Holmes was speaking to a full table, including the NSA officials Lana had sat with just yesterday. Ronald Wilkes, last seen by her in his tennis whites, now sported a dark suit that managed to look neatly pressed after his all-nighter at the Capitol; he had been liaising with congressional intelligence committees. With a declaration of war in the offing, Wilkes was probably taking furious heat from senators and congressmen eager for an identifiable enemy to crush.
Joshua Tenon, of the salt-and-pepper beard, sat directly across from her. His expertise on international energy matters had justified his presence at almost every meeting Lana had ever attended at NSA.
Next to Lana, veteran policy analyst Teresa McGivern worked her laptop with one hand, a skill that Lana had never seen executed with such élan. McGivern would not be retiring anytime soon, no matter her plans of little more than thirty hours ago.
The gray-haired McGivern had an assistant, a younger handsome man whose name escaped Lana, much to her chagrin. NSA was not a name tag kind of place.
“I’d like to dispose with the ‘red meat’ first,” Holmes said, a blunt acknowledgment that many pundits and so-called opinion makers would be screaming for retaliation against the country’s traditional foes, even if that mind-set harked back to a Cold War era already eclipsed by far more wrenching events.
Just as dangerous, Lana thought, was a reflexive bellicosity toward certain nations in the Middle East.
“If we’re in housekeeping mode,” McGivern said, “I think it’s incumbent upon us to put aside any notions of Chinese responsibility.” Tenon moved to speak, but she put up her hand to quiet him. “Yes, I know they drew up the drawbridge right away, but seriously, what else would we expect them to do? If we had that kind of capability over all the computer systems in this country, we would pull the damn drawbridge up, too. We’d do it preemptively to protect ourselves from the fallout. That’s all the Chinese did. Furthermore, they’re not going to destroy an economy on which they are highly dependent for their own domestic stability, and they’re not going to destroy a currency when they own a trillion dollars of it. I can’t imagine what the exchange rate is going to be on the U.S. dollar, but the Chinese are going to get clobbered on their dollar holdings. No, they did not cut off their nose to spite their face.”
Spoken with the crisp eloquence for which McGivern was long regarded. Her last comment might even have elicited a chuckle or two at any other time. But this was war, declared or not.
“But what about ‘GhostNet’?” Lana asked pointedly. “Look at what they were caught doing with that operation.”
She respected McGivern, but Canadian intelligence had found that the Chinese had taken over 1,300 computers in the embassies of a number of countries worldwide, including their own and the U.S.’s. What was extraordinary was the engineering that allowed Chinese hackers to remotely turn on cameras and microphones in the hardware of those computers without signaling those actions to the actual users. Then the hackers had the images and sound sent back to servers in China. The targets of GhostNet were offices working with nongovernmental organizations dealing with Tibet.
Lana wasn’t through: “The same year — and this is what’s so directly relevant — we know that Chinese hackers penetrated the U.S. power grid and left behind tools that could have brought it down.”
“Those were cleared out,” Tenon said, pulling on his beard. Nervous habit.
“Yes, and maybe newer and more sophisticated versions took their place and then took down the country,” Lana volleyed. “Look at how much China could benefit if we pulled out of the Pacific theater.”
“It’s a given,” McGivern retorted, “that they would have tried to penetrate our grid with better devices, and that they would benefit if we were foolish enough to withdraw from our bases. But it still doesn’t explain why they would so profoundly harm their own interests. And let me remind everyone that the penetration of our grid was all about keeping us on the sidelines in their squabble over the Spratlys.”
Numerous small islands lay between Vietnam and the Philippines, some of which were claimed by both of those countries and China, as well as other nations. The region of the South China Sea contained the world’s fourth-largest natural gas deposits; a critical trade route from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, through which most of the world’s oil was shipped; and also some of the largest stocks of fish left on Earth.
McGivern was stating that the Chinese grid penetrations were a subtle means of blackmailing the U.S. into standing aside as China had its big beef with Vietnam and the Philippines.
“The Chinese even hacked President Obama’s campaign material,” Ronald Wilkes chimed in, “so maybe taking them off the table isn’t such a good idea. Ideology can trump economic concerns.”
“Speaking of ideological blindness, just look at North Korea,” a grizzled analyst said, at about two o’clock from where Lana sat. “Is it mere coincidence that they hacked those classified hazardous chemical sites, and now we’re seeing chlorine releases in New Jersey and Pennsylvania?”
“I sincerely hope it’s not the North Koreans,” Holmes said to nods around the table. Everyone in the SCIF understood that if the trail led to the North Koreans, a huge kinetic response was all but inevitable. Such an attack would almost certainly result in the North Koreans unleashing thousands of rockets that they had trained on Seoul, obliterating the city and most of its ten million inhabitants. That, in turn, would surely set off a new Korean war — or a new chapter of the old one, in the view of many Asia experts — no doubt bringing the Chinese back into the conflict. The dominoes clacked almost audibly in the minds of everyone present.
“Let’s not disregard China, but let’s look at Russia, another traditional… rival,” Holmes said diplomatically.
“They’re perfectly capable of doing this to us,” Lana volunteered.
“They certainly are,” McGivern echoed.
Russia’s FSB, Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation, might even be NSA’s equal. The Russians ran what NSA officials conceded was one of the best hacker schools in the world. Its graduates had left their own cybertrail across U.S. intelligence. NSA had hounded the Russian hackers closely — sometimes, alas, only after the horse was out of the barn.
“SIPRNet, anyone?” the young male aide to McGivern asked.
Others, including Lana, groaned at the allusion to Russian penetration of the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, a U.S. Defense Department and State Department interconnected computer network for classified information. Russian hackers had engineered spyware that was downloaded onto thumb drives, unbeknownst, of course, to their users. Once those drives were inserted into SIPRNet computers, the security of the entire system was greatly compromised. Within hours, the Russians had infected thousands of high-level and supposedly secret U.S. military computers in a number of nations, including Afghanistan and Iraq.
“So we know the Russians have superb abilities,” Lana went on, “and we know they try to cover up their hacking any way they can.”
She was referring to the country’s extensive history of attempting to disguise its hacking by claiming the cyberassaults that originated on its soil were done by “patriotic citizens” who supposedly carried out the highly sophisticated and coordinated attacks on their own. Patent nonsense.
Those “citizens,” usually on the payroll of the Russian security agencies, were known to have launched “distributed denial of service attacks,” DDoS, on a number of former Soviet-era republics that had proved too feisty for their minders in Moscow. DDoS attacks overloaded servers in those countries, which denied service to their users, or slowed down the services so severely that they became, for all intents and purposes, nonfunctional.