Across the street from the Verizon Center here in Washington DC is the national headquarters of the AARP. In the basement of that building is a large, well-lighted parking garage with atypically high ceilings. Unquestionably, if you’re going to have a clandestine rendezvous in a parking garage, it’s a very good choice.
Thus, I was there last night, shortly after 6:30 p.m., on Level D, standing near the 6th and E Street elevator shaft, waiting for Pilchard. He works for the CIA. Usually, when he wants to consult me, he visits my office, but not last night.
“Collins!” Pilchard beckoned, sotto voce, from behind a concrete pillar. “Over here!”
“Pilchard…” I began.
“Quiet!” Pilchard hissed. “And call me ‘Deep Kimchee,’ okay?”
“All right, Deep Kimchee,” I whispered as he popped out to confront me, “why in blue blazes are we doing this?”
“Because,” he explained at an extremely low amplitude, “this isn’t something we can discuss in your office!”
“Are you serious?” I protested. “I spend more money on AV security per square foot at my place of business than you guys do on the average CIA field office.”
“This is different,” he countered. “It’s nothing I could even discuss with you in a black box at Langley – this particular subject is strictly… parking garage material.”
“In that case,” I relented, “shoot, I guess. What’s your problem that’s so severe we have to talk about here?”
“A Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle,” he revealed.
“The one the Iranians captured on December fourth, in the vicinity of Kashmar, in northeastern Iran, about a hundred and fifty miles from Afghan border?” I presumed.
“Is there any other RQ-170 stealth drone would I be discussing,” he implored, “with anybody, anywhere?”
“I suppose not,” I conceded. “That little bugger is the only one which has been in the news… ever. So, what about it?”
“What about it?” Pilchard exclaimed. “Forget asking me if I’m serious – are you kidding? You know the facts!”
“Those being,” I dryly, if somewhat quietly, responded, “that, as of December sixth, the United States government has formally admitted the Iranian government is in possession of an ‘essentially intact’ remote control Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone aircraft which belongs to the Central Intelligence Agency and was being operated by the US Air Force.”
“Officially inside Afghan airspace,” Pilchard vehemently pointed out, albeit very quietly.
“So,” I reasoned, “it’s your view that there was no CIA mission to violate Iranian airspace?”
“You know very well,” he muttered, “that I cannot either confirm or deny the nature of the drone’s mission.”
“So,” I reasonably extrapolated, “the RQ-170 was, in fact, operating inside Iran, headed for a routine spy fly-over of suspected or confirmed Iranian nuclear development facilities in order to target them for future Israeli bombing raids, and…”
“Will… you… please…” he growled, “keep… it.. down? The stealth drone’s specific mission is totally irrelevant, okay? What I’m concerned about is its… failure modality.”
“Well,” I noted, “that’s definitely an interesting question. At first, the Iranians claimed they had detected it and shot it down, in rebuttal to which, the United States asserted it had crashed after loss of remote control; after which, the Iranians responded that they had cleverly caused the loss of control the United States had claimed by hacking the drone’s supposedly top-secret software…”
“No, no,” he interrupted in a harsh whisper, “all of that’s pure horse hockey. Hot, steaming road apples, every word of it!”
“Why am I not the least bit surprised?” I asked, rhetorically.
“Yeah, sure,” he agreed, “each side saying what you’d expect – nothing unusual there. But what I’m here to talk to you about is… the truth.”
“Hey,” I interjected, “wait a minute here. You expect me to believe I’m going to hear the truth from a CIA employee I meet during a secret rendezvous in a Washington parking garage?”
“What choice do you have?” Pilchard smugly demanded.
“Not much… Deep Kimchee,” I shrugged. “Enlighten me.”
“Right,” he sighed. “First, realize that, if a federal government client, such as the NSA, DIA or CIA told them to, Lockheed Martin would hire a cadre of more or less qualified people with comprehensive background, polygraph life-style, forty-fingers-up-the-kiester ultra-top-secret clearances who were not just willing to eat those hot, steaming road apples, but actually, sincerely eager to do so, and put them on a project such as development of the RQ-170 stealth drone aircraft.”
“That is a proposition,” I assured him, “which I have absolutely no problem believing.”
“Then realize,” he continued, “it is perfectly plausible that a lot of federal government employees, including some very influential ones at the CIA, own Microsoft stock.”
“As far as I know,” I observed, “such behavior is not illegal.”
“Okay, then, Tom Collins,” he prodded, “connect the dots. They say you’re the most intelligent person inside the Beltway…”
“Which is a lot,” I reminded him, “like being the tallest building in Baltimore.”
“Baltimore?” Pilchard spat. “I’ve lived in Washington for twenty-eight years, and I’ve never even been there!”
“Not even BWI?” I inquired with an air of surprise.
“BWI?” Pilchard chuckled. “Come on, gimme a break! BWI is for stinky, unwashed, badly dressed poor people who get crammed into flying cattle cars. Myself, I fly exclusively out of National and Dulles, okay? The difference between Washington and Baltimore is the difference between Mount Everest and Mount Sunflower!”
“Mount… Sunflower?” I wondered aloud.
“The highest point in the state of Kansas,” he informed me with an air of distinct condescension. “Actually, I’m rather astonished you didn’t know that.”
“So – you’re from Kansas?” I sought to confirm.
“Ah… yeah,” he uneasily acknowledged. “Um… how can you tell?”
