“Your clients?” I asked.
That’s when he said, “Most of my work is on Saudi accounts.”
After a few minutes, I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and on the way there I leaned over to tell the CO who worked finance targets what I’d learned. After a necessarily too-long interval “fixing my hair,” or texting Lindsay in front of the bathroom mirror, I returned to find the CO sitting in my chair. I waved to my new Saudi friend before sitting down beside the CO’s discarded, smoky-eyed date. Rather than feeling bad, I felt like I’d really earned the Pavés de Genève that were passed around for dessert. My job was done.
The next day, the CO, whom I’ll call Cal, heaped me with praise and thanked me effusively. COs are promoted or passed over based primarily on how effective they are at recruiting assets with access to information on matters substantial enough to be formally reported back to headquarters, and given Saudi Arabia’s suspected involvement in financing terror, Cal felt under tremendous pressure to cultivate a qualifying source. I was sure that in no time at all our fellow party guest would be getting a second paycheck from the agency.
That was not quite how it worked out, however. Despite Cal’s regular forays with the banker to strip clubs and bars, the banker wasn’t warming up to him—at least not to the point where a pitch could be made—and Cal was getting impatient.
After a month of failures, Cal was so frustrated that he took the banker out drinking and got him absolutely plastered. Then he pressured the guy to drive home drunk instead of taking a cab. Before the guy had even left the last bar of the night, Cal was calling the make and plate number of his car to the Geneva police, who not fifteen minutes later arrested him for driving under the influence. The banker faced an enormous fine, since in Switzerland fines aren’t flat sums but based on a percentage of income, and his driver’s license was suspended for three months—a stretch of time that Cal would spend, as a truly wonderful friend with a fake-guilty conscience, driving the guy back and forth between his home and work, daily, so that the guy could “keep his office from finding out.” When the fine was levied, causing his friend cash-flow problems, Cal was ready with a loan. The banker had become dependent, the dream of every CO.
There was only one hitch: when Cal finally made the pitch, the banker turned him down. He was furious, having figured out the planned crime and the engineered arrest, and felt betrayed that Cal’s generosity hadn’t been genuine. He cut off all contact. Cal made a halfhearted attempt to follow up and do damage control, but it was too late. The banker who’d loved Switzerland had lost his job and was returning—or being returned—to Saudi Arabia. Cal himself was rotated back to the States.
Too much had been hazarded, too little had been gained. It was a waste, which I myself had put in motion and then was powerless to stop. After that experience, the prioritizing of SIGINT over HUMINT made all the more sense to me.
In the summer of 2008, the city celebrated its annual Fêtes de Genève, a giant carnival that culminates in fireworks. I remember sitting on the left bank of Lake Geneva with the local personnel of the SCS, or Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA program responsible for installing and operating the special surveillance equipment that allows US embassies to spy on foreign signals. These guys worked down the hall from my vault at the embassy, but they were older than I was, and their work was not just way above my pay grade but way beyond my abilities—they had access to NSA tools that I didn’t even know existed. Still, we were friendly: I looked up to them, and they looked out for me.
As the fireworks exploded overhead, I was talking about the banker’s case, lamenting the disaster it had been, when one of the guys turned to me and said, “Next time you meet someone, Ed, don’t bother with the COs—just give us his email address and we’ll take care of it.” I remember nodding somberly to this, though at the time I barely had a clue of the full implications of what that comment meant.
I steered clear of parties for the rest of the year and mostly just hung around the cafés and parks of Saint-Jean Falaises with Lindsay, taking occasional vacations with her to Italy, France, and Spain. Still, something had soured my mood, and it wasn’t just the banker debacle. Come to think of it, maybe it was banking in general. Geneva is an expensive city and unabashedly posh, but as 2008 drew to a close its elegance seemed to tip over into extravagance, with a massive influx of the superrich—most of them from the Gulf states, many of them Saudi—enjoying the profits of peak oil prices on the cusp of the global financial crisis. These royal types were booking whole floors of five-star grand hotels and buying out the entire inventories of the luxury stores just across the bridge. They were putting on lavish banquets at the Michelin-starred restaurants and speeding their chrome-plated Lamborghinis down the cobbled streets. It would be hard at any time to miss Geneva’s display of conspicuous consumption, but the profligacy now on display was particularly galling—coming as it did during the worst economic disaster, as the American media kept telling us, since the Great Depression, and as the European media kept telling us, since the interwar period and Versailles.
It wasn’t that Lindsay and I were hurting: after all, our rent was being paid by Uncle Sam. Rather, it’s that every time she or I would talk to our folks back home, the situation seemed grimmer. Both of our families knew people who’d worked their entire lives, some of them for the US government, only to have their homes taken away by banks after an unexpected illness made a few mortgage payments impossible.
To live in Geneva was to live in an alternative, even opposite, reality. As the rest of the world became more and more impoverished, Geneva flourished, and while the Swiss banks didn’t engage in many of the types of risky trades that caused the crash, they gladly hid the money of those who’d profited from the pain and were never held accountable. The 2008 crisis, which laid so much of the foundation for the crises of populism that a decade later would sweep across Europe and America, helped me realize that something that is devastating for the public can be, and often is, beneficial to the elites. This was a lesson that the US government would confirm for me in other contexts, time and again, in the years ahead.
16
Tokyo
The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage. The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory. Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will.