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.Meade."Look for domestic Southern California microwave intercepts from the night of the Fourth, and you will believe."Durban thanked the caller and hung up and went back to his model.He was sure now that it was an intra-agency sting operation, only a lot more cleverly conceived than any he'd ever heard of.As a serviceman, Lt.Durban was exempt from much of the scrutiny and polygraphic harassment that focused on the civilian wing of the NSA, but he'd never entirely trusted them.It was civilian spooks who brokered weapons of mass destruction to Saddam, but it was Lt.Col.Oliver North who answered for it; American servicemen who suffered from exposure to the Iraqi weapons the Reagan and Bush administrations had sold; and civilian spooks again who suppressed transmissions from coalition units detecting leaks of chemical weapons throughout the conflict.Lt.Durban had helped collect the intercepted Belgian transmissions himself from a field listening post in southern Turkey.Using his loyalty to his military service to try to turn him was sharper than he would've given them credit for, but he wasn't about to fall for it.He steadfastly clung to his ideals for a week and the better part of an eighth day before his curiosity got the better of him.As he did with any big decision, he plotted all possible outcomes, with his degree of commitment on one axis and the Agency's probable response on the other.Several such charts had to be plotted, based on the unknown quantity of the caller's identity.The curves based on a prompt report of the two contacts to his CO created a short, flat line segment; textbook procedure would deliver him out of all this with at worst a notation of his having failed to report the call the first time.If it was a screwball or a disgruntled former SIGINT spook or discharged sailor, it would come to nothing.If there were any merit to the charges, his CO would pass them up the chain, and there would, perhaps, be a Pentagon inquiry—someday.Another Iran-Contra, another dreadfully long and ultimately pointless congressional circus show-trial, with nothing gained but lower approval ratings for all involved, especially the military.The "evidence" destroyed long before it could be brought to light.If there was something to see, the time was now.If he brought evidence to his CO, there would be less chance of this slipping away, or getting filibustered to death.The worst he would be guilty of would be a security infraction if any of the documents were outside his clearance, but it wasn't spying if nothing left the building.Thinking this was bullshit, thinking getting caught could cost him his promotion and his security clearance, he reviewed the massive lists.The western microwave interception was down for the first week of July, but there was a field test of a miniaturized microwave interceptor at Twenty-Nine Palms throughout the summer.The NSA had been testing its new ECHELON-project COMINT vacuum cleaner, code-named MAUVE, but lovingly called Hoover by the propellerheads in Research.From what little Durban was cleared to overhear, the system could soak up long distance microwave relays and even local cellular transmissions from an entire state for hours at a time.This was not the sexy part, for the NSA had had this capability since the seventies, and the current ECHELON program already blanketed the world in a COMINT net.The new element lay in the speed and automation of the system, which was capable of sorting through millions of conversations at a time for precoded "loaded" words, such as "bomb," "heroin" and "Bubba," or other disrespectful nicknames of the current President and his staff, not to mention specific names.Privacy advocates had very little to fear from such a system, which listened only with mechanical ears, and only for sedition, and only in times of emergency.But field tests were required, and the Agency liked to test its products "to destruction," glutting them on "private" civilian telephonics until the processor overloaded.It was, of course, a violation of federal statutes for the NSA to act on information gleaned from such tests, but the broadest interpretation of the COMINT statutes allowed the Agency to pass on records of wrongdoing to the appropriate client agencies.It was for this reason that Lt.Durban was cleared to review the paper transcripts of the thousands of telephone conversations which had aroused MAUVE's interest.The Navy had been forwarded nineteen separate files pertaining to illegal activity perpetrated by enlisted men and officers within two weeks of the operation's conclusion [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]