He didn’t even need to ask. She shook her head, saying, “I don’t think so.”
Not bad, he thought, for not having seen the results of the voice stress analysis.
“Meaning?” He wanted her to be completely clear.
“I don’t think he had a hand in it.”
NSA chief James Bolls would howl if he ever got a gander at this scene, but Donna had been right much more often than most of the higher-priced talent. She swore that she had developed her “BS detector,” as she put it delicately, by raising three daughters, all of whom hit their teens in the 1990s. “If you can decode an adolescent girl’s excuses and ‘stories,’ these guys become a piece of cake” was her explanation for her strange prowess.
“How do you figure the links to terrorists that they found on his laptop?” he asked her.
Links that on the face of it were powerfully persuasive. The cyberforensics squad had already uncovered communication with known Islamist officers in the Pakistan military and with various chieftains in the northwestern region of that country. About the only thing they hadn’t found yet were communiqués from the caves of Waziristan, like the burrow that had proved so hospitable to bin Laden at Tora Bora. But given the enormous sophistication of the attacks, Holmes was reasonably sure that they weren’t emanating from the medieval reaches of the planet’s most infamous redoubt.
“I don’t know, Bob.” Donna turned informal only when they were alone. “Except maybe he was right when he said the Chinese might try to frame him. Whatever the reason, I think he’s telling the truth.”
“I don’t see any Chinese hand in this attack,” Holmes said at last. “I agree with McGivern on that.” The gray-haired analyst had agreed to postpone her retirement at his request.
“We’re not talking about the attack per se,” Donna replied. “We’re talking about the Chinese exploiting an anticipated attack by planting evidence, in advance, against its enemies. We know they’re opportunists of the first order. You’ve said so yourself many times, whether it’s computers or cars or flat-screen TVs. So let’s look at it this way: What if the Chinese saw an attack on the U.S. coming, even just a strong possibility of it, and put the Islamist evidence on Mancur’s computer because they wanted him silenced? However they do that stuff.”
Holmes had to suppress a smile. Donna had a clear conceptual grasp of cybersecurity, and could handle all manner of office systems, but when it came to the bytes and packets of cyberspying, all she had was her golden gut.
“It’s possible,” Holmes allowed. “But it’s hard for me to accept that the Chinese would have bet on the come, so to speak, and done it with such success.”
“Well,” she said with a shrug, “they had a strong reason to frame Mancur, even if they didn’t launch the attack themselves.”
Donna was referring to Mancur’s contention that the Chinese were angry with him because of his vehement and outspoken opposition to the pipeline that would carry crude from the Canadian tar sands down to the Gulf Coast. The bulk of the Canadian oil wasn’t going to the U.S. but to China, to feed that country’s seemingly insatiable thirst for energy. It was now the world’s number-one emitter of carbon dioxide.
Donna went on: “The defense secretary himself said publicly that we could be looking at the Pearl Harbor of cyberwar, long before this ever happened. I’ll bet there were all kinds of skulduggery going on in the cybersphere.”
“This was no Pearl,” Holmes said. “This was a lot worse.”
But he couldn’t quarrel with Donna’s larger point: The secretary of defense had been very public about U.S. vulnerability to cyberattack. Holmes knew that all too well, because he had helped craft the statement the secretary delivered when he stepped in front of the cameras to alert the public and Congress. Everyone in the intelligence community had hoped the man’s words would provide a strong warning — and great impetus for strengthening American defenses against cyberattacks. In the end, though, Congress had sat on its hands, and the message proved more prophetic than powerful.
It was never pleasant being right about disastrous outcomes, and that had been confirmed, once again, this morning when a gaggle of congressmen called for the defense secretary’s dismissal.
“I suppose you could ask the Chinese about it when they stop by,” Donna said.
She wasn’t kidding. A Chinese delegation was actually heading to the White House to talk directly with the president. The Russians had booked some of his time as well.
The leadership of both countries had raced to assure the administration that they’d had nothing to do with the attack. China and Russia, independent of each other, had also assured the U.S. leadership that they had started investigations of their own to find the perpetrators.
Holmes believed both countries on both counts. Why wouldn’t they do all they could to eliminate such a maverick terrorist threat? Russia and China could also become targets of a rogue warrior. And both nations had large stakes in America’s welfare. That was especially true of China, which was the single-largest holder of U.S. dollars, and whose own economy, after blazing along for years on the strength of low wages, cheap exports, and currency manipulation, was starting to sputter. The last thing the Chinese wanted was the U.S. in its present, weakened state — or worse, if the plug were pulled for good. They already had lost hundreds of billions with the collapse of the dollar.
Russian willingness to help the U.S. stemmed, first, from not wanting to endure the enmity of the world’s foremost military power; even in its greatly weakened state, the U.S. arsenal was not to be trifled with. And second, Holmes knew the Russians did not want to see their ally Iran blamed for the attack; they would undoubtedly make the case for not moving against Iran when they had their meeting in the Oval Office.
Russia’s reasons for trying to keep the Iranians out of U.S. crosshairs were geopolitical in nature. The Great Bear and Iran shared a common interest in wanting to limit U.S. influence in Central Asia, and the two had formed a gas exporters’ organization to further their individual and mutual interests.
But a lot of U.S. fingers were pointing to Iran, particularly because in recent history it had been identified as the source of Shamoon, a crippling cyberattack on Aramco, the state-owned Saudi oil company that also happened to be the world’s most valuable firm. Iran’s Shamoon virus erased critical data on seventy-five percent of Aramco’s corporate PCs. That was an extraordinary amount of information, including spreadsheets, files, emails, and documents.
To add insult to considerable injury, the data was replaced with an image of a burning American flag, driving home a point widely held in the Middle East — that Saudi Arabia was little more than an American proxy.
The attack on Aramco was “a significant escalation of the cyberthreat,” in the defense secretary’s words at the time. Holmes was certain of their accuracy because he had also penned them.
Shamoon had been part of an escalating cyberwar between Iran and the U.S. that America had actually started when it launched Stuxnet, the worm that targeted Iranian centrifuges at a nuclear facility — and then squirmed past its target to infect millions of computers worldwide.
The U.S. also took aim at Iran with Flame, a virus that went after the Iranian oil industry. It forced Iran to shut off Internet connections to their Kharg Island oil terminal, through which eighty percent of that country’s oil exports flowed. Flame also smacked down Internet service to Iranian oil rigs and the country’s oil ministry itself, which wreaked all sorts of havoc pleasing to the U.S.