“Never mind,” I assured him, “that’s why I get paid the big bucks. Now, let me connect the dots to which you referred: Dot One is that a highly sophisticated surveillance drone aircraft equipped with state-of-the-art stealth technology, including a design obviously resembling a B2 stealth bomber, only much, much, much smaller, would be incredibly unlikely to be detected by anybody’s radar, and even harder to shoot down. Dot Two is the US government’s reluctant, but nevertheless inevitable admission that, despite Dot One, the Iranians somehow managed to end up in possession of such a drone, more or less intact. Dot Three is that, with an operational ceiling in excess of fifty thousand feet, it would be extremely unlikely that such an aircraft could drift like a falling maple seed to a comfy, cozy, non-destructive landing on the ground after some sort of hardware or software failure had occurred at such an altitude. Dot Four is the rampant, festering amorality and greed of the top management at such federal contractors as Lockheed Martin, something which is manifestly evident to anyone familiar with how business is done inside the Beltway. Dot Five is the obsequious, spineless, mindless, lickspittle obedience of the typical high-level-security-clearance employees of corporations like Lockheed Martin, whose livelihoods are constantly in jeopardy, should they lose their security clearances, which, as we both know, can be revoked without appeal at any time. Dot Six is that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer love to eat hot, steaming road apples, in mass quantities, with a shovel…”
“What?” Pilchard exclaimed with an air of concerned anxiety.
“Just checking to see if you’re listening,” I assured him. “No, actually, Dot Six really is that your apparent concern with the fact that – like there being nothing illegal about members of the United States Congress trading financial securities on the basis of insider information received during testimony before them – there is likewise nothing illegal about members of the United States Civil Service who occupy positions controlling decisions regarding software procurement both owning Microsoft stock and mandating the purchase of Microsoft products for government use.”
“Okay,” Pilchard mumbled softly, “and what happens when you connect those dots?”
“The drone was running Microsoft code,” I concluded.
“Bingo,” Pilchard nodded. “Straight clone of the basic Flight Simulator with class extensions and method overloads. The trick is getting the signal from the drone to the operator in a millisecond time frame.”
“And how,” I asked, “do you guys accomplish that?”
“You want me to tell you,” he demanded, “or can you connect a few more dots?”
“Oh,” I mused, “in that case, sure – anybody with the common sense God gave a picnic ant who thinks about it for five minutes will readily realize that the problem has never been flying the damn drone. It’s always been how to get the signals back and forth between the Air Force operator – can you believe they actually call those bozos ‘pilots?’ – in White Bread, Missouri and the far-flung airspace of Uz-Becki-Becki-Camel-Fisti-Stan. And, of course, once you figure that out, provided you know enough about telecommunications technology, it’s a piece of cake to work out how they…”
“Don’t!” Pilchard almost shouted. “Don’t even think about they do the telecomm! Yeah, yeah, we know how the they do it – I was briefed, and you managed to figure it out, but for God’s sake, that’s not the point, okay? The point is, the Microsoft flight operations code in the drone.”
“Which,” I sought to confirm, “those dots connect to depict a massive failure of the American intelligence system.”
“Correct,” he slowly choked out with a wince.
“Let me guess,” I volunteered, “it wasn’t the Iranian’s security forces who hacked the Microsoft code controlling the drone’s navigation and aeronautics.”
“No,” he confessed with a sad shake of his head, “it was a thirteen-year-old script kiddie in Switzerland who was groomed and recruited by Anonymous. She loves Flight Simulator and has logged more than two thousand hours on it. Anonymous was out to get us for what we’ve been doing to Julian Assange because of Wikileaks. But the kid’s completely blameless – she had no idea what she was doing was real. Anonymous posted a ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator Hack’ to a bunch of freeware Web sites and waited for her to download it. Then they sent an ISO Level Two message disguised as a peer-to-peer bitorrent ping, which activated a software switch in her local copy of the hack that linked her machine to a set of XML files at a secure IP address which the Trojan subsequently uploaded and immediately put her in physical control of the drone. As always, she flew the aircraft around for a while, eventually locating an airfield, and, finally, landed it, flawlessly, at an Iranian Air Force base – all the while completely unaware that what she was doing was, in fact, real.”
“Well,” I opined, “I certainly hope every member of the US government, as well as its contractors, not to mention the obviously demented members of Anonymous who were all involved in this glorious pinochle of technological achievement are appropriately proud of themselves.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Pilchard vouched, “I’m sure they all are – especially those scum bags at Microsoft, whose security holes are big enough to fly a Boeing Stratotanker through.”
“So,” I prodded, “given all this extemporaneous joy, what can I do for you?”
“Jesus Christ on a crutch, Collins!” Pilchard beseeched, “I own Microsoft stock! I ordered the use of its products to control the damn drone! Okay, okay – maybe that wasn’t the best decision in light of the outcome, Tom, but I’ve been funneling CIA money to you for eight frigging years! You have to help me!”
Just then, our conversation halted as a large, boisterous family, all clad in Washington Capitals jerseys, debarked from their huge, shiny new SUV and thronged past us on their way to watch their home team take on the Philadelphia Flyers at the Verizon Center. “Look, look, Mommy,” shouted a child, pointing at us excitedly as they walked by, “spies!”
“What the hell,” Pilchard grumbled as they crowded into the F Street elevator enclosure, “do you suppose made the loudmouth brat say that?”
“Probably,” I speculated, “because we’re dressed in fedoras, sunglasses and trench coats whispering at each other in a Washington parking garage.”