Rechkov had expressed his wish to personally kill someone on board the Greer.
Immediately Jack wrote down the date of the post, suspecting that the entity he was looking for, the person or persons who somehow had reached out to Rechkov with the intel that led him across the U.S. to a Mexican restaurant in New Jersey, must have read that post and tuned into Rechkov at that time.
There were dozens of commenters on the post itself, some cheering him on, others warning him off, but Jack couldn’t discern any particular importance from any of the commenters. Plus, there was always the chance someone reached out to TheSlavnyKid exclusively via a private message on Reddit that Jack had no way of discovering.
Jack decided to take a break. He stood up from his laptop and headed to the kitchen for some coffee, promising Gavin he’d bring him back a fresh cup as well.
Spending too much time in the online life of a man going mad was depressing as hell.
41
President Jack Ryan stood before a rough room. He gave a lot of press conferences, compared with most other presidents, and was comfortable with even the toughest questions, but today he felt such a visceral anger inside him at the attacks going on in the country that he fought hard to temper his comments, to control his mood, and to craft his answers in ways that would show him in control and serving as a calm, reasonable steward over the investigation to capture Abu Musa al-Matari and his fellow terrorists.